Norfolk notes - the Golden Cludgie

A posh pub toilet. Note serious portraits of mildly disapproving chaps, to make sure you don't get up to any funny business.

Seaside toilets are usually pretty basic. Let's face it, they have to be. Not only are they designed to resist all the normal perils of public convinces, such as regular use by members of the public, many on whom have a diet that is best described as 'harrowing' and of course serving as meeting places for those who are slaves to forbidden love (actually there's not much that's actually forbidden these days so it's actually quite romantic to think of homosexualists taking the time and effort to bum each other in an uncomfortable location rather than meet in some lovely boutique B&B somewhere), but in addition they have to resist the winds and elements that assail them from the outside.

When you think about it it's a wonder that seaside loos exist at all, a council would be quite justified in just providing a shovel and a sign pointing to a location on the beach below the high tide line.

The loos at Brancaster beach could be described as either 'basic', 'grim' or 'an affront' depending on what your expectations of a loo are. Suffice to say there are no little chaps ready with a towel and a squirt of cologne lurking here. There is a sign that advises wind surfers not to get changed in the loos but frankly they appear to have come to the decision themselves that peeling off a wetsuit in the car park in full view of everyone is less traumatic than walking into the gloomy loos with bare feet. It's the sort of place one visits with elbows in, trying not to make contact with anything.

The loos at Old Hunstanton are somewhat better.


Clean, light and airy they still preserve a seaside charm by having small mounds of sand from the beach piled up in the corners.

Away from the public eye, the loo in the Crown in Wells has soap so posh that I can't afford it at home. Another Flying Kiwi inn, the Ship at Brancaster, has a hand basin that is essentially a horse trough.



This is an attempt to capture a rustic, ancient feel; something effortlessly achieved at the public loos on the beach at Brancaster through the simple application of use, abuse and a total absence of bleach and fresh paint.

But the award for this year's Golden Cludgie, that is, the most outstanding loo visited this trip, goes to the ladies' loo at the Hoste Arms. Despite access being via a flight of stairs so steep that you expect the provision of a funicular or at least a guide to rope on to, and despite the lavish provision of the ladies being at the expense of sacrifices of space in the gents, this triumph of marble and alabaster has it all - a huge vase of lilies on a free standing table in the centre of the room, stools in front of a huge, well lit mirror and counter for adjusting hair and make up and a collection of toiletries that would put a clean freak to shame. It certainly had the wow factor, as in: 'wow! I can't believe that anyone I know would actually make a point of hissing 'take a look at this!' and then holding the door to a ladies' loo ajar for me to gawp'. This is the sort of situation that leads to either farcical hilarity when performed by a touring rep company on the stage of a provincial theatre, or a court appearance and having your name top of the list of the sex offenders register.

Flushed with irritation

I think I can finally see the attraction of web places like myfacebook, mysite, oursite, shitesite and so on - they allow you to shriek at the telly and for the telly to notice. I’m becoming more and more selective of my viewing of television recently - one reason for this is that I’ve stopped drinking, so much, during the week, and as a consequence my ‘entertain me’ threshold has not been dropped, at a drunken angle, so I no longer find the home shopping channel amusing in a post-modern ironic way. Rather, I find a lot of stuff irritating. More precisely, I find certain personalities irritating. More precisely still, I find arseholes on the news or on reality programmes irritating, and so shout at the telly.

Entertainment is no problem, you can’t get upset about entertainment - if you find yourself screaming ‘but they didn’t have ruffs in 1642’ at a period drama, it’s time to get back on the horse tranquilizers. Finding yourself irritated by modern life is, I suppose, part of the modern human condition - at least for those of us that live in an information-saturated age, drink too much caffeine and think yoga is at best a waste of time and at worse some sort of evil eastern plot we should be all be suspicious of.

I bet those guys in the Greenpeace dingy buzzing the coast of the resort where the G7 summit was being held were irritated…but not half as irritated as they were when the security forces parked their rather bigger dingy on top of them! I laughed my arse off when I saw that, not just because it was a clear case of ‘well, really, what did you expect?’ but because the picture of two inflatables knocking hell out of on another was a little bit ‘it’s a knockout’ - if Greenpeace were serious troublemakers, they could have punctured the security forces boat with a corkscrew and been on their way, laughing.

The blogosphere is an environment where you can have a spirited debate with like minded people (or, much more fun, unlike minded people) and not worry about consequence, much. At worst you are exposed for all the world to see as an idiot holding unfashionable views who can’t hold an argument together (try starting a blog entry with ‘say what you like about Hitler…’ and see how far you get. But at least it allows you to vent and then vent at those who would close your vent.

For all that people write about irritants, there must be stuff lurking under the radar, minor irritants, background irritation. Like your local McDs, you know it’s there but you can’t be arsed to do anything about it, when you know that ten minutes with a flamethrower would make the world a better place.

In my case the minor irritant is the loos in our new office. The new office is, itself, spacious. Using the loo, you realise what they sacrificed to get all that space. Okay, the loos in our old office were not huge, they were not the sort of superloos that increasingly one is reading about migrant families living in (rather than tramps spending the nights in a stall at a local public loo on, as it were, a B&B basis, we seem to have a case developing of poor people using loos as cottages almost, much to the alarm of people wanting a pee and homosexualists wanting to cruise for sex), neither were they vast ceramic and mahogany palaces of the Victorian era, where a diet low in fibre required a loo to match - a seat comfortable enough for long sittings and a space wide enough to open up a broadsheet newspaper to read cover to cover, all concluded with a flush like the Zambizi in spate.

Our loos are rather cramped. Whatever architectural genius thought them up obviously never used them. Because of the positioning of the way the door opens and the loo-roll holder, in several of the stalls one has to basically stand in the cistern to open or close the door - hardly a boon to relaxation.

The other issue is that the stalls are in pairs rather than trios. Trios of stalls are important. With none occupied, you take the one on the left or right. One occupied, take the one on the other extreme left or right. Middle one occupied? Exit the toilet, the man in the middle stall is obviously some sort of pervert.

Research has, however, paid off. One of the stalls is easy to gain entry to and rush from. This is good because it means that I now have a favourite stall, which, I think, is something every chap needs, but a minor irritant when it is occupied. Naturally because this is real life and not a blog or television, I do not yell as a result of irritation, rather, I tut softly and plan revenge.