Flat: Ridin’ Out to Yarmouth

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 sixth part of what will comprise seven posts and it covers my trip up into Norfolk to visit the quite rightly famous seaside town of Great Yarmouth.

Thought of going to Great Yarmouth, dunno why, someplace to go for a walk by the sea, somewhere different and another reason to take a ride into the big wide open of East Anglia. A few such journeys have already been written about – High ‘N’ Dry in South Suffolk, Port of Felixstowe – Port of Britain, Cromer, Return to Felixstowe – all of which were done back in June, and then there was Norfolk Shrine in September, an account of a trip to the pilgrimage village of Walsingham in yes, you’ve guessed it, Norfolk.

This was going to be another bit of open roadin’ East Anglia style, early October time now, and with the weather still so good as to be almost preposterous. Confess I do have dim memories of having been to Great Yarmouth once or twice before but that was many moons ago, a lifetime in fact, back in the days when my family lived in Beccles, Suffolk for a couple of years in the mid 70’s where dad was manager of the port of Lowestoft before he became port manager in Barry, South Wales and shifted us all down there. All of which has been written about in the Badlands of Beccles chapter of Golden Telescope, an account of the first 26 years of my life. From what I do remember of Great Yarmouth it had a massive rollercoaster on a seafront which went on for miles, plenty of seagulls, loads of amusement arcades and that is about it, apart from the fact there also seemed to be a lot of water close by, not just the North Sea, but the wide expanse of the Norfolk Broads which lay just behind and around it.

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Flat: Norfolk Shrine

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 fifth part of what will comprise seven posts and it covers my trip up into Norfolk to visit the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Walsingham is a village in Norfolk where there are shrines to the Virgin Mary following a series of visions experienced by an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman in 1061. It was a major place of pilgrimage in the middle ages until its destruction during the time of the Reformation, at the beginning of the 20th century the shrine was revived and it is once again a popular place to visit, primarily but not exclusively, for Christians.

It was a sunny Monday morning early September when I set off in my Prius to drive to Norfolk. Up until a couple of years ago Monday mornings would have been a different kettle of fish, back in the time before we pulled the plug on Wisdom Books, the small company where I had worked for the last 27 years, when I still bought into the daytime illusion that business was the meaning of life. I had originally planned to go to Walsingham a few months ago, back in June, but on my way up I had changed my mind just past Swaffham on the A1065 and ended up in Cromer instead, a seaside town in north east Norfolk where there was a curious mix of tourists and down at heel locals for me to view, a considerable number of whom appeared to be either on medication or drugs. Or maybe it was me who was on the drugs, just seeing things strangely after nearly three hours driving.

I stayed in Cromer long enough to have fish and chips by the sea before getting out of there, later in the day ending up in Felixstowe, home to Treasure Chest, a second hand bookshop from where I picked up a paperback copy of a book called The Tantric Tradition for the princely sum of three quid. Clearly on that occasion my need for redemption or whatever it was you are supposed to get from shrines, fizzled out along the way. Maybe I shouldn’t have played the music quite so loud on the Prius sound system whilst going up. Music by the way, which had been some high quality, firing on all cylinders Def Leppard by way of Def Leppard, their 2015 eponymous album. This time around there was no doubt I would make it, if only to see what it was all about, shrines to the Virgin Mary in the fields of north Norfolk and all that, with no need to participate any further if I didn’t feel so inclined.

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Flat: Return to Felixstowe

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 fourth part of what will comprise seven posts and it covers the time I spent back in Felixstowe where I paid another visit to Treasure Chest.

You know, all through the weekend I had been kicking myself over the fact I hadn’t bought that copy of The Tantric Tradition by Agehananda Bharati, because I realised pretty much as soon as I was driving back to Woodford, that I definitely wanted it, needed it even. The desire to get my hands on it was no doubt amplified by the fact that when I returned home and checked it out online, I was more than a little staggered to see that copies of the 1992 Rider Books edition were now selling for well over 35 quid. The copy in Treasure Chest was just 3, being a 70’s reprint of the 1965 Rider Books original, and it was in pretty good condition too, so in terms of value, hopefully in terms of content as well, I knew that I just couldn’t go wrong.

There was already the nagging thought in my mind that someone else might have come along and snapped up that copy, bought it in those couple of days the shop would have been open since I had last been in there, although in reality the chances of that happening would have probably been pretty remote. All the same I sincerely hoped that it would not have been the case, but of course there was no way of telling until I got back to Treasure Chest to check if it was still on the shelf. The point was that the sooner I got myself to Felixstowe the better, then I would be able to get my hands on the copy and that would be the end of it. I was pretty damn sure it was going to contain some fascinating information as far as meditations on the subtle body were concerned, along with its composition and manipulation of the energies needed to aid the arousal of the primal power of kundalini. Otherwise it would be doubtful I would get to read it for quite some time, if ever. To fork out nearly 40 quid for it was going to be too high a price to pay, way too high, especially because it would be for something which I didn’t really know the full contents of. It was just a hunch on my part that, as far as The Tantric Tradition was concerned, I was on the right track, just a hunch that it would prove to be most useful, and that for 3 quid and a ride down to Felixstowe from Cromer, it was more than worth investing in both the time and effort.

By the time I got out of Cromer it was 1.30 in the afternoon and I calculated that if the going was good and there were no nasty surprises, it would take me around 2 hours to drive to Felixstowe, which would mean I would roll up on the seafront at around 3.30 in the afternoon. This would give me more than enough time to walk by the sweet North Sea and then take a hike up the hill into the centre of town in order to call back in on Treasure Chest. Yes, to once again walk through those maze-like rooms and corridors of the book stacked shop, and once I got to the end of it, reaching the section on Eastern Religions and Philosophies plus Occult, be able to pick up my precious copy of The Tantric Tradition. So I was happy I had followed the A148 to the end of the line and got to Cromer. Whilst Walsingham, my original place of intended destination, might have been a nice idea, in fact nice enough to get me out of the house and on the road again, I was glad I had not followed through on that part of the deal. In my own peculiar way I’d enjoyed Cromer, enjoyed my stroll around town which I had undertaken after having first parked up in the midday sun. Then I had more than enjoyed the box of fresh fish and chips I had eaten there, sitting under a solitary tree looking over an empty green, with the hot tasty fried stuff whilst swilling it down with an ice cold can of Coke. When the time was right things didn’t really get any better than that, at least not as far as I was concerned, but now that time was gone and I had to move on.

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Flat: Cromer

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 third part of what will comprise seven posts and it covers the time I spent in Cromer where I had some pretty good fish and chips by the sea.

Blue sky day, wanted to hit the road, hit it big. Straight on up, due north and Norfolk bound, with a route something like M11, A14, A11, A1065. On Friday it was Essex, south Suffolk and then onto Felixstowe, Monday it was to be another trip into East Anglia. I set off with the intention that morning of going to Walsingham, ancient Norfolk pilgrimage place for Christians with its famous Virgin Mary shrine, holy destination for British kings and queens in years gone by, all the way back to the Anglo-Saxons. Yeah, that’s right, pre-Norman, pre-1066, pre-The Big One when so much of what came along is still here now.

By the time I got to Swafham which was about halfway up the A1065 I had changed my mind. Christian blessings for me? Really? Did I need to go to that kind of shrine? No, didn’t think so! Whatever it was which caused this change in thinking I just can’t say, spiritual arrogance most likely, but when the turning came for Walsingham, just east of Fakenham on the A148, I didn’t take it and carried on instead, even though I was suddenly unsure of where exactly I was heading. I needed to pull over, to double check, but as is so often the case in such situations I didn’t find the right place to take a pit stop, so I kept on going, with the warm Norfolk breezes blowing in through the open windows of my Prius, bringing on visions of eternity which seemed to be sittin’ behind me in the rear view mirror. Where did they come from, an’ where do they go? Well, who knows? The A148 was a fast road too, and with the time coming up close to midday I found myself bombing along through the open spaces of north Norfolk almost as if I was in a trance. I thought that Sheringham by the coast would be a place to aim for, but I just could not see any signs for it, none at all, not even a sheriff to help me, and therefore didn’t know if I was on the right track or not.

The recently burnt How Big How Bold How Beautiful by Florence + the Machine had been on the sound system of the Prius on my way up the M11 earlier that morning, but not for too long, maybe as far as Stansted, something like that; four or five tracks at most was all that was needed from the Florence Machinery on this occasion. Then it was Def Leppard, this time their eponymous Def Leppard album from 2015, a fine piece of work which in my humble opinion more than restored their credentials after its less than impressive predecessor Songs From The Sparkle Lounge, an album that came out back in 2008. If you don’t believe me, check out tracks like Let’s Go, Invincible, All Time High and Wings Of An Angel to see, or rather to hear, how good Def Leppard really is. As an immaculately produced slice of melodic pop rock cut through with a dash of metal, itshone in all its glory once I reached the A11, where on the luminous highway of a perfect day the voice of Joe Elliott reared up from over my shoulder, singing all about how We Belong.

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Flat: Port of Felixstowe – Port of Britain

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 21^st 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.

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Flat: High & Dry In South Suffolk

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 first part of what will comprise seven posts and it covers driving up from Woodford in Essex to Felixstowe on the east coast of England.

It was a trip I had been meaning to make for a while but just hadn’t the chance, in fact it had taken me years to do it, dunno why, a straight through the heart of Essex ride into South Suffolk and then all the way to Felixstowe on the east coast. I was out of the blocks by 10 in the morning, with How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful by Florence + The Machine burning onto the hard drive of my Toyota Prius. Yes, my faithful old Prius, a car I had bought brand new, the only time I had ever done so, and which had now done over 84,000 miles in what would soon be coming up to nine years of proud ownership.

Once out of Woodford I drove straight up the M11 to Stansted just past junction 8. A few years ago it seemed like I was going up to Stansted quite often, every other month in fact, but over the course of time all that had tailed off considerably, now it was probably over 10 years since I had last been there. How time flies, whilst I hadn’t, or at least not from Stansted. I had driven past it plenty of times in that period though, usually making my way up the M11 to either join the A14, A11, A1 or to just go to Cambridge, so it was familiar enough territory.

It was a fine Friday, not deep blue skies but light blue skies with high clouds warm and bright, the land looking dry, early June in what was possibly going to be a long, hot summer. The choice of Florence + The Machine for the car ride had been a direct consequence of buying their How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful album after seeing them support The Rolling Stones at the Olympic Stadium in London back in May. Bought it at the HMV Store in Stratford Westfield, yes, bought Florence on one of those HMV 2 CDs for 10 quid special offer bundles I was so fond of and which I have indulged in so many times over the rollin’ years. Now I was in the process of playing and burning it onto the Prius hard drive, on which could be transferred over 100 CDs of music, something that I always thought was pretty cool, although of course in terms of how music’s currently consumed, is now tremendously outdated.

In that regard I had brought along a couple of other CDs to burn for the trip, Vessel by Twenty One Pilots and Def Leppard’s classic 1981 album High n’ Dry, this one being freshly re-mastered and taken from out of their CD Collection Volume One box set which had been released at the beginning of June and which I had just recently purchased. Needless to say I had filled up all the space on the Prius hard drive many moons ago, but the great thing about it was that albums could be deleted once I got tired of them, thus freeing up space again to stick some new stuff on. All in all these three albums would be more than enough for me to be getting on with as far as the listening to music in the car was concerned whilst making my way up to Felixstowe and then back down again.

Made fast progress up the M11 with there being no major incidents to hold things up, within 25 minutes I had filtered onto the A120 and was soon flying past Stansted. It was not that busy on the dual carriageway stretch, all was clear and driving on it was like a dream. A bit of a surprise to be honest, and I realised it must have been around 20 years since I had last driven on that part of the A120. Back then it had not been a double lane affair and driving it had been a bitch, stop start all the way, with the pinch point place of Great Dunmow being particularly painful, all in the days when I had a lot less patience than what I have now, or at least what I hope I have now. This time it was a different story and in the best possible way. As I headed due east towards Braintree, with open skies above me and clouds beginning to break into the blue beyond, there was nothing to stop me from going as fast as I liked, well apart from the fact I was driving a Toyota Prius of course, and not an Audi.

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A Ride to Mallilli Falls in the Coorg Hills, South India

Account of a trip made with my brother in law Sonam Tashi to the Mallilli Falls in the Coorg Hills, around 30 km to the west of the Coorgi town of Somvarpet.

The trip to Mallalli Falls took place the day after our ride up to Mandalpatti. Somvarpet was the town we were heading to and it lay approx 30 km north east of Kushal Nagar up in the Coorg hills, then from Somvarpet it was another 27 kilometres to the Mallalli Falls, heading more or less due west. In the Notes page on my iphone I tapped in the following –

Somvarpet, next place to go on a 2 day sleigh ride through the hills of Coorg. Never gonna tire of the feeling which comes over me when I go hill hikin’ from outta different temperatures where the land doth change. Sunticoppa, halfway up the pipe to Madikeri we could have gone and then got the SH8, but no, Sonam Tashi had other ideas and took us on a road which lay on the east side of Kushal Nagar. Coupla days hill rollin’, stepping out upon a different scene away from the heat haze of the plains where the red soil of Karnataka contains the tales of a 1000 million stories all bled out beneath the sun which we will never get to know. But it is just that I know it will soon stop happening – this goin’ here an’ goin’ there – because Sonam Tashi shifts back to Kollegal tomorrow, the place where he is now stationed as Chief Settlement Office and about four hours drive away from Bylakuppe. It is then that I will have the time to sit back an’ do more writin’ so as to keep up with all this stuff I have set myself the task of reporting on.

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A Ride to Mandalpatti in the Coorg Hills, South India

Account of a trip taken with my brother in law up into the hills of Coorg where we were heading for the Pushpagiri Wildlife Sanctuary within which was Mandalpatti, a place from which to view the Western Ghats in that region of Karnataka.

The last couple of days me and Sonam Tashi have been hittin’ the road and driving up into the hills of Coorg. First day of the two saw us go to a place called Mandalpatti in the Pushpagiri Wildlife Sanctuary which is in the Pushpagiri Hills to the north east of the hill station town of Madikeri, the administrative centre of the Coorg district of Karnataka. Second day was a swing across to the town of Somvarpet some 30 kilometres east of the Coorg town of Kushal Nagar and from there to make our way to Mallalli Falls, once again in the Pushpagiri Hills, only this time at the other end of them to where we went the day before.

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Bob Dylan Live: Cardiff International Arena 18th June 2004

On Thursday 17^th June 2004 I made my way down to South Wales in order to see Bob Dylan play at the CIA the following night. I had decided that it would be better to drive down the day before and stay at my parents’ flat in Penarth, a pleasant seaside town just to the west of Cardiff and where I had lived for the first six years of my life before rolling up and down the length and breadth of the land due to the work my dad was involved in. Driving down on Thursday evening would ensure avoiding any possible Friday jams on the roads, especially the M25 and upper part of the M4 which could be bastards to deal with if things weren’t looking pretty. It turned out to be a good decision because even taking into account the detour I had to make to my parents’ house in Harpenden in order to pick up the keys to their flat, it still only took me around 3 ½ hours to get to Cardiff.

So much was it a good decision that the only thing I really had to think about on the way down was whether or not I should visit my old friend Rik Dixon whom I hadn’t seen in about three years, possibly four, and who lived in an attic flat in Penarth which he shared with his long term partner Hazel. For quite a long time I sat there behind the wheel of my Nissan weighing up the pros and cons, trying to figure out if it would be a good idea or not to climb those stairs up to Rik’s place, and the further I made my way down the road the more I felt like it would be a good thing to do. On in the background for the duration of the journey was Bob’s far from perfect but still quite likeable Under The Red Sky from 1991, where for me the best songs on it were the title track, Unbelievable, Born In Time, God Knows and, coming in a distant fifth, Cat’s In The Well.

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Bob Dylan Live: Gettin’ My Tickets & Bein’ Burglarized

June 2004 and two Bob shows are coming up. It seemed like it was not so very long ago that I had finished writing up Three Bob Shows which covered the three bob shows that I had been to in 2003; Sheffield, Birmingham and London in that order. Great shows, naturally, although I have to admit that I did get into a couple of scrapes along the way, which led me to believe at times I was getting a bit of beating from the gods and that I’d better learn to stay on the right side of the road. Enough of that for now, suffice to say that I just about managed to come out of it with the sun still shining brightly over my shoulder as far as my love of Bob was concerned and at the end of the day that was all that mattered.

Early June, hay fever season, a bit of a distraction for me at some points to say the least, because on a bad day I can suffer from it pretty badly, flat on my back for hours and hours on end. Guess you just have to keep on riding with head held high, despite the fact I get up some mornings feeling like I have been boxed around the around the ears, walking around whilst sneezing continuously all the way to the coffee machine in the kitchen. No doubt whatsoever that I am looking forward to the 2004 shows, which will be numbers 22 & 23 respectively as far as my precious list of Bob concerts are concerned. Looking forward to upcoming Bob shows can be for me like seeing visions of glory, but having never done anything glorious in my life it is not possible for me to accurately define or describe what those visions might actually be. The main thing was that there was no way I would not be making it to them, only if strange lightning struck, or if some other such particular act of fate came along to cut through me like a knife.

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