Hemsby by Sea

Fat people in slippers eating chips. Apparently that’s how one English comedian described the people who visit ‘Great Yarmouth’. If you haven’t heard of Great Yarmouth chances are you haven’t heard of Hemsby, either. Apparently John Cleese labelled Palmerton North in New Zealand some years ago as the most boring place on the planet which means he has obviously never been to Hemsby! As an aside, apparently just a couple of months ago the fine folk of Palmerton North decided they needed to pay tribute to John Cleese for their new found notoriety and when the highest point in the town became a manufactured mountain of garbage at the local rubbish dump they decided to call it Mt. Cleese.

I arrived in Hemsby Saturday afternoon after being whisked out here, around two and a half hours east of London, after arriving off my flight from Sydney. After the usual drinks and banter with my Scottish friend and feeling the effects of a long haul flight I was happy to get horizontal and stretch the limbs that had been cramped in cattle class for all those hours. (Sitting upright with no room to move and having food continually served up to you gave me a better understanding of the daily life of a battery hen!)

Day 1 and I am up early dealing with the body clock and my curiosity of where I had ended up and decide to take a stroll. I headed in the direction my friend had vaguely pointed yesterday indicating the direction of the town. I did know the beach was not too far way and thought I’d look for that first. Well, actually, it is rarely called the beach here. You see the Brits don’t go to the beach or the coast as Aussie do but rather go to the ‘seaside’. If I was a linguistic academic I might theorise how the word use illustrated the shift in connection or use of the area where land gives way to the ocean. Aussies actually go to ‘the beach’ whereas the Brits seem to spend most of there time in the areas near but removed from the beach, the ‘seaside’. And that is where the horror begins.

When you go to the coast you expect the odd ice cream and fish and chip shop and the like. What I didn’t expect was the row upon row of shops containing amusement and arcade games and shop upon shop of tourist tack and crap. It is like side show alley right there on the beach. This is the kind of place you need to take someone who complains about town planning and council controls on development back home and say, ‘is this what you want this coastal community to become’. I just can’t understand the mentality of someone who would actually travel out here, spend the day dropping pounds into games machines and walking up and down a tourist strip with amplified sprooking, flashing lights and wall to wall tourist crap then go home and say, ‘that was a great day at the seaside’. Please hand me the bucket! The Great Yarmouth has about 4 kilometres of esplanade given over to sixties style development and probably the best thing you could do here is begin at one end with a caterpillar D9 and simply level it all and start again. They could do something really out of the box and put in a few parks, gardens, tables and picnic areas, plant some native vegetation, build some toilet facilities and perhaps some communal and recreational areas so people actually spent time enjoying the area rather than have it as incidental to sideshow alley.

On Sunday, my first day in the area, the pleasure of visiting Yarmouth still lay ahead as I strolled towards Hemsby beach. It was a pea soup morning with few people on the street as I walked into mini Yarmouth, Hemsby, a small strip of amusement arcades and tourist crap shops heading off towards the beach. Towards the end of the road a rough clearing below the sand dunes acts as a car park. It is Sunday at 8.00 am so I am not too surprised there are few people around. Tracks led over the dunes yet there is no attempt at conservation here. The pedestrian traffic is eroding and reshaping the dunes with sand slipping this way and that with many of the higher points lost to slippage. It was at about this time, standing on top of a dune looking out into a foggy North Sea with the sounds of sideshow alley wafting through the damp morning that I thought, “where in the hell am I” ? Later that day I was able to get coordinates from a map yet that morning I was already planning my escape. I knew I was around two and a half hours out of London somewhere to the east but that’s about it. I decided to leave the beach and walked in search of a real township rather than tinsel town as I needed a couple of things for breakfast.

I soon found a small supermarket and confirmation this really was a white bread town. You have two choices of bread on the Spar supermarket shelf: White thick and White thin. Even the most backwater supermarket in oz gets two loaves of brown bread delivered so the checkout operator can say all day, ‘sorry, brown is sold out, we’ve got white though’. Anyway, I decided to be completely radical and picked up a thin sliced on a Sunday and a few other bits. At the checkout I decided to ask the operator about transport options back into London. I was told there was a bus then a train from Great Yarmouth. I asked her how long was the journey and she looked at me in surprise and said, “I don’t know, why would I want to go to London”? I could tell she wasn’t trying to be rude or a smart arse but genuinely puzzled at such a question. I suppose when you live by the seaside there wouldn’t be much need to go London now would there as everything you could want it right here, right? And besides, I have heard that young woman from out of town are grabbed and dragged to one side the moment they arrive at Kings Cross station and injected with heroine, become addicts and never return to the seaside. Finally she looked at me and said, “I think the train takes about an hour and the bus takes a very very long time, around two hours”. I certainly wasn’t in the mood for a tired conversation on distance and the relative travelling times of oz and Britton so I said thanks and left back for the chalet.

Walking back I had a strange sense of fortune descend upon me. This was one of those moments that you can’t script. It reminded me of my younger days of hitch hiking where one of the biggest joys was the unpredictable nature of it. Sun comes up, who knows where you will be when sun goes down. (Hopefully not spending the night with Ivan Mallet) Murderers and rapists aside, hitch hiking was fun because you would meet people and be plonked down in places and situations you had little control over. Here I was in Hemsby as a result of meeting a Scottish guy having a coffee on a beach on the Island of Koh Phangan in Thailand. He had generously offered me his families chalet in Hemsby for a few days and picked me up from the airport as well. That explains a little of the ‘how’. As for the ‘why’, well it is a rather convoluted story involving ticketing, frequent flyers and the like but put simply I was able to fly to Thailand, my ultimate destination, via London for just two hundred dollars extra and as flying to the other side of the globe had always been seen as mission impossible for most of my life I jumped at the opportunity to catch up with Brett, Sandra, Neil and Christine if only for a short period. I am here just nine days before heading back to Thailand. I did however need to bring some study with me as I am sitting one of my exams in Bangkok on June 12. So the peace of Hemsby and free run of the chalet has been a great opportunity to catch up on some reading. I was walking back from the shop yesterday thinking, ‘this is just a little bizarre me being an aussie sitting in a chalet in Hemsby in the middle of nowhere UK studying for an exam in a week in Bangkok’ I think I might be getting chalet fever and think I’ll go and look for my spare one pound coins and walk down to the seaside and see if I can win one of those big fluffy bears!