Parallel Cost - Happisburgh
Added on Monday, August 10th, 2009 by Carole Nash Editor
Parallel Coast - Happisburgh
The R1 has a mode-mapping switch which acts like three different throttle cams on the twist grip. This effectively means you can select a different power delivery for a given amount of throttle. ‘B’ mode provides a lazy slow gathering of speed whilst standard for me is below par for a bike of this class. ‘A’ mode pushes your eyes to the back of your head while your testicles disappear to God knows where.
As you approach the speed of light, the colour spectrum alters, the bike starts to shorten and there is true fear in your stomach as you meet yourself on the way back from a place you haven’t yet reached. As I slow down with a ‘squishshsh’ from the brakes, I notice over the hedgerows how flat fields lead to a very big sky.
In 1951 The People newspaper did a survey of its readers and several tenets and beliefs proved common among the 11,000 respondents; these included ‘a love of freedom, a low interest in sexual activity, a strong belief in education, consideration for the feelings of other people…and a strong attachment to marriage and the institution of the family’. As the paper’s statistical analyst, Geoffrey Gorer concluded, ‘the English are a truly unified people, more unified, I would hazard, than at any other period in their history. When I was reading, I found I was constantly making the same notes: ‘What dull lives most of these people appear to lead!’
Perhaps this no longer applies. Then, the population had just emerged from a war, were used to discipline and had little experience of mass migration, so societies were in a real sense insular, and the media had not yet created the global village. So unworldly; Englishness (or Britishness) in that very different era was clearly a lot different from Englishness now.
That morning I am sitting in a café where the server tells me he’s originally from Manchester. His tattoos stretch up his arm and it is not difficult to imagine them continuing down from his neck to his feet and back up the other side. He has a flat nose and said think with an ‘f’. He has no front teeth so spoke with a lisp, but this is not a man you would tease. Once you’ve had your teeth punched out, it can only hurt less to do it to someone else.
“I fink Ronaldo should go to Madrid, win nuffink for four years and then come back when ee’s cheaper,” he said. This nasally Mancunian intonation is stiff with attitude. In its hometown, such an attitude leads to loud telephone calls in crowded places to give a dreadful impression. He has an accent, which, until the onset of inexpensive flights to the Spanish Costas, belonged to eight million of Lancashire’s working classes who took charabancs to Blackpool on their once a year holiday. So many of us are still one of those eight million. When I tell him this he makes me a cup of tea and suggests he leave behind his digestive biscuits. He counts out three and one of his hands has ‘mum’ etched into his knuckles, obviously a hand-made job, something rudimentary and loaded with ink. “This is the one wot will hit people first,” he says, looking me in the eye, “and this is the one wot will hit people next,” and shows me the one that said, ‘dad’.
North of the Broads and this is a landscape of flatness and my view of the day. Cattle graze on meadows reclaimed from the sea, and protected by a defensive barrier of sand and shingle, marsh grasses lead to the road across from which lush meadows appear to move like the arms of a Mexican Wave. Beyond the wall, sand spits are toyed-with by high tides, re-forming the coastline twice every 24 hours leaving behind salt flats that form estates of waders, avocets and marsh harriers. For the most part it is a land of flatness and big skies. It is a space bounded by fences and gate posts that look as if they’ve been there for hundreds of years.
Turning left and downhill into Wells, the street narrows. People, clearly familiar with each other, suggest a general air of ease. When the sun pops out from behind a cloud, it burnishes out the grey to highlight carefully painted primary hues. Traders’ signs are an array of blues and reds, some in yellows and greens but all highlight the ‘bucket and spade’ approach to colour close to the seaside. At the bottom of this cobbled street, the amusement centre and rock-sellers line the small main road adjacent to the town harbour. Alongside fish and chip shops and cheap cafés, ‘pay and display’ car parks have become a quintessential feature of a functioning seaside town.
These English villages have barely changed since I last rode around the coast in 2004. Such is the brittleness of modernity it’s like marching into the future backwards hoping everything doesn’t change; an Englishness for which newness is a mutation for the worse.
