Clive Best

Arrived in Godmanchester for a night before heading to East Anglia, somewhere I have never been. Thursday morning we head out first to Wisbech which was a bit disappointing . The town centre had been homogenised by the major shops and food stalls but we still managed to have a coffee. At 11-30 in the morning  everyone else seemed to be eating cakes or baked potatoes - UK does have an eating problem, as can be seen at the large number of overweight people. Then up the A109 to Kings Lynn, which again on first sight I thought  had been ruined but later found the old part of the town near the tidal river docks and some lovely original houses around the main church.

As far as I can see Council “planners” and commercial interests demand from all towns not strong enough to stand up to them:

- one or two “shopping malls” ex 70s “shopping centres”. These tend to be bland concrete areas with always the same shops in all towns of Britain - namely: Boots, WH Smiths, Carphone Warehouse, Clinton Cards, Argus, Phones 4us, plus estate agents. This could be anywhere in any town and you wouldn’t be able to tell. The real character of each town lies in those remaining market squares, old pubs, churches and the  non-developed areas. Britain must preserve what’s left - just like Italy has always done. In Venice there is a MacDonalds but the sign and frontage of the shop has been unchanged for centuries. The council insist on in tune shop fronts/signs.

Headed north past Sandringham - the Queen’s estate. Amazing woodland and walled estate which I am sure are wonderful but why is it that only the Queen has enough money to mainatin classic houses and why is it that we are so culturally stupid as to accept the damage done to our public villages and monotone architecture. Finally we arrived in Hunstanton.

Hunstaton is a pleasant seaside town for many retirees and again there were mobility scooters flying all over the place. Some of the occupants were my age but grossly overweight. Being obese can makes you “disabled” so rather than addressing the real problem - overeating and lack of exercise the social services hand out a disabled sticker and a mobility scooter. As a result you can’t find a parking place anywhere  because half the parking places are reserved for the “disabled”, and then we get run over by electric scooters driven by dimented physically challenged people on the pavement.  I can honestly swear that in 20 years I have never seen one electric scooter on any pavement in Italy. There are plenty of 80 year olds but they seem to remain slim and active to the end.

Next we went along the north Norfolk coast making a brief visit to a lovely beach which has really beautiful golden sands before  arriving in Wells-next-the-sea. This was the first town in East Anglia  that immediately impressed me. I remember as a boy hearing stories about East Anglians being a bit dense and inbred etc., but of course  one can’t say such things today and nor would I dream of writing such nonsense on this blog! Wells has a nice estuary harbour and is obviously a haven for crab fishing.

We headed for Fakenham imaging that it was a wonderful village - but it turned out to be pretty ordinary and devoid of even a hotel to spend the night, so I decided to head for Norfolk. Finally arriving in the town around 6pm we got  bunged up in a central jam with road works but realised from the side streets that here was a town really worth visiting. It had lovely lanes, an ancient wall and churches. So we were keen to stop - but the only problem was there were no hotels. It seems that Norfolk doesn’t want visitors - no signs and no hotels. Finally we fought our way through the traffic to a Premier Inn spotted in the distance only to find it was  booked out. Clearly other people had the same problem so  I headed for the station, because surely at any main railway station there are always Hotels - but no, not in East Anglia. There are none at all and there is no information booth or helpful hotel information stand in the station. Come to think of it there are no road signs in Norwich - it is almost as if it hasn’t occurred to them that a) someone mght want to visit their town and b) they haven’t a clue where they are going. Then a flash of a Holiday Inn near the Norwich

View from room

Union Football stadium. On arrival I was asked for my blue attendance badge - you see they had some conference on and certainly they were not interested in giving us a room for less than a minimum of: 175 quid/night.  So we hit the road again assuming we could find a hotel somewhere.

Cornwallis Hotel

Finally at a small place called Eye we found a wonderful old country hotel called Cornwallis Hotel. It was a 500 year old dowager’s house with massive rooms. We had the best room in the place for 90 quid plus a good meal and gazed down the 40 foot deep well sitting under a sheet of glass in the bar.