Down the Road to Lowestoft

Monday 19 August 2002. We are staying in Great Yarmouth for a week and after a relaxing day in the town yesterday, we wake on Monday morning ready for a bit of exploring.

So we set off after our customary trip to the beach hut for coffee and make our first stop of the day at Lowestoft just down the coast. It is the most easterly town in the United Kingdom and consequently the first town to see the sunrise every day. Well... on the days when the sun isn't blocked by clouds, rain, fog, snow, and vast alien space ships... The photo shows the East Point Pavilion from where you can sit in complete dry and strain to see the sunrise through the clouds, rain, fog, snow... (I may have exaggerated about the vast alien spaceships...)

As with many seaside fishing villages, the harbour has turned more into a marina for pleasure craft owned by people who rarely visit and even more rarely actually take them out to sea.

The Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club. Founded in 1859, the clubhouse of 1902-3 superceded an earlier one of 1866 that the club quickly outgrew. Meetings and races are held both at sea and on the easily reached Suffolk and Norfolk Broads, the nearest of which - Oulton Broad - we shall see in the next article.

Me, wistfully wishing I could afford to buy a boat and moor it and ignore it here... The yacht club does advertise its membership and mooring rates as competative, so I really should look wistfully at more exclusive marinas, perhaps in Monte Carlo or Portofino. At least I've now grown out of looking wistfully at the Marina in Stingray...

Lowestoft railway station. Opened as Lowestoft Central Station by the Great Eastern Railway in 1847, it was the eastern terminus for lines from Ipswich to the south and Norwich to the north west. A second station, Lowestoft North, was closed along with the direct line from Lowestoft to Great Yarmouth in 1970. It is now a residential site - Beeching Drive.

The station is half a mile from the main centre of town and they were originally separated by green fields along a cliff top. We walked through today's streets to the main shopping street.

In fact we walked up the shopping street further into the town than we had on previous visits and found the old part of the town. Here we found the old High Street with buildings kept in the character of the old town.

Narrow alleyways known as "scores" led from the High Street to where the fishermen had their huts in the old days. The name here suggests the brewing of beer may have taken place somwhere near! Malsters Score twists and turns - turning to the left at the far end of this photograph. In the past because of these blind turns, it was known as a dangerous place to walk at night and there were instances of robbery particularly of sailors using the score to return to their ships.

Spurgeons Score has no such twists and turns, but starts as a stepped alley and continues today down a long straight street. In the past dwellings would be much more crowded than they are today...

South Flint House is faced with knapped flints, a feature of many older buildings in this part of the UK. This one goes back to the 1500s.

Here and there what is obviously a building of greater age sits amongst the more modern box-shaped shops and whilst this is no different to almost every town in the country the sight of a more attractive and less severe building does make you wish that modern architects could apply a little more creativity into their work these days.

Inside the old pharmacy. The old shelving had been retained and preserved but had, of course, modern-day products on the shelves. I suppose most of us buy liquid soap these days, but I can still get nostalgic about a sudden whiff of Cusson's Imperial Leather soap bars and was amazed once in a "living museum" at the familiarity of cakes of pink carbolic soap that I wouldn't have smelt since early childhood in the 1950s at my grandparents' house. Not that I'd particularly like to go back to living like that, but it brought back memories of Mum scraping a cake of dark green Fairy soap on collars and cuffs before putting shirts in the washing machine.

Great Yarmouth 2002 Index

Woodbridge, Suffolk for an Annual General Meeting

Tuesday, 25 February 2003. The 2003 Annual General Meeting of the National Information and Learning Technologies Association (NILTA) was being held at at British Telecom's headquarters in Ipswich.

BT had a team dedicated to thinking about future uses of technology and it was at one of these visits that we were introduced to self-service shopping checkouts, shelves that registered which products were being sold and all things to do away with the need for human staff so that no-one would be able to get a job unless highly qualified and therefore wouldn't be able to afford food or pretty much anything else in the future... Ah... nearly there!

This was a two-day event and we were all staying nearby in a small town and port, Woodbridge in Suffolk. The photographs in this article were taken on one of my usual before-breakfast forays on Wednesday 26th.

Given that this was February, it follows that the sun was not quite at its zenith as I shrugged on a coat and grabbed my camera. Temperatures were hovering around zero. The sun was making a valiant attempt but hadn't succeeded in making itself known as yet. Woodbridge is on the River Deben, eight miles from the sea. The area has been home to humans for around 4,000 years. Somewhere behind those trees on the far side of the river is the site of the Sutton Hoo ship burial.

The Romans were here for around 300 years once they had finally managed to get rid of Queen Boudicca. That's quite a long time to wait before deciding that she wasn't coming back... Once the Romans left around 410 CE, the Angles migrated in large numbers from modern Germany and gave their name to East Anglia.

Woodbridge has a tidal mill. The mill wheel on the mill's website is described as "five metres wide" - I presume they mean "in diameter". It sits in the small extension seen on the right hand side of the mill in the photo. A mill has existed on the site since 1170 CE and it is thought that the one still existing is the third mill since that date. It is still working and can be visited. But not at 7:00am....

During the reign of Catholic Queen Mary Tudor a local woman, Alice Driver had her ears cut off as punishment for daring to likening Queen Mary to Jezebel. Being disfigured didn't stop her from continuing to have a go though and she ended up being burned at the stake as a heretic. Those were the days, eh?

The railway line follows the river and I had to use the footbridge to get to the harbour and return to the hotel. You can't help but feel that taking a train alongside the river must make for a brilliant scenic journey.

So it's now up and over as the cold and the growing pangs of hunger assault me. The rest of the day will be spent doing exercises as part of a marketing strategy. Some of the techniques we were introduced to stood me in good stead for the work that I was to undertake in the following years with JISC infoNet.

The hotel. My diary from the time says it was the Church Inn, dating from 1530 but I can't find any mention of it on the Internet now. So if anyone recognises it please leave a comment and let me know!

Work Index

A Snowy Trip to Newcastle

Wednesday 23 February 2005. It was a snowy but bright day heading over to Newcastle for a meeting of the Jisc Advisory Services. Besides Jisc infoNet that I worked for, there were Jisc Legal, Jisc TechDis, Jisc Netskills and a few staff from Jisc's central offices too.

As far as I remember, this was a meeting over two days, starting after lunch on the 23rd and ending after lunch on the 24th. It was 140 miles each way journey for me. Some had travelled from London and Bristol. On the way to Newcastle the A66 was looking a bit wintry and I was glad to get over the Pennines safely and onto the A1M. I stopped to take a quick photo of the Angel of the North in snow.

Thursday 24 February 2005. Overnight the snow caught up to Newcastle. This was the view from my bedroom that morning, looking towards Newcastle railway station with a GNER train pulling out on its journey south to York and beyond. The train is on a raised viaduct that now divides the castle keep from its barbican, the Black Gate.

There has been a fortress here since Roman times, guarding the crossing of the River Tyne at the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall. The son of William the Conqueror, Robert Curthose built a motte and bailey castle here in 1080, being a mound of earth with a wooden pallisade and the current Keep, seen today was built by King Henry II from 1172 to 1177 with the Black Gate being added during Henry III's reign between 1247-1250.

Heading homeward again later that afternoon, the snow was falling heavily on the A66.

The road was still open but there wasn't much traffic attempting it and I knew I had a few exposed roads to come even once I left the A66.

On the West Yorkshire moors the wind was blowing hard, turning the snow into a whirling blizzard and starting to cover the road. At times I had no idea where the edges of the road were but luckily there was always a bit of clear tarmac so that I could see enough to avoid any risk of driving off on one side or the other.

By the time I was approaching Kirby Stephen, the hills were white but the road was reassuringly visible again!

Work Index

The Gisela Express to Kitzbühel

Tuesday 15 August 2000. We are at Zell-am-See railway station where we are about to board the Gisela Express to Kitzbühel.

The train was one of the first electric trains in the world. Most of it dates from the 1930s but the original mail sorting room housed in a 1920s carriage is attached to the train.

The coach, with John driving, will meet us at Kitzbühel.

Keith is on his day off and so in civvies as he cheerfully waves us onto the train. He'll jump onto the Leger coach with John for the day.

We have a reserved carriage and get to know a few more people during the journey. The carriage is full, it's just that everyone else is crowded up to the windows! However, on the left, Barbara sticks her elbow out for the camera...

Once the train has got going lunch is served by costumed waitress service. Hot dog in a bun.

Well, nearly all in a bun as can be seen here! Barbara laughs as her hubby (whose name I didn't get, sorry!) wonders why the bun isn't bigger... The buns weren't cut in half, there was just a hole in them. People kept wandering down to the buffet car to see how it was done whilst everybody hoped it wasn't the same implement used to put holes in the doughnuts...

Lunch over, there was time to go out to view the mountains. The carriages were too old to be fully enclosed at the couplings and we had a great time standing on the footplates, taking photos of the scenery.

These little wooden bits of decking were safe enough for intelligent people. I have to wonder whether they would be considered so now after decades of people expecting to sue because they are too stupid to keep themselves safe without being told explicitly not to chop their own hand off with an axe... Common sense is pretty rare these days I find.

"I just wanted to see if I could stand on it..." Well, who could have guessed?

Meanwhile we are approaching a stop. This was to be a photo stop for people to take photos of the train and costumed staff and to have a look at the 1920s postal sorting office in the specialised carriage.

Here it is - dear me, there's not been a lot of mail to sort on this particular journey!

The guard and stewardesses pose outside the postal carriage.

The locomotive was an electric locomotive 1020.44 dating from 1945. The Giselabahn railway was opened in 1876 by Emperor Franz Joseph and was named after his second daughter with his wife, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary,Elizabeth, nicknamed Sisi. The opening of the railway made it possible to travel from London to Istanbul by train for the first time and it thus started the almost legendary Orient Express.

"Bo-o-o-o-a-rd!" It's time to take a last photo and get back onto the train as we carry on into Kitzbühel. We take our seats for a good minute or two before it's back to looking out of the windows and standing on the footplates. As we pull into the station at Kitzbühel we can see the coach waiting in the car park. We have a couple of hours free time to look around the town first though.

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A Morning in Zell-am-See

Tuesday 15 August 2000. Tuesday morning found us back in Zell-am-See for a couple of hours free time.

The bus dropped us off just a short way from the Grand Hotel that we saw last night in the distance as we sat by the lake in the twilight.

The lake was as spectacular by daylight as it had been by night. The railway was laid alongside the lake and we had to cross the lines to get into the town. Two seperate lines went into the station. The main line went through but a second light railway line that we saw last night terminated at the station, from Krimml through Shüttdorf where we were staying. Following our stay in Zell the afternoon will be a train ride on the Gisela Express to Kitzbühel.

We have to stand at the level crossing whilst a train goes through to the station on our right. Then we can walk into the town and take in the sights and smells of the main street.

We'll start with the sights. Zell was a wonderful place, with only a few buildings such as the Grand Hotel that were not the by now familiar chalet design. We were fascinated by the number of buildings in the famous music box shape. Houses, hotels, petrol stations, shops, sheds and barns were all the same basic shape. I wondered if they played music if you lifted the roof...

Now the smells. Shops had set up displays along the streets and smoked meat of various kinds added their aroma to the clear mountain air. Sausages, salamis, bacon rolls and rashers...

Miss Franny doesn't like smoked food and it wouldn't have been the easiest souvenir to transport home, but the next shop helped fill her bag with a cow bell and a yodelling teddy bear... In fact half the people on the coach seemed to buy a yodelling teddy! We knew this because they set off singing "Yodel-ay-delayee-oh!" at every slightest movement - which made for a hilarious moment at the end of the week when drivers John and Keith were loading bags into the coach, most of which went "Yodel-ay-delayee-oh!" as soon as they were picked up!

The tallest building in the town was this old tower, now a museum, rising above the yellow umbrella. The Vogt tower is the oldest building in the town and was first referenced in 926 CE, making it well over 1,000 years old. It was described then as an escape tower both for local military and town residents, though whether they were expected to escape from an attacking force or whether it was a contest to see if, once in, they could get out again I'm not sure... It has four floors of local historical displays and artifacts.

It was a festival holiday in Austria. By the church the locals were dressed in their finery and there were plenty of national costumes in evidence. The three ladies were pleased to pose - well, two of them anyway - even after my horrendous attempts to speak their language! Or maybe it was pity...

The men, meanwhile, were playing soldiers - dragging a small brass cannon around. You could tell from the air of excitement amongst them that it was going to be fired! They marched in a twin file with a marching band to the square, set up the cannon with as much fussing and pomp they could muster until the urge to fire it was too much. It made a loud crack, sad to say nothing more, but they all seemed satisfied and there was much laughter and comradely back-slapping. Their wives looked on with expressions of forbearance and indulgance. There was now an air of "They'll be satisfied again now until next year..."

Time was marching on though and with a last look at the square and the old museum we went back down to the lake, setting off towards the station. We had time to cross the lines again for a look at the lake.

By gum, they don't half feed up the livestock! This oversized swan was made for a festival and then afterwards when no one could think of what to do with it, it was left on the lake to keep an eye on speeding pedalloes...

Ok! Back to the station! It's time for us to board the Gisela Express that will take us on a train ride through the Alps to the resort or town of Kitzbühel. Food is provided onboard and will cause not a little hilarity. Join us for the next thrilling instalment!

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