Postcard from Norfolk - Yarn Bombing is a sunny Hunny delight

Hunstantion is getting posher. It still maintains its kiss-me-quick sensibility, but that co-exists very happily alongside skinny lattes. It is also presently the home to an event known as ‘yarn bombing’.

This essentially consists of tree cosies, that is, finding a suitable spinny, knitting like a fiend and then draping the knitted product round the trees and branches. The effect was enchanting. There were scarfs, waistcoats, bunting and even dolls (one of which is of the type from the label of a popular jam!).


But it doesn’t stop there, in the town the parking signs and various poles of officialdom that conspire to tell us what to do, where and when had also been yarn bombed. Somehow a ‘no stopping’ sign seems much more reasonable when the pole supporting it is covered in a purple knitted wrapper.


It’s quite a sight to see something so indoorsy and fragile, and obviously made with so much care, placed in an open air environment against rough nature or a rougher town centre. Maybe it’s this contrast that provides the charm, but I suspect that the charm is more the love and care in every stich of something made for the public to enjoy.

And The Ship at Brancaster fully redeemed itself after the whole tricky ‘not serving dinner yet’ episode earlier in the week. Overhearing an ill-informed but as usually fully opinionated discussion at our dinner table about just what constituted a ‘flat white’ coffee (latte we know is mostly milk and froth and a bit of coffee, cappuccino is the same, but with the froth mostly on top and added chocolate, but what the hell is a flat white?) our waiter turned up with a flat white and the girl who had made to explain how she makes it. It was sampled and proclaimed very delicious and on concluding her explanation, the waiter remarked to his colleague that ‘that’s not what it says on the instructions in the kitchen’. ‘I know, but that’s how I make it for the owner’ was all the reply needed.

So, if you are in the ship at Brancaster and Sara is available, get her to make you a flat white – it’s delicious.

Postcard from Norfolk - Hunstanton

Saturday saw Wells crowded with folk enjoying one last weekend of summer sunshine (in October!) before the onset of winter, heralded by the first appearance in supermarkets of Christmas advent calendars. I have no issue with Christmas stuff going on sale early, it helps families spread the cost of an expensive season but, if you are going to sell advent calendars in October, have ones with three months worth of countdown doors on them, let’s start building the excitement and winter-weight early.

So, hoping to dodge if not the crowds then at least the traffic, I headed west for a few minutes into Hunstanton. ‘Sunny Hunny’ is famed on the coast because through a quirk of geography, it faces West, meaning it’s the only resort on the coast you can enjoy the sunset from without having to turn around or something. Certainly, the sunset last night was spectacular, I enjoyed it through the bottom of a wine glass in a desperate attempt to keep cool through constant application of cold white wine from the fridge. It worked. I think. Consulting the notes of my experiment my handwriting deteriorates sharply after a few glasses for some reason.

Hunstanton was, to use a tourist board term ‘busy’. The seafront was lined with cars and the sunbathers were lined with tattoos. In part, the cars were parked on the seafront because parking there is free, but also because all the car parks were full. In the end, we parked up at Tesco (as it was free, I was expecting the parking bays to be marked out with blue and white stripes; every little helps!) and walked into town.

The grassy parks, normally picturesque triangles of green in the centre of town, were now a modernist mix of green and pinky red as those who did not have enough energy to get to the beach, or who decided they wanted to be close to the attractions of the town (chips!) chose to relax in the parks and gardens along the seafront.

In Norfolk, everyone has a dog. This is because walking is the regional pastime and its best enjoyed with a dog, not because a good walk is made better if you have to carry a small bag of dog poo with you to the nearest red bin, but because walking on your own makes you look like a serial killer, a rambler, or a rambling serial killer.

Gundogs and hounds are favourites, they come when they are called and lope in an attractive, relaxed way when on the beach. Before depositing half of it in the back of their owner’s car. I know some dog owners who have to empty the sand and seaweed out of their cars with a trowel after a week of walking their dog on the beaches here. Terriers, too, find favour and not just with women but with men who are not afraid to be seen with them, because while a terrier in an urban environment is basically a yap on a lead, out here they fly across the beach like wind-up toys, bark with alarm at something (such as a wave, a seashell or a washed up bottle) and then bolt back to their master before doing it all again. They are also excellent for sorting out anything nasty in the woodpile.

In Hunstanton though, the locals and visitors seemed to favour breeds more muscle than brains, the sort of thing that one normally sees guarding a crack den, or fighting in a gypsy encampment.

Like Wells, Hunstanton has a little train. Unlike Wells, theirs does not run on rails but rather is some sort of converted milk float affair, painted a jolly, and very bright, yellow, pulling a train of carriages that also resemble milk floats, but with passengers rattling round in the back nested of bottles. Like Wells, the owners could have benefited from adding a couple of carriages. Hunstanton has a long sea front and it's a pleasant walk but an even more pleasant ride.

The bright yellow road train is something of a local landmark, even featuring on postcards. Obviously, when something is that striking (and that yellow) the only reaction is to embrace it. Hunstanton used to have a proper railway station, it's how the hoards of tourists used to get here for their holidays before the car became the popular mode of transport and unpopular clutterer of villages that it is today and so any link to that heritage, no matter how tangential, remains popular, this explains the little train and the signal in the town car park where the station used to be.

So popular is the train that I think for the next season the should think about developing it, nothing creates a profit on a train quite like first class accommodation, although a sleeper service along the coast to Cromer might be pushing it a bit.

It was good to see the town so busy, with the traders making the most of this unexpected end of season trade. As the tourists made the most of the late sunshine, the traders made the most of the late rush and anywhere that sold coffee or chips was doing very well. The little corner bakery that I stopped in at had a coffee shop tacked onto the side, and onto the pavement, and had discovered that core requirement of all good coffee shops, the twenty first century equivalent of a teenage girl in an awkwardly formal waitress uniform (although it had those too); free wifi. The password to the network for customers was, charmingly, not handed out like some secret code or printed on a till receipt (a hangover from the bad old days of having to buy your Internet by the half hour) but chalked on the blackboard along with the specials of the day. Casual passers-by who were not customers were deterred from using it by the simple feature of it being about fourteen characters long. Genius! By the time I had entered it correctly on my third attempt, I was more than ready for my coffee.

Hunstanton caters for the bucket and spade brigade, there’s plenty of shops selling beach essentials (windbreaks and so on), and the fun-fair was in full swing, the thrill rides being enjoyed by those unaware or uncaring about the effects that salt corrosion can have on the load bearing metal struts of a roller coaster. The odd thing is that there’s no tat end and posh end, rather the two co-exist in the town with a seasidy atmosphere that is the result of more than a receding tide and vinegar splashing on hot chips. The rest of the coast may be painted a soft sedge green, but Hunstanton is pink lit by neon and funfair bulbs, and gloriously so.

Norfolk notes - Hunstanton

Hunstanton prides itself on being a proper seaside town. It ticks all the boxes; slightly seedy, near the sea, large number of pensioners and seagulls that will engage you in a life and death struggle for your chips. It also has tat shops. Rather, because of the size of Hunstanton, it has tat emporiums. There's a shop on the front that sells everything from post cards to high-vis anoraks and, of course, comes with the requisite surly staff.

Hunstanton's claim to fame is that it faces west. Hence, you can watch the sunset from the cliff tops. Now, you have to admire any town that makes a virtue out of a sunset, something that most of us can appreciate simply by turning ourselves in the right direction.

Hunstanton has tat shops, arcades, amusements and a theatre. It also has a joke an novelty shop with a sign up saying 'no photographs'. This is obviously to discourage the sort of people who can spend hours trying on funny hats, laughing themselves sick, take a photo and then bugger off without buying so much as a fake dog poo. I guess the owner has a point, it must be difficult enough trying to make a living selling novelty faeces without some joker accidentally sneezing inside your best masks and then discreetly replacing them.

Out of season, the place has a particular charm. The bright colours fade to pastels and the whole town is a lot gentler, if somewhat sadder. Luckily the ice-cream place was still open leading me to discover that all I need to lift me from melancholy is a magnum lolly.

Old Hunstanton is the neighbouring town, so close that the two actually run into one another but, thanks to that 'Old', is a world away. Old Hunstanton is so called because, I suspect, the folks there saw what Hunstanton was turning itself into and wanted to make sure that they had quite a different identity thank you very much, like a prim sister who sees her sibling becoming a star by the simple acquisition of bumps and pumped up bits added to nature, who decides to change her name because she feels just that little bit ashamed of her.

The irony is that thanks to its fantastic beach and amazing cliffs, Old Hunstanton is astonishingly hip. This, you see, is where the kite boarders and paragliders come to play. While the kite surfers rule the waves at Brancaster, here at Hunstanton it's their dry land equivalents who carve endless loops, swirls and curves in the pristine sand, or occasionally have a moment of excitement with a close encounter with a sea defence.

The paragliders were indeed out playing. One chap was just taking his first solo steps, launching from a sand dune and floating about a foot off the ground before coming gently to earth before reversing back up the dune and repeating the process.


It looked a little odd to see somebody apparently content to spend upwards of an hour basically suspended a foot off the ground, all that gear must cost a fortune and you can achieve the same effect with a step ladder. But I guess the point is that practice makes perfect and you don't want to be two hundred feet up when your kite wing folds for the first time. That's when knowing how to speed dial an ambulance as you plummet to earth comes in handy.


The other chap, who was floating high and free, was obviously having a great time and was obliging in that when he saw the camera raised he would swoop and soar, essentially strutting his stuff on thin air. It led me to wonder if these people frequent photo social networking sites, scouring and searching for images of themselves in action? I assume that they must pop up in the background of thousands of holiday photographs, the same way that commuters piling out of the train stations in London must feature in a million snapshots that tourists pour over, maybe never noticing that they are the only people in a crowd of thousands smiling.