Great Yarmouth

We went to Great Yarmouth today (Friday). It’s nothing like that other seaside town, Sheringham, which I found delightful. Yarmouth is seedy, verging on sleezy, and looks in need of a good cleanup in many areas. The beach was mostly empty, in spite of it having a lovely long stretch of white/yellow sand. Admittedly it was windy, but it wasn’t too cold. But the main pedestrian mall, a long street that stretches up from the beach front to the town centre and consisting of old shops in run-down buildings, was packed with visitors, though many of the shops were more like market stalls in fixed locations than real shops.

However, for all its look of not having been given a good coat of paint for a while, Yarmouth is alive. Maybe it’s just my dislike of this kind of town (it has a lot in common with Blackpool, a place I wouldn’t visit if you paid me), but it’s certainly not the worst town in the world. I just don’t enjoy places that have a seemingly endless run of cafes and restaurants and bed and breakfast places and amusement arcades all taking up the main beach front area. There are so many eating places in Yarmouth I think it would take you several months to visit each one of them for a meal.

It didn’t help that our first main impression of Yarmouth was from a parking area on top of the Atlantis amusement arcade. We were the only people parked there initially, and in the middle of the parking area was a three or four storey apartment block that looked as though it was abandoned. It was certainly very much run-down. This apartment block was on top of a three storey building. A rather odd place to put it, I thought. Next door was a building with dormer windows that were all shut up, making the place look a bit like a film set from a gangster movie.

When we went down the stairs to get out of the building we found the stairs had picture after picture of nearly naked young ladies (they were being promoted for some contest in the Sun newspaper), and we wondered if we’d strayed into something iffy altogether! Obviously some sort of over 18 shows take place somewhere in the building – we didn’t wait around to discover where.

All this negative view of Yarmouth was thoroughly displaced by the fact that we happened in on a session at the Yarmouth Docwras Rock Shop – a family business that’s been going since the end of the 1800s. It was busy, and got busier, but besides the enormous array of rock on display, we got to see the production of rock by two men, one of them no chicken. (And with parts of two fingers missing, a Glaswegian visitor beside me pointed out.) I’ve written about this on another blog, but being there watching these two professionals at work made our day.

National Trust membership

One of my in-laws has been trying to email us for a few weeks, but unfortunately she was still emailing my old email address, which I haven't been checking for some time. (Though when I did check, there were some 665 emails awaiting me – 95% of them spam.)

Amongst other things, she wanted to let us know about the NZ branch of the National Trust through whom we can get a membership that will enable us to get into National Trust places in the UK, either free, or at a discount. And it reduces the parking fee as well. Furthermore, getting a membership in NZ is more economical than getting one in England. Now how would you find out about something like that?

So of course we've followed her advice, and taken up a family membership. This means if we have any grand-nieces or nephews that we'd like to take on a trip to one of these places, we can take them on the same basis as ourselves. We don't really know these grand-nieces or nephews as yet, except by the reports we've received from their grandfather, so it will depend what they think of their never-before-seen and aged relations from over the sea. Hopefully we'll get on with them as well as we get on with our own grandchildren.

Don't bank on it...

Yesterday we received a letter from the Bank in the UK that we're going to be dealing with, asking us to either send them a pin number to enable internet banking, or to ring the number through. Since it was ten o'clock at night when I talked about this with my wife, we decided to ring.

What a schemozzle! For some reason the letter had come addressed only to my wife, so she made the call, while I listened in. The guy at the bank, when they finally answered after a variety of options were presented, and after putting in our account number to help them identify us, didn't really know what my wife was talking about. He said he'd have to ask her several questions, some of which she might have to go away and check and ring back with the answers (!). Anyway, he first asked for her date of birth, which wasn't too much of a problem for her, and then asked if she had a debit card. She said no, because we're due to pick up cards and such when we get to England. That seemed to stump him, somehow, and he asked her to hold for a moment while he went to confer with someone else.

At that point, some canned music came on the phone. It sounded like a tape that's been used over and over, and was wearing out. Not only that, it was the same piece played over and over, some unidentifiable piece played mostly on a piano. We had the joy of listening to it two and a half times through before the bloke came back on the line. A long confer, by the sound of it.

The music reminded me of the canned music used in the public toilets here in Dunedin It's a short piece played on a piano, and on an average visit to the toilet, you'll hear it played at least twice. It has a glitch in the middle, and repeats a couple of bars as a result. Very annoying, if you're a musician who uses the public toilets a lot!

Anyway, when the guy came back on the phone, he said he'd have to put us onto his confrere, and did. She said they couldn't actually help us, because they couldn't do anything until we got our debit cards and we weren't going to be getting those till we got to England! I suspect that someone in one part of the UK sends out these interesting letters, and puts a phone number on them for a different part of the UK – where no one knows what's being done.

The photo isn't of our bank, by the way.

Connectivity

My wife has spent an inordinate amount of time on the Net searching for ways to be able to use our laptop while we’re away. It won’t be a problem when we’re staying with people – we’re assuming they’ll have internet access – but when we’re not with rellies, we’re not quite sure what we’ll do. The laptop is wireless enabled, so internet cafes are presumably an option, but short of travelling around the streets searching for someone who’s got wireless and then piggybacking we’ve struck no gold so far.
We did look at mobile connect, a little device that fits into the laptop and enables you to use your mobile phone as a receiver, but this looks to be a quite expensive approach. We may just have to check things out when we get there and see how it goes. Prices in the UK are quite a bit higher than in NZ, for internet access, but being without it for long periods means I won’t be able to enliven the reading world with my regular posts.
And we can’t have that now, can we?