Skinny Windows

I don't appreciate the English countryside enough. That's one of the lessons I took with me when I came back from Japan - along with 'cold canned coffee tastes like cigarette butts and, like an Epipen, is only to be used when you might die otherwise'. Many, many times, when I told people I was English in Japan, they would begin to gush about how beautiful England was, how much they wished to go there, how quaint the villages, how green the hills. (And that was just the Americans.) People showed me tourist brochures they carried around with them like a good luck totem. And I just took it for granted a lot of the time.

My patch.

I was not at all outdoorsy growing up - why are things crawling on me? why is there a leaf in my face? why mud? - so appreciating the countryside is something that I've only learned to do in the last few years. And even now, I often don't like to venture out for long hikes unless it's properly warm, so the English countryside is out of the question for at least three quarters of the year. Still, I've recently become aware of how little I've explored the countryside, in my own native Sussex and also further afield. I've never been to the Lake District, the Peak District, Cornwall or the New Forest. I know that on this small island there's a surprising variety of palettes - move from region to region and watch the changes in shade and softness of stone, darkness of tree, stubbornness of chimney, curve of street, moodiness of cloud. And so much of it I have yet to see.

A couple of weeks ago I tried to rectify my ignorance by spending a weekend in Norfolk. The first thing I noticed: all the buildings have skinny windows. Second thing I noticed: the ground is low, and chewy underfoot.

Like this.

After a warm, cosy evening in a pub, I spent a grey Sunday morning treading across marsh, along the squishy fringe of the East Anglia coast. The edges of Norfolk are quite alien. I sometimes wonder if they could have filmed Tarkovsky's Stalker there. It is not hard to imagine the ground simply dragging your foot in and taking you out to sea. Down south, land and sea are two separate things. In Norfolk, I have learned, there is a lot of grey area. None of this bothers the dogs. I have also learned that every single person in Norfolk seems to have a dog.

I'm not sure if I liked the place or not. There is a kind of brackish, earthy beauty to it I suppose. Very brown. Perhaps I would have liked it better if I hadn't wandered onto an A-road with no pavement and been forced to take a detour through a cabbage patch that probably belonged to a farmer with a shotgun.

A few miles down the road, I whiled away the afternoon in a seaside village called Cromer, which was much more familiar territory to me. (If you grow up in a town with a pier, going to any other town with a pier just feels like going to the Bizarro World version of your town.)

 Cromer's beaches are sandy, which is a change for a Sussex girl. I must admit being a little jealous, though I'm tempted to cover it up with scornful comments about how sand is for wusses and real beaches are made of pebble. There are also pristine cobblestone streets, leading up to a massive church. Like, a really massive church.

This picture does not show you how massive this church is.

Couple of hours around Cromer, fish and chips, a train back to Norwich, and a National Express home. Not a huge adventure I'll admit, but a new way to spend a weekend.

Would I come back to Norfolk? I think so. There's a few more place on my bucket list first. But I'm happy to have taken some shy, sandy first steps to discovering more of my own country.