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

Norfolk and Transport Museums Weekend

Highlights of a long weekend break in Norfolk in 2012. We stayed in Great Yarmouth but spent much of our time visiting transport museums featuring aircraft, buses and trams, and steam trains.

Each place of interest is shown on its own separate article, reached by clicking/tapping the six photos below. A link on each page will bring you back here.

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The Nottiff of Sheringham

Monday 1 October 2012. We have finished journeying up and down the North Norfolk Railway and decided to have a look at what else Sheringham has to offer.

I was a touch surprised to see a pub called the Robin Hood. I didn't actually go in to see whether there was any claim to connection with the famous outlaw of Sherwood Forest, but perhaps it was a drunken mistake as per my title at the top!

The town clock has been built onto a shelter with a sign that says it was once the site of the town's water supply and possibly the stocks and pillory.

By water supply, this means a well. Few town wells were what most people would think of with a handle to winch down a bucket. They were mostly puddles some of which were defined by stone or brickwork but at which you would normally stoop to fill your bucket or whatever you had brought.

Some delivered clear water, others brackish green or brown water with a generous share of pond life. Tadpoles are easy to fish out, microscopic life forms including bacteria are not... The word "possibly" is fun as well isn't it? As in "possibly the site of the stocks and pillory... but possibly not..."

Down the main street towards the seafront, the Lobster seemed to have been in the wars. Covered with bullet holes and a shell hole, it turned out that these had been painted on in honour of a 1940s night!

At first glance though it did seem particularly appropriate that the pub was on the corner of Gun Street!

Joyful West's Seafood Bar stands on the other corner. Now I have never been a fan of seafood I'm afraid. Raised some 50 miles from the coast in Rochdale, seafood was not a family staple foodstuff in the 1950s and 60s of my childhood. Fish came from the chippy and was cod, hake or haddock and if we ate fish in a "posh" restaurant it would be plaice. Salmon came from a tin and I never even tasted tuna until I was 30. Shrimps, prawns and most definitely things like mussels, crab, lobster, oysters, squid, and scallops mostly remain (the exception is prawns) if not downright poison at least under the mental heading of probably-tastes-so-putrid-I'd-puke!

At the end of the street right on the seafront is The Two Lifeboats pub. The beach is one of those where tons of huge rocks have been spilled to protect the coastal area from the sea. Practical and comparatively cheap I suppose, but looks bloody awful. But it seems to be getting increasingly common more's the pity. Perhaps they will look ok in a few thousand years when the rocks have worn smooth by the sea?

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North Norfolk Railway

Monday 1 October. We'd seen aeroplanes, we'd seen trolleybuses. We had even seen trams. So in the midst of the Norfolk Broads, what form of transport have we still to see? Right! Steam trains!

We drove to Sheringham along the Norfolk coast and by the time we got to the lovely little station we were a bit late to catch the train we wanted to catch. However by lucky chance they had been having a small technical hitch and we arrived in time to dash onto the train literally seconds before it went!

We wandered through a couple of carriages and came to an old one with compartments and a corridor - very Harry Potter! We settled ourselves down and waited patiently for the witch with the sweets trolley. When she came she looked just like a male ticket inspector who, when asked where the chocolate frogs were, obviously thought he had misheard and ignored the question altogether... Not an HP fan then...

This was another place where the area's retired folks were having the time of their lives! Why are they all in Norfolk, these places? Pensioners really have it made down there! I think I'm going to have to move there. They were driving steam trains for Heaven's sake!!! One was selling souvenir booklets and popped his head into our compartment every ten minutes to say "Have I seen you before?" On receiving the nod, he'd say cheerfully, "Ah well, I'll leave you alone next time then!" Ten minutes later he'd pop his head round the door and say "Have I seen you before?"

The track runs ten miles from Sheringham to Holt with a stop at Weybourne along the way. At either end the locomotive has to be decoupled and then runs to some points and then trundles past the train of coaches to couple onto the other end to draw the train back again.

At these points we all jump off and take lots of photos of superheated water shooting out of safety valves and generally get in each other's way before jumping back onto the train once the locomotive is ready.

A group of children dressed as wartime refugees with little square boxes for a gas mask have got off at Holt and lined up. The teacher is dividing them up into three groups. "In line I want you to count to three," he says. Dutifully the first child shouts "One!", the second shouts "Two!", the third shouts "Three!" and the fourth shouts "One!" to start the sequence again. By the time it gets to child twenty the system has fallen down and another teacher is saying crossly to him "You haven't the foggiest idea of what you are supposed to be doing have you?" Upon which he turns a bewildered face to his equally bewildered neighbours who all shrug their shoulders and look mutinous along with him.

It takes around 40 minutes to do the ten miles and switch the locomotive to the other end so a full return journey takes an hour and a half. Back at Sheringham we get off the train and decide to go and find something to eat in the town. Sheringham looks extremely pretty so we decide that we will have another ride on the train (as our ticket lasts all day) and then will have a walk through the town later in the day.

We find a cafe at the end of the street and have a toastie and a coke (the drink that is... I was never a one for chemical pleasures... I did get confused once and snort a line of Pepsi...)

When we got back to the station a huge chunk of locomotive called Ayrshire Yeomanry (No.45156 for the enthusiasts) was swapping ends of a single coach which was filled with excited men and somewhat resigned but determined women.

The men had all paid around £400 for a day's footplate experience. Each of them got to drive the locomotive for the full ten mile stretch of track under the close supervision of a Norfolk pensioner who knew what he was doing. And more importantly knew what they might do before they actually did it, so that he could warn them about it before they smashed through the level crossing gates and gouged two deep lines across the main road...

The journey was remarkably similar to the one we did in the morning, but was no less enjoyable for that. We sat in the very same compartment and found a packet of tissues that must have fallen out of my pocket in the morning's excitement. Whilst we had lunch those tissues went on a 20 mile journey without us but now we were happily reunited!

We waved to the old chap in his conservatory at the back of his house, jutting into a garden that bordered the railway line. We watched as the windmill went by on the horizon and at Holt when we got off the train I looked at the small museum and the model railway for ten minutes whilst the locomotive did its swap-ends thing.

Then we sat in our compartment again and watched the crocodile of wartime refugees make their way back to the train. I think most of them had survived the war...

The sweets trolley never came round though...

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