4. Fakenham Rececourse

    CC site
    8th-12^th March

Short drive (20 miles) here to what looks a very tidy site. Not actually a CC site, but affiliated (AS). The rate (£10.50) is good for an AS. Handsome new stand and the course looks in great shape, with lots of jumps all ready for next Friday's meeting. When there's a meeting on, any vans staying on site have to uproot and go to the middle of the course!

Fakenham Racecourse

 

Enjoyed the rugby, especially Brian O'Driscoll's last match in Ireland. A great send-off for him. The Irish and Welsh certainly know how to do heroes. Can't imagine an English player ever getting those accolades. Then again, which English player has been as charismatic, influential and just plain heroic? Jonny Wilkinson was two of those but hardly charismatic, very much a Roundhead to O'Driscoll's Cavalier.                                                                                            

 

Well, England duly battered the Welsh to defeat. Good performance, promising team, but still unable to turn their dominance in all areas of the game into points. They should have had it won by half-time. And does Dylan Hartley not know the flaming rules? It seemed that every time England laboured and brought forth a try or penalty, Hartley gave a penalty away to even things up and keep it exciting.

 

Central Cinema, Fakenham

Sunday here was, as forecast, sunny and warm. Monday not. Bitterly cold north wind (how can the wind go round 180 degrees in 12 hours?

Fakenham is very small and rather run-down, with many defunct shops and other businesses and a very high charity shop count. The river (the Wensum) is lovely and goes through a fine mill which is now a block of flats. There doesn't seem to be a pub in the centre, which is quite unusual. (Later found a pub near the centre, but it proved to be a Wetherspoon's, which accounts for the absence of other pubs). There is a nice old hotel, but closed, but there is a great old cinema. There is also an amazing new health centre, and I went there to get my meds for the month. It had 4 different waiting rooms, each one for 4 consulting rooms, which seems to suggest there are 16 doctors there. Can't be right, surely? Went slightly the wrong way to get there and had to climb over an earth bank and through a hedge to get into the car park. Got a bit muddy, but nobody saw and they treated me like a human being, not a total bearded cycling hedge-hopping muddy nutter like I felt.
 

While cycling to the centre, passed a pub called “The Henry IV”. Sadly, it was a “Hungry Horse”, what is now known as an “eatery”, I think, so not a proper pub at all. Never seen a pub named after him, but he must have been quite significant because, according to Shakespeare, he had two parts. So, I looked him up. First Lancastrian king, 1399-1413, his reign was characterised by rebellion and lawlessness. Possibly guilty of or at least complicit in the murder of his predecessor, Richard II. Ended his life as a chronic invalid and acute epileptic, he is buried at Canterbury. Mmmm, not many points for kingship by the sound of it, and why a pub in Fakenham?  

So, Tuesday, my last day at Fakenham. Sunny but a bitter wind again. Off to Wells-next-the-Sea on the bus. Beautiful but undramatic countryside. Rolling low hills, hedges, deciduous copses, flint villages. Mostly arable land but a few flocks of sheep. One of the villages is Walsingham, with its shrine of “Our Lady of Walsingham”. Small market square, narrow main street with many very impressive old houses, some half-timbered. Strange to see a Catholic shrine here in East Anglia, the heart of Non-Conformism. Must be relatively recent – Cromwell would never have let that survive in his backyard.

                              Wells-next the-Sea

Wells has a very interesting harbour , sheltered from the south-west, with a narrow main channel and extensive salt marshes, which are presumably submerged at high tide. Seems to be a thriving shell-fishing port. Walked out for a while along the Norfolk Coast Walk (“Hunstanton 23 miles” - no thanks).

(There's a mallard drake outside my door, looking in).

My van is backed-up against an evergreen hedge which surrounds a small wood of, I think, larch trees. There is a rookery in the trees and the birds make an enormous noise. Now and then all take off in a huge explosion of squawking and fluttering, just like those terrifying creatures in the film “Pitch Black” when the suns go down on their planet. Thankfully, these rooks are not man-eaters.

Some great accents here. I heard someone who sounded just like the Singing Postman and yesterday I was walking along and heard the voice of Mandy, my nephew Gareth's wife, from Exeter. Wrong, just one of two local ladies nattering. Strange how the accent from the far east of England is so similar to that of the far west. I had a very smart haircut in Fakenham in a barbers which proudly boasted it had been open on that site since 1920. There was a notice in the window saying the 80-year-old barber had retired, so I was sheared by a young lady with the weirdest accent I'd ever heard. She said she came from near Nottingham.

My God, I see Deadly Dave got his man. BBC News said Bob Crowe had died suddenly of a heart attack, but in the streets, bazaars and souks of north Norfolk the word is that some of the Russian oligarchs, tired of how the extra traffic caused by tube strikes had clogged the streets of the capital and prevented their armoured, black-out Range Rovers from reaching 70mph down the King's Road, had approached Dave and offered to take-out Bob in exchange for Dave getting their sons into Eton.