Sheringham...at last!

We made it to Sheringham today, the place my wife has most wanted to come back to. It’s where she grew up, and she has a great fondness for it. Consequently I got a running commentary on everything we passed, things that were still there and things that weren’t (such as one of the hotels near the beach), things that had changed (like houses on Beeston Bump) and things that had improved (the way the lifeboats go in and out), people who’d lived in certain spots (like the boy who wet his bed – hopefully he doesn’t still after forty something years), and who’d married who.
She met up with at least five women who knew her or other members of the family, from the two elderly ladies who lived in the same ‘Close’ as her family, to a woman selling crab meat from a stall, to the librarian who at first claimed vehemently that there had never been a Methodist church on the corner near the library and then had to admit defeat when Celia found it in one of the library books, to a woman in a pet shop who had worked under Celia’s big sister.
The houses in Sheringham have been greatly improved over the last few decades: everywhere you find solid plastic window frames (instead of aluminium ones), and plastic decoration around the doors and so on. The picturesque feature of these houses (it’s common throughout the coastal area of Norfolk, I think) is that the houses have brick corners but the central area of the outside walls are made of beach stones set in concrete. Nearly all the houses are two storeys, and many of them are attached to other houses. Brick is everywhere. Those houses that aren’t built with the stones, are all brick. Brick, with tile roofs, so there’s an overwhelming red brick feel to all the housing. (The beach stones make a nice contrast).
I must say I liked the place – and didn’t remember anything about it at all, even though I have been there once before with Celia, thirty-odd years ago. The beach isn’t my style of beach, with it’s heavy pebbles and stones before you reach the sand – and the sand is more orange than white, and more gritty underfoot. But the buildings around the beach area are delightful, all squashed together, with little yards and alleys running between them. It’s all very clean, and it looks as though the place is prospering. Certainly it was busy, even though it’s not the ‘season’ yet.
Just while I remember: a curious piece of Norfolk speech is that they say things like, ‘Come round to ours,’ or, ‘we’re going round to his,’ the ours and the his referring to the person’s house in each case. We’d say, ‘come round to our place,’ but the place gets lost in Norfolk.