A few notes

One of the great advantages of having relatives in England who care about you is that we’ve been looked after very well, even by those who’d hadn’t seen us for more than thirty years. Without our extended family over here, this trip wouldn’t have been possible in any sense.

I’ve just been checking back over some of the words that HitTail has turned up and find that the windmill in Cley, which we visited (well, we walked around it as it was closed at the time) was restored by the parents of a singer/songwriter called James Blunt. His real name is James Blount and he’s the composer of the album, Back to Bedlam. There now, did you know that?

I mentioned too that we’d had to get Vodafone to unlock the content control on the mobile connect, and that it had been a bit of an issue doing so. Seemingly, Vodafone is the only company that actually does this for free (why do they lock them in the first place?). Some companies in Australia, apparently, charge anything from $27.95AUD to $199! What a racket.

I’d talked about Gaudi’s architectural approach to the Holy Family Cathedral in Barcelona, and said it looked like the stone was melting. This isn’t unusual in Gaudi’s work, apparently: in a recent article in the NY Times, the writer talks about the way Gaudi used this melting effect on houses and roofs and other architectural features.

Our frequent mention of McDonald’s brought us into a search result as well. I don’t know if I wrote that we didn’t go to McDonald’s in Spain because they didn’t serve milkshakes. Whether it’s something to do with the way they bottle milk or what, I don’t know, but we couldn’t get a milkshake in Spain (not from McDonald’s anyway).

It was interesting the way the McDonald’s vary. When we came back to London we had more trouble communicating with the staff in the two McDonald’s we visited than we did in any of the countries in Europe. There the assistants were pleased to interpret our English into McDonaldsese. In England, even though the assistants were all English-speaking, they got our orders muddled, didn’t seem to hear what we were saying and in generally were surprisingly obtuse. Ordering in McDonald’s shouldn’t be that difficult: they have a kind of universal language, and you find the order boards are the same wherever you go around the EU.

I said in my last post that we’d been to Cambridge. Apparently Sir Humphrey Cripps, the man who built up the Pianoforte Supplies company in Roade was an honorary Fellow there. He was ‘the greatest single benefactor the College has had since its foundation over 500 years ago.’

And finally, Buckley’s Canadiol Mixture gets yet another mention in HitTail. I haven’t had to use it yet for the cold I’ve got at the moment, but just the mention of it brings to my senses that wonderful aromatic and throat-burning mixture.

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.