Wireless, market, church, library.

Celia and I went into Norwich today, intending to have a look round the place, but also to try out our wireless laptop, which we haven’t managed to do so far. We paid for three hours of use on wireless with The Cloud before we left, but I’m not entirely sure we need it. Time will tell. Anyway, today we sat just near the market in Norwich and opened up the computer and voila! we were online. It wasn’t quite as easy as that, but it was pretty straightforward.
By the time we’d got all that sorted out, and rung one of the kids (Celia was going to Skype him, which was the idea behind the excursion with the laptop, but then realized he isn’t on Skype!) and walked from the car park and back to it within an hour, we didn’t get much else done. However, we reparked the car in an area where there were no restrictions, caught a bus back to town and walked about without the weight of the laptop or the backpack – both of which we’d brought with us on our first trip in. Sounds complicated? Yup, we seldom do anything without complication.
Anyway, the market has all been upgraded, and all the stallholders now have permanent wooden stalls, closed in above, and closeable at night with shutters and such. This means that many of them look much more professional than in the past. The secondhand bookstall, for instance, was so tidy I didn’t want to disturb the displays. Didn’t buy anything from there but did buy a copy of Dombey and Son (which I think I’ve already got at home) from an op-shop later on.
I did get a watch from one of the stalls – again, it was much more like a little shop than a market stall. The watch is very similar to the one I’ve had since Celia went to England the time before last (around twenty years ago). My old watch has suddenly come apart, which is distressing, as I’m not a person to change watches at the drop of a fashion. I’ve only ever possessed two: one I got for my 21st and the other one I just mentioned. Now that I’ve said that, it’s possible I did have another earlier one: I seem to remember a rather ugly thing I was glad to replace with my 21st birthday present.
The weather continues to be mild and often hot, and we both came home exhausted from traipsing around and not really seeming to achieve anything much. I did have a look around the library, and even joined up on the off-chance that I might borrow something from there during our stay. The library is only seven years old, with a great deal of glass, a huge covered forecourt (there was a careers display going on while we were there) and three stories high. When you look out through the glass from the inside you can see the wonderful old church of St Peter Mancroft just in front. (It’s next to the market.) The church has all these plates in the floor where either people have been buried or that are just memorial stones; I’m not sure which. It also has three marvelous series of stained-glass windows; stone heads sticking out from below the upper-level windows, and a blazing gold altar of carved statuary. Quite a place.
There isn’t a saint called Peter Mancroft, by the way. The church was originally St Peter and St Paul, but St Paul got dropped at some point and the Mancroft bit was added. It’s thought that it relates to the name of a person who owned the piece of land where the market is now situated.
The other remarkable thing about Norwich is that much of the original city wall is still standing: it wouldn’t actually keep anyone out, but it’s been there for an awful long time.