Not sure how long I’ll keep this up – a week, maybe – but what the heck. In this post, a couple of big-hit viral videos, some righteous anger about the bankers, local news from north Norfolk and north Hertfordshire, music from Big Country, Mari Wilson and the Grand Ole Opry, and the incomparable Lady Chablis.

News

Tony Robinson asks if bankers are human: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18642323. A most splendid rant on BBC Question Time. Sadly, not much of a cunning plan to fix it all.

Tony Robinson asks if bankers are human

Hitchin Town FC’s Position on Top Field: http://www.aboutmyarea.co.uk/site/content.asp?area=122&type=0&story=225962. A sorry mess…

Hitchin Town FC’s Position on Top Field

Features

This is our planet

Point Break: stranded on a spit: http://www.northnorfolknews.co.uk/news/point_break_stranded_on_a_spit_1_1427950. My ex-colleague Steve Downes goes back to nature.

Point Break: stranded on a spit

The story of the o w l sweater: http://katedaviesdesigns.com/2012/07/08/the-o-w-l-sweater-a-design-story/. A tale of big business ripping off small enterprise.

The story of the o w l sweater

Cool stuff

A Conversation With My 12 Year Old Self: 20th Anniversary Edition

Words of Wisdom: Feynman to the Rescue! http://school.failblog.org/2012/07/04/homework-class-test-words-of-wisdom-feynman-to-the-rescue/. The great iconoclast with advice that is excellent in all respects – except its implications for classroom management.

Words of Wisdom: Feynman to the Rescue!

100 Riffs (A Brief History of Rock N’ Roll)

Online

July 9th: Internet Doomsday – How To Prevent And Save Your System: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/preventing-dnschanger-malware/. If this was going to affect you, you’d know it already.

July 9th: Internet Doomsday – How To Prevent And Save Your System

Fury after Facebook messes up smartphone users’ address books: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/07/03/facebook-address-book-smartphone/. Facebook does it again.

Fury after Facebook messes up smartphone users’ address books

Music

Charlie Daniels Band “Devil Went Down to Georgia” – Grand Ole Opry: A master at work.

BIG COUNTRY LIVE – FIELDS OF FIRE 1995: RIP Stuart Adamson.

Mari Wilson awesome Live version of “Cry Me A River”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muJkEjUXMDE. The Neasden Queen of Soul at her spine-tingling best.

Mari Wilson awesome Live version of “Cry Me A River”

Retweets

Right, now how long until someone starts selling boxes of Higgs Bosons on eBay.

— Chris Warren (@Ixalon) July 4, 2012

.@alanbaldwinf1 It’s the only way the kids will get excited about it… “CERN confirms discovery of the OMG WTF particle.”

— Will Buxton (@willbuxton) July 4, 2012

Life is always a test, when things go wrong TWO TEARS IN A BUCKET MUTHA FU*K IT! Cry and solve it.Move on, it will happen again. CRAVE IT!

— theladychablis (@theladychablis) September 24, 2009

Hemsby beach

A part of the county where they factory farm tourists in endless caravan and chalet parks, where grey-haired rockers play the Byrds and the Monkees in clubs full of appreciative grandparents, where endless piles of twopenny pieces balance on the edge of the drop in endless arcade machines, never quite cascading down.

I loved it.

I’d begged a long weekend in my parents’ caravan, just me and my laptop and my plans for a novel (oh – and a box of college marking, but let’s not mention that). Just as on a previous day trip to Hunny, I wanted the seaside at a time when it wasn’t swamped by tourists.

I love to see what’s in the cracks between the places the people go, what’s left behind in the busy places when they’ve stopped being busy.

From the sand cliffs

And I certainly picked the right weekend. Although the sun shone at the end, which was not unpleasant, for most of it there was driving wind and horizontal rain. On Saturday night the TV weather map, showing the whole of East Anglia, had a big arrow indicating gale-force wind that pointed exactly at the caravan.

Couldn’t have been better.

So, I did get the project moving again. It’s an idea I floated 18 months ago in a Faber Academy writing workshop with the authors MJ Hyland and Trevor Byrne, and it’s a good idea. But time and, you know, life and stuff, mean I haven’t done anything more than poked at it since.

And this weekend I moved it on enormously. I have characters now, and a milieu, and a narrative (though not yet the right way of translating that into a non-linear plot with multiple voices… this isn’t going to be easy). I’m happy.

Caravans at sunset

But it’s a funny ole place, that Hemsby. There’s a village a little inland, a proper little Norfolk village. Then there’s a thick layer of caravan parks, most with their own club or bar, and a sliver of arcades. And out from these are the sand cliffs that hide the sea, and which are being steadily eroded. Sheltering behind – and sometimes embedded in – the dunes are rows of wooden chalets, a silent secret community sandwiched between the noise of humanity and the power of the sea.

Which is the real Hembsy? I don’t know. Perhaps they all are.

They were all interesting in their way. The village got on with life as if there wasn’t a tourist magnet nearby. The chalets, too, seemed to have little connection to anything else – if it wasn’t for the cars parked with them, they could have been from another decade. But it was the tourist ecosystem that fascinated me most.

Appearing live...

On two of the nights I was there, the caravan park club had live acts. One was a Buddy Holly tribute, the other a band with thick local accents, thinning grey hair and an inexhaustible supply of banter. Each was well-known to and well-loved by the club audience, filling the dance floor with retirement-age couples for short bursts of careful but comfortable twirling and twisting.

The holiday resort live music scene isn’t one that gets much attention – it isn’t glamorous, and the serious music journos and the X-Factor starlets would each likely sneer at it. But that would be unfair, as the people in it are seasoned professionals, deserving of respect for their unheralded pursuit of a craft and for the pleasure they give.

Viva Hemsby

I was less sure what to make of the nearest thing Hemsby has to a strip – a road lined with arcades that borrow their names and facades from Las Vegas, like the Mirage or the Palace Casino, or which try to bask in reflected light from Hollywood, Formula One and any part of the world that can guarantee sunshine, glamour, wealth or class.

“London – New York – Paris – Rome – Hemsby” declared one ice cream and shakes parlour, in deliberate and happy irony. Not every place seemed quite so clear on the joke.

Down the coast, another caravan park settlement is called California. Here, there’s a Bermuda park – or was it Bahamas? Get swept up in the illusion and it’s fine – take a step back and see the fields outside the village, or look up at the grey skies, and it all starts to look hallucinatory – even psychotic.

Make. It. Go. AWAY!

Although, not so psychotic as the statues – human-sized hot dogs and cartons of fries with faces to give you nightmares, solitary centurions, the many children’s rides.

And in the road outside my caravan park, a painting on the Tarmac designed to promote Hemsby and its caravan-and-sand-chalet suburb Newport. A grinning Viking in horned helmet, with the caption “1200 years of seaside fun”.

Seaside fun? The Vikings?

Storming ashore from their longboats with bucket and spade in hand perhaps, ready to find a comely English maiden to buy a punnet of chips from, before spending a jolly afternoon on the fruit machines, the F1 karts and the Lost World crazy golf.

Like I say, funny place, Hemsby.

Couldn’t have been better, as far as I was concerned.

Photo gallery

Click thumbnails to enlarge.

And when one appears over the back garden it’s impossible to resist running outside with a camera.

As ever, click for the full-sized version.

Further along the road, after I’d switched the camera off, he had a mate who was having a fine old time, waving at the cars and mugging for the drivers who were taking photos of him.

This chap, though, looked like he wanted the ground to open up and swallow him whole…

Worst job ever?

The taste of summer...

It’s been a long time since I lived in Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, after all, and even longer since visiting family in Lincolnshire occasionally included a jaunt to Skegness. Nor did I get to see many of the sights as an observer at NUS conference in Blackpool as a student.

So, back in March, we loaded up our metaphorical bucket and spade and headed off to the seaside.

While what I really wanted was somewhere seedy and run down, the need for an enjoyable day trip meant that instead we went to Hunstanton and Cromer on the north Norfolk coast.

The season hadn’t started yet – not by a long chalk – but it was starting to heave into view on the horizon.

There’s nothing bleaker than a seaside resort in the depths of winter, with howling rainstorms lashing boarded-up seasonal attractions, and that atmosphere was missing in both towns.

But the few visitors that had ignored the calendar to make the journey to Hunny had the air of endurance athletes, not holidaymakers, while barbed wire, barriers and boards were much in evidence along the front.

By the time we reached Cromer it was dark, and the heaving waves around the pier – though nothing particularly special – were a reminder why the town is as famous for its lifeboat as for its bucket-and-spade brigade.

Photo gallery

Click each thumbnail to see larger version.

The full tale of why we were there is on our walking blog, where Beloved Other Half wrote up the visit as our contribution to the Celebrate Our Forests Day activities.

But for me it wasn’t just about activism, or a return visit to a location that the hobby of geocaching has pulled us into several times over the last few years.

It was also a trip back into a time long-gone when I camped there in the Scouts – memories of cooking dough strips and sausages over an open fire, sleeping in fern-covered bivouacs or brand-new two-person tents, tears and crippling homesickness, brittle oak twigs and papery dry leaves, wood smoke, and a sense of adventure and possibility that couldn’t even see the boundaries of the wood, let alone of life.

The place seems smaller now, and I noticed the roads and fields and houses beyond the edge of the wood as I never had before. But in the heart of it, I could still see the past staring back at me.

Apparently founded by the Knights Templars in the 12th Century, it’s got a suitably historic town centre with lots of remarkably unscathed architecture.

What look like the survivors of mediaeval merchants’ houses extend back endlessly from the street, cheek-by-jowl with the best that Georgian and Victorian-civic styles have to offer.

But poke around for a while and all is not well. For every thriving gem of a building, there seems to be another shuttered and semi-derelict, its internal floors reduced to bare joists and its windows boarded up.

It’s rather a shame, and it makes you fear what might be coming down the line for this wonderful street scene as the economic screw tightens.

Anyway, here are some photos – the good, the bad and the bizarre.

Photo gallery

By this morning it had gone, but yesterday when we went for a walk it was at its finest. The far-off Wymondley Wood posed on the horizon as if auditioning for a Christmas card, and the broad skies over the frozen Common gave a passing glimpse of the infinite.

Lovely. Buggeringly cold, but lovely with it.

Photos

Click to enlarge.

The opposition for this Herts Senior Cup first round tie was Ware FC, a team that hadn’t won away all season and which Hitchin had already dumped out of the preliminary rounds of the FA Cup.

Looked good on paper, but they don’t play football on paper.

The dedicated few

A dank evening developed into a shiveringly cold one and we were among only 64 spectators who braved the conditions. It felt rather like that old joke – the crowd was so small that, before the game, the names of the spectators would be announced for the benefit of the players.

For Beloved Other Half it was the third visit to Top Field, for me only the second – and this despite me growing up in the town. More to follow, I hope.

Our first game as spectators was against North Greenford United, and you can read Beloved Other Half’s write-up here, or see some photos here. That was a good definition of a thriller, with late goals sealing the victory and their man-of-the-match keeper sent off for dissent in the dying moments.

Ware’s website report used the same word for this one, calling it a “seven-goal thriller in which the lead changed hands three times”.

Perfectly accurate as far as facts go, but it didn’t have the feel of a thrilling game. It was deeply frustrating, with Hitchin’s passing misfiring and Ware squashing us further and further back into our own half.

Free kick just outside the box

There was a short, happy, period when we were 2-1 up and the cold seemed to have disappeared (freshly-cooked chips, steaming tea and a Mars Bar had something to do with that, too).

But after 60 minutes there was a crunching tackle in the home penalty area and a confused period during which not a lot seemed to happen. With every spectator clustered optimistically behind the away goal, it wasn’t at all clear what was happening so far away – and only those following the game on Twitter realised a Hitchin player had been sent off.

The penalty made it 2-2, another goal followed within two minutes, and a fourth arrived after 81 minutes. Hitchin pulled one back in injury time, but it didn’t spark much hope – faced with the prospect of an equaliser, a voice from the crowd was heard to say “I hope not, or we’ll be stuck here another half hour”.

Ah well, there’s still the league to look forward to – and Hitchin are top of that, 10 points clear with a +25 goal difference. And it was great to experience Top Field under floodlights. It’s a uniquely historic place, protected from developers (and prevented from modernisation) by ancient covenant – as the essay with this set of photos from the North Greenford game explains.

We’ll definitely be back, hopefully bringing better luck with us.

Photo gallery

Click to enlarge.