Norfolk
Tuesday February 21, 2006
Although I now live in the UK’s second-biggest, second-noisiest, second-craziest city, I was brought up in a small Norfolk market town, and it was wonderful last week to step back from the bustle of city life and to spend a week down by the Norfolk coast, visiting old haunts. I love the wildness of this part of the world, the enormous skies, the profusion of bird-life. The picture to the left is of me walking through the drizzle along the sands of Brancaster. It is strange how walking in the drizzle in the city can appear to be unpleasant whilst walking in the drizzle on the coast often appears to be merely invigorating…
Here are a few images from various places along the coast, so that if you find yourself in a big, noisy and crazy city you too can remind yourself that other places still exist. The first set of pictures are, in order: of reedbeds at Cley; of a slowly-decaying boat at Blakeney; and of one of my favourite places on the face of this earth, Morston creek. They are popup images, so if you click on them a full-sized picture should pop up.
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Here are a few more, the first two of Holkham beach (the beach at the end of Shakespeare in Love, for all of you film buffs), and the last one of Morston again.
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Of course, back in the city, it is good to remember that, although big and noisy and crazy, if you only pay sufficient attention you can see that there is a whole world behind the judgements of “big” and “noisy” and “crazy”, a world of extraordinary richness.
Some time ago I was coming back from a retreat and, whilst stopping at a service station, I was captivated by a poster. But I wasn’t looking at the poster and what it was advertising. I was looking at the way that the spattered raindrops on the glass reflected and refracted the light from the coloured dots of ink on the poster behind. It was breathtakingly beautiful… To maintain an innocent eye like this can be harder amid the chaos of the city; but it is not impossible.
(P.S. Have a read of Gareth’s recent post on photographing geese, which spurred some of these reflections.)
Images by Will and Elee
#1 · Sujatin
21 February 2006
I love this part of the country too. My sister-in-law lives in Sporle and one of my oldest friends near Sherringham so I get to visit every now and again.
Yes, beauty and wonderment can be found everywhere – but I do admit to missing my time living on a boat in the Essex marshes – the sky, the reflections in the mud, the sound of the water