Norfolk notes - The Coast Hopper and other roadside advertising

The long ribbon of coastline that runs from Hunstanton in the West to Cromer in the East is well serviced by the busses that run back and forth along it, stopping at the villages, hamlets and occasionally just apparently hedges that dot the route.

There was, on this trip, ample opportunity to check out the front of the busses, usually when trying to squeeze round one at a coast road pinch point like Stiffkey, where one focusses very hard indeed upon the front of the bus currently just inches from your front bumper. Unusually for busses, there was not that much of an opportunity to check out the back of the vehicle, as the drivers subscribe to the 'foot down' school of motoring.

What I first took to be commercial advertising on the front of the bus, or even the name of the vehicle, was in fact tourist advertising. Just a couple of words and a sentence about some local attraction, personality or legend. The moment of realisation came when, after considering that Thomas Coke may well be a firm of Cromer Solicitors, it's unlikely that any such organisation might decide to call themselves 'Black Schuck' (the phantom dog of the fens). Also good to see devilish folklore making it's way onto public transport.

The coast road was actually a rich source of entertainment, and not just in terms of wildly swerving to avoid the twitchers that seemed to lurk in every hedge and thicket. Apart from walkers there are lots of things at the roadside, not just the roadkill that, depending on how 'successful' it have been in its attempts to cross, are near the centre of the road rather than at the side. No doubt some wag will compile a roadkill spotters book with different points depending on how exotic the creature concerned was, with bonus points for artistic impression or, to give it it's technical name, splash pattern.

As well as the roadside shops, there are roadside stalls. Just as in warm foreign parts with scooter hire every bend brings a little shrine with some flowers and a faded photograph of some bloke who thought that he could overtake on a blind corner on a road regularly used by lorries doing the run from the local cement works, so there are little stalls with fruit for sale. These are based on the honour system, you take a bag of apples and put twenty pee in the tin. You can tell the visitors to the area because they all first remark upon the refreshing honesty of the system and then start bleating about the lack of credit card payment facilities and loyalty card schemes at such roadside stalls.

It's not just fruit though. Every day on our way to Wells we drove past a sign advertising kittens for sale. I'm not sure how long kittens stay kittens, but we were there for two weeks and by the end of the holiday I was expecting to see the sign amended to 'cats for sale'. The sign showed quite a lot of optimism. This is dog owners' country, where one feels underdressed without at least one gun dog and a telltale bag of poo that marks you out as a responsible dog owner.

Postcard from Norfolk - Market day

What’s your favourite bookshop? Probably the bookshop I buy most of my books from is Amazon. But that’s not really a shop, is it. The mental image I have of Amazon, the vast warehouse from the final scene of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ is probably hopelessly quaint; Amazon is probably a vast network of vast warehouses, based on the moon or something, or the Isle of Man, as that’s where most of the DVDs I order from Amazon come from.

I’m not a total luddite. I’m not, for instance, wholly against the idea of coffee in a bookshop. It’s good to be able to take a stack of books to your table, have a coffee, brows, decide which one you want and put the rest, now with coffee rings and biscotti crumbs evenly distributed among the pages, back on the shelves. The day some genius puts a wine bar in a bookshop, I’m there!

But for me a bookshop sells books. Calmly, efficiently and with the minimum of fuss. The problem is that a lot of big chains are about as soulful as supermarkets (which is where you can also buy books, in between buying dog food and tampons, you can slip the latest beach-read bonkbuster into your basket). A good bookshop needs some sort of indefinable charm.


Much has been written about the perfect bookshop, most of it by Terry Pratchett in the novel ‘Good Omens’, so I won’t repeat it here. I will add though that the perfect bookshop is well stocked, has lots of books in the windows which, together with high shelving, cuts out harmful UV and, er, light, leading to the feeling of the creation of a literary womb or cave. Any hermit taking up residence would at least have plenty to read. It will be run by an eccentric proprietor who will make favoured customers tea and offer them rich tea biscuits (never digestives, as these crumble too easily having been dunked). His hours will be erratic, his footware will be slippers.

Top three fictional bookshops? Black Books, Bernard Black proprietor, from the television programme of the same name. The Eloquent Page, the science fiction bookshop run by Uncle Rogi Remillard in the novels written by Julian May. And the bookshop in ‘Before Sunset’ where Ethan Hawke meets up with Julie Delpy again. Okay, that’s actually a real store (Shakespeare and Company, Paris), but in this case it’s fictional because hey, it’s in a film.

But it brings us on to real actual bookstores. Okay, top three. In third place, Toppings and Company in Ely. Toppings is probably the last place in this dimension to be selling books at their cover price. How do they get away with it? Well, many of the hardbacks are signed by the author and come sealed in little plastic bags with an attractive band wrapped round them proclaiming ‘signed first edition’. Not something you get at Asda or Amazon. In addition, it’s a shop of great physical charm. The staircase up to the first floor is steep and twisty, but worth the climb to access the books on mountaineering – handy in the fens. Having recently moved Mrs Rochester out, they’ve opened up the attic and you can now have a coffee (free, there’s no Costa or Starbucks up there) and read a book while looking out the attic window at the cathedral lantern. The state of semi-hypnosis that this generates results in you splashing full price on books and not resenting the hell out of it.

Okay, second favourite (previously favourite). The Brazen head bookshop in Bunham Market, Norfolk. Exactly what a proper second hand bookshop should be. Crammed with books and with an enthusiastic owner. The last time I was in there he had just acquired some new stock and was looking through it, he got very excited about a ‘Biobull’ – a Gaelic bible. I should have bought the thing there and then, despite not being able to understand a word. They make their faith like granite in areas where Gaelic is spoken and this appeared to me to be just the sort of religious artefact to take comfort from in a faith emergency or vampire attack.

But my new number one favourite bookshop? It’s not a shop at all, it’s a stall. The Wednesday market at Sheringham in Norfolk is host to stalls selling everything from screwdrivers to football team themed duvet covers. Also, there’s a book stall. It’s fantastic. The chap who own it has his books lying flat on some tables in fruit boxes (if ever you need to transport your library, these are the carriers of choice) and also – and here’s the genius part – stacked up in ‘shelves’ by halving the fruit boxes and stacking them one on top of the other.

The stall sells second hand books – everything from the latest beach read that’s been read once and still smells faintly of tanning lotion where it’s rested on a baking tummy somewhere along the shores of the Med all the way to old penguins that have obviously spent a lot of time travelling in the pockets of various chaps.

The sheer variety is breathtaking, you could become ridiculously well-read by visiting once a week with a fiver. And you leave with some paperbacks in a paper bag, a lot more cheerful than you arrived and usually with a surprise buy. Now that’s a shopping success and that’s a great book stall.