As you may have noticed, I am now attempting to let slip the Blogs of War from the new HQ at Cley-next-the-Sea, on the north Norfolk coast. It won't be easy. As anyone who has done much travelling through Europe knows, good scenery = bad phones. And Cley-next-the-Sea has just about the best scenery on offer. (It's not only the phones, either: if you're not quick, you're liable to miss one of the five copies of the Times deposited every day at the little house which doubles as the Post Office. If you're really late on Sunday, you could end up with no other option than the Sunday Sport, a tabloid where every page seems to be numbered "three"-- which is not without its charm, certainly, but the fact remains that its coverage of the news is as limited as its "coverage" of everything else: just imagine a soft-core porn San Francisco Chronicle. OK, you can stop imagining it now...)
Despite the name, it's not actually all that "next" to the sea-- it's a good two mile walk to the rocky shore by the quickest route. As a matter of fact, it's not really "next" to anything at all. The coastline used to be quite different, and Elizabethan ships once sailed in and out of what is now a vast empty marshland. Cley (which rhymes with "sigh" for some reason) was once a thriving sea port, they say; now it's just a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. People always laugh when I say it, but to me, this "nowhere," Norfolk's great emptiness, is beautiful beyond description. The sky looks different here than anywhere else I have been, and, because of the "flat" quality famously derided by Noel Coward, there's a great deal of it. To walk out the front door is to walk into a gigantic watercolor painting. I imagine there are other places on earth where you can do that, but this is the one I know firsthand.
All of England has a certain "hobbit" quality (not surprisingly), but Cley comes closer than anywhere to the Hobbiton of my imagination. Everybody lives in little houses made of stones gathered from the shore. I'm pretty sure that every time my girlfriend and I leave the pub, they turn to each other and mutter "there's queer folk about, and no mistake." In fact, tonight they're going to have that opportunity once again, as we're spending New Year's Eve among the hobbits at the George and the Dragon down the road.
Happy new year, everybody.
Posted by Dr. Frank at December 31, 2001 12:18 PM | TrackBack