The perils of Shakespeare in the open air

So far we’ve been fairly free from travel problems – or the problems of summer, I might call them. And apart from the stinging nettles I encountered when I walked with Celia the other day – the results were itchy for a short time, but then turned ticklish, which was odd – and the midges that bit when we went to see the Chapterhouse Players at Barnham Broom a few weeks back, we’ve kept clear of anything nasty, including tummy upsets and so forth.

However, Celia did have quite a reaction to the insect bites she got that night while watching Shakespeare (it made it all the more memorable an occasion!). For well over a fortnight she was itching the places they’d bitten her, and nothing, not antihistamines, not insect bites soothers, not calamine lotion, not nothing (!) kept her from scratching. She’d wake in the night scratching. She’d have to get up in the night to scratch and go and soothe herself somehow. Her stomach and arms turned red where the skin was getting attacked constantly, and she was not a happy lassie.

In the end the itchiness went away, but for a while it looked as though being woken in the night was going to be a permanent state of affairs!

Potter Heigham

Yesterday we went to Potter Heigham, which is famous for two things. Firstly, it’s on the Norfolk Broads, so that makes it special to Celia, and secondly, there’s a bridge over the River Thurne at Potter Heigham beside which Celia fell in the water when she was a schoolgirl. (We have a photo of this bridge, but on the laptop, and I can’t upload from there at the moment. However, the link I've just given has a very good picture of the bridge on it.)

Why did she fall in the water? She was on a week’s boating experience with her school, and when you get to the bridge at PH (there are now two of them, in fact) you have to lower the mast on your boat because the bridge isn’t very high above the water. In lowering her mast she knocked herself into the water. Historic.

Potter Heigham isn’t pronounced Potter Heigham, by the way. Try something along the lines of Potterhyam? I put the question mark there because Celia always gives it a kind of upward lift at the end of the word.

It was packed with people having a day out yesterday, (although not so much as Wroxham, which is further along the road). We went for a walk along the bank of the particular arm of the Broads that comes into the village, and walked, and walked – and walked. Our intention was eventually to cross a bridge and walk back on the other side, but the bridge proved to be over yet another arm of the Broads, and there was a considerable body of water between us and the other bank, so we didn’t try to cross it. In the distance we could see the boats sailing through what appeared to be fields, with cows munching away. It’s an odd visual thing because it’s only as you get up close to some of the waterways that you can see they’re there. If it wasn’t for the boats on them you wouldn’t realize they existed.

Our long walk took us past a now disused (and dis-sailed) windmill, one of about half a dozen in the vicinity, past the backs of dozens of little holiday houses (virtually cribs or baches as we’d call them at home) parked right on the bank of the water, past marshes and smelling ditches where the water had become green and stagnant, past odours whose origins we didn’t want to think about, past brambles and stinging nettles and reeds and, best of all, wild blackberries. Which were ready to pick and exceptionally delicious. One of my great regrets in New Zealand is that the blackberry is considered noxious; here it grows where it pleases and passersby can pick as they please.

Most of the holiday homes were for rent, I presume, or were owned by people who came year after year. One of them was up for sale: £120,000 was the asking price. £120,000! The building was in a pleasant spot, but it was also run-down, and would need repairs to the walls, the roof, and probably things we couldn't see. The notice on the window did admit it needed a bit of a sorting out. That didn't apparently stop them asking what seems to me to be a phenomenal amount of money for what would be a crib back home.

Fishy Stuff

On Sunday we had a lazy day - lazier than usual, in other words. One thing we did do, however, was go with our rellies to East Harling (I think it was East) where there's a shop that sells tropical fish, gold fish and all sorts of other fish, along with assorted snakes, crocodiles and tortoises. If ever you want to check out God's imagination, go to a tropical fish shop. It isn't just that the colours are extraordinary, from the dullest to the most startling, but the shapes and sizes and variety of extras show a mind at work that has no problem coming up with something new - or something odd.
There were tanks with dozens of identical fish in them, and the slightest movement would send them off in a group to the other end. There were tanks with large koi (or carp) in them where the fish were keen to make friends, and were coming to the surface opening their mouths wide and happy to let you touch them. There were strange wormlike creatures that were some form of anemone. Ten or more of them would be entangled with each other in a thick bunch, so entangled that when one of the staff needed to get one out for a customer, he had to literally pull them apart. And then the worm would open up its end and produce a great flowery display. There were other black creatures, whether fish or plant, I don’t know, (though they seemed to be able to climb), and they consisted of a little ball with a bunch of the thinnest spikes all over it, especially on the ‘top’. These spikes waved round continually, checking out the environment, and making sure something didn’t happen to step on them or swim past.
Walking around at a great pace were tiny prawn-like creatures, their legs going nineteen to the dozen. And in other tanks – more the size you might see in a house – there were so many tiny fish that the tank was ablaze with the particular colour they were made of.
The crocodiles were only about two feet long at the outside, with very flat, square tops to the heads. They were in the same tank as dozens of turtles, and the latter were happily using the crocs as stepping stones up onto the stones at the side of the tank. One large tortoise was outside in his own little enclosure, eating grass, and inspecting the world with wise old eyes.
And in a very large glass tank, a huge fish rolled back and forward, and certainly seemed to be well aware of the world outside the glass, as he reacted to people passing by not by flitting away, but by coming up and inspecting them.
Ain’t creation incredible? (I was watching a David Attenborough doco last night on bugs and things. Some of what they get up to is absolutely mindboggling.)

Almost forgot

I’d forgotten that we actually fitted something else into today’s packed schedule. We did a short detour to a place called Lyveden New Bield. (Don’t ask.)
This is a National Trust place set in the middle of nowhere, and began life as a stately home for a Catholic family, the Treshams. It was begun between 1595 and 1605, but because Catholics were on the out at that time in English history, fines and penalties - and one of the sons being involved in the Gunpowder Plot - meant that the house and its architecturally planned garden was never finished.
Consequently what is left, still standing after 400 years, is the shell of what would have been a lovely home. Many things are in place: fireplaces, the decorations over doors, the decorations around the outside of the building, the underpinnings of a spiral staircase, the inner drainpipes. It’s like seeing a stately home stripped of its interiors, including floors, so that you can look straight up from basement to the top walls of the house. There’s no roof or ceiling either.
The gardens are lovely, although again because it was so hot we didn’t walk as far as we might have done. But we did go round the spiral Mount (a raised area a short distance away from the house which has a spiral path on it), and crossed over the man-made lakes on a short bridge. There are orchards as well, but we didn’t get that far.
An oddity, but worth visiting, especially on a day like today.

Two hectic days

Two full-on days. We drove back down to Northampton yesterday, aiming to arrive for lunch at 12.30 but were already running late by the time we left, and finally got there at 12.45, which was pretty good considering that there’d been delays on the road. Nothing like the last time we went, though.
It was my oldest sister-in-law’s birthday, and Celia had made her a birthday cake, and bought a bunch of food to take. Far too much food, of course, but that’s always the way with any Crowl celebration. We stayed with my other sister-in-law and her husband, again, and I finally remembered to return the key we’d borrowed last time. It was a blisteringly hot day - the hottest we’ve had since we’ve been here perhaps - and major change after all the rain.
The birthday party went off well, though most of them had to retreat in out of the sun because it was too hot. It wasn’t much cooler inside, however. At the end of the day we offered to take my nephew back home to Milton Keynes. This set up a chorus of ways we should gon to take him there (he doesn’t have his own car at present), and we had to leave in the end, and rely on our Sat Nav as there would have been no consensus from the other four. We went via a back road rather than the M11, and that was much more pleasant, and quicker!
Came home to our hosts and watched Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood’s first outing as director. More of that on my other blog.
Slept in this morning, and finally got away about ten. Arrived home at Wicklewood some ten hours later!
We wanted to take a quieter route than the one we’d come down on, and also see some other places. Headed to Wellingborough, which was a pleasant town, with op shops, a church with a spire in the Market Square, and a market in progress. In the church there are a number of new stained-glass windows - new in the sense that they were made in the 20th century. The creator of a couple was John Piper, and these are startlingly beautiful in a modern way, when the sun is shining through them. The woman who greeted us and talked to us about the place said that the minister who’d been there for some forty years (if I remember rightly) had had a way with getting people to part with their money and help improve the church. Consequently it has a mural over one altar painted by a Dutchman called Hans Feibusch (the woman said she’d never got to like it, even though she’d been longer than it has), the several stained-glass windows and several other modern works. Unfortunately the church is in a bad way outside, with the stonework deteriorating rapidly.
We went on to Oundle - don’t ask me how to pronounce it - where all the houses and buildings seemed to made of the same light-grey stone. There was such a uniformity about the colour that it almost didn’t seem real. Probably a very pleasant place, but that stage it was very hot again, and we didn’t stay long. Another church with a spire. (The Norman and Saxon towers aren’t much in evidence around here.)
We were going to go to Peterborough, but didn’t make it due to the fact that we decided to look up my cousin who, with another woman, runs a Christmas tree business. She also works at a full-time job. It took us two or three attempts to get to the place: for some reason our Sat Nav took us to a completely wrong place, recommending we pull into a private driveway where three houses were situated. Two little dogs gave a sort of effort to warn me off, but it was too hot for them to be really bothered. The man gave me fairly clear instructions, and we allowed Malvina to offer to put us on the right road as well, and eventually we got to the place - after first driving up a farm road that ran straight into a field.
My cousin wasn’t home when we arrived, so we walked around the house - and found a photo of one of my NZ uncles was up on the wall, which confirmed that we had the right place at least. And then, after we’d had a cup of coffee, my cousin suddenly turned up as we were about to leave, telling us my NZ uncle was coming along behind with the other woman - on bikes. He’s only 82.
Finally, after this, we headed straight home. It was a couple of hours of travel, and finished up taking us back down the road we’d come from King’s Lynn on Thursday.

Out in the Rain

We finally ventured out today in spite of the ongoing rain. (It’s been raining for four days solid - drizzling rather than raining, and more unpleasant for it.) One of the main reasons we got out of the house was because I’d rung a woman called Amanda Jennings at Anglian Worms, and she was happy for me to come and look at her worm farm. More about this visit on one of my other blogs. After we’d been to the worm farm we backtracked a little to Langham Glass, which, like Anglian Worms, is out in what I’d call the middle of nowhere, on an industrial estate. Be that as it may, we checked out the place, which was very busy, in spite of its isolation. Celia wanted to have a look at the people doing glass-blowing, but since this is England, and they charge for everything here, she baulked in the end at paying highly for the privilege. (Particularly since, in Nelson, in New Zealand, we’d seen the same thing for free.) Langham Glass produces some lovely work, however, and we bought some marbles - which Celia almost lost as soon as she got home. Again, in spite of the rain, we carried on to King’s Lynn, which apparently used to be called Bishop’s Lynn because it belonged to a Bishop. (It was a little smaller then.) A lynn is a pool, I‘ve discovered. King’s Lynn would have been better without the rain and overcastness, but it was a pleasant surprise. Five op shops at least, which kept us busy, but also a bustling shopping centre spreading out in several directions. In fact, we got lost at least twice by turning a corner than was curved rather than straight. We wore ourselves out in the end and didn’t get to the church in the town with two towers; another time perhaps. However on the way home we dropped into Narborough, where my brother-in-law had built a house in the past, and had lived there for about eight years. The house has been built up around now, but it still has some distinction - and beach stones set in the walls. Narborough also has a trout fishing place which was set in a delightful park area with pools and streams. And it has an old mill next door, with a rushing waterfall. Since we’d missed out on the King’s Lynn church, we went into the Narborough one. It’s smaller, of course, but quite light inside, as the big window over the altar isn’t stained glass, but almost clear. There was one other person there - also taking photographs. He turned out to be one Mr Spellman, and was taking photographs of the tombs of his ancestors. It seems the Spilmans (as they were called then) were prominent people in the Narborough/Norfolk area, and the church is riddled with their monuments and gravestones. He told us how one ancestor there, a woman, had married into the Spilman family back in the 13th century. Another had been a Recorder, and was buried ‘standing up’ in a large square block. It has his statue on top of it. He insisted on this (before he died, of course) because he’d never been ‘stood on’ during his life and wasn’t going to be after he died. However, as these things turn out, his body was disinterred at some point and is now stuck under the stones beneath one of the pews. So much for dignity. In the picture on the left, the statues of two of the ancestors lie on their sides, leaning on their hands. These are the parents of the Recorder. In the second picture, Mr Spellman isn't praying to one of his ancestors, he's trying to take a photo. Celia, in the wet raincoat, supervises.

Roman Catholic Cathedral

We finally made it to the RC Cathedral in Norwich today. The weather has been dull all day, and it was still overcast when we stepped inside the building. All of the rear part of the building was in gloom; the light was all up the front, most of it natural, some of it artificial.
It takes a good deal of time to find the detail in this large building. Unlike many churches, where things stand out the moment you enter, my first impression of this place was of the immense columns holding up the ceiling arches, columns a good metre or more in diameter. Only later on did I realise that each one has a different floral design around its base. And only later on did I realise there were small sculptured heads lining the walls. And that there were gargoyles on the outside of the building. Nothing seems to hit you at first; there’s just this lovely sense of peace. The place was empty apart from one man who sat in the pew for most of our visit, barely moving.
This isn’t a fussy church, somehow. There aren’t bits and pieces going off in various directions; instead there are a couple of small altars - maybe three - at the sides of the original main altar, and these are gloriously decorative affairs, Byzantine in their colour schemes. The main altar has been left isolated because of the shift in thinking about the altar being closer to the people, and the priest facing them. Consequently there’s a large gap between the painted screens that would have been behind the altar originally, and where the main altar is now.
There’s a sunken chapel off to one side, sunken in the sense that the floor is lower than that of the main building. And there are plans in the making to extend the building considerably out at one side. One part of the wall - two or three metres across - is going to be opened up and a new section built outside. This will include a shop, toilets, baby rooms and so on. It will also destroy the design of the building, but needs must, I suppose. Except that there’s an awful lot of space inside the building now, and somehow I can’t see it being filled to overflowing every Sunday.
The stained glass is lovely: there are two kinds. One is very demure, quiet, and almost colourless. You only see the patterning when you get up closer. The other is full of colour, with hundreds of pieces of coloured glass making up the pictures. It’s not the usual stained glass colouring somehow, but something much brighter and more cheerful which gives off a kaleidoscope effect. The main door is glass too, a wonderful smoky glass.
Outside, the building seems to be in a bit of trouble. Whatever stone has been used (and the building is only just over a 100 years old) is crumbling badly in places. The gargoyles are in for a fall if they’re not careful.
We wended our way down St Giles St (think it’s a Street) and came across an excellent secondhand bookshop, which had a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’d seen a copy of this in the Oxfam shop in Yarmouth (if I remember rightly) and had decided it was too expensive. I should have bought it as I’ve had trouble finding a copy ever since. It’s still a very popular book. Not sure why I want to read it, except that it’s one of those books that sticks in your mind and you keep saying…I must read that someday.

A lack of verandahs

Things are still a bit quiet on the Crowl front, but we’ve now booked a flight to Hamburg for early in October, as the beginning of our European train tripping around. And we’ve booked our first piece of accommodation. Scary.
Meanwhile, today we went into Norwich intending to go to see the Roman Catholic Cathedral (which we tried to see a few days ago and couldn’t find where to park conveniently), but Celia got stuck in a department store while I went to take some books back to the Norwich library (yes, of course I have an English library card) and that was the last I saw of her for an hour and a half or more. When I say ‘stuck’ I mean she decided she could do some shopping while I wasn’t standing alongside her being annoying, so she just got on and did. The poor old Cathedral missed out on our patronage again as she was too exhausted after all the trying on of clothes to walk along Chapelfield from the main shopping area.
Never mind, we’ll get there eventually.
It was raining in a misty sort of fashion when we got into Norwich, and continued to do so while we were there. What the English cities and towns could do with are the verandahs we have in NZ, which protect shoppers from the rain - pretty much. Dripping your way around a shopping area with no cover isn’t fun.
It was raining last night too, when we went to see The Bourne Ultimatum. The Riverside complex, where the multiplex is, doesn’t have any shelter either!

Couple of quiet days

We haven’t done a great deal that’s unusual over the last couple of days. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to make my bloggers more productive, income-wise, than they are at present; Celia went to Norwich with her 11-year-old great-niece, and hada ball buying clothes for our granddaughters back home; we had a family meal - a Chinese, that cost us a lot in weight-watchers points; I played cricket very badly with my great-nephew, who plays cricket very well; our Garvin Sat Nav continues to take us from A-B and in general we don’t go down the wrong road too often. Although one of the turns we’re supposed to make when coming back from Attleborough to Wicklewood is a few hundred yards beyond the one we have gone down - twice. And the wrong turning (where Malvina cries out in mock alarm: Recalculating!) takes us miles out of the way.
Attleborough (two of them) and Attlebridge and Attleton Green are the only places in the UK starting with the odd word, Attle. According to one online dictionary, the word means: Rubbish or refuse consisting of broken rock containing little or no ore. It’s a mining term. (There now, wasn’t that interesting?)
I’ve been playing the piano again, because there’s a rather-out-of-tune piano here and I can practise as I please. It’s not a piano made in the fair village of Roade by the Pianoforte Company run by Mr Cripps; nope, it’s an Eavestaff made in London, a make I must say I’ve never heard of. Last night we had a bit of a sing around the piano, working our way through some old jazz classics and some modern love songs. The others enjoyed it, even if the piano-playing and the singing were both a bit shambolic.
Just a postscript: I wonder why Buckley’s Canadiol Mixture is such a popular search term? It’s always been one of those names I’ve delighted in; compare it to the modern names for cough mixtures: Robitussin, for example. What the heck does that mean? Does it grab your emotions the way Buckley’s does?
And the ad that goes with Robitussin is awful. Mummy, if we say Bless you when someone sneezes, what do we say when someone coughs? Robitussin.
Robitussin? Good grief.
I've just discovered that Buckley's Canadiol has a rather delightful site - with an ongoing competition where you can send in a photo of your 'bad taste' face, or a story about taking sour medicine.

Fakenham

Yesterday was wet and blowy in the morning (as it had been the previous afternoon) so we didn’t decide to do anything until the afternoon. The National Trust choices weren’t good because most of the ones we hadn’t seen were quite a way away, so we finished up going to Fakenham (pronounced Fake-nam).
Whether it was the dull day that didn’t greatly encourage us about Fakenham or whether it was just the town itself was inspiring, we didn’t feel much enthused about the place. The church seemed untidy and dim, and there wasn’t much to write home about it in it (though we met a bellringer who was waiting for some other campanologists to arrive for a session on the bells), and the shops were okay. But everything had a down-at-heel feel about it, as though the town didn’t have much pride in itself. Even the secondhand bookshop, situated in the basement of a café, smelt mouldy and the books weren’t very exciting. This may all be a completely subjective impression, and there is a new mall in Fakenham that looks good - although two or three of the shops are untenanted.
However, the saving grace of Fakenham was a little teashop called the Tudor Tea Room - seating for about 25 at a pinch - which advertised tea for 60p and coffee for only a little more. In the end we actually had one cream tea and a coffee, which meant we got a scone with jam and mock cream as well as the drinks. We shared the scone and toppings (I had all the butter) which meant our points for the day were rapidly reduced. (Had vege soup and toast for tea to make up for it!)
The thirty-something bloke running the teashop kept all the orders in his head - I never forget an order, he claimed - and was working full bore to keep up with all the customers, because the place was nearly full when we arrived. Probably nobody actually bought a tea or coffee for the cheap prices, because the other items in the place were quite enticing!

Place Names

Anyone who likes a bit of nonsense can check out a short piece I wrote on place names in England called Ten Places in Great Britain You Might Not Want to Move To.
It appears on the Quazen site in something called Trifter.com. (Quazen has developed a policy of putting the articles people write on a variety of sites, instead of all on one main one. Not sure whether it’s ideal, particularly when I have no idea what Trifter means, but it seems to collect all the articles on travel together.)

Checking out prices online

Just having some fun playing with the HotelReservations.com site. I began by looking at Hotel Reservations on their own. You can put in a place name and the site will skip off and find you a choice of hotels (and other facilities) within seconds. Even though USA was on the page, I put Auckland in, and it was quite happy to find Auckland, NZ. Some of the room prices were a bit out of my reach, but that’s okay - at this point I don’t actually want to stay in Auckland, even though my daughter has moved there recently, and taken her man and their two children (our grandchildren) with her.
But we have considered going on the Continent for two or three weeks, say in October, so I put Florence in as a search. I hadn’t realised there were five places called Florence in the USA, one in Alabama, one in Arizona, one in Kentucky, one in Oregon, and one in SC. It’ll come to me in a minute which state that is! Ah, South Carolina?
In spite of the wealth of US Florences, the first Florence to come up was Italy‘s, which is where I was intending to look. So that was a plus. Clever site.
The site does vacation rentals as well as hotels (and flights, cars, package deals), so I checked out NZ for that, too. Up came Auckland, Queenstown, Wellington, Christchurch. Pretty good, though again things are on the pricey side. Maybe this site doesn’t look at more economic possibilities?
Thought I might as well have a look at the flights option, as this is something we’ve been checking out quite a bit online. And it’s usually not easy. However, apart from checking which of the several London airports I wanted to fly from, it found a possible flight very quickly. Though at US$10,683.40, it might be a bit beyond our budget! I went back to check that I hadn’t put business class in the options, but the only option was economy/coach. Obviously there might be a cheaper flight available: £5,339.80 or NZ$14,621.95 for one return flight to a place that’s not that far away from here, seems just a bit over the top.
However, one interesting thing that did turn up in the flight options, was this: people 62 years old and over can obviously go for a better price. Finally my age gives me some benefits! (Actually, if I want to travel by bus from Norwich to a large number of destinations, I can go free, because of my age.)

Rochester and Braintree

Our trip back from Rochester took all day, but that was okay as we were just wanting to meander. We’d stayed at a Youth Hostel at Gillingham overnight - it was fine, a bit expensive, I thought, and very noisy (not helped by a baby who woke up several times during the night screaming, Mummy!)
We began our meandering by going back into Rochester again. Just a few hundred yards away from where we’d had the party the day before (at the Quaker Hall) we went into Rochester Cathedral. It’s a smaller Cathedral than Norwich, for example, but it has a more welcoming feel as a result. Not only that there was a choir there practicing for Matins, which was at 9.45. So we sat listening to the wonderful music in excellent acoustics, and then joined in Matins by sitting in the choir stalls themselves, just a few feet along from the singers. Apparently they were an ad hoc group. Celia had met one of them the night before at the Hostel, and she told us that they used to sing together in Southampton years ago, but because they’d all gone their various ways they only got together like this once a year or so, and this year they were spending a week singing in Rochester. Fortunately for us!
The cathedral also had an exhibition by Robert Koening in situ. It consists of a large group of figures all carved from lime trees - the trees had all grown in the area near where his family had come from, in Poland. The twenty or thirty figures, men and women, stand all facing one way with pain and hope on their faces. Their clothing is painting in simple colours, though the bumps and bruises caused by the sculpture’s travelling around Europe and England have knocked some of the colour away. There were four other smaller figures, done in greater detail.
We then went on to have a brief look at the Castle, which is literally just across the road. We didn’t go inside the building itself, as it cost more than we felt was justified at the moment, but the castle is still fairly intact given its age.
Set our Sat Nav to go and find the couple who had held the party the day before, to see them once more before we go. They have a house that by NZ standards is very narrow - one room across, and three deep, with presumably a similar arrangement upstairs - and it’s set in a street of similar houses. Still, its value has more than doubled since they bought it, so that’s a plus.
Onto Braintree, where Celia’s niece and her family live. She was surprised we found the place so easily, but Malvina had taken us there fairly straightforwardly. She was in the middle of finishing of an assignment for some higher degree she’s doing, so we didn’t stay too long. We may go back there when we head off to Luxembourg next month. (We’d had a bit of a panic about our possible European travels, wondering whether we needed visas or not, but after some calls today found that any places we’re likely to go to we don’t need them.

Spelling and grammar

One of my daughter's has been checking up fairly regularly on spelling mistake in these blogs. Now she's come back to me with a couple of grammatical problems. She emailed me to say I must be typing really fast recently. That's part of the problem, though more of it is that I'm not doing as much proof-reading for myself as I should be.
This is the same daughter who, back in the 90s when I was writing a weekly column for the Star Midweeker, was on one occasion allowed by the editor to write the column for me. She wrote about how I used incidents from family life in the column, and perhaps shouldn't (!), and how the column was read at her school and dissected by the English teacher.
It's interesting how words you write that seem to have little more than temporary value can wind up being used in places you never know about. I was once asked by an American school-text publisher if they could reprint one of my columns in one of their text books. I was happy for them to do so (particularly as there was a payment involved) but I often wonder how they wanted to use the column in the book, and what various students over the years have thought about it.

Rochester and a party

Back into Norwich yesterday for a short visit with the aim of trying to find a travel agent who could tell us more about rail travel on the Continent. Neither of the places we went to were much on to it; seems they don’t handle rail travel a lot. So in the end we went back to the online info in the evening, and are trying to work from there.
Today we drove down to Rochester in Kent, via the M25 at one point, and the bridge at Dartford. Four lanes of traffic on our side all slowing up to pay a pound toll (see picture). The bridge is massive, a great creation slung from towering pillars. And it rises way up in the air before hitting it’s peak and coming down again. Quite impressive.
We drove to Rochester because we were attending a ‘welcome ceremony’ for a recently-adopted child. She’s near to two, and has the energy of a fireball. Her father is Cockney Indian, so there were a lot of his Indian relatives there making us welcome. Her mother had friends from the library where she used to work. And there were various other ring-ins like us (we‘re not related to the family, but my daughter in NZ is). One of the librarians used to be in the Poetry Library which is situated in the Festival Hall building on the fifth floor; she‘s now in the British Film Institute Library - just as intriguing!. The poetry library has nothing but 20th and 21st century poetry in its stock: two copies of nearly everything, one for borrowing, one for the collection. Another friend at the party was a poet, Patience Agbabi, a lovely London-born woman from a Nigerian background. We’ll have to try and track down some of her poetry; though from what I read on the Net it sounds fairly radical!

The Pedlar of Swaffham

Yesterday we visited Swaffham. There were plenty of op shops there, but little else to capture our attention. Maybe we’re getting blasé.
Stephen Fry was making some film or tv item there. He was standing in front of a pub in the main square that had a false name over the top of its real name, and was contemplating life, since nothing else seemed to be happening. Several very bright lights were shining on him, but the crew were sitting to one side chewing the cud. We walked past him, went to a bookshop, browsed around for a time and walked back again. He was still in the same position, and nothing else appeared to have happened.
The main church in Swaffham had a little old lady offering us information about the place. She was very helpful, and we learned things from her we wouldn’t have by just wandering around. Carvings of figures on the pew ends - a newish set and the old original set - were of the Pedlar, about whom there’s a charming story.
When he was struggling to survive, he had a vivid dream about London Bridge and all the shops there, so, when he awoke he set off to seek his fortune. On arriving, after a long journey, he met up with a shopkeeper who scoffed at his dream, but told him that he’d also had a dream: of a pedlar in Swaffham who dug up treasure from underneath an oak tree in his back garden. The pedlar said nothing, but turned back towards home. When he got to his garden he dug down and found a pot full of gold coins. On the pot were Latin words which he couldn’t read, so he asked someone what they meant. They told him: Underneath me lies a treasure richer than I. He dug again, and found even more gold.
The pedlar, whose name is generally considered to be John Chapman, shared his fortune with others, and contributed to the building of Swaffham church. He’s acknowledged still in the town by a statue in the square and by being seen on the town’s signage.
One other interesting thing about the church. There was a large tapestry over one of the small altars. Paua shell was used in part of it - a very small part of it. In the brochure about it, the word is curiously spelt: Pahwah!

Oxburgh

I didn’t get round to writing my post on Oxburgh yesterday, so here it is now. Oxburgh turned out to be one of the most delightful Halls we’ve visited. It was owned by the Roman Catholic Bedingfeld family until it was given to the National Trust in 1952. However, the Bedingfelds still live in some part of it.
There’s a wall all the way around, with towers at intervals, and a wide open garden area as you enter. A stream runs along one side; well, when I say stream, I’m not sure that it goes anywhere, but it’s like a stream, and there a beautiful lily-pads in flower over towards a little platform. Across it at one point is a bridge which has a pulley on it, so that part of it can be raised to allow a small boat through. Small, as in a rowboat.
In front of the Hall is the parterre garden. I guessed this meant something along the lines of ‘by earth’ but in fact the proper translation is on the ground, which seems just a little bit obvious for a garden. Wikipedia tells us that a “parterre is a formal garden construction on a level surface consisting of planting beds, edged in stone or tightly clipped hedging and gravel paths arranged to form a pleasing, usually symmetrical pattern. Parterres need not have any flowers at all. French parterres were elaborated out of 16th-century knot gardens.” The parterre at Oxburgh is elaborate and colourful - and it does have flowers, and a knot shape.
Beyond this is the Hall itself, surrounded by a moat, which may have only arrived in the 19th century as there was a photograph inside the building of men working on it. The building (which was begun in 1482) itself has been added to and altered but in spite of its inconsistencies of design is strong in its features. There’s a bridge over the moat and plenty of fish in the water. We couldn’t tell what kind they were, except that they were black, or dark in colour, and about 6-8 inches long. Long iridescent dragonflies hovered over the water.
Apparently the house was originally U-shaped, but the fourth side was filled in by the industrious Victorian, and there is now a courtyard in the centre. The Victorians also added the Flemish-style windows and the terracotta chimneys.
While the house is interesting to walk around in, its major claim to fame is that it has a priest’s hole. This was a hiding place for Catholic priests in the time when they were being hunted down. The hole is in an interesting place. One of the rooms above the main archway was slept in by King Henry VII. The privy (it has a more particular name which I’ve forgot) was up a short flight of steps. Behind this was the trap to flush out the doings; in the troubled times, this trap didn’t flush anything out but hid the priest who had a small ‘room’ beneath. His access was in fact through the trap, and he would have had to have been a fairly skinny fellow to get through it.
Above the King’s room was the Queen’s, reached by a stone spiral staircase. And further up the staircase again is access to the tower overlooking the roof. There’s more access to something above that again, but it was closed to us yesterday.
Unless you have a good idea of period furniture and style it’s hard to tell what was original in the house and what has been added. The Victorians seemed to have collected a great deal of carved wood, sometimes adding it to existing furniture. Only someone with particular knowledge would know what belonged to what.
Yesterday there was an art exhibition on at the house as well. Art in the sense of ‘someone’s idea of art.’ It consisted of copy after copy of various ‘common’ items such as books, hotties, tanks and airplanes (!) all made in white porcelain. The artist had a philosophical reason for making all this stuff - these sorts of artists always do - but in fact it wasn’t particularly exciting, and it detracted considerably from the genuine art and furniture and fittings in the house. Fortunately the stuff was only in two rooms, otherwise it would have been quite irritating. One of the volunteer guides expressed some considerable disdain for it, as well he might.

Going abroad - or not

We haven’t made much progress on doing any planning for going on the Continent as yet. I suspect in part we’ve been a bit put off by trying to figure out whether it’s cheaper to fly to a place and back again, or to go somewhere and try and fly from there to a second destination. Doing it online ought to be the way to go but it never seems quite as easy as we’d like. And it was a disappointing, I think, to find that even Ryanair, which was so cheap in terms of the flight proceeded to add a pile of extra charges on once we’d actually booked. They don’t always do that, but you have to catch their super-duper-specials before you can get out of the extra costs.
We don’t want to take the car on the Continent: for one thing neither of us fancies driving on the wrong side of the road, and we’d have to hike the insurance up even further.
Anyway, we are going to Luxembourg early in September, to see a man who was only 12 or 13 when we left London in 1974. I was a kind of big brother (as they call it in NZ) to him for a while, and we used to get on very well. Hopefully after an absence of thirty-plus years we still will!
We’ve thought of going to Switzerland, because there’s a young fellow who used to be at our church in Dunedin now living there with his wife, and we’d like to go back to Rome, because we have such good memories of it. We were thinking about Venice too, but my niece has rather put us off the place: she felt it was overpriced, crowded, and that they tended to rip off the visitors. Florence is another possibility, and of course the Continent is so full of choices it’s hard to know where to start.
We haven’t even considered places further afield like Bahrain or Dubai, and I’ve just come across Egypt package holidays - I don’t know that either of us are keen on the heat or the type of atmosphere in those places. I think I stopped off in Bahrain briefly when I first came to England; my memory of it is that the airport had a toilet I couldn’t figure out how to use and oppressive muggy heat. I was happy to get back on the plane!
The company that does the package holidays, however, does have a lot of info on Continental holidays, so it's probably time Celia and I sat down and tried to work something out.

More on HitTail

I haven’t paid much attention to the results from HitTail for this blog so far because no one wants to read a post that contains the words Mike Crowl Travel several times over.
However, things have improved a bit and we’ve had people looking for some things that are a bit more interesting. Curiously, Buckley’s Canadiol Mixture turned up on the list, even though my post regarding it goes back to when the blog had nothing to do with travel but was more personal in tone. The Sally Army got a look in after I mentioned them in the beach service that took place in Sheringham. Another search result that came up was from a blog written by someone who’s doing a social work course and is having to do research on various Christian organisations, including *shudder* (her word) a Baptist website.
A search for Mike Crowl Blog plasters me all over the Google page, which is nice (egotism notwithstanding) and a search for Mundesley takes us straight to the top of the list. Whether finding out that Celia worked in Mundesley forty years ago is what the searcher was looking or not is another matter.
The Garvin Sat Nav that we borrowed made the list, being very close to the top of the results but my mention of Michael Crowl and Goldman Sachs in the same post didn’t even make the first page of Google results.
For those reading this blog for travel news, I’m afraid my interest in turning up on search results probably isn’t very interesting. So I give you full permission to skip these HitTail blogs if you want!

Off to Oxburgh

Decided to tick Oxburgh Hall off our list today. It’s another National Trust place, so of course we can get in free. It was supposed to be near King’s Lynn, but when we put the post code in our trusty GPS it turned out to be a lot close to where we’re staying than we expected. Took only about half an hour all up.
On the way there we stopped off in a couple of places, Hingham and Watton. Hingham is a fairly small town (almost a village) which has the claim to fame that Abraham Lincoln’s ancestors came from there. It also has a couple of other interesting features: the largest parish church in the area, and a shopkeeper who sells ex-army and navy stores gear, and Russian Christmas decorations. Okay….! How he manages to get rid of either I don’t know, since he certainly wouldn’t make much money out of the local people. Buses pass through fairly regularly and presumably he makes money out of the tourists. But what an odd combination. The shop was full of these decorations: hand painted balls of various sizes, and a few other items. That was in one side, while in the other were all the army and navy clothes and boots and so on. Outside he has a sign in Russian. Strange.
The church was certainly large, and reasonably interesting. Lots of stained-glass, a bust of Abe, a marvellous memorial in carved stone to a number of leading lights in the village from way back.
Next stop was Watton, a much large place - with op shops. Investigating those took us a while, and then we found a secondhand bookshop. That took longer. Celia got a couple of books on making hassocks, something she’s been quite keen to investigate since we came across all these ones in churches, and I found one of the two Ellis Peters Brother Cadfael books we’ve been trying to track down.
We had lunch in the car park and then drove on to Oxburgh, which, as I said, turned out to be closer than we expected. More on that in the next post.

Some things I meant to mention

Policeman’s Loke. We’ve passed a sign with this on it twice now, and wondered what on earth a Loke is. Finally checked it out: it’s a private path or road; also, the wicket or hatch of a door. Presumably in this case it’s the former. The origin of the word seems to be a local dialect version of the word, lock.
Secondly, I keep meaning to say about the number of churches in Norfolk and Suffolk that have made their own hassocks. In some churches they commemorate occasions, in others they have all sorts of designs on them depending on who made them, in others they may be only a couple of designs spread throughout the church, and in others such as the one we were in today at Hingham, each hassock is a memorial for a person who’s been in the church, at some time over the last several centuries. And in Bury St Edmunds we came across a woman measuring out the correct distance between each hassock as it sat waiting for a user on the pew back and putting them closer or further apart as the need arose. There were at least thirty rows, with six or so hassocks in each. A time-consuming job! Those hassocks each had a different design on them, commemorating all the different parishes within the diocese.
Thirdly, in every National Trust place we’ve gone so far, they’ve had a secondhand bookshop. Very tempting, and I don’t think we’ve managed to get out of one yet without a purchase.

Old Norwich

Back to Norwich later this afternoon, where we finally got the Vodafone people to unlock the content control from my mobile connect. The control has meant I haven’t been able to get onto my Scrabble site - not exactly a site to worry anyone, you’d think!
The other aspect of our trip there today was that I rediscovered the Norwich I remembered - as far as I remember it at all. My impression had been of a place with narrow streets and old buildings. That’s the bit we came across today. It had been hiding further along the road than we’d explored so far. And there are some op shops there - and the SPCK bookshop. So we’ll have to go back when we have a bit more time, and find out what else it has hiding away.

Dereham and Withburga

Visited Dereham today. We’d passed through it (in fact, we’d stopped and had a cup of coffee there the other day) but hadn’t really looked at it. So a return trip was necessary.
It turned out not to be overly exciting, because many of the old buildings that might have made it interesting were demolished in the 60s, when it was fashionable to do such a thing and the historic places hadn’t got their teeth into preservation. Now Dereham consists mostly of newish buildings, and more to come. The main shopping area isn’t large - we covered it in about twenty minutes - and so the major sight to see was the church, which, surprise, surprise, is called St Nicholas’ Church, as are most of the churches in Norfolk, it seems.
But this church has some interesting features. Firstly instead of having a tower attached to the church, it has a ‘detached’ tower, and quite a substantial one too. The bells are lodged there.
Secondly, William Cowper, the poet, is buried in the church, and there’s a large memorial stained-glass window above his burial place. Two other people he was closely associated with are also buried there.
And thirdly, the Christian presence in this town goes back to the 7th century, when Withburga, the daughter of the then king of East Anglia, came to the place along with other women, and began to minister to people. She was greatly revered, and there are several interesting stories about her. At one point she had nothing to give the workers building the convent but dry bread. After praying about this, she was directed to send her maids to a certain place each day, and each day two does came and provided milk. Unfortunately this eventually aroused the ire of the local land overseer, and he drove off the does with his dogs. It didn’t do him much good: his horse threw him and he broke his neck!
After Withburga died, her body was buried in the cemetery belonging to the Abbey of Dereham. 55 years later, her body was found to be uncorrupted, and was moved into the church itself. However, the Abbot of Ely wanted to bury the body beside those of Withburga’s two sisters. So he took a group of armed men with him to Dereham, invited the townsmen to a feast and made them drunk. He then carried off the body. There was great distress when the Dereham people discovered the loss of the body, and they pursued the Abbot and his men. According to one story the body was placed in a barge just before the Dereham men arrived; in another a battle took place. Whatever the case, Withburga’s remains wound up at Ely - but not for long. The Vikings turned up (as they had done for decades) and destroyed much of the church at Ely, including the place where the women’s bodies were buried. No one now knows where they lie.
However, in a kind of compensation for the loss of their saint, a spring appeared at the site of Withburga’s tomb, and continues to run to this day. It’s become a place many pilgrims over the centuries have come to.
The photograph is of the well.

In the country

Just been for a walk round a little of the village we‘re staying in. We‘re on the outer perimeter, I think, so that the line of houses on one side is contrasted with wide open fields on the other. Everywhere we’ve been lately the farmers have been cutting the wheat and then gathering the hay into large round bales. The dusty smell lingers in the air.
At the end of our Close is another of the innumerable old churches that dot the Norfolk/Suffolk countryside. This one has a square tower which makes it Norman, if I remember rightly. Inside it’s quite cramped compared to many of the old churches, and seems to have little to differentiate it from dozens of others. There is a turnstile at the gate, however.
Outside the grass is growing up amongst the older graves, some of which are on a lean, and will soon fall to the ground. Most gravestones only seem to go back to the late 18th century; perhaps the earth has swallowed up earlier ones, as it seems to be threatening to do to later ones, or perhaps gravestones weren’t large in the earlier days and the graves of the old saints are well and truly hidden from sight.

Going back in time 2

Yesterday we spent a good deal of the afternoon at a wedding reception with a difference. Firstly, the actual wedding had taken place back in July - we’d babysat the house for the couple while they went on their honeymoon. Secondly, there were six wedding cakes. The bride had asked certain people to make a cake specially for the reception, and so each cake was quite different, and at least two of them were more like children’s birthday cakes. One of these had a little car and trailer on it, and the other was a large teddy-bear shaped cake with scrumptious soft icing.
And then the reception took place at a pub in what I would call the middle of nowhere. It turned out to be about a mile away from the main village of Whepstead, and had no other buildings anywhere near. It’s a lovely old building, in good condition, large enough for a few guests, but really what we would call in NZ: out in the wop wops.
Still, the day was hot (the English can no longer complain that they’re not getting a summer - today is too hot to go outside); the bride left some water pistols for the children to play with after lunch, and it was two adults (my wife and a lady vicar) who started the ball rolling. At different times in the day some people got completely soaked. In fact, the vicar poured a glass of water down her brother’s back late in the afternoon, something he took with surprising equanimity. I suppose he thought retaliating on a woman wasn’t the done thing, let alone a female vicar. More fool him.

Sorting Out

Yesterday, probably because I was tired when I wrote, I got tangled up completely as to where we’d been. Most of the interesting stuff was in Cley, such as the marshes and the lock, and the windmill. The tide was out in Morsten, and the boats there were all becalmed as well as at Blakeney.
And then I forgot that in the morning that we’d spent quite a while on Beeston Common, which is across the road from one of the houses Celia lived in as a child. Beeston Common is now more ‘grown-up’ than it was fifty years ago: the trees are much taller, making some parts of it more like a wood than a common. And the grasses and stinging nettles and various other plants are profuse on the ground. But there are still tracks, and a local group has signposted some of them as a way of not getting lost in the area.
Celia found the pill box that had been there when she was a child. It was built as a kind of lookout for when the Germans were coming. Health and Safety have had a go at it, and repaired it, and filled in the holes, so you can no longer get inside and play. Spoil sports. A woman passing us at that point said it was because there had been snakes and such inside it. Snakes - you tend to forget that England still has snakes, though I can’t say I’ve seen one, this time or the last time. But another woman we met in Sheringham Wood the other day said her dog had been bitten by a young adder a couple of years ago. Dogs can suffer badly from adder bites and can sometimes die, but for humans it’s more of a nasty irritation. The dog in question, one of two the woman had with her, seemed to have recovered. Along with its companion it was hiving into the pond the woman was sitting beside, and getting itself thoroughly soaked and then coming out and sharing the water with you.
I keep meaning to mention as well that we’ve frequently passed a village called Roman Camp - in fact, it was the first place we bought petrol in England. It’s rather mind-boggling to think that the Romans made such an impression on this particular area that people still call it by such a name. And I also keep forgetting to name drop and say that Bill Bryson, the travel writer and humorist, lives not far from where we’re staying now, in one of the many tiny villages around here.
After our Beeston Common excursion, we went down to the beach where the CSSM (Children’s Special Service Mission - and not Come Single Soon Married, as Celia insists it ought to be) were holding one of their beach missions. These are annual events and go on for two weeks (used to be three). There were puppets and a girl talking about Abraham, and quite a lot of kids (considering it wasn’t warm at that stage) and adults, and they were mostly pretty involved, even the teenagers sitting up in the shelter above the mission.

Footnote to the previous post

As I said in the previous post, we visited so many villages and towns today that my mind has got befuddled about which one was which. I think it was at Morsten that we visited the marshes. There was a windmill, I recall, and when we went to look around the other side of it we found the marshes, and a small stream, with a lock, running out to sea.
In Cley, we went around the back streets and alleyways between the houses. These were just delightful, particularly the alleys, where flowers grew up on both sides, and there were walls made of beach stones up high on either hand, and little arched doors into the back gardens of the people’s cottages.
The quay at Blakeney wasn’t too exciting, because the tide was out, and this meant that all the boats were sitting in the mud, This is normal each day, but not particularly attractive. Blakeney was crowded with lots of visitors, and was one of the places where we couldn’t get a park for love nor money. Well, we could have for money, but we weren’t going to pay £3 to park some distance away from the town for only a short period.
Going to Walsingham was a disappointment for me. When I was hitchhiking through England on my last visit to the country, I came across Walsingham almost by accident. I’d heard about it, I think, and it’s legend of the church being carried across from France (I think) by angels. I remember walking into the village and sensing a real atmosphere about the place. I wondered whether it was Little Walsingham that I’d visited last time, perhaps, because Walsingham itself struck me today as not very interesting and was certainly lacking in atmosphere.
We visited the Shrine, and the church that now surrounds it, and neither of us felt good about the place. The church is full of altars and chapels dedicated to different saints, and it’s very dark compared to the other English churches we’ve visited, as though light wasn’t somehow supposed to penetrate. I felt rather edgy in there, which was odd, and Celia came out saying it seemed idolatrous the way there was so much emphasis on saints. Hmm. Interesting that Walsingham has had a different effect on us this time!

I've just had a look at Walsingham on the Net and find that there are both Anglican and Catholic Shrines there. Seems like we went to the Anglican one, which being very high Anglican could easily have been mistaken for a Catholic church.

A long post divided into more than one section`

Today was a wandering day. We left our current abode and moved on, as we’re now babysitting a house near Wymondham. Celia wanted to go along the coast past Sheringham to look at some of the other seaside towns, so that’s what we did, spending the better part of the day at the job.
I’ve think I’ve lost track of most of them already, but we passed through Salthouse, Cley-Next-The-Sea, Blakeney, Morston, Stiffkey and Wells-Next-The-Sea, and later on went to Walsingham. I’ve now lost track of where the three bookshops were that we visited, although there was one where Celia bought a book on Norfolk dialect called Crab Books; another that sold a lot of original paintings and prints, had at least four rooms and also managed to fit in a café and lots of bric-a-brac. And then there was another which had rooms scattered around what might originally have been a house, including a chunk of books out in a shed out the back (a very tidy shed, that is) and which also had pottery for sale.
I watched a potter making a pot another place, and we discovered what appeared to be a small town that had a very large church, in very good condition, and full of interesting wood carvings. There was another church – in much worse condition, in Salthouse- where their annual art exhibition was going on. The few paintings and ‘works’ that were worth looking at had been snapped up early, and the rest of the stuff was being ignored (rightly so in my opinion). Someone had written in the visitors’ book: not as good as last year, and someone else had written: positively gloomy.
The bookshops were all worth visiting, each in their own way. Apart from the peculiarities of the one with the café (some shelves of books were around the sides of the café, but it was difficult to interrupt the people eating their meals), it had a great stock of stuff, including tons of sheet music, much of it for horn. I picked up a Bach piece that I can probably still play, and an autobiography of Eric Ambler.
Crab Books was very clean and tidy, to the extent I thought it was a new books shop at first. But there were no category headings anywhere, so that you had to work them out for yourself, and the books weren’t in any order within the categories. But the books themselves were a great mix.
The other bookshop was more typical of secondhand bookshops: books crammed into every available corner, and wonky shelves. But! Everything was categorised, and all the books throughout were in author order. What a difference that makes. They also had quantities of books by various authors such as Wodehouse, Kipling, Leslie Charteris, and dozens of others. I found a book of short stories by Dorothy Sayers which I don’t think I already have.

Birth and death

Yesterday we went to West Beckham, because that’s where Celia was born. In a maternity home that had formerly been a workhouse, supposedly. A workhouse is something that you’ll read about in Charles Dickens’ books, and they were pretty awful places then; somewhere for people who couldn’t afford to spend their last days in any comfort. By the mid-fifties of last century, the few that left were better, but still had a bad name.

Anyway, we found the West Beckham church, which is actually the East and West Beckham church, because the two parishes amalgamated sometime back in the late 19^th century, when the churches, which had fallen into great disrepair, were rebuilt on the West Beckham site. Unlike the rest of the churches around Norfolk, this one is built almost entirely of Sheringham beach stones – inside and out. I’ll add a photo in due course. It’s in good condition, being a lot newer than the average 900-year-old church, though apart from the stones it isn’t particularly distinguished in design. The arch over the front door was apparently rebuilt from leftovers of the East Beckham church.

Well, to get into the church, we had to go next door and get a key. The guy there went off to get his wife, who had the key, and when they came back, Celia asked about the maternity home, saying she’d been born there.

The guy’s reaction was that it was a wonder she survived: the place had been notorious for lack of care and infant mortality. And yes, it had been a workhouse once. And it still exists, except that the roof has all caved in, and it’s inaccessible. His wife was greatly amused that someone standing in front of her should have been born there.

The current owner is having long debates with the Council about what’s going to happen to it, so he’s put barbed wire all around. We managed to get a photo or two of some of it, but the hedges are very high around it as well. I’ll add these in due course.

Celia also wanted to track down a former teacher – her favourite. She’d met up with her former art teacher the night before, and decided to see if she could find this other man, who would now be in his eighties. We found his address in a phone book in Holt, put on the Sat Nav for Hunworth, and, after asking at two different houses in that village, found the house where he’d lived. But he’d gone onto a rest home in another village with the marvellous (and very English) name of Hindolveston. (I kid you not.)

Put Hindolveston in the Sat Nav, and again, after asking someone where the rest home was (none of these places have street addresses, only names), found it. Celia went in and there was her teacher, a skeleton of a man, still very alert (though he didn’t actually remember her) and pleased to have a visitor.

Finally, on the way home, we dropped in at Weyborne, a lovely village by the beach. It’s unspoilt, never having taken off like its great coastal cousins, Sheringham and Cromer. And the beach would be like any typical country beach in NZ if it weren’t for the fact that it’s all stones and no sand.