Category Archives: North Norfolk

Think Liminally!

 

I’ve always been interested in the idea of liminal spaces, that strange place which exists, or non-exists, between other things.  It’s a concept I explore a great deal in my poetry.  It could be the moment between sleeping and waking.  It could be a whole film.  Brief Encounter appears to be mostly set in a liminal space.  Laura (Celia Johnson) and Alec (Trevor Howard) meet on a train station and much of the action takes place here, particularly in the waiting room – a classic liminal space.  Their love-affair is doomed from the start – a brief passionate interlude, unrealised and unconsummated as both protagonists are drawn back to their sober, dutiful lives.  There are angsty, canted angles when Laura is in danger of going too far (there’s a very film noir kiss in an underpass, shadowy and sinister) or when her state of mind is unbalanced almost to the point of suicide.  The film has been called the “Anna Karenina of the home counties” with one critic scathingly saying “make tea, not love”.  Audiences at the time were famously irritated with Alec and Laura’s inability to “get a room”!  If you ever get the chance to visit the Carnforth Station in Lancashire, where the film was shot, you are in for a treat. It houses an excellent heritage centre with, at its heart, a celebration of David Lean’s 1945 classic.  You can even have tea in the faithfully restored Refreshment Room which sports huge, rather intimidating tea urns.

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My favourite liminal space, however, is the pier.  It’s not sea, it’s not land.   As soon as you step onto a pier life feels full of possibilities and difference.  Southwold Pier is surely the most unusual you’ll ever encounter.

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I last visited in December when Southwold beach was shrouded for hours in a thick sea fret and the pier only came into view as we were almost at the steps.  As well as great shops and cafes, the pier is home to Tim Hunkin’s “Under the Pier Show”, a superb collection of unique, hand-built, wacky machines (there’s also an amazing clock halfway down the pier which comes to life on the hour).  In the “Mobility Masterclass” you have to get gran across a busy road with her zimmer frame.  There’s also the deeply satisfying “Whack the Banker”.  The most recent addition is “airbednbug” where a few coins activate a sort of live storyboard about persecuted bedbugs – it’s charming – a comic strip come to life.  My favourite moment is when the bedbugs realise they have to move and are leafing through brochures to choose their next hotel to infest – genius!

Is a pier a truly liminal space?  A liminal space is one of transition and you could say that piers are really ends in themselves although in the past they probably fulfilled a clearer liminal role as some the first pleasure piers were where you would while away your time as you waited for a steamboat or ferry.  One of the earliest pleasure piers was Ryde Pier, built in 1813. There were working piers too, of course, (and still are today), like Wigan,  where passengers and cargo were loaded and unloaded.

If you’re a film buff like me then probably your first thought at the mention of piers was Brighton Rock.  There’s a great article at the link below

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/artsandculture/8273771/Brighton-Rock-stepping-into-the-black-and-white-world-of-Pinkie-and-Rose.html

about a Brighton Rock walk given by Julian Clapp.  The 1948 version of Graham Greene’s book stars Richard Attenborough as baby-faced evil personified, giving a stunning performance as Pinkie.  The film was an immediate sensation and also deeply disturbing for an audience reeling from the horrors of the Second World War, with some critics believing the film shouldn’t be shown.  Violence in films was always a concern, with those in control believing that it could have an adverse effect on the suggestible, mostly working class, cinema audiences.  Brighton Pier, of course, takes centre stage, with its ghost train, fortune tellers and the “make a record of your voice” booth, used to such great and poignant effect at the end of the film.  You can watch the clip below:

Many people who feel the 1948 version is the definitive one were not too keen on the 2010 remake with Sam Riley as the psychopathic Pinkie, and the reliably superb Andrea Riseborough as Rose, but I quite like remakes.  It’s always interesting to see how a new version of a classic addresses its audience.

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Richard Attenborough renewed his connection with piers by directing the iconic anti-war film Oh What A Lovely War! in 1966.  The archetypal Smith family’s experience of the First World War is played out through a series of elaborate tableaux staged mostly on Brighton’s West Pier.  It begins with General Haig selling the family entrance tickets to the “show”.  At one point, officers zoom down a helter skelter, the perfect metaphor for their heedless and naive decisions.

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Hunstanton Pier, or the lack of it, has been a bone of contention in this West Norfolk town for some time.  The pier was destroyed by storms in 1978 and the little which remained was more or less destroyed by fire in 2002 and subsequently removed.  Before its sad demise, the pier was immortalised in an Ealing comedy from 1956 Barnacle Bill, starring Alec Guinness.  Guinness plays a sea captain with seasickness who buys up the old pier and turns it into a non-moving cruise ship, a shipshape vessel which will never go to sea – so we are very much back to the strangeness of liminal spaces.   The success of the pier and its new role is very much to the chagrin of the local council who want to demolish it and modernise the promenade (plus ça change…)

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As a child, I had an aunt who lived in Hastings whom I used to visit so I have vague memories of the old pier which was destroyed by a fire in 2010.  It has just been rebuilt and looks stunning, I can’t wait to visit this stunningly modern new space which was named the UK’s best new building last year.

Image result for cromer pierNow I’m resident in East Runton and just down the road from Cromer, this, of course, is my new favourite pier.  It’s one of only five UK piers with a working theatre and I’m very much looking forward to booking my ticket for the End of the Pier show!  The pier itself has had a long and rich history with records of a structure going back as far as the fourteenth century.  At night it’s lit up in a magical way and acts as my beacon when I walk along the beach to Cromer on dark evenings.

Image result for in love with alma coganThe pier was the location for “In love with Alma Cogan” directed by Tony Britten.  Much of the action took place in the Pavilion Theatre and the plot revolved round Theatre Manager Norman’s resistance to a more commercial show.  Norman was played by Roger Lloyd Pack and the film was one of his last appearances on screen.  Lloyd Pack was well loved locally, he’d fallen in love with the area in the 1970s after acting in Joseph Losey’s The Go Between  alongside Alan Bates and Julie Christie and, as a result, owned a house locally.

 

So, my advice to you all is to have a liminal moment.  Stand and contemplate life in one of the places in-between – a stairwell, a waiting room, an airport – these are places where reality feels somewhat altered, places which only exist as a means of getting somewhere else or as a resting place.  Best of all, go and stand on a pier and enjoy not having to find your sealegs, experience the feeling of walking on water.  Buy chips, have a cup of tea, get your fortune told, admire amazing starling murmurations from Brighton’s ruined West Pier or at Aberystwyth.  A place of creative pause and contemplation.

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Small Pleasures

 

Life in East Runton is so different to anywhere else I’ve lived.  It’s just outside Cromer and is very much connected to the big, wide world by bus and rail, but a lot of the time it seems utterly apart, bubble-wrapped in a rather engaging time-warp.

On Christmas Day we decided to pop down to the beach before dinner.  At high tide we were regularly seeing a seal on the beach.  We were pretty sure it was the same one each time.  He (or maybe she, we haven’t quite got the hang of this yet…) had the same laid back attitude when people and dogs approached and a rather nonchalant way of arranging his  flippers which made him look as if he were personally greeting each passer-by.  We named  him Runty, not political incorrectness at all but merely alluding to his appearance on the beaches of East and West Runton.  On one memorable occasion I nearly fell over him on the pitch dark beach as we walked back from the cinema one evening.  So, we thought we’d check whether he’d made a Christmas visit to “our” beach.  As soon as we came out of our front door we could hear a brass band playing carols and there, on the Lower Common, was a five-piece brass band which played all the classics for around forty minutes.  They were three generations of the same family raising money for Parkinsons Disease.  The whole village turned out, there were hugs and kisses and Christmas greetings and children who’d decided to stay in the warm calling out of top-floor windows.  It all felt very cosy and Miss Marple, hopefully without the murders!  Another of my favourite screen depictions of a village is Bramley End in Cavalcanti’s thought-provoking 1942 film for Ealing Studios Went the Day Well.  Based on Graham Greene’s short story The Lieutentant Died Last, this was a propaganda film designed to alert the country about the dangers of being complacent about the possibility of invasion.  In the film, the villagers of Bramley End are far too trusting and are overrun by Nazi paratroopers posing as an English battalion.  There’s a cast of much-loved 1940s actors – Leslie Banks, Thora Hird (in her first major role), Harry Fowler, Mervyn Johns, Valerie Taylor, Patricia Hayes, Basil Sydney…  The village (actually the very pretty Turville in Buckinghamshire) is shown as an English rural idyll, depicting very successfully what we were fighting to preserve.

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All this makes me think of John Betjeman.  For me he is the quintessential poet of Britishness, probably because of his delightfully tongue-in-cheek take on xenophobia in his poem “In Westminster Abbey” with those immortal lines:

Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots’ and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.

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On Boxing Day we set forth along the beach to Cromer Pier to catch the traditional Boxing Day swim.  Again, a lovely atmosphere with the whole town out in force.  We continued to Overstrand for a festive drink at The Sea Marge.  This is a gorgeous hotel, largely Arts and Crafts in style,  in a former Edwardian mansion house, once owned by Sir Edgar and Lady Speyer, great friends of the Churchills.  Winston and Clementine were holidaying here with their children just before the outbreak of the First World War and it was from here that Winston Churchill made the call to mobilise the fleet before hurrying back to London.  The house was one of the first in the area to have a telephone line. Edgar Speyer was an American-born financier with German heritage and, of course, at this time there was great suspicion of those of German descent.  The Speyers were ostracised locally and accused of disloyalty and treachery.  One of the accusations was that Speyer had been signalling to German submarines from the clifftop gardens of The Sea Marge.  The Speyers left the country in 1916, never to return.  Today the Grade II listed building has a very friendly bar where muddy boots are acceptable and you can play traditional bar games such as Shut the Box and cribbage at your table as you sample the local beers.  I’m very much looking forward to seeing Gary Oldman depicting Churchill’s role in the Second World War in The Darkest Hour which is out this week.

A highlight of the village week is the arrival of the Fish and Chip van in East Runton.  This sturdy red van appears at 6pm every Wednesday, ably commandeered by Paul who knows everyone’s location in the village, name and, more importantly, food order!

 

New Year’s Day was very different for us this year.  Normally it’s an anti-climax after all the sparkliness of Christmas but this year, at 5pm, we stood on the beach with the tide coming in and waves lapping at our wellies to watch the spectacular fireworks at the end of Cromer Pier.  There were thousands of people packed on the beach and the clifftop promenades, a wonderful communal way to bring in the New and say goodbye to the Old.   We let our salty wellies dry in the warmth and comfort of the Regal Movieplex in Cromer, watching The Greatest Showman.  Musicals aren’t usually my favourite genre but this was such a heartwarming, feelgood film,  impossible to dislike and a suitably vibrant and colourful follow-up to the fireworks.

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I don’t make New Year Resolutions, having decided at a young age that they only lead to disappointment in both oneself and the world.  Living in such a lovely rural and seaside area with great walks literally from our front door has made me live more for the moment and to relish them all, which seems as good a princile as any to take forward in 2018.

 

 

 

 

Merry and Bright!

 

I’ll confess right from the start of this blogpost that yes, I adore Christmas and everything about it, but particularly Christmas films and books and bracing walks by the sea.

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A few years after we’d moved to King’s Lynn we went to the fantastic Old Boathouse Café in Hunstanton for breakfast on Christmas Eve, but were distracted by something big and fishy-looking on the beach.  It turned out to be an extremely dead sperm whale.  It was quite young, so not as large as it might have been, but still an awesome sight.  I felt very privileged to be able to get so close to one of these creatures and he appears occasionally in my poetry, which is getting increasingly fishy and salty as we settle in to our new coastal home!

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I hope you have all discovered Candlestick Press www.candlestickpress.co.uk and their wonderful series of slim pamphlets, mostly poetry, which can be sent instead of a card.  There are a number of Christmassy ones including an annual series The Twelve Poems of Christmas, now in its eighth volume.  One of my favourite pamphlets is Gillian Clarke’s The Christmas Wren, a beautiful re-interpretation of A Child’s Christmas in Wales.  There’s a Welsh language version too!  Also worth checking out is John Lewis-Stempel’s The Wood in Winter – a transcendent piece of nature writing about the life of a wood in bleak midwinter. There’s nothing nicer than curling up under a fleecy throw with a glass of mulled wine and candles and reading Christmas poetry, preferably aloud.  Throw in a beautifully illustrated version of Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and I’m in Christmas heaven.

If you’re looking for that perfect last-minute gift for someone who loves reading, I’ve discovered a new literary gift website, Bookishly, https://www.bookishly.co.uk/collections  They have the most beautiful gift packages, such as their limited edition festive gift box, A Christmas Carol Book Crate.   I’m rather taken with the idea of A Blind Date with a Book, where you get a surprise vintage book, beautifully wrapped, or The Coffee and Book Club subscription which gives you  a monthly vintage book and bag of coffee.  There’s a tea equivalent, Classics and cuppa, which sounds great too.

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So, given my predilection for all things Christmassy, it’s no wonder I’m completely entranced by Christmas lights.  The North Norfolk coast abounds in pretty villages with classy lights.  Holt is a must with the wonderful Bakers and Larner (a sort of Fortnum and Mason equivalent, but cuter) looking truly magical.  The fine city of Norwich is full of glittery snowflakes hanging from trees, and also has a Tunnel of Light… I love the idea of bringing light to the darkest time of the year: candles, fairylights, fires.  Perhaps we should all start celebrating St Lucia’s day on the 13th December as they do in Sweden.  Lucy was a young Christian girl, martyred for her faith.  She would bring food to the catacombs for persecuted Christians in hiding, wearing a garland of candles so she had both hands free to carry more food.  I once had a poem published in fab webzine Ink, Sweat and Tears http://www.inksweatandtears.co.uk/ which explored various ideas of light, including this festival:

The Chandelier Competition

 What would you use to bring light into our lives?

Candles? Crystal? Mirrors?  Sparklers?

Fireflies? Solar Trickery?

Your entries, boxed and bubble-wrapped,

must reach us by midday of the winter equinox.

 

Last year’s winner is a hard act to follow;

an intricate weaving of glow-worms,

darkness and moonlight;

a perfect equilibrium of chiaroscuro.

 

This creation lasted one night only –

the glow-worms devoured

both light and shade.

They lay, plump and dim in the dawnlight

like toothless vampires.

 

This year’s judges are our most northerly neighbours :

Icelanders, Greenlanders, Swedes and Orcadians.

They have all signed waivers

after the Danes’ scandalous looting

of last year’s runners up.

 

First prize this year is a month

in the southern hemisphere.

The darkness is coming.

Light a candle to Santa Lucia

and try your luck.

 

Image result for its a wonderful lifeI do, of course, spend quite a bit of time watching Christmas films.  I’m sure we all enjoy creating our own traditions at Christmas and for us Christmas Day can’t start until we’ve watched  It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) late on Christmas Eve.  I always cry at the end, even after multiple viewings.  James Stewart as George Bailey, in debt and trouble through no fault of his own, wants to die.  Clarence, the angel who’s trying to get his wings, rescues him by showing him what life would be like if there were no George Bailey.  It’s really a re-telling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with Mr Potter as the evil banker – the bad side of Scrooge, and George Bailey as the benign banker who Scrooge later becomes.  Clarence is all the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future wrapped into one as he shows George the impact he has had on everyone.  The film has to be watched in conjunction with my favourite version of  A Christmas Carol, the 1951 version with Alistair Sim as a fabulously histrionic Scrooge, although The  Muppet Christmas Carol is a close second!  Paddington, voiced by the inimitable Ben Whishaw, is fast becoming a Christmas favourite.  I’ve been very interested in the discussions in the press discussing Paddington 2 and referencing Paddington as our outlet for Brexit frustration.  He is the classic immigrant and the various attitudes of the community towards him reflect our somewhat divided nation at the moment.

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I very much enjoy cooking at Christmas.  As a vegan/vegetarian household our food is non-traditional and features lots of salads and tasty nut roasts baked in pastry with lashings of red wine sauce and copious amounts of roast potatoes.  It’s always interesting to try something different at Christmas and my first Christmas abroad was in Israel on a kibbutz near Afula.  All the volunteers were given a day off and we had a feast featuring food from all over the world outside in the sunshine where I discovered the delights of Dutch apple cake which I still adore today.  The most unusual setting I’ve experienced was in the Rajasthani desert.  We were on a camel trek and our rather meagre Christmas feast was hijacked by three very suspicious-looking men who appeared out of nowhere heading for the Pakistan border.  Our guide nonchalantly explained later that they were heroin smugglers which explained why he was so  eager to give most of our food away.  Another year we had Christmas Day in Cochin where every Indian we saw wished us a Happy Christmas, to the extent, at times, of honking and shouting their greetings from cars.  We walked past window displays of Santas astride cotton wool snow and went to a Kathakali  (Indian dance) show, complete with a very memorable make-up demonstration which lasted longer than the actual performance.  Earlier that day I had been able to pander to my usual geekiness by visiting the synagogue with the beautiful blue cantonese tiles which Salman Rushdie describes in The Moor’s Last Sigh.

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So, wherever you are in the world, and however you feel about the festive period, be warm, safe and happy!

 

Poet By The Sea

 

Image result for east runtonAs you can see from the heading, I’ll be blogging under a new name from now on to celebrate our move from King’s Lynn to East Runton, a little village just outside Cromer near to where the late, great John Hurt lived.  I’ve already started writing more sea related poetry than usual so it looks as if it could be an inspirational step in the right direction and there are lots of great cafes to explore locally!

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At the moment, I’m obsessed with Jane Austen.  It’s 200 years since she died of what might, according to experts’ analysis of her detailed letters, have been Addison’s Disease.   I love her wit and the way she exposes all that’s wrong with the middle-class Regency world.  I’ve been watching the 1999 version of Mansfield Park with Frances O’Connor as Fanny Price and Jonny Lee Miller as Edmund Bertram and, somewhat surprisingly, Harold Pinter as Sir Thomas!  I’m interested in the the way Austen hints at parallels between the patriarchal oppression of women and the concept of slavery and all its moral dilemmas.  Fanny and Edmund object to slavery and reference Thomas Clarkson and the abolitionist movement, but they are both living thanks to its proceeds.  Fanny is the poor relation and Austen talks of the slavery of poverty, of which she was very much aware.  Edmund is the younger son who will have to make his own way in the world to a certain extent.  They are both dependent on Sir Thomas, the slaveowner, for their livelihood and happiness.  Austen’s stories brim with intelligence and, although it has been said that if she were alive and writing today her work would be classed as “chick lit” in that her main frame of reference is always The Marriage Plot, I feel that she does so much more in her writing than mere plotting and characterisation.  As P D James put it, “Mills and Boon written by a genius!”

Image result for bride and prejudiceI’m rather partial to modern cinematic adaptations of Jane Austen and Alicia Silverstone as a high-school Valley Girl version of Emma is one of my favourites, followed closely by Gurinder Chadha’s brilliantly cheesy Bollywood Bride and Prejudice.   I often find myself, just as Emily Blunt’s character does in The Jane Austen Book Club, asking What Would Jane do?

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And yet another reason for me to love Austen at the moment, there’s even a connection to Cromer!  The town was at the forefront of the burgeoning interest in seaside tourism and began life as a Regency bathing resort.  In Emma, Mr Woodhouse says,

 “You should have gone to Cromer, my dear, if you went anywhere.  Perry was a week at Cromer once, and he holds it to be the best of all the sea-bathing places. A fine open sea, he says, and very pure air. And, by what I understand, you might have had lodgings there quite away from the sea – a quarter of a mile off – very comfortable…”

Image result for winchester rain janeIn May this year I visited Winchester, paid my respects at Jane’s gravestone in the cathedral and absorbed the atmosphere of this pretty town where she lived out her last few months.  “I see more distinctly through the rain,” Jane once wrote and, with this in mind, there’s a wonderful trail through the town called Rain Jane.  If it rains, quotes from her novels magically appear on the pavements and disappear as the rain evaporates.

Image result for janes table chawtonI also visited the village of Chawton, where, in the cottage which is now the Jane Austen’s House Museum.  Here, Jane, her mother and beloved sister Cassandra finally had a place they could call their own, albeit briefly.  I stood reverently before the table where she wrote, trying not to be too angry at the tiny space she had to let her imagination run riot with the intricacies of hatching, matching and dispatching.  This anger led to my only Austen inspired poem, the imaginatively titled Jane’s Table!

If you do find yourself in this part of Hampshire, then the Sculpture Park in Churt is well worth a visit.  It’s really a giant open air exhibition showcasing around 800 pieces of work from approximately 300 different artists.  This means it’s also well worth revisiting as the pieces are all for sale and change constantly.  It’s set in ten acres of woodland and heathland with some quite steep parts at times as it’s set in a natural valley.  There are three lakes fed by natural springs which provide a stunning backdrop for some of the artwork.

https://www.thesculpturepark.com/

And once you’ve had your fill of art, pop over to Bel and the Dragon opposite the entrance for refreshments!  It’s a lovely country inn/boutique hotel, beautifully decorated, and all the rooms are named after Jane Austen characters!

Finally, for all you writers out there, the wonderful Jack Milgram has been in touch with his latest infographic 28 Boring Words and What to Use Instead.  Jane would have loved this, what a great rescource!

https://custom-writing.org/assignment-writing-services#boring-words

North Norfolk – On Location!

 

I, GeminiSo, this month we’ve been listening to I, Gemini.  Definitely the sound of summer, this is the debut album of Let’s Eat Grandma, Norwich-based teenage duo Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth, both are multi-instrumentalists as well as singer-songwriters.  The album is getting great reviews, it’s trancey, psychedelic pop, deeply weird and wonderful…  I’ve known Rosa since she was born as I’m a good pal of mum Adrienne and was delighted to discover that the band were playing twice while I was in Paris.  The first gig was at Point Ephémère, a trendy warehouse venue by Canal St Martin and the girls were playing as part of Rough Trade’s Pop-up Store on Record Store Day (Jour Disquaire).  Their second gig was at Les Trois Baudets in the Pigalle area, just up the road from the Museum of Erotica.  Adrienne and I went for coffee and cake at the Amelie café (Café des Deux Moulins) and then joined the girls, Lee, their technician and Philippe, the record label’s local rep, for dinner in the great café above the venue.  Let’s Eat Grandma played their brilliant brand of pixie pop to an appreciative and enthusiastic audience and I helped out for a few minutes on the merch stall afterwards which was dead excitingles trois baudets!

Let’s Eat Grandma have a cameo role  in one of the Flaneur style poems  I wrote over the course of three very long walks which encompassed practically the whole city.  This style of poem is, of course, inspired by Walter Benjamin, Edmund White and Baudelaire.  In a nutshell,  you walk and record your observations in poetry, prose or prose poetry.  The pace should be that of a tortoise.  I find this aspect more difficult than the actual writing as I am frequently told off by friends for walking too quickly!

I love walking and, as a non-driver, it’s how I get from A to B so I walk from both a practical and leisure motivation.  It’s an even greater joy when the days are long and dry when my perennial favourite is the North Norfolk coast path.  One great bonus in the past year or so for coffee addicts like me and Chris has been the discovery of Grey Seal coffee.  The roastery is in Glandford opposite the wonderful vegetarian Art Café www.art-cafe.org/northnorfolk which serves what must be the freshest coffee in terms of roasting to table.  Grey Seal is typical of the Third Wave coffee movement which is sweeping through the UK.  The roasteries and outlets have a stronger relationship with the growers and often use single estate coffees.  Caravan, near King’s Cross in London, even send their staff out to work with the pickers.   In December a Grey Seal café opened on the quayside at Wells and earlier in the year one opened on Westgate in Blakeney, a stone’s throw from the harbour. The coffee is excellent and the service is bright and friendly.  The Blakeney café has a tap built in to the counter to top up the doggy water bowl, used twice by thirsty quadrupeds while we sipped our expressos.  Dogs also get free biscuits, with the owner’s permission!

grey seal blakeneyWalking and writing are such complementary activities.  The rhythm of walking very much mirrors the rhythms of poetry and I often walk stuck ideas out into the open.  I rarely want to write in the style of a flaneur when I’m out in the countryside, it’s very much an urban style after all, a bit like Frank O’Hara’s brilliant lunch poems – you need a busy scene with lots of people and activity and a slightly grungy feel to the whole scenario.   When out and about in the great outdoors haiku are the perfect fit – I seem to compose them endlessly the minute I get a whiff of fresh air.  This Japanese poetic style is much loved by Westerners.  Short, delicate, just three lines and 17 syllables in total (although balance is more important than syllabic perfection), haiku are a great way to record impressions and their focus is usually the natural world and the seasons.  The great Japanese haiku master was Matsuo Basho (1644-94), one of my favourites by Basho is:

Autumn moonlight –

a worm digs silently

into the chestnut.

I always find this haiku really thought-provoking and slightly chilling… My attempts will never have his lightness of touch, but I do enjoy writing them as seasonal diary entries.  The ones below evoke happy walking memories for me:

common blues rise

like confetti in reverse

from the cliff edge.

 

Taste the salty breeze;

a flying carpet of knots

brushes the horizon.

 

A silken sphere of

tiny spiders becomes a hundred

fluttering abseilers.

 

Walking by the river;

a robin boldly leads the way

until the sky darkens.

 

bird footprints at low tide

etched on glistening mud like

marks on a clay pot

 

Each snowflake

a tiny crystal world

melting in my hand.

 

There’s also the haibun form – a mixture of haiku and poetic prose which is perfect for travel writing – find out more here http://contemporaryhaibunonline.com

Being out and about in nature much more means I don’t go to the cinema as much in the summer as I do the rest of the year, but thoughts about films and film-making are never far away and Norfolk has always been a very attractive location for film-makers.  It’s not as well known as other parts of England so can stand in for other places without being too recognisable.  Over time it has been Denmark, 18th century New York, The Netherlands, Sudan, India, Russia, France… as well as representing countless English locations.

flora le bretonOne of the first feature films to be shot in Norfolk was The Rolling Road in 1927 starring Flora le Breton.  Legend has it that the October sea at Great Yarmouth proved too much for the skimpily-clad heroine and she had to be saved by Carlyle Blackwell, her co-star, although some say she was saved not by the film’s hero but by Robert “Chickie” Drane, a Yarmouthian who was an acknowledged champion swimmer and lifesaver and allegedly doubled for Carlyle Blackwell in the aquatic scenes.

CHILI BOUCHIERAnother notable early film shot partly in Norfolk was Anthony Asquith’s 1928 Shooting Stars.  Chili Bouchier won a competition in the Daily Mail to become a film star and here she is as a bathing belle on Cromer beach.  One of our classic British films, The Go Between, starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, was shot in Norfolk using locations at Thornage, Hickling Broad, Holkham, Heydon, Norwich, Melton Constable and Hanworth to evoke the hottest day of the year in 1900.  Norfolk is so held in time that I often feel I am walking in the past evoked by these films, until my next stop for an expresso shot at the defiantly 21st century Grey Seal, that is!

And a final tip for all of you interested in writing.  Luke Palder from ProofreadingServices.com contacted me to say they  have designed an infographic entitled “128 Words to Use Instead of ‘Very,'” located here: www.proofreadingservices.com/pages/very  Sort of a one-word focus thesaurus – “very” useful!