Notes on East Anglia III (July 26-30, 2025)
July 26 (Saturday). Norwich to Sheringham. 10.00 am: I enjoyed a second iced-hot chocolate at yesterday’s cafe, before my final amble around the market district and Lower Goat Street.
11.00 am: A trip to the railway station, where my younger son and his wife were about to arrive from London.
From there, we all headed to Salthouse, Holt, and the acclaimed Cookies Crab Shop. There we met my elder son and his wife, who’d also travelled from London. We were all spending a weekend together in Sheringham, further up the coast. While the family ate a mixed-seafood platter; I contented myself with the shop’s celebrated bacon bap.
On, then, to Cley-next-to-Sea (prounounced ‘cly’), in the pouring rain, where we visited a pottery shop and the village store. (The name is derived from the Old English word ‘clay’.) It’s a quintessentially quaint and well-kept English village, with a solid sense of its own identity and community, as well as a windmill. But Cley hasn’t been next to the sea since the 17th century, when the marshes were drained (again, with Dutch know-how) to reclaim land. The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, the writer Stephen Spender, and the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton had once lived here. 3.30 pm: We arrived at our apartment in Sheringham.
6.00 pm: A family dinner, to celebrate being family. Life at its best. A draft beer called ‘Ghost Ship’ is sold in these parts. 7.30 pm: The presentation of a surprise birthday cake (long overdue) to Harvey the Younger, followed by an evening of sharing enthusiasms. news, and memories.
July 27 (Sunday). 6.00 am: Time to myself. A light-wind blew.
10.00 am: Together we set out on the coastal path from Sheringham towards Cromer, over Beeston Bump. Where, it’s said, a demonic spectral dog called the Black Shuck lives. Its appearance to an onlooker portends their death. (I kept my eyes firmly on the path.) The writer and spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle, having convalesced in the area in 1901, based The Hounds of the Baskervilles (1902) on the beast.
Footprints in the sand recalled the imprint of the ship at Sutton Hoo. Lunch was taken at a tearoom in West Runton. Two young children had locked themselves in the only toilet, in order to play hopscotch on the tiled floor, while an irate and desperate queue grew longer outside.
We followed East Runton Beach towards Cromer.
The chalk cliffs are slowly crumbling onto the pebbles, nodules, and shards of flint along the shoreline. The process of oxidisation has produced a range of surface colouration: bleached white, orange ochre, sienna, umber, black, and terre verte. A veritable palette. Fossils abound, they said. But not where I was looking, clearly. As we approached Cromer, I spied a small boat drawn in the sand. Once again, I recalled the impress of the ghost-ship.
Then … all of a sudden … I recognised — flying high overhead — the characteristic outline of a Supermarine Spitfire. I’ve never before seen one in the air, or heard the distinctive overdriven growl of its Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Has there ever been a more elegant expression of aeronautical design and engineering? An astonishing and moving sight.
Cromer is the sort of seaside resort I remember from my childhood: spirited, fun, gauche, bedecked with lights and bags of candyfloss, and confidently unselfconscious. I recalled innumerable childhood holidays with my parents to Weston-super-Mare and Blackpool. Cromer has a magnificent pier, with an RNLI station and a theatre at the end. These days, variety shows and tribute acts comprise the ‘what’s on’ listing. Although John Lydon (formerly the front man for the Sex Pistols and PiL) is due to make an appearance in October. The arc of his career as been as unpredictable as it has been disappointing.
Before taking a bus back to Sheringham, my younger son, his wife, and I enjoyed a Mr Whippy ice cream and Flake. It used to be called a ’99’. Theories regarding the origin of the name are many and various. On our return, Harvey the Elder cooked us a delicious beef and pork ragù with pasta for dinner, while popping in and out of the lounge to watch England beat Spain in the Euro ’25 final.
July 28 (Monday). 6.45 am: I moved around the house with the stealth of a cat burglar, so as not to wake the others. 9.00 am: Off to Potter Heigham, where we embarked upon a self-drive boat trip up and down the River Thurne and River Bure. We were given life-jackets and a 10-minute talk on how to pilot the vessel and observe maritime courtesies.
There were some sections of the waterway without any signifiers of contemporaneity. Before me, I saw only a river braced by dense banks of tall reeds and marshes, inhabited by herons, black-headed gulls, swans, ducks, and otters (possibly). In the middle and far distance were a windmill, the remains of an abbey and a derelict cottage, and the unbleached sails of yachts. My photographs of the scene effortlessly evoked the moods and compositions of 17th-century Dutch landscape painting, and the work of Jacob van Ruisdael in particular. I’d never before appreciated just how well-adapted the East-Anglian countryside, along with the 19th-century English landscape tradition that evolved in this area, had been to the Netherlandish template.
Just as the landscape’s interest lies below the surface of fens, marshes, mounds, and streets, so it does above too. Cumulus, flat-bottomed clouds bloomed, huddled, and built across the breadth of the sky, like the cloudscapes in John Constable’s ‘six-footers’. These formations are this countryside’s surrogate hills and mountains.
5.00 am: On the way home, we walked across Sheringham’s beach. Afterwards, everyone (but me, of course) wanted to play shove-penny (or 2 penny, these days) at an amusement arcade. (‘It doesn’t cost anything to sneer disapprovingly, John’, I consoled myself.) Inside, pop music blared from the sound system. When I was young, one-armed bandits had an arm, and there was no music in the air. At the end of Weston-super-Mare’s Grand Pier, in the 1960s and early 70s, all you could hear was a cacophony of tinkles, rings, cranks, jangles, and sirens, made by many various slot machines and rides sounding in unison.
July 29 (Tuesday). Sheringham to Oakham. Norfolk to Rutland. 6.30 am: I awoke to the promise of a fine day ahead, and our last outing as a family. 8.00 am: All hands to the deck, as we emptied the fridge, cleaned up the kitchen, put the communal rooms in order, checked all the draws, gathered our device chargers, and packed belongings, in readiness for checkout.
9.45 am: We took a final walk along the Promenade, passed brightly-coloured beach huts, signboards explaining the presence of fossils and the history of mammoth elephants in the area, and more ice-creams and coffee shops than you could shake a stick at. I looked towards the horizon of the North Sea. ‘Between us and the North Pole there’s nothing’, my elder son’s wife (who’s a geographer) informed me. I found that concept hard to take in. We repaired to a cafe.
12.00 pm: Friends had advised us to take lunch at what’s reputedly the best pie shop in Norfolk. It has the aura of a ‘greasy-spoon‘ cafe. Laminated menu cards and table tops. No frills. No fuss. Take it or leave it. The clientele were retirees, mostly, who, I imagined, returned every week, on the day same, at the same time, for the same meal. I certainly would. The proprietor was simultaneously warm and brash: ‘Watcha taking a photograph of that for? You-a interior designer, or wha’?’ My instinct was to hug her shoulder and extol the earthy virtues of her establishment. ‘Don’t you EVER change ANYTHING’, I insisted. My fare was a full-English breakfast squashed between to two slices of limp, buttered gluten-free bread, laced with a liberal dose of Daddies Sauce. I’d not tasted this brown nectar since childhood.
1.45 pm: We said our ‘goodbyes’ at Sheringham railway station. My sons and daughters-in-law headed back to London by either train or car. 2.00 pm: My penultimate journey was to my friends’ home in Oakham (through Little Snoring and Great Snoring), where this adventure had begun. I paused at a local farm shop en route for another cup of tea. (My lubricant.)
July 30 (Wednesday). Oakham to Aberystwyth. Rutland to Ceredigion. 6.00 am: An Oakham morning.
8.00 am: Tea, coffee, and conversation around the kitchen table. 10.00 am: I set out on the final lap. The journey was broken at the outskirts of Birmingham City Centre, to buy provisions from an enormous Chinese supermarket. It supplies many of the Asian restaurants in the city. The complex looks like a Las Vegas casino: overblown, tacky, and tasteless.
3.30 pm: From there, I travelled to the farm shop and cafe on the outskirts Shrewsbury. This had been my first port of call on the outward journey to Oakham, on July 14. There, I ate a late lunch: a side-plate of chips (French fries) and a mug of hot chocolate.
Finally, the two-hour passage to Aberystwyth. At Powys, flatland reformed into gentle hills, rising to mountains as I passed into Ceredigion. Oh! How I’d missed them.
Summa: diary: Notes on East Anglia I (July 14-18, 2025)
Summa: diary: Notes on East Anglia II (July 19-25, 2025)
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Studium; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Bluesky; Instagram; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice