A-HA!
That woke you up, didn't it? I can only apologise and put my outburst down to last weekend's jaunt to the homeland of Alan Partridge, the chief knight-errant of chat who is one of the twin pillars of comedy in my estimation, the other being the lesser-spotted Chris Morris. As an aside, it was Morris who spearheaded the Radio 4 show On the Hour which first gave flight to the fledgling Partridge (aka Steve Coogan) almost 25 years ago. Bonkers.
The aim of my visit to north Norfolk was not a pilgrimage to the ABBA-worshipping broadcaster and accidental assassin but rather a family get-together to mark the 70th birthday of her nibs' father, yet it didn't require a Herculean effort to discern which elements of Norfolk life inspired Coogan, Armando Iannucci and Patrick Marber to spawn their monstrous mash-up of male British broadcasters from the 1970s and 80s.
Settlements such as Heacham, Hunstanton and Wells-Next-the-Sea seem to occupy a hinterland of modern Britain peopled by self-made, almost exclusively white men called Ray and Geoff who drive Jaguars and Range Rovers. Boards entreating a vote for the Conservatives or Ukip litter the fields and there is a county-wide obsession with wading birds. The hotel/golf resort we stayed at, for example, has a bar and changing room area improbably called Avocet Barn (I know ¬- no definite article. Zany!), presumably not in tribute to Bert Jansch's 1979 album of that name, alas.
Norfolk, or at least its north-eastern shoulder, certainly has a whiff of the timewarp about it, so much so that on a trip to King's Lynn (Partridge's birthplace, FYI) we stumbled upon a courtyard filled with strange characters garbed up in medieval costumes and undertaking anodyne workshops in coinmaking, stick whittling, how to use a crossbow and suchlike. Even the pa-in-law was nonplussed, which made me feel slightly better about the Olympian levels of scorn emanating wordlessly from my pores, levels barely tempered by the ersatz galleon a stone's throw away on the muddy Great Ouse.
On the plus side, at low tide the north coast becomes a flatland of unparalleled majesty and no little menace. At one point as we strolled and strolled along the beach at Brancaster I could feel its immensity doing strange things to my mind. A few hours later, though, the mental kinks were ironed out thanks to a lifesaving 12 holes of crazy golf in Hunstanton. I'd sworn off the sport for the duration of the trip - the chipping yips can do that to a man - but the peer pressure was impossible to ignore. I won ...
Knowing me, Sean Guthrie; knowing you, north Norfolk. A-ha!
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