After a tough couple of hours checking through the first two chapters of the autobiography and having them read to me by a Dalek in Word, I switched the old telly box on to watch Escape to the Country which I do enjoy in a kind of perverse sort of way.
And there they were smack bang in the middle of Cromer, looking at properties in Bracon Ash, North Walsham, Old Costessey and somewhere else that slips the mind at the moment. Of course I know that there's quite a distance between Bracon Ash and North Walsham but television does jumble things up. I remember Stephen Fry in the drama Kingdom where he walked out of his office in Swaffham straight onto Wells Harbour despite the fact that there is about 20 miles between those two and possibly more.
Anyway places always look good on television and sometimes when we are in them we take them for granted like the alleyways and narrow streets of Cromer.
And while I was watching Cromer on TV the other threequarters was sitting in the pavilion theatre on the end of Cromer Pier watching the Christmas show and just remember.
Norman and Norma
Got Married in Cromer
1983
The programme did a piece about Hemsby which is rapidly disappearing into the sea just as Shipden did as the precursor to Cromer.
There have been some stunning photographs of old Norwich on various Facebook pages recently. I was particularly taken by a series from a book by Ralph Mottram. It had some graphic shots in it.
Of course I was aware that Norwich had been badly bombed in the Baedecker Raids in the Second World War but this book really pushed home the devastation. We were so close to having the Cathedral destroyed and it becoming a monument as has happened in Coventry.
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Is it me or are there more Christmas fairs and firework displays than ever before this year? I will just leave you with that thought and a few of those pictures of bombed out Norwich I mentioned a short while ago.