Flat is a series of pieces on some trips I made into the heart of East Anglia with a little bit of music listening thrown in for good measure along the way. This is the second part of what will comprise seven posts and it covers the time I spent in Felixstowe where I ended up on a bookshop called Treasure Chest.
After my drive through South Suffolk, with Def Leppard’s highly dryly incredible High ‘N’ Dry blasting through the sound system of my trusty old Prius, I rolled up on the seafront in Felixstowe at around 2 pm. This pretty much meant I had been 4 hours on the road, or not quite, because I had taken a stroll around Braintree Freeport which taken around 30 – 40 minutes and which of course had resulted in me bagging a load of clothes from a Next Outlet shop. Good thing about Felixstowe, great thing in fact, was that you could park up on the seafront and not have to pay a single dime which of course is very much not the way of things in 21st century Britain. Just park up if you found a space, get out of your car and go for a walk by the sea; nuthin’ more, nuthin’ less, how fab is that?
The entrance to Felixstowe I came in on was one which made the driving easy. Turning off the A14 it was half a mile before going over a set of lights just past the rail tracks, then straight down the road and onto the seafront. Something cool about it, as if the council had just decided to let things roll, cut people a little slack, keep things simple and in the process open things up. In some ways there was an American feel to the place, with its big wide streets, all so easy to negotiate and relatively empty as well. It was cooler once I got out of the Prius, cooler on the coast than in Braintree Freeport. With those North Sea breezes blowing in it was too cool for me to walk along in just a t-shirt, so I took my long sleeved top from out of my back pack. Might have been that all those things were necessary after all, despite my earlier vexation over the amount of stuff I had to bring along with me. As well as the cooler temperatures, Felixstowe had a completely different feel to it than all that pretty perfect Suffolk and Essex countryside I had been driving through prior to getting onto the A14 at Bury St Edmunds, rougher around the edges that was for sure, and all the better for it.
Felixstowe is the biggest container port in the country, trading under a banner which simply reads – Port of Felixstowe: Port of Britain – and it has miles and miles of container parks with stacked up lorries all over the place waiting to either load or unload. It is linked to one of the main arteries of the country – the A14 – a road which almost slips by unnoticed when compared to motorways such as the M1, M4, M25 and M6, but make no mistake, its importance simply cannot be overstated. Now I have to say that there always seemed to be more than one or two people who looked pretty wrecked in Felixstowe. There was just something about the place, like it was an end of the line town, out on its own facing the North Sea, which in years gone by would have had Vikings on the other side of it, Vikings who were no doubt making preparations to come on over. Wild West out on the east coast in miniature scale, or something like that, well not quite I guess, because nowadays what lay on the other side of those grey waters was just a ferry terminal at the Hook of Holland.
After I had put on my top the breeze was invigorating rather than threatening, and I made my way along the seafront looking for a place to get some fish and chips, eventually ending up in the Royal Fish Restaurant next to Mannings Family Amusements. Being in a seaside town meant the Royal Fish was open all day, where a sign by the counter indicated all their fish and chips were cooked in beef dripping, but I didn’t let that put me off, even if it was something I hadn’t tasted before. There were just one or two tables occupied and it was quiet, guess it livened up later in the day, but for the moment the Royal Fish had to get by on whatever business people such as me brought along. A waitress who looked like she might have been from the Philippines, although on my part that was little more than a guess, could have been Nepal for all I knew, Thailand even, came up and led me to a table. It didn’t take long for me to go through the menu and give her an order for cod and chips with mushy peas, along with a tall glass of Pepsi straight from the pump with plenty of ice and lemon. Usually I was not in the habit of having any of the fizzy stuff and would have stuck to water, either still or gas, but once in a while a Coke or Pepsi hit the spot and worked a treat, despite the price I had to pay for it, what with my sensitive teeth an’ all that, rotten gums too.
So I sat there in the half empty restaurant, glad to have made it over to the coast. This was more like it as far as I was concerned, no more pretty stuff, no more not a blade out of place spaces, and I was happy enough tapping a few notes into my mobile phone, notes about how much I’d enjoyed listening to Def Leppard’s High ‘N’ Dry in the Prius. The tapping of the notes led me to ponder the fact that it might well be the case I’m not a particularly subtle kind of guy when it comes to what it is that I like. I mean look, I was clearly someone who enjoyed being out there on the seafront in a half empty restaurant in Felixstowe eating fish and chips; all of it after a car ride during which my ears had been boxed by a healthy dose of hard rock courtesy of some early period Def Leppard. As far as I was concerned it counted for more than what many would consider the finer things in life; five star restaurants where you have to book months ahead in order to get a table; picture postcard countryside just waiting to be filmed by the BBC; city galleries full of priceless works on high culture and no end of other things seemingly deemed crucial and significant. What to make of that? Really don’t know, don’t care either.
When my food arrived it was a healthy portion of the fried stuff, falling off my plate and almost too much for me, or at least that was what I thought when I was halfway through it, but sure enough I gathered second wind and polished it all off. Being cooked in beef dripping gave the fish and chips a particular taste which I was not quite sure how much I really liked, but it didn’t put me off, fact of the matter was I was as hungry as a hog because it had been a long time since breakfast. Needless to say I also drained that tall glass of Pepsi, enjoying every single drop, almost went for a refill but managed to rein myself in because all that sugar might have been a bit too much of a price to pay, might have seen me walking straight into the North Sea hallucinating I was an axe slayer instead of someone who was beginning to run to fat. When my tip to the waitress was thrown into the deal, my fish and chip meal came to 18 quid and as far as I was concerned it was money well spent. I was full as a butcher’s dog and more than satisfied, what I needed now was a long walk by sea and it just so happened I was in the right place to do exactly that. And so I had done one of the main things I came for, which was to eat my fish and chips by the sea in Felixstowe, simple really, nuthin’ too sophisticated, job done. As far as food was concerned, filling my stomach was not something I would now have to worry about again for some considerable period of time, if at all for the rest of the day.
A couple of years ago, when Dawa Dolkar and I had stayed in our caravan in Suffolk Sands Caravan Park on a blazing hot weekend in the middle of July not long after pullin’ the plug on Wisdom Books, we had done plenty of walking along the coast because there was loads to go at, endless space under the skies of the North Sea to have a good old stretch of the legs. The caravan park had been at the far end of the seafront, south of the centre of town, and beyond the park was a piece of land called Landguard Point, a nature reserve which had a desolate beauty to it, especially when set against the vast container terminal on the other side of the road. Once you turned Landguard Point you got a full on view of the River Orwell and the deep water container port of Felixstowe which lay just a little way up from its mouth. A port which had some truly massive container ships moored up alongside its quays, either loading and unloading their cargoes, an activity which went on 24/7. Container ships such as ones from the Maersk Line stacked high with boxes belonging to companies like Hapag-Lloyd, China Shipping, Hamburg Sud, Evergreen. Make no mistake, it was the 21st century face of the international trade phenomenon in all its overpowering glory. The busy scene around the port contrasted markedly with other parts of Felixstowe, where it felt more like a loose end junk-pot kind of town, but it might have been the case the two were inextricably linked. There were many ex-sailors, ex-dockers washed up there, possibly now with nowhere else to go apart from the pub or the off licence and local parks, places for them to drink and stare out upon the often never ending grey of the North Sea.
With a stomach full of fish, chips and mushy peas, plus that tasty ice cold Pepsi, I was now ready to go, raring to go, to get down and do some serious walking, stepping out by the sea shore, ready to pound down along the sea walls, all the way to where the birds flew freely in the skies above the big rolling ships. At the end of the seafront I took the road which ran by Suffolk Sands, took it to the end then stepped onto Landguard Point where things opened up and the nature reserve was spread out before me. It was great to be able to walk up and down the little dunes, take in the views of the busy port of Felixstowe in full operation, container capital for the whole damn country. Those fish and chips stayed with me as I walked along taking in the fresh sea air, taking it deep down into my lungs, and where the temperature was rising with things getting warmer again, so much so that I had to take my shirt off. Yes, the fried stuff stayed with me in the form of rumbling Pepsi driven fishy belches which popped my ears and left me with a weird taste in my mouth. Thought to myself, for some strange reason, whilst in the middle of the nature reserve, who was I after all? Just an anonymous guy in the middle of his life, maybe past the middle, well not maybe but definitely, a shadow figure shuffling along minding his own business, on this occasion finding himself by the North Sea with its waters washing up onto the shingle sands of the beach beside him. Not that such thoughts bothered me, if anything in those moments it felt that life was fine, just fine and there was little more I needed.
Took a few shots of Landguard Point on my mobile phone once I had walked on down there, to then look back at the looming bulk of a Maersk Line container ship unloading its cargo by way of a never ending series of intricate mechanical movements high above. The ship was moored up along the quayside as it sat in the River Orwell, still as a mountain high on a plain. Yes, all simple stuff; the walking, the watching, the thinking, the liking, even the belching I guess. Never got tired of the view from Landguard Point where the mouth of the River Orwell widened, with the town of Harwich over on the far side to the south down Essex way. Harwich was where ferries run by the Stena Line and DFDS made their way across to Zeebrugge and the continent, the deep waters of the Orwell more than capable of handling both container ships and huge roll on-roll off ferries pretty much any time of the day or night.
The car park next to Landguard Fort was almost full, the location a popular destination for people who wanted to go down to the Point and be next to the port of Felixstowe, where they could look out upon the river with their eyes opened to the great wide world which lay beyond it. When I had made it past the Fort I walked across the car park to a cafe by the shores of the river, so as to use their toilets and take a leak since all that fizzy Pepsi sugar stuff had more than done its job and left me bursting. For a minute or two I did consider taking a boat across to Harwich over on the other side because there was a little ferry in operation which was due to depart in a little under 10 minutes. When I looked at the people already on board however, I saw they were well wrapped up and I realised it might be pretty nippy out there in the middle of the waters, too damn choppy for a guy like me with just a t-shirt and top, even when he had a belly full of fish and chips inside him. So I took a pass on the ferry ride, turned around instead and walked back the way I came. Back through the flats of the nature reserve which had all kinds of shrubs and bushes growing on them, whose names I would never know in a million years. All the while taking in some more views of the container port as I did so, a very busy port in full operation. Port of Felixstowe: Port of Britain.
The sun was now out in full and it was considerably warmer than when I had first rolled up in town. Wearing just a t-shirt was fine now, perfect in fact, with my long sleeved top rolled up and back in my pack again. I walked through the reserve and its flat lands, back along the road by the Suffolk Sands Caravan Park, thinking how it might be quite nice to live there someday, far away from the city, lungs full of the fresh sea air. Then I walked along the seafront, past Martello Park, Mannings Family Amusements and the Royal Fish where not so long ago I had eaten my fish and chips, then past the leisure centre and the amusement arcade on the pier, before finally hiking up the hill into the town centre. By now I had clocked up well over 10,000 steps on my mobile phone so I had more than hit my target for the day, but I was good to carry on for a little while yet, still full of energy from my late lunch by the seaside. Felixstowe town centre, with a Friday afternoon feel to it and things winding down, looked pretty good to me on what was now a beautiful early summer’s day. It was all very pleasant but still there were plenty of characters who looked like they were more or less in the same station in life; rough edged middle aged men who might have been partial to the odd drink or two. Nothing threatening about them or anything or like that, but still it was noticeable. I walked past a church on the high street which had a big colourful banner hung from it advertising a drop in facility provided for people who might be financially struggling, a banner which read – Weighed Down by Debt?
My first priority on hitting the centre was to find a public bogs so as to take another leak. It had been a 50 minute walk from the cafe on the River Orwell, which had been plenty long enough for my bladder to fill right back up again after all that Pepsi fizz I had drunk at the Royal Fish. It had filled up to the point where it was now decidedly uncomfortable, once more ready to burst. If truth be told it was crippling me and is jus’ gonna be the death of me I know, making me feel shadow haunted at times, stalked by the Grim Reaper by way of broken prostrate visions. Fortunately I found some bogs without too much of a problem and breathed a big sigh of relief as I pissed into the urinal. Even so I still didn’t bother to wash my hands after I was done, just stepped right back out again into the bright light of the day, once again without a care in the whole wide world. Crazy how the mind works sometimes, isn’t it? All part of being human I guess.
On the high street opposite The Palace Cinema I saw a second hand bookshop by the name of Treasure Chest which seemed like an opportunity too good to miss. I mean I love books, love them to bits, so I had to go inside and take a look. The shop turned out to have such a large amount of stock that it was quite staggering, a shop full of endless tiny rooms and narrow corridors, all of which were jam packed with printed matter on any subject you might care to think of. Eventually, after making my way through to the end of it, I found tucked away right at the back, a section containing books on Eastern Religion and Philosophy, Magic and the Occult, of which the first of those categories happened to be my particular area of interest. A lot of the books were editions of titles published in 60’s and 70’s, and some were looking pretty ancient and dust crusted. They had probably been on bookshelves for decades, or stuffed in boxes up in attics, long forgotten until finally got rid of. After scanning through what was on offer I picked out a copy of Living with the Himalayan Masters, an account by Swami Rama of his travels as a holy man in the mountains of India, well over 30 years old and on sale for only 5 quid. Within certain circles it was considered to be a bit of a classic, so I decided there and then I would buy it because it was in pretty good condition, just a little shelf worn, nuthin’ more than that.
Treasure Chest also had a copy of Agehananda Bharati’s The Tantric Tradition, a book which had last seen the light of day in a different edition back in the 1990’s when we had stocked it at Wisdom Books. Although the content looked good, fascinating in fact, the cover was a full-on image of the erotic carvings found on the outside of the temples in Khajuraho, a place which was located on the plains of Madhya Pradesh in Central India. It was a cover which I did not feel comfortable with for some reason, guess you might have got away with it in the 60’s or 70’s, which was when this particular edition was printed, age of free love an’ all that, but I’m not so sure if you would now. Nevertheless it did look a good book, with quite possibly some very useful stuff in it, so I was in two minds about it and not only that, the price was only 3 quid. What finally put me off was when a scary looking man came into the same section of the shop I was in and immediately went to the books which were on the Occult. This shiny bald headed guy kind of looked like he might have been a black magic wizard himself, no doubt into Aleister Crowley, once dubbed the most wicked man in the world. There was an intensity about him which made it seem like he really knew what he was looking for, the darker the better probably, and his presence somewhat unsettled me for some strange reason, guess you could say I was spooked.
So anyway, I quietly put the Bharati book down in a box at the end of the shelf and walked back towards the front of the shop with just my copy of Living with the Himalayan Masters, kind of regretting already that I didn’t get the other one was well, that spicy looking copy of The Tantric Tradition. Instead on the way out and towards the front of the shop I spotted a copy of Wolf Hall, a book which I had wanted to get for quite some time but had always struggled with the idea of forking out the best part of a tenner for it. It was a very well worn copy, more or less much intact and on sale for a mere 2 quid so I picked it up and took it to the counter as well. The 2 books came to 7 pounds which in my view was a bit of a bargain, all rather unexpected because I had not been planning on going in there at all, hadn’t known that Treasure Chest in the town of Felixstowe had even existed. It had been a spur of the moment decision, which of course is sometimes the best way to go about things, too much time to think can often mess you up.
All in all I spent quite a while in Treasure Chest and also had a chat with the woman who ran it, basically asking her how the hell she managed to get her hands on so many books. She told me they went out from time to time and cleared out peoples’ houses of all the old books they had, probably when family members died. In fact she told me they had just come back earlier that day from the town of Diss with their van laden down with stuff which they would go through before pricing up and sticking everything on the shelves to sell. Guess it was more than possible they had the whole of south Suffolk to themselves in this regard and therefore had an almost never ending supply of extremely cheap stock to play with. In other words, they were onto a sure fire winner! My conversation with her briefly brought back memories of Wisdom Books and the fact it was now coming up to 2 years since we had pulled the plug after 27 years in the book business. Yes, it briefly brought back memories but no more than that, because the truth was that I was glad to be out of the book selling scene. It had become a dog eat dog world many years ago and it had made me sick, probably due to the pressures of having to compete with the likes of Amazon who were always selling stuff so much cheaper than us.
Time was pressing on and I felt it would be good to make my way back down the hill to my Prius on the seafront, so I walked along the high street in the direction of the beach. Once I was by the sea I walked for a while behind a group of young men who were each carrying a couple of four packs. They were talking loudly, shouting really, drinking from their open cans and generally horsing around in a mildly intimidating way, which meant I kept my distance. Guess they were just looking to find a spot to sit and drink their beers, ciders, lagers and all the rest of it whilst staring out upon the North Sea on a sunny Friday evening, shadows slowly lengthening and the sun going down on yet another day in the coastal town of Felixstowe. Nothing wrong with that I suppose, or at least nothing that I could think of.
By the time I hit the road out of town it was 5.45 and getting busy, well kind of, being rush hour time Felixstowe style on a Friday evening with the weekend just around the corner. There were also plenty of container lorries making their way out of the port onto the A14, after which their destinations could be anywhere in the country; north, south or west but definitely not east because Felixstowe was the end of the line as far as that particular direction was concerned. Once I hit the A14 Def Leppard’s High ‘N’ Dry was back on the sound system of the Prius and it sounded so good, amazing really. The dusty flat fields of south Suffolk I was bombing through provided a perfect back drop to the sonic landscapes created, and it quietly staggered me to think that it had been released back in 1981, now over 40 years ago. No doubt about it, the newly re-mastered High ‘N’ Dry quite simply never sounded so good. The sheer quality of my listening experience whilst bombing along back down to Woodford went some way to putting my mind at ease over the £59.99 I had splashed out just a few days ago on the box set which contained it. Fact of the matter was that if you wanted quality stuff which stood the test of time, stuff which you could play again and again, then you really did have to cough up the bucks for it.
Guess I could have driven straight back to Woodford by staying on the A14 until the turn for the A11, then further on from that feeding onto the M11 which would see me hit the section heading due south, past Stansted and back on into London. Decided against going that particular route however, and I came off the A14 at Bury St. Edmunds, to head down the A134 which would then take me to Braintree via Halsted and Sudbury. My idea was to do something different, see a bit more of the countryside in the process, and it all worked swimmingly. Sure it was busy because it was a Friday evening and there were loads of cars on the road, people wanting to embrace the weekend, but I wasn’t tired in the slightest and with High ‘N’ Dry blasting out of the sound system it felt like everything was just how it was meant to be.
The trip over to Felixstowe had left me feeling energised, there was something about the place I really liked, something about it which suited me just fine. I would take that kind of ragged scenery by the sea any day of the week over so many other places which would be much cleaner, much nicer, but with none of that free sense of space. It was also good to be driving back through the south Suffolk and north Essex countryside on an early June evening, heading towards Chelmsford until joining the A120 again at Braintree. Once on the A120 I was driving due west, straight into the slowly setting sun, the lights and sights of Stansted airport soon looming up on the horizon in front of me, planes coming in low to land on the runway and with an enormous Premier Inn by the side of the highway. All the fun of the 21st century fair, all the fun and possibly more! Just felt so good at that moment to be a human being alive on Planet Earth, to breath the fresh, sweet air.
Off the A120 in what seemed to be next to no time and back onto the M11, I was now driving fast with Def Leppard still pounding away through the speakers, High ‘N’ Dry on heavy rotation, a never ending riff cycle hollowed out from the heart of the sun, pulsing hard and straight through me, sounding better and better with every play. I drove fast enough to be home before 8 in the evening, which was great, job done. It all felt so good that I thought on Monday, after the weekend was over, I would do it all again only in a slightly different way. Next time around it would be M11, A11 and the A14 past Thetford before turning onto the A1065 to take me up into Norfolk, deep into Norfolk heading north past the town of Swafham and then on to Walsingham, ancient place of pilgrimage since the time of the Anglo Saxons. From Walsingham I would head across to the seaside town of Sheringham on the coast. Well, that was the plan, and I have to say it seemed like a good one!
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