Home to Attleborough

Long day yesterday, all focused on travel. We could have quite happily have got on a plane back to New Zealand, but we still have a month to go in England before we go home. That’s okay, we have all these friendly relatives here who look after us, so we can’t complain!

The plane didn’t go till 16.20 so we had quite a lot of time to fill in. The trouble with travel days is that you tend to do little else except wait around: so we had a coffee and coke in a café around the corner from our apartment, moved up the road and read for a while under a willow, moved further up the road and caught the tram, transferred to the Metro which conveniently took us all the way to the airport, sat around in the airport reading, had more coffee (our own from the famous flask this time), read more, eventually stood in the queue to get on the plane (I stood in the queue – Celia sat and read), sat and read some more, had more coffee, stood in the melee to get on the plane, got on the plane, read on the plane, snoozed on the plane, got off the plane, got on the bus and finally got home. Exciting.

The biggest bonus of the day was that we already had our ticket booked for the National Express and there was no problem getting back with them, and they got us here a quarter of an hour earlier.

The other unusual thing was getting to Stansted and finding that all the passengers, having disembarked from the plane, then got on the airport tram and were shot off to the arrival lounge, which must have been a kilometre or more away. Stansted is huge.

On the Ferry

21st Oct, 2007
I’m writing this on the Ferry from Civitavecchia (pronounced, roughly, Chiv-ee-ta-veck-ee-ah) to Barcelona. We left over an hour late last night, so it doesn’t look as though we’re going to get into Barcelona (which apparently is spelt, Barcellona, in Spain) until at least an hour late, and maybe longer.
We got to the ferry terminal much too early, being a bit concerned in case we missed the thing. As it was, we sat around from two to six waiting. And reading - more of Ian Rankin. Stood out in the cold waiting to go on board because Celia was concerned that the machine we had to go past might notice that she had knives in her pack - and so we were trying to avoid it! In fact, we didn’t put our luggage through there at all in the end. Maybe they don’t use it anymore.
When we finally got on board we found that the cabin is more than adequate for anyone’s needs: a shower and a toilet included, and bunks and a little couch, and a small desk with a chair. Only about seven foot across, but surprisingly well-designed. We opted for the buffet meal because the ‘proper’ restaurant was expensive. Perhaps we should have gone with the expense: the buffet food was lukewarm, and the beef stew was full of gristle. Very disappointing, and not that cheap for what it was. Breakfast this morning wasn’t much better: very little choice - the only cereal was cornflakes. Never mind, it’s fun being on the boat with hundreds of Italians all doing their usual shouting at each other, and with East Europeans who’ve been shopping in Italy and are bringing all their goodies home.
I didn’t find it easy to sleep, though Celia dropped off while listening to one of her audio books around nine and didn’t get out of bed again until eight this morning. The boat rocks, of course, but that’s no big deal. But when you’re lying in bed you’re much more aware of noises and movement. It shudders continually, but like it’s breathing; so there’s a space and then a shudder, a space and shudder and so on. And every so often it hits a solid rock of a wave, and it sounds like one of the articulated lorries in the hold has come loose and gone for a wander. After this crashing down below had gone on for quite a while this morning, I went and talked to the Purser, and an Italian-speaking guy came round to explain, not long after, that it was the ‘machina’ that was making the noise. It still sounds as though it’s trying to drive a hole in the side of the hold, however!

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.

Cromer - Gem of the North Norfolk coast

We haven’t got quite so much access to the Net at the moment, so things are a bit quiet on the travel blog front At present we’re in Cromer, which is only a few miles from Sheringham, the famous town that my wife couldn’t wait to get back to and see. In fact we went been back there again a couple of days ago checking the place out, and had a look at the old alma mater (the caretaker who came out to see what we wanted had been to school there himself and originally couldn’t wait to get out of the place) and then at another part of it which I hadn’t heard about before: Upper Sheringham. This turned out to be a delightful place, not large, but with its own church, and full of those houses that are made of the local beach stones. Even the newer buildings were made to fit in with the old houses. In the centre of the village was a large round wall less than a metre high, with a gate in it. It turned out that inside the wall was a pool and the water was pouring out on either side of the gate, and presumably being channelled back into the pool again. It may originally have been a horse trough, according to my sister-in-law.
We walked into Cromer yesterday - my sister-in-law is a keen walker - and then back again a different way. Both of us have started a new regime diet-wise, as we’re both needing to deal with our weight. Being on holiday is not conducive to exercise or healthy eating. So we’ve gone onto the Weight Watchers’ approach - my sister-in-law has used it in the past, and continues on a maintenance diet - and we’re keeping track of what we’re eating. I certainly need to deal with my tendency just to munch away, and I certainly need to get some more exercise. I’m used to walking a lot more than I’m doing at present.
Anyway, we walked into Cromer and did the op-shops, and then in the afternoon we took the car part of the way and walked back into town again from there. Unfortunately, even though the weather seemed lovely when we set out, it rapidly turned off, and a chilly wind blew up, and it began to drizzle. We checked out the secondhand bookshops - there are three, but only two of them were open. The two we went into were packed with books, and I found a Studdert Kennedy (The Wicket Gate) for a couple of pounds, which I suspect was a bargain. In the morning we’d found that one of the op-shops was also a Christian bookshop, with both new and secondhand books available. I found an F W Boreham book there for 75p. His books are highly sought after - in NZ, Australia and the States anyway - so that was a bargain. Also bought a new book on Christianity and Islam, which I started to read when I got home.
We got soaked walking back to the car, so I popped into the bath to warm up, and read.
Cromer doesn’t have quite the appeal for either Celia or me - perhaps it’s because it’s so close to Sheringham. It’s still an interesting town, full of those typical English seaside buildings, three storeys high for the most part, with balconies and large windows. They only seem to appear in seaside towns. There are odd alleyways, and streets going off at peculiar angles (which isn’t good for the traffic that trawls its way through the town), and then there’s the beach. It’s way below the town - about three storeys below - and there’s even a modern lift for people who find it difficult to get down or up. We haven’t been down to the beach yet, but no doubt will as we’re here until next Wednesday, when there’s a Carnival procession.

Norwich Cathedral

I only realised after my brother-in-law queried it, that the dates on these posts are in NZ time, not British. Consequently we’re sometimes managing to do things eleven hours before they’ve happened.
Yesterday we finally went and had a look at Norwich Cathedral. It dwarfs all the other churches, even the big ones, that we’ve been to so far. Not only that, it’s like a collage: piece after piece and layer after layer has been added on. Other pieces have become hidden under Time, pillaging, spires falling, the Dissolution and so on. People who existed and died in one century lie cheek by jowl with those who died two centuries later. Brasses have been removed from most gravestones now, as seems the custom generally in England because they were getting rubbed away. Splendid art work from three or four centuries ago rubs shoulders with something done in the last few decades. A glittering museum of gold and silver plate is reached by a narrow spiral staircase inside stone, and there’s a rope, grimed with thousands of hands, to haul yourself up by.
We discovered that the innumerable bosses on the ceiling (not those sort of bosses – even in England they don’t banish bosses to the ceiling) are not all the same, but highly individualised. This discovery came about because each boss has been photographed and put on a CD Rom. It’s the only way you can see them clearly at all, since the Cathedral is virtually three storeys high.
It’s also like two separate churches. Half way down the centre is a kind of narrowing, a bottleneck almost between wooden structurings, and then the church opens out again into a second section as big as the first. I suppose you could have two separate services going on at once – quite apart from the services that could be going on in the Jesus Chapel and the Mary Chapel and the who knows what other chapel. All around the edge of the Cathedral is a kind of walkway, where there are doors and passageways and rooms. It would take a year to become familiar with the place. We were there for maybe an hour all up – and that included having tea in the Refectory: the name of the café but also the real name for the area that used to exist there where the priests and monks would have had their meals. It’s now a modern structure hung between the walls of the Cathedral on one side and the old Refectory wall on the other. A theological library sits up along the end of this section (this is all on a first floor level) and in the middle of the library is a piece of the original wall, about three foot by one foot in size.
It’s a church we’ll have to go back to. For starters we didn’t have the camera with us, so it just exists (barely) in memory at the moment.
We came out of there into Tombland, a street presumably named after an area that was once where graves were. Each shop in the street is called Tombland something (newsagent, bookshop, hairdresser). We went into the secondhand bookshop, but it was very expensive overall. Certainly there were some good books there, but it was geared for those with plenty of money in their pockets, like the old man who was buying up large and handing over wads of notes as he did so. We found a copy of one of the two boEllis Peters’ Brother Cadfael books we’re missing out of the series but at £10 it was just a bit pricey. Celia said, ‘Phew…!’ and that confirmed my feeling about the price!

Footnote: Norwich Cathedral is apparently named The Cathedral of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. And I forgot to mention that it has proper cloisters, in very good condition. Obviously Henry VIII didn't manage to get his nasty hands on those.

Lavenham

Today’s been a less eventual day: we spent most of the morning enjoying the sunshine and each reading a Christopher Fowler mystery that we got in an op shop in Bury St Edmunds (I think – all the op shops are starting to coalesce into one homogenous mass).
But this afternoon we set off to Lavenham, primarily to see the Guildhall, which is 16th century, like the house we’re staying in, but also to see the various other 16th century houses in the main streets. Not so much because they’re 16th century but because they’re odd. Every one of them is skew-whiff. The ground floor sections aren’t too bad, but the upper storeys either lean to the left, or lean to the right, or even lean out over the street. Consequently casements are out of kilter, and presumably floors are likewise. In the Guildhall itself, in the upper storey, you go gradually downhill as you walk through the museum, and then back uphill again. Part of the problem no doubt, is age. Part of the problem surely must be that there’s been some upheaval in the earth beneath, or that the piles of the houses have shifted. Perhaps there was some manic builder who couldn’t set a house straight – my wife doesn’t seem to think this is a likely possibility. Whatever the situation, the strangest thing is that these houses have survived. You have to wonder why they haven’t been pulled down by some 19th century developer and replaced by something more sturdy – and secure!
By the way, Lavenham isn't pronounced like Taverham (in Norfolk) but like the beginning of the word, lavendar. The 'h' still goes missing, so we get Laven'am. Celia and I had a debate about the pronunciation, and of course she had to check it out with a local.