Unlike most tiny islands, this one stretches to its own website, so pop along here for a preview peek.

Herewith my website. Remember, it’s not actually me, it’s merely some information about some things that I do portrayed by the clever arrangement of pixels. If you were to meet me in the flesh, I suspect you’d be disappointed, unless I’m wearing my bottle green fleece, which is a thing of beauty.

Anyway, 2012 is the year of researching my new book (out in April 2013 with AA Publishing, fact fans) Tiny Islands. I’ll thus be travelling by train, bicycle and boat to sixty tiny islands in and around Britain from the Scilly Isles to the Shetlands and posting tidbits about same on this very website.

If you see me, do wave.

Yours and oblig,

Dixe

Unlike my first two Coast Hoppers, which were well patronised, I was the sole passenger for long stretches of the 78-minute¹ journey to King’s Lynn. While this meant that there was very little in the way of fellow-traveller-watching on offer, it did at least allow me the pick of the seats. And although it was only lunchtime on my fourth day I had already learnt how to sniff out the whereabouts of the best seat on each bus. The secret, I can reveal, is to seek out the emergency exit.

The Orange Tree, Thornham, dripping with families, couples and other unthinkingly happy types

In order to allow passengers to escape from any bus that has thrown itself in a river, exploded, or lost the will to live, the empty space in front of a seat next to an emergency exit is larger than that normally assigned as leg room for all other seats. By my reckoning, about 50% larger, meaning that that my legs, which I would guess are a good 50% longer than the average Briton’s, are more than happy to fill the space thus apportioned.

Oh, and if there is an emergency, well, you’re right next to the emergency exit. For this reason, if you’re lucky enough to nab such a seat you should always take something smart to slip into in case news broadcasters press you into giving an impromptu interview to camera in your new found post-crash rôle as ‘only survivor’.

Of course, in order to make up for this spatial generosity, the leg room assigned to the seat immediately in front of the ‘emergency exit seat’ is correspondingly dolls-house-esque. Unless you are a doll, or don’t mind the permanent loss of the use of your legs, it’s best to avoid such seats. Indeed, they really only have one use. If you happen to be standing next to them in a crowded bus you can smilingly offer them up to any fellow passengers for whom an inability to perambulate freely from that day forth would be of major benefit to society.

§§§

We hustled as best we could through a positively throbbing Hunstanton. Once at the end of a railway line beloved of Betjeman, the town was cut adrift in 1969 by Dr Beeching and went into decline as a seaside resort. It’s fighting back now, partly due to the Coasthopper which connects it to King’s Lynn, as close as the railway gets nowadays. However, the miles of stationary traffic we passed that was attempting to enter the town from the south suggests it would probably be doing all right for itself regardless of public transport. Its pavements fair spilled over with bank holidaymakers.

The lighthouse at Old Hunstanton, parabolic reflector not shown.

Like all seaside day-tripper crowds, this throng moved at the speed of its slowest members: barely toddling toddlers, arthritic grandparents, snogging teenagers. The fleeter of foot wove loosely choreographed patterns around them as they pressed on to wherever it is in Hunstanton one presses. The fine lighthouse at Old Hunstanton, perhaps? Now a holiday let, it was the once the only lighthouse in the world to employ a parabolic reflector, you know. Or maybe the moderately famous stripy cliffs? A layer of white chalk tops vermilion Carrstone with a thin band of Hunstanton red stone between them. The effect suggests that the town is built on nothing more substantial than a large cream biscuit. Wherever the multitudes were heading, they all seemed to be reasonably happy about it. Looking on, I envied them their apparently unthinking contentment.

I think my unease with summer and other accidents of life – Christmas, my birthday, parties – during which one feels one really ought to be happy, began when I was sixteen. Back in those days, summers were always hot and long, of course, and full of meadows. You couldn’t move for meadows: they were everywhere. In fact, I seem to recall there was some government programme that brought meadows into the hearts of small, otherwise inconspicuous towns in the home counties. I can think of no other explanation as to why my adolescent memories of Caterham, a nondescript blot on the North Downs, are bursting with cornflowers, cow slips, yarrow and bumble bees.

And where there are meadows there must young love be also. At sixteen, to see a meadow and not have the love of one’s life on hand to invite into its concealing grasses is to feel pain. Actually, one can be a lot older than sixteen and still feel that thrust to the guts. As Oscar Wilde said – or at least I vaguely recall the fact that he said it but can’t seem to find any trace of his doing so, so I append my apologies if someone else said it, particularly if it was you – there is nothing worse than a missed opportunity. Being in a meadow on a warm summer’s day without a belovéd one with whom to share it feels more like a missed opportunity than almost anything under the unforgiving sun. And Lucy was never there.

So were sown the seeds of my unhappiness at summer, a misery that would grow to cast its shadow over any other occasion at which it should be possible to feel happy in the normal scheme of things. Of course, that is not to say that I have never known aestival glee or enjoyed a cheery moment when celebrating my birthday, it’s just that I suspect I find it much harder to do so than most people. The up side of this is that when circumstances are outwardly gloomy – when sleet lays waste the population, recession ravages the land and the grim streets blow with detritus – the lack of pressure to feel happy rather lifts my spirits.

Today, as we jolt unsteadily through Hunstanton, I suspect there’s something else going on as well. Everywhere there are people grouped in families or couples. Hard as I look, there doesn’t seem to be a single person who is, well, single. And here am I, alone on a bus. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend, you know,’ I want to call out to the maddeningly contended crowds, ‘and friends too and everything.’

But I rather suspect that only people with neither of those things actually do say that to strangers. So next time you hear someone make such a claim, do be extra nice to them. You’ll probably be the first person to do so for quite a while.

§§§

Our bus, or rather my bus, eventually wriggled its way free and shot along the Roman-straight main road towards King’s Lynn. I saw a Muntjac deer in the woods here once. But I was on a bicycle then and, with little traffic about, I had crept up on it. From my seat by the emergency exit I spotted precious little wildlife. However, there was an intriguing graffito on the back of a road sign to be savoured. ‘Love not obsession,’ it declared. I imagine the author probably meant there to be a comma in between the first two words but as an imperative it still worked rather well.

I pondered its intent as we made our way through the outskirts of Lynn (I’m assuming here, rather rashly perhaps, that locals shorten the name of their town to this – ‘Kings’ just doesn’t sound right and ‘KL’ risks getting it confused with that other mighty East Anglian town, Kuala Lumpur). Once the third most important port in England, Lynn was a member of the Hanseatic League, the alliance of trading cities that hoovered up the lion’s share of northern European commerce in the late Middle Ages. Nowadays, that grand monopolising spirit lives on in the town’s four Tesco supermarkets.

But I digress. As I stepped out into the now humid air swaddling the bus station, I had to concur that love, as the graffiti poet averred, is clearly better than obsession. However, when there’s no love to be had or given, obsession can be a wonderful comfort.

Until it eats you, of course.

¹Apologies for the geeky exactitude of the time keeping. Since I tend more to the ‘chaos’ end of any scale whose other end reads ‘strict regimentation’, it does me good occasionally to engage with the mild autism with which nearly all British males are afflicted.

[Up next: Spalding – you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.]

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.]

Buses 17 (cont.) & 18
736/6 Great Yarmouth to Cromer
44 Cromer to West Runton

The journey to Cromer on the north Norfolk coast was speckled with place names that drew me back again to my childhood holidays. Hickling, Ludham, Stalham, North Walsham (where the no. 736 mystically became the no. 6) – I’d arrived at all of them at one time or other on a boat confidently driven by my step-father. I was disconcerted, however, to find that as the bus passed through or nearby these villages, they conjured up no memories beyond that of a lingering fondness for the names themselves. That may have been, of course, because this time I was travelling by road. If I close my eyes and try to recall Norfolk as it was in the 70s, there’s always some water in the foreground and, more often than not, some reeds and bulrushes thrown in too, but it’s all rather generic, I’m afraid.

The mighty mountainettes of north Norfolk

It certainly suits me to believe that it’s only the difference in conveyance that is impeding the memories of these pre-teen holidays from creeping out from the distant backwaters of my mind. However, if truth be told, I rather suspect that there’s something more to it than that. To put it bluntly, I remember almost nothing of my life until I’m about five, and then very little until I reach ten or eleven, although I know I was happy at my two primary schools. Things improve once I’m at secondary school, which is ironic as my time there constituted the five most miserable years of my life. Thus it appears that the period that my psyche should be repressing is a lot more vivid than the portion of my life that bears rather fewer scars. That’s a bit upsetting really, not only for its own sake but because it leads me to believe that in a world of toil and trouble even my own psyche is against me. I’m no psychiatrist, as this paragraph ably demonstrates, but even I know that being at war with one’s own psyche cannot be a good thing. Furthermore, it adds further fuel to my suspicions that, in the realm of romance, my heart isn’t on my side either.

When, after an hour and a half of village trawling, we finally pulled into Cromer, I was disappointed to find it wasn’t windy. I’m not normally a big fan of wind, particularly if I’m cycling, but Cromer without wind is like a relationship without a fatal flaw – i.e., no fun at all. The last time I had come here there had been no shortage of gusting drafts of icy air. It was 2002, I think, and I was researching a putative book – The Point of England – that was never to see the light of day. The town, or more accurately its weather, got a whole paragraph to itself:

Just to the west, Cromer, in common with Skegness, is famed for being ‘so bracing’ – a delightful tourist office euphemism for ‘Arctic’. The astonishing thing is that should any Arctic weather proceed south from the North Pole in a disorderly fashion along a line one degree east of the Meridian the first land it encounters is the promenade at Cromer. Keen not to disappoint me this day, the wind tore over the sea and cannoned into the town throwing into the air anything not directly attached to the earth. I sought refuge in a café overlooking the doughty pier and allowed the gales to rattle the windows instead of me for a while. The establishment had that wonderful damp ozony seaside smell that even the persistent battering wind had failed to drive away. Heartily I breathed in the muskiness as I watched frail pensioners take flight on the prom, their flapping anoraks whipping them high into the sky like brightly coloured stringless kites. They were swept along the beach and over the pier before plunging magnificently into the raging foam below, transformed for one glorious moment into silver-haired kamikaze cormorants. There is no gentle fading away into dusk for the elderly of Cromer.

With no sea breezes to hold me there – and I’m afraid Cromer has few other delights – I was keen to push on along the coast to West Runton, where I’d ear-marked a campsite for the night. On alighting, I asked the bus driver whether he knew of any services going that way.

The smile of a thrifty man (the mug's probably empty too)

‘There are, but you’ve probably missed the last one by now,’ he replied. I looked at my watch. It was just past six on a Saturday evening, so in the literal twilight zone in which bus timetables exist, I knew I was pushing my luck.

‘How much would you pay me to take you there?’ he asked, with the air of one offering a seat on the last helicopter out of Saigon.

The proposition took me by surprise. In my drawing up of the rules of the trip, I hadn’t considered that I might be offered a chartered bus service. The temptation to accept was manifest. It was still a bus, after all, and being driven by a real bus driver. It would also save me a great deal of faffing about walking to West Runton or trying to find a campsite closer to hand. In the end, it was a combination of embarrassment and tight-fistedness that saved me. Firstly, I had no idea what to offer. What was the going rate for a four-mile trip in what was, effectively, a massively over-sized taxi? And secondly, when it comes to unnecessary expenditure I am Ebenezer Scrooge, pre-spooky visitations.

None of this, of course, found its way into my reply. ‘Well, that’s very kind but I’m on a trip around the outside of Britain using only local buses and I’m not sure whether your offer wouldn’t be stretching the rules a bit,’ I burbled

The driver’s look of bemusement lasted but an instant because, as luck would have it, the last bus he believed I had missed chose that moment to come hurtling round the corner. I jumped off, hurled myself into the road in front of it and leapt on. Six minutes later the new driver was calling back to me that we’d arrived in West Runton.

I walked up a steep hill (yes, I know, in Norfolk) and through some dark woods where I surprised a Muntjac deer at close range. ‘£1.10!’ I announced to his fast disappearing form. ‘It only cost me £1.10 from Cromer. Result!’ But he was gone, back into his better world of less illusory joys.

[Next up - Is love better than obsession? And the abolition of the bank holiday.]

Bus 17
736 Great Yarmouth to Cromer

It’s odd how quickly one becomes accustomed to things. Not so long ago it was obligatory in Britain for everyone over the age of ten to smoke everywhere at all times. Indeed, when it came to particularly confined spaces, those found not puffing away at two cigarettes at once were liable to crippling fines. As a result, merely by remembering to sniff their own clothes after a night out, even dissident non-smokers could conform to societal expectations by contracting lung cancer.

An actor's life: self (left) doing mildly forceful

It came as a surprise then to catch the driver of my bus to Cromer stubbing out a crafty ciggie in the far corner of his cab before he opened the doors to his passengers. As he scratched around looking in vain for 20p to give me in change for my fare, the glowing filter dimly illuminated a region of the vehicle I wish I had not seen. When last cleaned – around 1972 by my reckoning, though you’ll have to get the forensics jonnies in if you want the month as well – it had doubtless already earnt the reputation of being the place where stuff went to die. Even inanimate objects, it seemed, had breathed life into themselves with the sole and express purpose of expiring there. Messily. Is there a Museum of Filth? If so, do ask the curators to get in touch: I think I may have found them a choice exhibit.

That said, the rest of the little yellow bus was very clean. Sanders Services – the first really small bus company of my tour – were its proud operators. So proud, indeed, that they also ran it out on special excursions to remote and exotic destinations. York, Belvoir Castle, Bury St Edmunds, Clacton Sands – with Sanders the world, if not exactly your oyster, is at least your cockle. There were two trips to London, I noted, though neither were of the traditional ‘take in a big West End show’ variety. Which lack, rather perversely, set me to thinking about the stage. One particular stage in fact, the one where Emily and I first met.

A year after returning from Guatemala I joined a local amateur dramatics society. Well, local-ish, anyway. Tower Hamlets, for all its real life characters, suffers from a shocking dearth of am dram groups to portray fictional ones. The Lansbury Players, based a couple of miles from my flat and named after local hero and socialist saint George Lansbury, was (and still is) the only one. For a borough of over 200,000 people, that’s no mean feat. To put it into context, if the Players were to put on Waiting for Godot twice a year every year and everyone in Tower Hamlets wanted to be in it, there’d be a 20,000-year-long waiting list. Those towards the back of the queue could thus find themselves waiting for nigh on twenty millennia before treading the boards. By which time, of course, Godot might well have turned up, thus frustrating their Thespian ambitions forever. Which in a way would be rather Beckettian.

Self doing happy

Anyway, my principal reason for joining was not the usual ‘dahling, I simply must be on the stage or I shall die’ notion – that came a little later – but rather my desire to find out how the whole acting thing worked. The feature film screenplay that was going to make my name was into its fifth year and seventeenth re-write (how I wish that were a joke) and I felt it was about time I learnt something about the art of acting – viz. what actors might have to do to transform my squiggles on paper into cinematic gold.

Emily wandered into the theatre one evening about five years later (thus missing my groundbreaking portrayals of Lignière (Cyrano de Bergerac), Geoffrey (Stepping Out), Mike (Wait Until Dark), Roy (Neville’s Island), Greg (Relatively Speaking) and Salty/Mr Nixon (Teechers) – which in retrospect may have been no great loss) and asked if she could join the group. In order of my first impressions, she was long-haired (I always always notice women’s hair before anything else – if that is weird then so be it), small, pretty, young and wore a T-shirt that bore the profound legend ‘Confusion is sexy’. At least, in my recollection of the event, that was the T-shirt she had on though it’s quite possible that it made its first appearance on one of the following weeks – I’m not very good at that sort of detail. As a witness to a crime I’d be as useful as a deaf mole. One thing is certain though, at some stage I pointed at the T-shirt and said, in my best perplexed voice (I had been an amateur actor for five years by then so this was just about within my repertoire), ‘Err, sorry, what does that mean?’ I know, I couldn’t help myself.

Emily was easy to talk to and laughed at my jokes, which showed good breeding if nothing else. She also had a boyfriend whom she’d been with for three or four years. One evening as we were supping tea during a break in rehearsals, Chloë, a fellow actor, asked her whether she was likely to marry him. Her answer was somewhat equivocal. And at that moment hope was born.

Self doing something in between

As for the whole theatrical side of things, I did learn a little about what it takes to be an actor. I also learnt that I haven’t got it. Most of all, I discovered that I’m more or less clinically incapable of taking direction. I like to think that this wasn’t due to a pig-headed refusal to believe that any way other than mine was wrong, but that I was so poor an actor that I was simply unable to alter what I was doing.

I wonder sometimes if the same might be true of my concerns about what might happen if I were married: it’s not that I would refuse to change on account of a ridiculous sense of my own perfection, but that my bachelor idée has become so fixe that it is no longer sufficiently malleable for a marriage to work. Unfortunately, the only way of testing this is by getting married. This experiment is fine in theory but it does have the downside of turning both me and my putative wife into lab rats (all right, lets put it more gently: guinea pigs). I realise every marriage is like that to a certain extent but I doubt whether any connubial union that includes me as a participant would ever receive a licence under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. The more likely scenario is that balaclava-ed activists would break into our matrimonial home one night and release us both into the wild. Now that does sound appealing.

[Next up: Should pensioners be used as kites? And other moral conundra.]

Bus 16 (cont.)
X1 Lowestoft to Great Yarmouth

My family and I visited Great Yarmouth during one of our intensely thrilling cruiser holidays on the Norfolk Broads. I weaved this enthralling tidbit into the opening paragraph of the piece that was intended to kick off my Guardian series. Oh lucky lucky readers.

Scythe into Great Yarmouth on the X1 bus from Lowestoft and you’ll not even catch a glimpse of what the town is famous for –The Golden Mile. ‘That’ll be no loss then,’ would be the response of many visitors in the past who have tried Great Yarmouth and found it wanting. I first came here on a day trip with my parents and even as a child I realised it was grim – plasticky shops, tacky amusements, tawdry entertainments, everything looking forlorn and run down, as if the place had contracted some terrible wasting disease for which there was no cure.

A landau - the sort of German word the Welsh feel at home with

For the rest, I rattled on about the regeneration of the town which has sort of transformed it into a tacky-but-spruced-up-resort-cum-heritage-destination with a new improved and shinier Golden Mile, two piers, horse-drawn landaus patrolling the front, and some rather good new museums in the back streets. One of these, Time and Tide, is housed in a Victorian herring curing works whose walls still reek of the ‘silver darlings’ that once made Great Yarmouth the fifth richest town in England. ‘The hotter the summer gets, the stronger the smell, so nearly everyone who leaves finds they have a sudden terrible desire to eat herring,’ chirruped my guide with obvious relish. It was the first really hot day of spring – one of those days that feels more August than May – and I felt it impolite to tell her that her museum actually left me feeling a tad queasy.

Perhaps the town’s best kept secret is its rows: wafer thin alleyways across which, should the fancy take them, neighbours were able to shake hands without leaving their homes. It once boasted 145 and, though largely demolished now, each row’s site is marked with its original number. I found no. 6 (‘Snatch Body Row’) to be a particularly fine one, especially as nowadays you’re far less likely to be murdered there by Thomas Smith and Astley Cooper and have your body sold to a well-to-do London doctor for the purposes of experimentation. In row no. 90, one John Hannah apparently took it into his head to murder his wife before attempting to finish himself off with a skewer, which must have been a messy business. The Crown completed the job, giving him the honour of starring in Great Yarmouth’s last ever public execution.

A Great Yarmouth row reconstructed for the museum-going generation

Meanwhile, the local football team rejoices in the nickname ‘The Bloaters’ and, if that were not enough, the town also sports the earliest evidence of human activity in north-west Europe: some animal bones left by a group of picnicking day-trippers over half a million years ago.

For some reason, the editor took against the article and, despite me knocking off several rewrites and receiving copious reassurances that it was ‘going in soon’, it never saw the light of day. It is literature’s loss. Mine too, actually, since he somehow wriggled out of paying me a spike fee for it. Just as well I’m not the bitter type.

Having taken all that Great Yarmouth could throw at me, and with a few hours of daylight still remaining, I picked up my rucksack from the tourist information centre – noting with some pleasure that the blood offering was still there (see previous blog post) – and headed for a bus stop on a wide shopping street.

Melancholic and oddly troubling

[Next time on Busorama: Norfolk has hills. Tall ones with snow on top.*]

*Snow subject to availability. Terms and conditions apply.

Buses 15 & 16
99A Kessingland to Lowestoft
X1 Lowestoft to Great Yarmouth

The journey to Great Yarmouth took us along Rider Haggard Lane (the adventure novelist lived for a while in Kessingland) and threw up two cameo performances. There was the boy on the 99A who spent the greater part of the perfectly pleasant half-hour excursion repeating the mantra, ‘I hate buses, dad,’ oblivious of the fact that his father had entered a Zen-like trance after the first few minutes and was away on some astral plane, only re-entering our world as we neared Lowestoft bus garage; and there was the man who cycled past with a six-foot tall wooden birdhouse over his shoulder. I looked around but no one else seemed to be carrying around a birdhouse so perhaps it’s not the every day Norfolkian occurrence non-East Anglians have been led to believe.

Thirteen hours a day of more fun than our forebears could possibly handle

Great Yarmouth was to be the first subject of my ten-article bus trip series for the Guardian website. The seaside resort and self-styled Gateway to the Broads had recently undergone a major regeneration and I planned to spend most of the day seeing if it had done any good, before fearlessly reporting my findings to a readership hungry for news of all the latest developments in coastal urban planning. Imagining that it was what a proper journalist would do, I headed for the Tourist Information Centre to pick up some leads. The front steps up to their shiny new building on the sea front were only slightly spoiled by fresh blood stains. I’m no Sherlock but they definitely looked human. If you have to bleed in public, I suppose the steps of a Tourist Information Centre are as good a place as any but these stains were so neatly arranged that I couldn’t help thinking that the bleeder had gone about his business rather methodically, perhaps as some form of protest.

I tried not to think about the set of circumstances that could lead a person to being so disquieted about an issue that they felt the most effective means of registering their displeasure was to bleed on Tourist Information Centre property. I turned my energies instead to interrogating the very helpful staff for some while, batting my eye-lids until they agreed to look after my rucksack, and breezing out into the warm sunny Saturday, swerving around the blood and its unsettling story.

By the rough calculation I made heading back from the super shiny newly spruced up prom to what a leaflet promised me was the flourishing Heritage Quarter, my last visit to Great Yarmouth had occurred three decades beforehand. At the instigation of my step-father my family’s annual holiday for most of my childhood and adolescence had been a trip on the Norfolk Broads. I remember the early years with some fondness – on a cruiser tying up to jetties all but overwhelmed by tall reeds on bends of rivers impossibly remote; learning to row on Barton Broad, where the young Horatio Nelson had had his first sailing lessons; savouring the independence of walking on my own along the river and through fields to the only shop in a tiny village where I saw my first ever packet of Walker’s Crisps, back then a regional oddity worthy of comment.

People doing pleasure today

In the later years my siblings, both being several years older than me, began to sheer off from the family holiday to embark on what seemed to me incredibly exotic adventures with their friends. My brother to Carcasson, my sister to the South Downs. We also made the highly regrettable switch from cruisers to houseboats on account of my step-grandmother’s knee which suffered from some unspecified malaise (unspecified to me, at least) and which made boarding and disembarking hazardous if not positively life-threatening.

Although I accepted the situation with the sort of blank resignation that is the closest most thirteen-year-old boys get to displaying empathy, to my mind houseboats combined all the inconvenience of boat life with none of the excitement of propulsion. Of the houseboat holidays I have just two vague memories. Of one, on Wroxham Broad, I recall visiting the mighty Roy’s of Wroxham toy shop where I developed a curious fascination with Playpeople, buying a couple of cowboys and a (ahem) red indian. Since I was reading Solzhenitsyn and Dostoievsky at the time, it makes my infantile purchases all the stranger to reconcile.

Another year we spent a week moored on the Waveney just outside Beccles, bang on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. A funfair was set up on the field across the river and one evening we wandered over the bridge to sample it. My sole recollection is of playing one of those ‘score under ten with three darts and win a prize’ games. I was not a darts player and blindly hurled my three arrows at the board. I hit a 1, a 2 and a 4. I was duly given a prize. Not, of course, one of the huge pastel pink and blue teddy bears who would never experience life outside of a polythene bag but a tiny plastic silver-coloured trophy on a tiny plastic plinth. I suspect it cost less than the money I paid to have a go but I was immoderately pleased. It swiftly became the trophy my brother and I would contest via tense games of Subbuteo football.

If ever I should doubt that I am one of life’s natural winners, all I have to do is cast my eyes on its now dull greyish patina. It’s in my brother’s keeping at the moment – we pooled our Subbuteo gear when he started having sons – and I’m sure he also finds it reassuring to look on it and remember his sibling’s past triumphs.

Who was the natural winner there - Louis, or his great-grandmother, erm...Madame?

I have no doubt that outsiders, if called upon to judge which of the two of us was life’s natural winner, would plump for my brother. He, after all, has been very happily married for over twenty years; has three amazing children (yes, all right, I know they’re my nephews and niece but they actually are amazing); and lives in a nice house in Sussex. I, on the other hand, once got lucky with three darts; was highly commended in a WH Smith’s writing competition at the age of ten; and live in a small flat in east London slightly below the elevated section of the London to Norwich line. Oh, all right, I’ll start again: I, on the other hand, have a modest writing career; a girlfriend who loves me; and a small flat in east London slightly below the elevated section of the London to Norwich line. It’s not been a disaster, but I’m guessing it’s still not quite what everyone thinks of as success.

Do I care what everyone thinks? Not really. I’m just slightly worried that, on my deathbed, I’ll agree with them.

[Next up: The man who tried to commit suicide with a skewer. Fret ye not, it wasn’t me.]

Buses 11 (cont.), 12, 13 & 14
64 Ipswich to Saxmundham
521 Saxmundham to Halesworth
601 Halesworth to Southwold
601 Southwold to Kessingland

Before we pull into Wickham Market, I overhear a line of conversation further up the bus. A very elderly man with a strong Suffolk burr is telling his equally venerable acquaintance, ‘I don’t drink now…[there is a pause – possibly for effect or perhaps just to draw breath]…I’m still trying to get used to this hot chocolate thing with cream.’

When we do pull into Wickham Market I know I have been here before. I love that – when the name of a place suggests nothing but, the moment I see it in the flesh, I realise we’re old friends, or at least on nodding terms. The difficulty then is in dredging the memory for my history with the locale in question. In Wickham Market’s case, the key is when I spot the Co-op in the market square. I like Co-ops and tend to remember those that I have shopped in. (Don’t be alarmed, this is perfectly normal behaviour. In fact those who do not remember the Co-ops they have been in are the ones who should seriously consider seeking professional help. I have the numbers of some good people if you want to get in touch.) As a result, I suddenly recall having nobly cycled here for provisions a few new year’s eves ago when staying in a cottage with friends a few miles up the road. Rosie was amongst the party, a thought that might perhaps make me maudlin if I were that way inclined. I used to be that way inclined but I’ve lost the knack somehow.

Saxmundham - less exciting than this picture suggests

In Saxmundham – a village whose name is its highlight – I do at last alight upon something that might be termed a hitch. There is a bus from here to Lowestoft – my next port of call – but it only runs once a week. I have, quite by chance, arrived on the correct day but have missed it by a mere five hours and one minute. There is also a weekly bus to Norwich but I’ve missed that by a day, five hours and sixteen minutes, and I’d have had to have hijacked it and forced the driver to take me along the coast, so perhaps it’s just as well. With a possible wait of six days, eighteen hours and fifty-nine minutes looming over me, I head for the library. Inside there is a promising array of leaflets bearing bus timetables and, after some trawling, I discover that I can take a bus to somewhere called Halesworth which is, according to the timetable’s diagrammatic map, on my way, although whether this is true merely in diagrammatic terms or in an actual compassy-routey manner it is impossible to tell. Since the next one goes in about half an hour, I decide it’s worth taking the risk.

It is. When the little single-decker 521 ends its journey at Halesworth, Tinkerbell rings her little bell and the bus magically transforms itself into the 601 to Lowestoft. This is a clever trick my timetable leaflet had decided to keep to itself, presumably so as not to spoil the surprise for everyone. It is on account of this that, on boarding the 521, the driver and I embark on a series of hilarious misunderstandings worthy of a mid-to-late Carry On film – the ones in which Jim Dale is forced to making the running with the lion’s share of the attempted comedy lashed to his back only to find it slip off his back, taking his trousers with it. Oh how we laughed. At length, we come to grips with the fact that both of us (the driver and I, that is – Jim Dale is trying to run away but with his trousers wrapped around his ankles – we’re killing ourselves) are Lowestoft bound. The driver, who I know quite well by this time and am beginning to count as an old and valued friend, attempts to get his machine to sell me a ticket to Lowestoft. More hilarity ensues. Eventually, for the sake of his blood pressure, we agree that I’ll pay for a ticket to Halesworth if I promise to buy another one from Halesworth to Lowestoft the moment Tinkerbell swings into action. There’s never a dull moment, I tell you. Sweetly, knowing that I’m not from around these parts, Rob (for that is my new best friend’s name) keeps up a running commentary for me: ‘Down to the train station…here’s a left…turning right here.’

As it happened, I missed the last bit of Rob’s literalist tour because I got waylaid by Southwold, a place I only knew by reputation but which looked too good to pass through. My new soul mate assured me that if I wafted my ticket around on boarding the next bus to Lowestoft, it would be accepted without murmur. One brave last wave and I was off to do Southwold in sixty minutes.

Kessingland - actually also a bit nothingy. Pity I've forgotten to put up my photos of Southwold, really. There's an especially nice one too of a baby rabbit on the front. *Sighs*

There was a camping ground about half a mile along the shore that tempted me but I had that bus ticket burning in my pocket so I was back at the stop at the allotted time and soon alighting outside a campsite at Kessingland, just short of Lowestoft. Here, at last, the pleasurable tingle of anticipation I had felt for the past two days could find its realisation. The grass was level and short, the tall trees promised shelter from the night winds, and in my rucksack, all shiny and gleaming, I had a brand new tent. Oh the joy.

[Next up – Rider Haggard and the results of a fight outside a Tourist Information Centre.]

Buses 10 & 11
93 Colchester to Ipswich
64 Ipswich to Saxmundham

Just south of Woodbridge in Suffolk we pass a sign announcing our arrival in the village of Martlesham. After a few seconds’ urgent deliberation I realise why the name rings a bell: it’s because of my friend Rosie. Ah yes, Rosie. More than one mutual friend was of the opinion that we should, would or ‘really absolutely must’ get coupled up. I dithered.

I don’t always dither. I’m not an obsessive ditherer. But in her case I dithered (although I prefer to call it ‘giving things a bit of thought’). One weekend, at her aunt’s second home in a tiny hamlet in Herefordshire, we ended up talking about the possibility of our friendship developing into something a little deeper. I had split up with Emily by this time (sorry, I should have told you about that) and was not to know that we would be getting back together a few months later. What with the urgings of the mutual friends, a shade too much red wine, and an undeniably romantic open fire before us, the issue was bound to come up, I suppose.

To cut a long (and, I must confess, rather fuzzily remembered) conversation short, I said something along the lines of it being unlikely to end well. This was rather presumptuous of me since I still wouldn’t be able to say for sure whether she would have consented had I suggested giving a relationship a go. I know – like all men, I find it extraordinary that any woman is able to resist me, but by the law of averages there must be some out there who would and Rosie might well have been one of them. If I’m perfectly honest, although I loved Rosie dearly as a friend (still do, come to think of it) and found her very attractive, she had one fault that I just couldn’t get over, one shortcoming so short that The Romance To End All Romances could never have happened between us: she can’t spell.

That’s a bit harsh, of course. She can spell lots of words – ‘fantastic’, ‘scrounge’, ‘mundane’: none of these hold any terrors for her – it’s just that there are quite a few words she mis-spells quite badly. Her world is peppered with ‘genious’, ‘gorgous’, ‘lucious’ – indeed, nearly any word that ends in ‘ous’ or shouldn’t end in ‘ous’ seems to be beyond her. And, just in case you’re screaming, ‘Give the girl a break, they’re typos!’ – they’re not. We’ve exchanged correspondence on the subject and she joked about her inability to keep to standard English spellings of words. We also spoke about it once (again, fuzzily remembered – I give my brain lots of healthy vegetarian food and this is how it repays me) and I think she said something about being borderline dyslexic. That may also have been a joke.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Not going out with someone because they can’t spell is the act of a shallow feckless individual and an intellectual snob of the highest order. Certainly I’m not going to deny that I’ve been both at some points in my life and, regrettably, I don’t discount the possibility of me going there again. It’s just that, when all’s said and done, I can’t imagine ending up with someone who can’t spell, however light they may make of it. How, for instance, would we do the crossword in bed of a Saturday morning? For one, I’d hate myself for correcting her linguistic mishaps – ‘No, my dearly beloved, ferrous has an f not a ph’ – in a tone of voice so desperate not to sound patronising that it goes full circle and sounds nothing but that.

And spelling gets everywhere – it’s not just for crosswords, you know. There are shopping lists and e-mails and notes on fridges and birthday cards and, lest we forget, wedding invitations. Of course, there is also the text message, the only medium in which unorthodox spelling is not only acceptable but more or less obligatory. This might perhaps have proved a safe haven where we could have communicated without interference from my linguafascism. It’s unfortunate, then, that I refuse to own a mobile phone.

Flipping through a few of her e-mails just now in search of some of her choicer orthographic peccadilloes to put some backbone into my argument I discovered it’s actually more feeble than I imagined. My memory has exaggerated Rosie’s spelling mistakes. Why, she even gets ‘tedious’ right.

It’s not really about the spelling then, is it? The spelling is merely symptomatic of a truth that, until now, dare not speak its name: I want to be with someone cleverer than I am so I can fall in love with the poor girl’s mind. Rosie has just about the biggest heart of anyone I know but, hey, what does that matter when she can’t grasp the important stuff like the ability to name the capital of Burkina Faso (and, just as importantly of course, spell it).¹ I clearly need to start stalking the studios where they film University Challenge.

Anyway, six months or so after the hazy evening with the wine and the open fire her life was hijacked by a couple she knew. They invited her and a man from Martlesham [it’s a small unprepossessing village and I’m afraid my single-decker bus has long since roared through it as I write these notes] to dinner in the sort of show of shameless matchmaking that gives married couples the bad name they deserve. I recall from our debriefing session that she was unimpressed with the putative life partner plonked opposite her. Still more so when, a few days later, he sent her a text asking to see her again but spelt her name wrong.

Less than six months later they were engaged. I went to the wedding. In those awkward few seconds of silence immediately after the ‘if anyone knows of any cause why these two persons here present should not be married he should say so now or forever hold his peace’², was I biting my tongue and inwardly screaming, ‘It should have been me.’? Happily not, though given my track record of emotional perversity that values what I cannot obtain in direct proportion to its unobtainability, it wouldn’t have surprised me unduly had I done so. What I was thinking was, ‘And so disappears another friend.’

Rosie is nothing if not a pragmatist. She wanted to get married and have children. She was not without her suitors but didn’t see any of them as potential husbands so she never bothered with them after the first few dates. Then she met someone who didn’t exactly bowl her over but who was clearly a solid sort and with whom she thought a marriage would work, so she married him. Knowing her as I do, I suspect she’ll make a roaring success of it too. In fact, I’d be immensely surprised if she wasn’t very happily in love right now. I’ll ask her next time I’m this way again and report back.

I, on the other hand, am not a pragmatist. However, I can see the advantages.

—

¹It’s Ouagadougou, but I expect you knew that.

²And if you think I had to look up that wording before typing it then you have not been to as many weddings as I have, my friend.

[Tune in on Monday to read the words ‘acquaintances’, ‘maudlin’ and ‘Victorianate’, all of them spelt correctly. I’m such a catch.]