Great Yarmouth, 25-31 May 2023

Thursday 25 May 2023. We set off for a week's holiday to Great Yarmouth in sunny Norfolk.

Well, sunny but just a bit breezy if you know what I mean. We had a hotel room with sea view which meant a grand view of a vast car park with a narrow line of sea behind it. Some of this seascape was taken up by Scroby Sands, a sandbank that as a kid I remember being full of seals with regular boat trips out from the beach to enable you to look at them. It's now full of basking wind turbines, the vibrations of which somewhat put the seals off anything but a short stop to catch their breath.

The hotel was nice though, it was our third time of visiting it and it has a few quirks like an ancient lift that you have to manually close the doors of - outer door and an inner cage door. If any of these doors are not shut tight the lift refuses to work, so sometimes when someone gets out on the third floor and leaves the door slightly ajar, no one can use the lift until someone has hoofed it up the stairs to shut the door.

The first night we were sitting quietly in the bar and Miss Franny saw one of these being made for someone else. Apart from a few dubious floaters (coffee beans, always highly-prized for a quick crunchy snack) it looked really good and she was quite appreciative, delicately spitting out the rock-hard beans. I'm sure it wasn't really her fault that one smashed the full pint glass of beer of the chap sitting opposite, bringing a look of swift surprise and soggy comprehension to his face...

Holidays for us have become much less exotic than in recent years. Now carrying a cancer about, I'd rather not pay more for insurance than I would for an actual cruise holiday and I find that walking any distance is more a series of short hops from one bench to another a few yards further along. A fair bit of pain comes on holiday with me now too along with a daily unknown quantity of lightning bolts to the side that can make me yelp like a kitten whose tail you've just trodden on.

So Miss Franny ruled out any thoughts I might have had about trying this out. It's ok Miss Franny... I wasn't really having that many thoughts about seriously wanting to go on it anyway. Interestingly whilst sitting nearby and listening to passers by, it was mainly small kids and teenagers who fancied going on it whilst Dads almost invariably said "Oh no, I'm not going on that - I can't even look up to watch it without getting light-headed!"

Miss Franny spent several interludes having sat me down on benches outside cafes, on the Promenade or near the shopping centre and/or markets, where she disappeared to empty her purse and bank account whilst I sat marvelling at what people seem to think makes them look more attractive these days. I've never been a fan of tattoos I'm afraid, but am happy to overlook them on others. The current fad seems to be to cram as many small and totally incompatably random subjects as possible onto shins. Weird.

Anyway, many a time Miss Franny would return to find me deep in conversation with someone who had sat down next to me, or had a dog that liked the look of me and rushed over, or in one case almost knocked my cafe table over in what appeared to be an unplanned and unexpected sudden woosh of motorised mobility scooter. Why such things, intended for use on pavements and around vulnerable pedestrians, are designed to zip around at 20 miles per hour with first point of contact at shin or heel height I'm not too sure. Perhaps it's the manufacturers' way of ensuring future custom? In any case, on Miss Franny's return I would be greeted with "I always find you talking to people when I get back!"

This made me laugh. My phone ringtone is a snatch of the chorus of a 1932 comic song by Al Bowlly and Leonard Henry called "Meet Me Tonight in the Cow Shed"... You'll find it on YouTube if you want. This was up near the old Windmill Theatre, now an indoor crazy golf course... There used to be so many theatres and summer season shows in Great Yarmouth that you could see a show headed by famous household names just about every night during a week's stay without repeating a show. Now it's just the odd karaoke bar. The Britannia Pier still has its theatre but there were no shows until July and then it seemed that they only did the one night before moving somewhere else. A great shame.

We did a couple of bus rides out during the week. One to Norwich to see the castle. We saw the outside covered in scaffolding but it was closed for the renovations. We went in the museum where I enquired about the 1549 rebellion led by Robert Kett who beseiged the city with a few thousand peasants, taking the castle and cathedral during the short reign of Henry VIII's son, King Edward VI. Not only was there no reference to it anywhere, the girl at the counter had never heard of it. There's an excellent novel about it in C.J. Sansum's Tombland, one of the Shardlake series of novels.

Also we took the car out one day and went for a ride on the North Norfolk Steam Railway at Sheringham. A couple of trains were running and the photo shows the steam locomotive Black Prince at the terminus, reversing back past the train to be re-attached ready to pull the string of carriages back to Sheringham.

I found the courage to brave the wind towards the back end of the week to sit and draw this sketch of the pier and bowling green with a couple of tea huts on the Promenade. I did all of the colouring in the hotel bar on the last night to the great interest of some members of a coach party. They turned out to be a County Bowling Team which led to a slightly surreal conversation thus: "Is that where we were playing this afternoon?"

Well for one I'm not a member of your party so I have no idea where you were playing and for two, there was no one actually playing on this green and if they had have been then the wind would have been blowing their bowls off course... (The wind snapped a sapling tree in half opposite our bedroom window one night!) Anyway the following morning one of the blazered gents turned up to breakfast with a wooden spoon around his neck. "Did you win that as a trophy?" I asked cheerfully. He looked at me with a heavy sigh. "We won it for coming last," he said, "I have to wear it now until the next match..."

Holidays and Day Trips in the UK