A weekend away from London is one thing – a weekend with the family is quite another. You never know whether it’ll be pleasant or nightmarish. Will it end with smiles or scowls? It was nearly a disaster before I even arrived. The trip across London was a nightmare in rain and public transport, and I missed my train by thirty seconds. The next train was double the price, and some bloody woman who had claimed two seats glared at me when I asked if I could sit down for the two hour journey… Halfway through the journey – an hour away from Norwich, I took a picture of Colchester station…
The following day we decided to go to the beach. My memories of the North Norfolk coast basically revolve around my step-father trying to get me to swim in the North Sea and it being cold and rainy. So I was a little grudging about the plan, but we all piled into the car nonetheless and drove north…
My suspicion had evaporated by the time we reached Brancaster. The day was beautiful, and the sky – the thing I miss most of all in London – was, well, everywhere. My mother and brother wandered off in one direction…
… while my father took the dog off for a bit of a paddle …
The beach was almost empty – there was a couple playing with a kite, and some people walking a couple of dogs on the horizon. But for the most part, there was nothing for miles around us in every direction… Even looking away from the beach…
My brother has an incredible throwing arm. He can launch a tennis ball into orbit, throwing at least twice as far as any of the rest of us can manage. Our dog – Tango – loves this, and will run backwards and forwards for hours and hours, fetching ball after ball…
At the high-water mark, the beach was crunchy with shells…
After a while we stumbled upon some mud-flats… It’s easy to walk on mud-flats for about twenty seconds, and then all the grippy parts of your shoes fill with clay and crap, which makes the soles of your shoes feel like huge slippy pats of butter, only black…
Some of the mud-flats rise up into creases by some kind of weird natural process. If you get close to them and photograph them close-up, they start to resemble hills, mountains and canyons…
Anyway – no walk can last forever, so we turned to head back to the restaurant, only to be confronted by one of the most beautiful skies I’d ever seen…
