Postcard from Norfolk - Llama drama

Ever wondered why there were so many churches on the North Norfolk Coast?  Apparently, it’s all to do with an ostentatious display of wealth.  Before expensive divorces and second wives, wealthy businessmen used to spend their money endowing churches.  This achieved the triple whammy of showing everyone how successful you were, ensuring your name is remembered for posterity by having a family pew (remembered for posterior?) or a stained glass window and, of course, getting on the Fast track to heaven.

Wool, it would appear, used to be big business and the North Norfolk coast is ideally suited to tourism, and stupid white things who basically just stand around all day chewing, well, anything.  It was also easier to get your goods to Europe than it was London, thanks to conveniently located sea.

Apparently, people also got rich by piracy, smuggling and subjugating the agricultural workforce, but sheep make for a better subject for a picture in a window.

Today if you want to get rich on North Norfolk you, as far as I can determine, paint your food stall or café that blue/green sedge colour that everyone round here is nuts for, write the word ‘jus’ after every dish on your menu, and charge a fortune.  By the way, ‘locally sourced’ does not, as far as I am aware, mean obtained at the big Tesco in Hunstanton.

But there is still wool here.  Not so much for the sheep, who are pastured in the salt marshes with a view to becoming essentially self-seasoning main courses, but from the llamas.  OK, so there are only half a dozen of them in a field in Wells, but they do make a sight.

Christ alone knows what they make of Wells.  You don’t get much more sea-level than North Norfolk and for an animal used to living at altitude, like athletes in training or chalet maids, it must be something of a surprise to breath the fragrant air of the coast.  Not that they seem to mind.  In fact they don’t seem to mind anything.  Not even people taking pictures of them.

I’m not a huge fan of wildlife photography.  I can barely get friends or family to sit still long enough to take a photograph, and have no patience, so my snapshots of wildlife essentially consists of animals wandering away disinterestedly (although, oddly, one of my photographs was once used in a book about animals, so it just goes to show there’s a market for everything, even pictures of shy pigs).

That said, I enjoy the llamas of Wells-next-the-Sea.  Watching their owner (or a really, really confident looking rustler) walking them along the pavement is a joy to behold.  And it’s lovely to see an elegant creature up close, and downwind.

Postcard from Norfolk - Daffy and Dickie

  

An association is rather a good thing for a public house.  Fame and infamy can equally add character to a pub and, pubs being pubs and human nature being human nature, any pub of a decent age will be more likely to be infamous than famous.  Pubs, you see, even respectable ones with coffee machines and a breakfast menu, are less likely to be the place where a National Treasure hung her bonnet when writing the sort of fiction that is adapted for Sunday night viewing, and more likely to be the place where a laudanum soaked poet wrote his last before drinking himself into an early grave.  Alternatively, they were frequented by a bloke with the charming name of ‘Mad’, ‘Chopper’, or ‘The Lathe’, once to be avoided and now on a Gangland Walks trail.  Many pubs have Blue Plaques, more still have stained carpets.

Indeed, companies exist that can create character in a pub for you.  They scavenge skips (or to give them their full title rural action houses) and can transform a former car showroom into Ye Olde Something Or Other with the addition of only a few antique agricultural implements and a pine-effect condom dispenser.

However, it takes more than a few antique cigerette or Fry’s chocolate machines converted to dispense vape-sticks and pistachios to give a pub atmosphere, especially since the smoking ban came in.  What a pub really needs to do is a holistic historic makeover, setting up web-sites that will convince you that your local boozer has that most attractive of qualities, a pool table (just kidding, I mean A Past).

I used to drink in a pub that was featured on Crimewatch.  Everyone suspected that the landlord had done his wife in because a) she disappeared and b) the cellar acquired a new concrete floor.  The thing is, he kept a good pint.

Tricky moral decision, but when asked if one wanted a quick one ‘up the murderer’s?’, the answer was usually ‘yes’.  In his defence, I don’t think he served Stella, so he was obviously anti-violence to women.

Many pubs have, of course, been around since pilgrims needed somewhere to stop off for a quick drink before visiting Jerusalem.  Given the state of the Middle East today, that remains a good idea.  The older the pub the ‘richer’ the history, usually featuring, appropriately, claret.  But stabbings, gangland slayings and poetry is the least of it, given the amount of former entertainers, a trade that traditionally like a beer, now being locked up, it’s a wonder the police don’t just visit every pub called ‘The Yew Tree’ and throw a net over the regulars.

Of course, the best a Bristish boozer can boast is a resident highwayman.  Bierkellers are an efficient, mechanised, German pub and, if grainy black and white newsreel footage is to be believed (and why not) most of them were frequented by Hitler.  Not so much a Blue Plaque, more a brown shirt moment.

Britain’s pubs are richly decorated, and not just at chucking out time.  The walls of pubs in Britain are adorned not just with Sky Sport posters but with everything from hunting prints, to tabloid front pages, to wanted posters.  Look closer still and you will see why, in Britain at least, pubs remain haunts of gentlemen; photographs of regulars who may have stepped out, but who remain in spirit.

The Hoste Arms in Norfolk remains one of the best pubs in Burnham Market.  It remains so in rthe face of significant challenges, such as having a spa on site, and being frequented by very wealthy people.  It remains a good pub because the staff are quite, quite lovely and the place is at the same time the last word in excellence and not remotely pretentious.  I have had some great times there and sitting in the October sunshine with a glass of champagne and a springer smelling faintly of beach is one of life’s great joys.

The walls of the bar are adorned with original cartoons by Annie Tempest of her weekly strip (ooh er!) in Country Life magazine, ‘Tottering by Gently’, featuring Lord Tottering (‘Dicky’) and his wife, Daffy.  The strip concerns itself, as far as I can determine, with the upkeep of Tottering Towers, their stately home, red wine, dogs and, bizarrely, social media.  The strip is very ‘Country Life’, a magazine slightly up its own arse, more usually up a fox’s arse, but amusing.

All very lovely and slightly more original than a Space Invaders cabinet converted into a wifi booth or whatever.  A recent addition though are busts of Dicky and Daffy.

It’s always tricky to pull off a likeness of a cartoon character.  The last person to do it successfully was Michael Keaton.  However, one you get over the initial shock, they are actually quite fun.  Daffy is just as you would imagine her, although worryingly close to the red wine.

Dicky is fantastic.  That he does not resemble the cartoon character so well is fortunate, because the bust is an incredible likeness of the late, much missed, Professor Brigadier Richard Holmes.

Possibly the sculptor captures the likeness of the wrong Dicky.  Probably he captured the right one.

And if you were playing pub heritage top trumps, military history beats everything else.  From faded photographs of local lads in kaki, through oil paintings of Spitfires, through to bright photographs of local lads in desert gear, and never forgetting the gentleman in the red jacket, every pub should have a military connection.

Finally, the Hoste has it all.

Postcard from Norfolk - Guns 'n' Bras at Holt

Ah, Holt.  Unlike some towns, usually the sort of town that has butchers that have offerings still in fur and feathers in their front windows, Holt has never crossed the line from Posh to smug.  This may because it’s ‘Holt’, simply ‘Holt’, and lacks the ‘by-the-Sea’ of nearby villages such as the delightful Cley.  It’s not by-the-Sea and ‘by-the-arable-farm’ does not have the same appeal.  For all that the residents of Holt may wish their town to be regarded as posh, and for all that it is undoubtedly monied, a few things keep it firmly rooted in unpretentious.

The first is the art galleries.  Not a natural choice.  If one is grading on the Cotswolds scale of poshness of village as a result of the simple formula of art galleries per head of population (unlike the rural scale of depravation, which is number of pubs per head of population – a healthy ratio being 1:1, in case you are interested), then Holt is very posh indeed.  Luckily, the art galleries perform a public service of selling stuff that is either too expensive, or whacky, to actually buy.

Take for instance the bras carved out of driftwood.  Well, I presume they are carved.  It may be that somebody spends a lot of time beachcombing in order to find naturally occurring double dee cup driftwood.  Never seen any yourself?  Just proves my point, the Coastal Creeper probably got there ahead of you.  Even if you did, you would at most try and get the damn thing out of your dog’s mouth before it charged into the pub with it, or take a picture for the amusement of your more puerile friends.  What you wouldn’t do is fish it out of the surf, dry it, sand it, varnish it, masturbate feverishly over it and then sell it.

So hats off to the galleries of Holt for making visitors smile and move quickly on to the pub.

The other feature of Holt that keeps it thoroughly grounded is the local field sports store.  Now, this used to be in a tiny shop and was crammed with stuff.  It relocated a few years ago to a much larger store that allows them to cram even more stuff into it.  It’s a delight to browse there, if a challenge, because trying to find a camouflage hat in the camouflage section is something of a challenge.  My advice is to buy a duck lure furst, startle the hat and then make a grab for it as it takes flight.  Never seen a flying hat?  Might I suggest a stroll on Brancaster beach in October with insufficiently secured headgear.

Downstairs though, oh, it’s a delight.  That’s where they keep the Guns!  And these are real Guns for men.  These are not the sort of guns that feature in the news, they are not guns for small minded psychopaths, these are guns that are designed to be taken out of the house hours before dawn and held by their owners in darkness, in a hole, in a marsh, waiting for first light.

Because who the fuck needs an alarm clock in Norfolk, it’s rosy red dawn followed by enthusiastic goose calls, then a fusillade, then some likely shouting.

Honk Honk!

Bang!  Bang!  BangBangBang!

Fuck!

Sorry Nigel.  Shit, that looks nasty.

Later that day:

“What did you get darling?”

“Oh, one for the pot, one for A&E”.

That’s why fowl hunters crouch in holes.  It’s not for cover, it’s because some idiot thirty yards away is tracking at zero elevation and doesn’t see you because a) he’s concentrating on a low flying duck and b) you are wearing a camouflage hat, remember?

In short, Holt is lovely, but unglamorous.  Solidly Georgian, with good parking facilities, it remains the sort of Norfolk town that is much more suited to the Defender than the Range Rover Sport.  Leave that to the posh places.

Postcard from Norfolk - behind the scenes at Wells-Next-The-Sea

Obviously, I’ve always known that Wells-next-the-Sea is a working port.  The clue is all the fishing boats in the harbour, occasionally one putt-puttering along the channel and out to sea.  Then again, most of the time I see the boats I’m looking down on them as they lay beached, thanks to a vertigo-inducing low tide taking them far, far below the harbour wall.

The tide, it would appear, is anti-social, and usually puts in an appearance in the early morning, meaning that fishermen have to get up very early to get their floating boats out there, catch some fish, then back in time for market, breakfast and bed.  No wonder they are all such grumpy bastards when they are interviewed on telly, and it can’t all be the fault of the EU.

More than the boats, it is the crab and lobster pots stacked up in the harbour that reveal the port of Wells to be working.  Downwind, you can tell that a few hours ago, these were immersed in the sea and probably home to a clacky, annoyed and ultimately and unfortunately for the resident, delicious crustacean.

Today though, we walked past the harbour and instead of taking a left at the chandlery and looping up past llamas to the pub, walked on.

Wells has a sailing club!  I mean, of course it does, why wouldn’t it? but they have boats, all varnished and shiny and everything.  And a club house, with a little marquee attached to it which simultaneously announces to the world ‘barbeques are a frequent occurrence here’ and ‘our members like to smoke’.

The racing dinghy’s of the club, uniform in colour, were an incongruous bookend to the fish crates stacked along the harbour, looking for all the world like somebody who was playing Tetris as art.

Yet somehow both were Wells, and epitomised the very picture that everyone has of Wells, the beach huts.  No two exactly alike, but all the same basic design, a shed on stilts, the sort of thing an Englishman exiled to Indonesia or some other flood-prone country would have in his back garden to ensure his mower and trowel stayed dry, yet all different colours.

Past the club house, you come to the real working area of Wells, far (well, twenty steps but metaphorically far) from the whelk stands and rock shops, here are the sheds and warehouses of the fishermen.

I love industry.  Proper industry.  The sort of industry that is all about a proper workshop, home to about seven or eight chaps, who are simply superb at what they do, and smell of swarfega.  You can stick your robot assembly lines right up your arse, if you want something done right, you get a craftsman with a regional accent.

I got the same feeling here.  This was a place of serious toil.  There are some who would say that this sort of thing is unglamorous, and maybe that’s why you have to peek behind the curtain, or at least walk past the pub, to see it.

I wouldn’t agree.  I think there’s a sort of beauty to be found in places like this, where people work hard at difficult jobs, especially when they are not around, when the buildings themselves seem to be resting.  The sheds may be weatherbeaten, but there’s not a stray rope or a scrap of litter to be seen; untidiness and fishing, or industry, do not mix.

Well’s beach huts line up in the sand like sentinels.  Red, white, blue, sometimes red white and blue, they are colourful and characterful.  No less colourful and characterful are the boats bobbing at anchor or, more accurately, by the time I get down the harbour, the boats resting at anchor.  But how good, how reassuring, to know that behind the colour and the character is the substance.

Postcard from Norfolk - Holkham Hall

What do you mean, ‘try something different’?

Here’s what happens when we visit Holkham Hall.  We rock up, we say it used to be better when you could park anywhere, we have a picnic lunch, we walk up to see the Duke, we take a photograph, we visit the gift shop, we decide we don’t need a tweed tea towel that costs thirty quid, we walk back to the car, we admire the deer on the drive out of the estate, we go for a drink at the Hoste.  What’s not to love?

This visit, though, heralded Change.  The kitchen garden is now open to the public.

Thanks to ‘Downton Abbey’, we now know that, prior to the existence of Ocado, feeding a household of a stately home required quite a lot of work.  The extent of the vegetable portion of the meals taken at the Hall, the vegetables in question presumably performing the vital function of soaking up the gravy covering the swan, badger, fox or whether it is that aristocrats eat, was revealed by the size of the gardens.  Picture an allotment the size of a footie pitch.  Of course, because the gardens were tended by members of the working class, it meant that they could also be neat and require a great deal of attention.

The gardens themselves were, actually, something of a delight.  Obviously pretty neglected for many years, they are now being restored, presumably prior to the launch of ‘Holkham Organics’.  They are also impressive.

When the aristocracy build a garden, they don’t start with a trip to B&Q, they start with a team of masons working for about a year on the walls around the place.  Whether this is to deter deer, rabbits or vegetarian poachers is not quite clear.  What is clear is that unless rabbits develop siege-warfare any time soon, they are not going to be getting in at the sprouts.

The next thing that is put in place are greenhouses.  Country folk these days bleat over polytunnels and solar farms, but a quick look over the wall would reveal that the Victorians knew a thing or two about vast glazed areas, and what they knew was that they liked wine, and to make wine you needed vine, so you needed a lot of greenhouse.

Between the icehouse and the greenhouse, no wonder so many great explorers of the age thought visits to the poles or the interiors was such a great idea, they could spend the morning acclimatising, the afternoon playing croquet and the evening having a seventy seven course banquet washed down with home-made plonk and then a bunk up with the maid or, if your tastes ran to rough, the under-gardener.  Shame with all their foresight nobody thought to get inoculate, but maybe a simpler age.

Obviously, having now seen the gardens and, perhaps more importantly, ridden on the little shuttle that takes you back to the Hall (like an oversized golf buggy for eight persons, or like a normal American golf buggy), any future trip will require a return visit there.

Because visiting the kitchen garden, that’s what you do when you visit Holkham Hall.

Postcard from Norfolk - Fish and Chips

One of the holiday party has announced that they are on a mission to have fish and chips every day of the holiday.

Given the enthusiastic rapture that I was in yesterday as a result of the seafood platter at the White Horse (a dish that deserves capitalisation and so will henceforth be known as the Seafood Platter), and the secret ambition I am nurturing not just to have the Seafood Platter every day but, if at all possible, every meal, I am in no position to criticise what I now consider a sound and admirable moral choice.

Because if you are going to choose to have fish and chips every day, this is the place to do it.

Fish and chips on the Norfolk coast is a single meal option with a multitude of options and varieties.  Obviously, you have your sauces, but you also have side dishes.  Well, one side dish, mushy peas.  Simply remembering there are more fish than cod in the sea that taste astonishing when battered for your pleasure makes the possibilities if not limitless, then certainly enough to fill a week.

Me?  I go for cod and chips from French’s, the best fish and chipper in the world.

This, it appears, is hardly a secret.  The queue was, literally, out the door when I arrived.  However, thanks to the experienced team working the friars, it was a moving queue and, because we were all only ten minutes away from golden battered goodness, it was a good humoured one.

It’s not just the tourists who turn up to take away here, it’s the locals too.  What I love about the take away service is that fish and chips is, more than any other food, ideally suited to being a take-away product.

Most importantly, French’s serve their fish and chips in a cardboard container.  No polystyrene here, just good, honest paper-based flatware.  What’s more, they warp them in sheets of paper to keep them warm.  What’s even more, they bag them in paper bags or, more precisely given the amount of fish and chips I was picking up, sacks.  French’s must have a paper bill just below that of a mass-market tabloid.

The benefit of all this is twofold.  Firstly, it keeps everything toasty for the journey back to the caravan, without everything going soggy in the way that using unnatural, godless packaging makes it.  Secondly, it allows the aroma to drift gently up and around the interior of the car.  This is especially wonderful of a wet winter night when, with a warm bag of fish and chips in your lap, the interior of the car slowly becomes a vinegary fug, a different variety of the atmosphere that is normally only found under duvets; warm, welcoming, comforting.

Finally, of course, one has the sauce sachets and condiment packets.  One is treated like a grown up and trusted to sauce and season one’s own whips.  The question is, one sachet of red sauce, or ten?  The supposed answer may be found in the pages of the better guides to etiquette, the actual answer is; as many as one thinks is appropriate.  We don’t judge.

Postcard from Norfolk - Caravans

Caravans, it would appear, have come a long way since the holidays of my childhood, when, if I recollect correctly, they were essentially overheated (perfect British holiday weather exists in fading Polaroid’s and childhood memories) Tupperware boxes filled with happy holidaymakers and a miasma of feet and drying beach-towels.

We are holidaying in Norfolk, and we are in a caravan.  This is not a social experiment.  This is real.  It’s also an attempt to ‘try something different”.  Why we have to ‘try something different’, I have no idea, as ‘sticking with the familiar’ is my favourite strategy when on holiday in Norfolk; rise late, walk on beach, lunch, shop at local shops for evening meal, visit the pub, cook dinner, teevee, bed, repeat.

But different it is, and the caravan is certainly that.  A lot of thought has gone into the modern caravan.  For a start, room in the bedrooms has been sacrificed to create more room in the communal areas, including a large kitchen and living area.  Obviously the designers consider that a family going on holiday together will actually want to spend time with each other, which is a charming ideal (it is good to know that there is still a place in the world for wild optimism), or be able to watch the telly in comfort, which is pragmatism.  The seating area is a large el shaped ‘bonkette’, traditionally used by teens for pouty slouches in very much the same boneless way that lemurs drape themselves over tree branches.  As well as a kitchen you can actually cook in, there is a dining table that you can sit at without having to fold away either another piece of furniture, or a teen.  All of this occupies the same space at the front of the caravan, the shared family living space.

The site itself is a mixture of residential and rentals.  You can tell the residential caravans because they are surrounded by tiny gardens enclosed with low fences.  Residential caravans also come with extensions, usually those lock up plastic tool sheds you see that look like a cross between one of those things that go on top of cars for extra luggage, and a portaloo.  Judging by the contents of the open ones, these can house bicycles (sensible) or washing machines (very sensible).

The site itself is a mixture of residential and rentals.  You can tell the residential caravans because they are surrounded by tiny gardens enclosed with low fences.  Residential caravans also come with extensions, usually those lock up plastic tool sheds you see that look like a cross between one of those things that go on top of cars for extra luggage, and a portaloo.  Judging by the contents of the open ones, these can house bicycles (sensible) or washing machines (very sensible).

The site itself is a mixture of residential and rentals.  You can tell the residential caravans because they are surrounded by tiny gardens enclosed with low fences.  Residential caravans also come with extensions, usually those lock up plastic tool sheds you see that look like a cross between one of those things that go on top of cars for extra luggage, and a portaloo.  Judging by the contents of the open ones, these can house bicycles (sensible) or washing machines (very sensible).

In terms of pecking order, residents look down on renters, renters look down on motor-homes and everyone looks down on campers.  Scum.

The caravan has two loos.

That’s right.

Two toilets.  Fuck the iPod, two toilets in a caravan is real design genius.  Two toilets in a caravan is probably the single greatest contribution to family, if not world, peace since the invention of alcohol.

I remember the facilities of my youth.  Even in the long hot summer, where the crispy crinkly grass’s colour had faded like that of an old Polaroid picture first to dull green then to brown, the toilet block had a fringe of lush green grass around it, kept fresh by the eternally damp concrete that was in turn moistened by the Timotei-scented showerings of endless adolescents and the occasional Imperial Leather lathered middle class refugee.

This then, is luxury caravanning.  Luxury because of the space, luxury because there’s a little rack to hang your towels up to dry on the outside of the caravan, luxury because the telly is colour and large (although not as interesting as watching the goings-on of your fellow caravanners through the enormous picture window) and luxury because, most importantly of all, you don’t have to lead a torchlight parade to shared facilities last thing at night, in flip flops.