Thetford

We went to Thetford today, which apparently used to be the chief town in Norfolk. It isn’t any more, and though it has the usual churches built in 1100 and such, it didn’t strike either of us as very interesting a town. Maybe we didn’t see enough of it. However we did find out that the Dad’s Army series was partly filmed there, that Thomas Paine the great political pamphleteer was born there, and that the place was burnt to the ground by some Viking whose name I’ve now forgotten.

We bought ourselves a GPS system today, (which was why we were in Thetford in the first place), one that’s a bit more user-friendly and that we can also use when we go back to New Zealand. It’ll help in those awful cities - Christchurch and Auckland - where we can never find our way around.

Thetford also turned out to be full of Eastern Europeans and Portuguese (amongst others), people who are there to work at jobs that Brits are no longer doing, but who, by all accounts, may not be very well off. I’m only hearing about it secondhand, so I don’t know the details, but the number of foreign-speaking people walking the streets of Thetford was rather high.