The Year of the Tiny Islands

Buses 19 & 20
Coast Hopper – West Runton to Blakeney
Coast Hopper – Blakeney to Wells-next-the-Sea

The clouds slid around the sky like huge grey squid – not always a good sign – as I dropped a postcard into a post box at West Runton and headed for the bus stop. It was my second postcard to Emily on this, the morning of only my fourth day, which I felt more than fulfilled my boyfriendly communication duties (particularly since I was (and still am) the last person in Britain under sixty not to own a mobile phone). Had I been more emotionally intelligent I might have wondered if she would see it that way too.

Blakeney, land of boats

The Coast Hopper bus, whose green, orange, yellow and blue colour-scheme appeared to have been devised by someone more used to knocking out colour-blindness test cards, careered up to the stop on time. I had already learnt that dumpy-single-decker buses had just two modes of advancing: dawdle and career. In towns, their drivers instinctively put them in ‘dawdle’ and potter along, giving way cheerfully to other traffic, loitering at unpopulated bus stops, halting before zebra crossings and calling for volunteers among the passengers to get out and cross in front of them. ‘Bus brevis, vita longa est,’ is the motto of dumpy-single-decker bus drivers when in town. Get them out into the countryside, however, and it’s another matter altogether. All of a sudden their vehicle becomes a boxer – ducking, diving, weaving, bobbing, tearing up the road as if in fear that some field or wood is about to launch a volley of fast-right handers at its radiator. With sweat beading on furrowed foreheads the drivers mutter their new mantra: ‘I came, I saw, I got back to some sort of urban settlement as fast as I could.’ As mantras go it could be snappier but it gets them through the day.

Since the road that hugs the coast is strewn with villages, we careered and dawdled westward in a ratio of about 3:1. We hurtled past golf courses, camp sites, salt marshes erupting with birds, and squat flint settlements pressing themselves as far into the bog as they dared to evade the worst of the pummelling wind.

As its name implies, the Coast Hopper styles itself as a hop-on hop-off service, which rather loads onto the shoulders of passengers an inate moral obligation to do some hopping. Skimming along my map with a finger, I plumped for Blakeney and Wells-next-the-Sea as two places worthy of an hour of my time. In the former, I encountered a large brilliant-white marquee on a patch of green by the riverside. With little else to the north in the way of land but low lying salt marshes, however, it looked as if it were on the seafront. So successful was the illusion that I expected this shining pavilion to be filled with halls of mirrors, candy floss machines and rock in the shape of a fried breakfast (why do they do that?). What I actually found was a book fair.

Boat preparing to repel children

Now, secondhand books are, to me, just about the most precious jewel this world has to offer. I love the feel of old books, the innocence, raffishness and hauteur of their covers, the ivory yellow of their pages, their comfortingly old fashioned fonts. I buy them by the shelf-full. I add them to a library that has outgrown my bedroom and is colonising the living room. Sometimes, if I’m feeling really keen, I’ll even read them. However, the beginning of an odyssey of unknown length, burdened by a rucksack that was already taking its toll on my lower spine, is not the time to be taking on board yet more ballast, even if it does have a dust jacket that is the very essence of joy in paper form. It was a relief, then, to discover that the vast majority of stalls were dedicated to books in which I had no interest: airport novels, horse care manuals, apparently humorous copy cat books rushed out to piggyback a bestseller, chick lit, mis lit, ‘I’ve spent a year in Spain/Italy/France growing lemons/olives/tiresome’ lit, annuals, contemporary novels (I know, I’m a bad person), digests, self help guides and works of psychobabble.

In short, although I claim to love second hand books, the reality is that I only ever buy two sorts: old Penguin paperbacks (own 341, have read 32), and accounts of escapes from prisoner-of-war camps (own 36, have read 28). There being neither for sale at the book fair, I rifled happily through boxes I knew would offer me everything but temptation, cheerfully incommoded fellow bibliophiles with my rucksack, and strode out in good heart for the next bus west. Sometimes, just being near books is enough.

Wells-next-the-Sea. Thrumming.

Through tiny stony Stiffkey we rattled, with its unlikely pronunciation rules (as a proper noun it’s ‘Stiff-key’ but when used to describe a native of the village it becomes ‘Stew-key’), and its even more unlikely shop which sells nothing but lamps and is clearly a cover for some crab smuggling operation or similar.

Wells-next-the-Sea I knew, or thought I knew, from a visit when writing The Point of England. Back then I’d spent a trammelled night with my tent buckling in a constant gale on a flooded campsite. The land had been reclaimed from the sea by Victorian engineers and the sea was doing its level best to reclaim it back. The only other campers on the site were a vaguely hippie-ish couple who devoted their stay to the capture and humane dispatch of a myxomatosed rabbit. It was just about the only fun in town.

Today, I felt as if I must have dreamt such a scene. Wells thrummed with Bank Holiday Saturday trippers, their ice creams obediently melting under a sun that had finally banished the squid from the sky. A football ground was pressed into service as an over-flow car park, and a miniature railway ferried numberless parents and children along a mile-long bank through the salt marshes to a yolk-yellow beach and a gentle sea.

Park. Park.

It was all I could do to prevent myself from succumbing to what the Germans, with an efficiency typical of their language, call weltschmerz. There’s nothing like a sunny summery afternoon in a seaside resort to bring on a bit of ‘world-sorrow’. For years, I thought it must be some sort of nostalgia for an innocent past that triggered it but now I’m pretty sure it’s actually something else entirely. At the risk of making Eeyore sound like Pollyanna, it’s the pressure to feel happy that drives me headlong into sadness.

[Next up – Why winter is inherently better than summer and more so when it rains.]