Head to the East of our great country and you’ll see birds with very few clothes on, out for a good time on a Saturday night (so I gather). I’m thinking of Newcastle and Essex. Norfolk is no different. Birds love it in Norfolk. Stunning sandy beaches, plentiful food & drink options and many fields to land in. What’s not to love if you’re a goose? I know geese love it there, because hundreds (if not millions*) of them were calling incessantly outside of our bedroom window in our Norfolk holiday cottage this week. The bloody things never seemed to go to bed.
I couldn’t sleep because of all the noise, so instead of counting sheep (wrong county for that), all I could do was count the number of geese I could hear, to get me off to sleep. As it happens, these weren’t just any old geese, these were pink-footed geese. I haven’t seen the M&S Christmas advert yet, but I imagine it will be along these lines. “This isn’t just a goose. This is a pink-footed goose. This isn’t just an expensive Christmas. This is an M&S expensive Christmas.”
Our holiday cottage was in a little village called Stiffkey, on the north Norfolk coast (we didn’t have a problem with any of our door locks, so no writing material came about from that). You see, not all of the place names in Norfolk should be taken at face value. Take Wells-next-the-sea. Firstly, it sounds like a pirate named the town. Secondly, it’s hardly next-the-sea, it’s half an hour’s walk to the beach, so it’s more of a Wells-not-farrrghh-from-the-sea if you want to be more precise and even more pirate-like (and who doesn’t). If you do make it to the beach however, it is stunning.
We discovered that Stiffkey is pronounced Stoo-key by the locals. On Friday we walked from Stiffkey to Wells-next-the-blah-blah-blah-sea and we saw more enthusiastic bird watchers than birds along the way. The twitchers were clad head to toe in camouflage, presumably so that they could sneak up on a goose and bag it for free without having to pay M&S a penny for their Christmas lunch, the tight bastards. They might have been filming for a new hit TV Series titled Loosey Goosey, the latest in a line of shit TV to rival the likes of Geordie Shore and TOWIE.
Having successfully made it to Wells-etcetera without inadvertently walking into any well hidden twitchers, we headed for the town centre. One shop sign promised to sell its customers “stuff you didn’t know you needed in your life”. This had “tat shop” metaphorically written all over it and I was confident that I did not need it in my life, nor did anyone else. I decided that what I did need in my life was a pasty and a brownie from the bakery, so that is what I bought. It wasn’t described as a Cornish pasty, but if it looks, smells and tastes like one, then that’s good enough for me.
If you’ve ever walked any of the coastal paths in Devon and Cornwall, you’ll know that they’re rarely flat. Each time you clamber down to sea-level, you then have to stagger up a near-vertical slope to reach the summit of the next cliff. You need a cream tea just to get your energy levels back up after each up and down. Not so in Norfolk. It’s pretty much flat as a pancake, so you won’t be tucking into a cream tea every half an hour to keep your energy levels up. Unless you’re a massive fatty.
When we got the bus back from Wells-etcetera to Stiffkey, I was told that I must ask for a ticket to Stoo-key, otherwise the bus driver couldn’t possibly understand me (despite the village being the next one along the coast). The most common phrase in Norfolk is “Ar yer orrite bor?”, so should I also be greeting the bus driver with this line? I wasn’t ready for all these decisions that had to be made. I just wanted to get back to my geese, I’d almost grown a little fond of them.
Where you won’t find any shops selling tat that you don’t need is Burnham Market and Thornham. Any village that has a Jack Wills in it (either a shop or a person by that name) is going to be a bit fancy. Tesco Express? McDonalds? Forget it! Every other dog there is a black labrador called Monty (I’m fairly confident they are not the most diverse villages for humans or dogs). The houses for sale in the estate agent’s window didn’t have the number of bedrooms displayed on the advert, just a spiel about how brilliant every house was. They expected people to buy their properties based on a couple of pictures and the fact that they’re buyers had a shit load of cash. Clearly the number of bedrooms was an aside as this was very much second home territory.
What else do you need to know about Norfolk? The US Air Force (not all of it, obviously) are stationed in the area. In the skies above, it sounded like Tom Cruise, Ice Man and Goose (oh wait, no Goose didn’t make it) were filming Top Gun III. They had some very important training missions to execute over the North Sea and coastline a.k.a They were to piss about in the skies pretending to shoot each other with their jet aircraft, with Goose trying not to bail out and land in the sea. Had they even heard of the Noise Abatement Act 1960?
Horatio Nelson, the British naval officer, was born in Norfolk. Better known as just Nelson (not to be confused with the school bully from the Simpsons), and who would blame him for dropping his silly first name. Delia Smith (she’s shortened to Delia rather than Smith) shouted “Let’s be ‘avin’ ya!” at a Norwich City home game (please look up on Youtube if you don’t know). Delia wasn’t trying to drown out the sound of fighter jets or geese, she’d just had a couple of drinks. Kettlechips are made in Norfolk don’t you know, but founded by an American, which might explain the name. Calling crisps chips, when they are actually crisps is poor form, but they taste too good for me to care. Norfolk, with yer fields, yer food and yer beaches… yer mor than orrite!
*the UK population of over-wintering pink-footed geese is estimated be around 510,000 (I counted them while I couldn’t sleep and I’d say that that’s an accurate figure)