The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781473508071
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2015-10-07T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

East Anglia

I

ON A LOVELY bright summer’s morning, I was walking the Norfolk coast path between Holkham and Blakeney when I came round a bend and found the way temporarily blocked by a woman and her dog. I stood with the woman and we watched together as the dog dolefully extruded three soft lozenges on to the path.

‘Don’t you think that’s a little disgusting, right on the path and all?’ I asked in a tone of genuine enquiry.

‘I’m local,’ she said as if that explained everything. She was well spoken.

‘And that gives you the right to let your dog shit on the paths?’

‘I’m going to cover it,’ she said irritably, as if I were needlessly belabouring the point. ‘Look,’ she said, and scuffed some leaf litter over it, converting the dog’s deposit from a conspicuous hazard into a kind of faecal landmine. ‘There,’ she said, and looked at me with satisfaction, as if this had solved everything.

I stared at her for a long moment, with something like awe, then raised my walking stick high into the air and calmly beat her to death. When she was quite still, I rolled her ample, Barbour-clad body off the path and into the marshy reeds where it sank with a satisfying glug. Then I checked my map and resumed my walk, wondering if there was any place in Blakeney where I could get a cup of tea at this hour.

I like Norfolk. I lived there for ten years until 2013 and have grown convinced that there is nothing wrong with it that a few hills and a little genetic variability wouldn’t fix. As my son Sam used to say: ‘Norfolk: too many people, not enough surnames.’

If none of the county is exactly spectacular, parts of it are at least very fine and nowhere is that more true than along the north Norfolk coast. For the ten miles or so between Wells-next-the-Sea (and how pretty a name is that?) and Cley it is buffered on the seaward side by great expanses of salt marsh. These are intercut with channels, some quite deep, that fill with water remarkably swiftly when the tide comes in. It is very easy to lose your way in the chill and wispy fogs that sweep in off the North Sea and to find yourself stranded, very possibly engulfed, on a shrinking island of marsh.

North Norfolk is popular with second homeowners from London; it is often called Chelsea-on-Sea. But it was blessedly quiet after the West Country. The coast here has the best and most intelligent rural bus service I know. Some years ago, Coasthopper, the company that runs the service, got rid of all its slow, full-sized buses and invested in a fleet of small buses called Hoppers, with the promise that there would be a bus in each direction at least once every half-hour. Because it is so dependable, it has proved remarkably popular with locals and visitors alike. One of the drivers once told me proudly that it is the best-used rural bus service in the country.

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