A couple of my stories have appeared in the local press over the past couple of days.
Firstly there was coverage of the re-opening of a post office in the village and there's photographs of that. Very often people don't get the credit they deserve, so I would like to thank our county councillor David Bills, our parish council and the Hethersett Hearts charity group for battling hard to save the facility. I posted a photograph of the opening on Thursday on Facebook and it got well over 200 likes, which just shows the amount of support for keeping a post office in the village.
I also did a story about disused land at the former Woodside School in the village which is now the subject of a planning application to provide affordable housing in the village for people with specific needs. This is laudable but not as good an idea as that proposed at the parish council meeting on Monday. That was to incorporate the land into the existing village playing field as an additional area of recreation for the enjoyment of local residents.
This is an excellent idea but of course money talks and I bet I know what will happen to that land. You can see a cutting from the Norwich Evening News on this subject.
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Yesterday we paid our first visit of the year to North Norfolk. Pootled along to Sheringham for fish and chips and a look at the sea. It was still quite vicious and my photographs really don't do it justice. Waves were crashing against the rocks. Goodness knows what it was like during the recent storms. My photos which are included don't really show the power of the sea as it was.
We also drove to Upper Sheringham - a tiny village just away from the main part of Sheringham but a place in its own right.
It doesn't take very long to walk round but a visit to the church was definitely worth the effort. I found a book by Elvi Rhodes which took me back a few years. Most churches nowadays seem to have second hand book sales with books priced at 50p which was a lot better than the £5 being charged for some in charity shops in Sheringham High Street.
Elvi Rhodes wrote romantic fiction - nothing special in that. But she didn't take up writing until relatively late in life and was still going when she died at the age of 98 in 2015. She is buried in Rottingdean Cemetery which is near Brighton. The blues guitarist Gary Moore is in the same cemetery along with numerous other lesser known musicians and a smuggler or two. I have written about all this in a previous blog.
Anyway on one of the walls of the church was a list of men under the heading 1914-1918. There is no description but I have to assume they were local men killed in the First World War and I will do some investigation as one of the names was Frederick Dew and the name Dew plays a prominent part in my family's heritage and also in the history of North Norfolk.
You can bet that I will mention the results of my research in a coming blog.