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 - value for money

North Norfolk Council kindly request that the North Sea refrain from getting all over-excited and move from the left to the right of this picture.

If you live along the coast in North Norfolk, you take sea defences very seriously.  In some cases these are concrete sea walls with gates that shut and have watertight rubber edges, because everyone knows that a washer is going to keep out the fury of a Force Twelve onshore gale.  In other places there are enormous shingle banks and probibitions about what you can do on them, like nbot being able to ride motorcycles, not being able to ride horses and not being able to drive up in the dead of night and fill your trailer full of free aggregate.

There are of course those tasked with putting aggregate back.  Pulling into the car park on Old Hunstanton beach I was pleased to see evidence of my car parking fee – one which I had negotiated rather than having to pay full price no less as this was a short visit – in action.  The chap in the shed was busy with a wheelbarrow full of gravel, a shovel and some pot holes.  The car park here is grass, well, grass and mud.  But increasingly also gravel.  Good to know that if the sea ever does threaten, there will be a bloke with a wheelbarrow at the ready.

Postcard from Norfolk - Drink up

'Boat on Cley beach'  The right light, the right angle, a right old pain in the arse getting this shot.

My tip - support the local economy and buy one of the many postcards available with this shot...

but better.

Every year you read about some poor chap who is drowned trying to save his dog after the dog decides to go swimming.  As one of the dogs ran into the surf and suddenly found itself out of its depth, the headline ‘Heroic dog rescuer mourned’, together with a picture of the canine in question sitting on my gave looking properly mournful, flashed through my mind as I started to take off my jacket.  I needn’t have worried as the next wave deposited the dog safely on the shingle, while I wondered if anyone else could hear my heart beating as loudly as I could.

Once my hands had stopped shaking, I set about trying to take the perfect photograph of an upturned boat.  This is apparently easy, as there are many galleries showing variations on this image in just about every visual medium available up to and including modern dance.  My conclusion is that getting a decent photograph is a lot harder than it looks.  You have to wait for the right light, not easy when you have to keep one eye on a dog apparently intent on doing a Reggie Perrin, and you have to find just the right angle, which is, let me tell you, hell on the knees.

After such exertion the place to relax is the marvellous ‘Lobster’ in Sheringham.  Sheringham had just finished celebrating some sort of festival related to World War II, and many of the buildings had bullet holes painted onto them, it was as if the Arab Spring had happened in Norfolk, but with more booze.

The pub itself is an interesting place.  You walk in and there’s a spaniel sitting looking at its owner eating and thinking that maybe, just maybe, this time things will end differently and chips will be involved.  It’s also rather vast, and on different levels, but at the same time cosy.  Best of all, despite the latte and the food, it’s a proper boozer, where men can go in the middle of a long day for a sustaining pint.

I bet it bloody rocks in the evening.

Postcard from Norfolk - Chips with a view

Pass the salt, and the gull repellant.

French’s fish and chips shop is the best fish and chipper in Norfolk and, if we’re talking pure fish and chipper, probably the best in the world (the fabulous ‘Café Piquante’ in Edinburgh is in a class all by itself, selling as it does the ‘Ladies Special’, chips with cheese and a glass of white wine!), certainly when it comes to taste.  And location, overlooking the Quay at Wells, diners can sit and watch the fishermen arrive and depart and the crabbers pace the edge of the Quay with line and bucket, considering no doubt if they would be better off just making a sandwich out of their bait.


The restaurant area is small, which matters not because the sea wall on the Quay forms al fresco seating for anyone who can’t find a seat in the shop and of course that special extra something that any meal has when consumed in the open air with an aggressive gull beadily eyeing your chips.

As well as the sea wall, seating abounds in North Norfolk.  It’s a beautiful spot with many views, meaning there is no shortage of benches bearing sweet little plaques explaining that such and such loved this view (sometimes of a lovely natural spot, on one occasion in the Buttlands in Wells, towards The Crown, bet he liked the view from the bar out to the bench even more but I guess it’s harder to have a small plaque erected in your memory in a pub, in all my years boozing I’ve only seen one).  Normally, if you notice such a memorial bench at all, you have a read, give a small sigh and move on.

Rather unusual to see not one but two benches bearing bouquets.  If a public bench is adorned at all, it is usually with a scarf or mitten that has been abandoned, but flowers are something new.  And touching.

Postcard from Norfolk - Hut! Hut!! Hut!!!

Wells-Next-The-Sea, home of the £60,000 beach hut.  That’s right, a beach hut which comes without running water, mains gas or electricity or any guarantee of good weather, will set you back almost as much as a flat.

There are some wonderful examples of the art and I think that most owners are now developing along the lines of ‘the bigger the better’ and ‘the better to ignore any neighbours’.  It also gives an excellent opportunity to give your hut an amusing name, something nautical themes, like ‘the rum shack’, ‘the sodomy shed’ or ‘lashings’.

There are posh huts, there are sheds on stilts and then there are, well, the forgotten huts, victims of the last onshore wind where the beach has eventually crept up the stilts and stairs.  Ideal, of course, for anyone with mobility issues as these are essentially bungalows but it’s the half-buried examples that really pique the imagination.

Presumably the owner is aware of the desirability of the hut, they need only look in the window of the estate agent to realise the value, so why are they half-submerged in the sand like the relic of a lost city?  And does treasure lie within?

Postcard from Norfolk - Pull!

Once you have blended your own shot, you never go back to 'shop-bought'.  Like drugs and porn, the over-the-counter stuff just isn't strong enough.

They have refurbished the Victoria Hotel at Holkham.  Possibly this was because too many visitors were mistaking the distressed furniture and hard-to-achieve ‘shabby chic’ look as ‘shabby’, which is also hard to achieve, or at least takes some decades.  The place had had a makeover and very lovely, without a trace of shabby, it was too.

As was the young lady who served us our coffee.  She was also so very posh that looking at her was like turning to the frontispiece of Country Life magazine, where posh young ladies are presented for…well, I’ve never quite worked out why but suspect it has something to do with finding husbands.  The property is in the front, the small ads are in the back and Lady Jocasta Farthingham-Smythe-Smythe is somewhere in between.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being posh, or at least having a posh accent.  Maybe she was foreign and had learned English watching box-sets of Downton?

In between serving coffee and being from the upper classes, she was decorating the mantelpiece at the Victoria.  This was a simple, minimalist affair and the theme was ‘Autumn’.  So, you have your pine cones, of which there are many locally, you have your pheasant tail feathers, of which there are also many locally, and you have your empty shotgun cartridges, the abundance of which explains the feathers.

What struck me was the many varieties of shotgun cartridge on display.  Now, I am familiar with the simple red, and I know that people fill their own cartridges as well as buy them from a shop their own, but I never quite realised that this means you can blend your own shot like you can blend your own coffee.  Fantastic! 

One can imagine that if you are, for instance, a bank robber you want something that is half lead shot and half firework so that when you let off that all important warning shot into the ceiling, it really has effect, like an angry chrysanthemum.  If you are hunting, I suppose the different sizes and weights of the shot can be tailored to your particular needs.  For instance, when hunting pheasant, a bird so stupid that the only time it can be relied to go in a straight line is when it comes directly at your front bumper, you want a rather large cloud of shot to ensure that any scatty aerial zig-zagging doesn’t result in a miss.  And for those special outings, how about a little depleted uranium in the mix?  Just like Terry likes up his arse.

What I liked about the mantelpiece decoration was that it underlined that the only debate about hunting in Norfolk is what is the most efficient way to kill something.

Postcard fron Norfolk - Quay Tea

Ponies on a beach.  A serene scene, one would imagine.

The thing about the countryside is that it is oh so very dark and oh so very full of strange noises, or rather, noises made strange by the dark.  Ignorance, imagination and some woodland creature innocently and nocturnally going about its business do not for a great night’s sleep make.  In the past I have been kept awake by, in no particular order; a banshee (turned out to be the wind), a badger in the bathtub (turned out to be rain on a skylight) and a fox apparently caught in wood chipper (turned out to be a fox caught in another fox).

This morning’s alarm call came courtesy of a pine cone falling off a tree and rolling down the roof.  So, the morning’s cardio routine out of the way, it was time for a walk on the beach.

But not before preparing a picnic.

I have, for several years now, been trying to track down the perfect picnic hamper and, like anyone in search of just the right something or other, have in the meantime been going without, while droning on at length about it.  I was coming to the conclusion that the only way to obtain the perfect hamper was to make one myself and had gone so far as to Google ‘basket waving’ and follow up with ‘not as therapy’, when I was fortunate enough to be given a picnic hamper.

I can tell it’s a picnic hamper because it is lined with gingham and has plastic glasses, plates and some cutlery inside, all cunningly secured with loops of elastic.  Gentleman and Player’s fashion editor did not appreciate the aesthetics of the thing.  It is, I have to concede, not a traditional picnic hamper, being made out of bamboo rather than wicker, but I think calling it ‘The Tenko Box’ was a little cruel.  Not unlike Tenko.

Now that I’ve used it however, I am developing a degree of affection for The Tenko Box.  This is largely, I recognise, affection by association, because it contained sandwiches and tea today and anything that produces sandwiches and tea is OK by me.

There was also a bold experiment in pic nic tea making, or rather, a return to the days of greatness.  Back in the seventies, I had an uncle whose idea of making a proper cuppa was to get out his camping gas stove, brew up some boiling water, and do the thing properly.  The man could brew up in the teeth of a gale and, as somebody who liked an al fresco cuppa on holiday in Scotland, usually did.  The decades gallop forward and I had got used to the convenience of flask tea, that is, tea in a flask allowed to stew and brew until when you drink it you can’t shake the suspicion that somebody has used the flask recently to store Bovril, or diesel, and has not rinsed it out properly.

Fast forward to earlier this summer and a long overdue breakthrough.  A large flask for boiling water, a smaller flask for milk and some teabags.  And so it was that with my two flasks and my teabag, I was able to brew up on the harbour wall what shall henceforth be known as ‘Quay Tea’.

Quay Tea was a resounding success, free of the tannins and criticism that formed so much of a feature of flask tea it actually tasted like, well, tea.

And very welcome it was too.  We had just done two hours on Holkham Beach, where the early start was put to good use in beating the crowd.  The beach was deserted apart from enthusiastic dog walkers, there enthusiastic dogs and horse riders with their skittish mounts.

I had not appreciated just how crazy horses are.  At least the ones on the beach were. Presumably they have seen water before, not least in troughs.  One would think from the reaction that splashing across a small stream provoked that their rider was urging them to swim the Amazon.  I thought it was just supposed to be witches that had a problem with crossing running water but no, apparently it’s horses too.  This may explain why witches ride brooms rather than ponies.

Out on the beach, back through the pines.  And what better way to get the old heart rate back up again then, in the middle of a lovely walk through the shady pines, suddenly recall every M R James story I’ve ever read.

Still, better that than Black Shuck.

Run!  Run back to the car and waiting Quay Tea and, if necessary, beat the spectral hound to death with the Tenko Box.

Postcard from Norfolk - Tune in, drink up

I love local radio.  If you are visiting somewhere, the quickest way to get a handle on the local character is to pick up a local paper and tune into the local radio.  Despite the apparent homogenisation of the UK, it’s still true to say that every postcode has its own qualities.  That is to say, peculiarities.

In North Norfolk, the radio station of choice is North Norfolk radio (surprise!).  There are a number of reasons to tune into this excellent station, and these were all evident in the two hours that I heard this morning.  The first is that they actually do do an island waterways forecast, it’s like the Shipping Forecast for toddlers.  I love the idea that some weekend sailor facing a degree of chop on the Broads gets his forecast, just like some trawler captain with a hold full of mackerel facing the fury of the unforgiving storm and the cruel sea somewhere where the cod have retreated to because they think it’ll be too inhspitable for humans to fish.

The second reason is the limerick competition.  Now, can there be any better way of keeping yourself amused as a deejay for two hours than having people send you filthy verses?  I think not.  Apparently the way they do it is to go with a different letter of the alphabet every week to get a place name, so ‘There was a young man from Stiffkey’ for instance, and just wait for the amusing rhymes to pile in, because if there is anything the great British public are great at, it’s making up names for moist and thankfully normally hidden areas of the body so that they can just about rhyme with anything.  (As it happens, ‘There once was a wreck called the Vera’ was completed in clean and tidy manner, and the challenge here was because there are no places starting with vee in Norfolk, except ‘Very Fucking Expensive’, which is Burnham Market’s post code.

The third reason is the local announcements, both paid and unpaid.  Unpaid come in the form of announcements for local events, like the book and jigsaw sale at Fakenham parish church.  This sounds like a fantastic idea but let’s hope that they remembered to keep the two separate, unlike that time in Bromsgrove when there was uproar after some genius decided to combine books and jigsaws by removing the end pages from a number of whodunits and selling them in kit form.  On the minus side, quite a lot of people were both angry and frustrated, even more so than the Bromsgrove norm.  On the plus side, the auction for the concluding chapters for the mystery thrillers in question the following week raised several hundred pounds for MacMillan nurses.

The paid announcements or, as I believe they are called on commercial radio, adverts, are fantastic.  When I was but a youth, I heard a C60 tape of American radio that a relative had recorded when over in the US.  Just some songs and a DJ and adverts that appeared to have been scripted by the Monty Python team but were actually for real.  Fast forward thirty years and I have the same sense when listening to North Norfolk radio.  This is not, I hasten to add, because the tyre dealerships that advertise on North Norfolk Radio advertise family fun days with ‘free balloons, candy and clowns’.  Around here, the only time that tyres and clowns go together are when they put the former round the neck of the latter and set fire to it and, by extension, Coco.  But the advert that captured my attention was for logs.  Logs delivered free of charge.

That’s right, the good folk of North Norfolk get through so much wood during the winter that not only do they buy it, not only does the supplier offer free delivery but they actually have the money to advertise.  This is like Ocado, for wood!

Have just checked the Ocado web site.  They do not do wood.  Yet.

I’m not sure I like this.  When I’m in Norfolk I like splitting my own wood.  One so rarely gets to swing a huge axe unchallenged at home.  If you can’t chop your own, then the next best bet is to stop by a sign at the roadside that says either ‘logs for sale’ or ‘woods, next left’.  That’s the thing about the countryside, it’s quite acceptable to have a bootliner and an axe in the back of the car.  Still, if one is rushed, I can see the sense in getting logs delivered.  The next step must be the web site and the various packages, from ‘value’ (a tree and a spoon) to ‘luxury’ (organic scented wood chopped for you by the regional X Factor finalist of your choice, safety gear optional).

Away from the radio, it was a beautiful day.  Walking into the Within Hill Cider shop in Wells-next-the-Sea I cautioned Gentleman & Player’s cookery editor ‘don’t say we’re just buying cider to cook with’.  Two things then happened, G&P’s cooker editor piped up ‘we’re just cooking with it, what’s the best one for that?’ and the planet earth neglected to offer up a perfectly timed seismic event to bloody well swallow me up.

Actually, as you would imagine, the chap was very chaming about it, especially after I had back pedalled like a clown on a unicycle faced with a mob holding a tyre and a box of matches and explained that, yes, a small amount of cider would be going in a pan but a large amount would be going down my throat.

There is, perhaps, something of a cultural divide in the town and the city about cider.  In the country, there are, according to the documentary made by Oz Clarke and James May, three types of cider, fighting, singing and sleeping.  In the town, cider is known as ‘trampagne’ and also comes in three varieties, farting, shitting and shouting.

This had been a bad year for cider (I withheld my professional condolences as the owner of a vine) and for apples.  The crop yield was down and the chap explained that he was ready to go to Sandringham to ‘beg, borrow or steal’ from The Queen.

This was, bluntly, fantastic.

The very idea that one would have The Queen’s Apples in your cider press, presuming you could keep her son’s Duchy mitts off them for long enough, would allow you to slap the word ‘jubilee’ on the label and charge an extra 20%.  Moreover, the idea that this might be achieved by scumping made me want to purchase an under the counter bottle of ‘Sandringham scumped’ at once.  Forty quid you say?  Bargain!

Postcard from Norfolk -- Pub Grub

Dinner at 'The Ship' in Brancaster.  Note the bacon garnish.  There is no meal that cannot be improved through the simple addition of bacon.  In this case, liver.  A classic pairing.

It’s Friday night and at ‘The Ship’ in Brancaster every table is full of what could be described as ‘types’, although certainly not stereotypes, because these types are making enough noise for a full on surroundsound experience.

Which is no bad thing.  The background chatter is the aural equivalent of a flickering fire, making the room cosy.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt that there is the actual equiavalent of a flickering fire – a flickering fire – and that the lighting is just right, and that there are just the right number of tables spaced just so, that just being so that you are not banging elbows, conversations or opinions with the people next to you. 

This is not London.  This is a proper pub where food and drink and atmosphere are taken seriously.  That’s probably why it’s so popular.

On the table to my right a pair of mums and dads are having a dinner of weekend portions of wine garnished with a huge portion of fish and chips.  It’s good to see that having young children has not cut into their typical Friday night pattern of sodding off early from the office, flying up the M Way in their Volvo or Bald Man’s Wagon and being elbow deep in vino by six o’ clock.  The adults tuck into their wine (red for the men, white for the ladies) with nearly as much gusto as the kids tuck into their chips (dipping them in mayonnaise, ketchup is for chavs and soccer matches).

At the table next to them sit what might as well be their parents and grandparents.  The chaps are wearing white checked shirts, dark navy pullovers and a complexion that goes beyond ‘ruddy’ to a red normally associated with a warning sign.  In this case I would say the warningsign in question is: ‘you are one glass of claret away from going face down in your starter’.

Trouser of choice, corduroy.  Wellie of choice, Hunter.  Child’s name of choice, Toby, and that’s just the little girls.