Red bike and blue

Unwanted bikes make for colourful flower displays (eventually) or so says Hunstanton. I'm supposed to be stuck in a house a hundred and more miles away so my view rightly doesn't count for much.

Escapism

I mentioned at the start of this month how Henry Le Strange built a very successful railway to get folk from King's Lynn to Hunstanton, well thanks to 1960s profligacy that line no longer exists. You'll have to find other means of escape that's if the CovidNazis will ever let you out of your house again. Above we have the neatly decorated KL station still pretending it is run by British Rail (Queenie regularly uses this place and they haven't told her about denationalisation) and below all that's left of Hunstanton station where the trains ran into the sea...

Here's a little something extra, a relatively young John Betjeman (younger than me, let us say) taking us on a day trip from Lynn to Hunstanton. Look, listen and learn not least how to pronounce Hunstanton and Snettisham. A different country in so many ways.

Triple tattoosies

On the first Sunday of Operation Domestic Internment I thought that, for want of anything better, some tattoo parlours might fill the gap until tomorrow. Above from Hunstanton has a fine pun and skull. Below from King's Lynn is just showing off but somehow does not overcome the sleaze, I mean a red door off a side street off London Road... definitely as it should be done.

And finally who has the bad luck to open up just days before the current outbreak of stupidity? Good job he hadn't got too settled in. But "Angry Badger"?  What's that all about? This one is just down the road in Hull and was the site of the short lived "Killer Kitchens" enterprise ("Kitchens to die for at slashed prices"!) ... some might say places have a doom on them.

Only our rivers run free

How sweet is life but we're crying, how mellow the wine but we're dry,
How fragrant the rose but it's dying, how gentle the wind but it sighs,
What good is in youth when it's ageing, what joy is in eyes that can't see,
When there's sorrow in sunshine and flowers, and still only our rivers run free. 

                                                                                              Michael McConnell

It seems you can be fined for taking your dog for a walk, going to the shop more than once a day. Don't think for one minute of putting the kids in a car and going to the wildest most empty spaces as far from any other person as you can imagine because your journey is deemed unnecessary by your unelected Chief Constable and he's spying on you with his drones. The police and the media invite us to inform of breaches of the new way of repression, I wouldn't tell the police the time of day ... 

Our liberties, once considered sacred and worth fighting wars over, are now in a bag marked "unnecessary" and "a danger to public health" (there is , of course, no such thing as public health; it's a myth used to cow the timid and ignorant) and there they will stay until unelected civil servants or idiots from Imperial College dictate. Our ancient rights to go about our lawful business without let or hindrance swept aside in a couple of days with the blessing of a rancid (and hopefully fatally infected) Parliament... 

We, the imprisoned, were urged the other night to go out at 8pm of an evening and applaud our imprisonment, to thank the NHS (what for? for doing the job we pay them for? ) and as you might guess many did. Sweet, intoxicating stuff that Kool Aid. Well, if my neighbours are assholes it's not my problem.

"Is Everybody Happy?"

  "It's funny 'cos it's true"
                           Homer Simpson

Just look what joy Hull had to look forward to this autumn, being entertained by others' misery. This was before the dreamy happy times began and we all sat comfortably at home obeying the Fat Controller and being entertained by own wretchedness; running sweepstakes on the mounting but quite normal deaths from pneumonia, diabetes, old age and so on being twisted into something so deadly serious we simply must collapse the entire economic/politcial/civic system. I see the FC has caught the WuFlu (along with the Health Secretary, you really can't make this stuff up!)... serves the fat bastard right, should have washed his hands more though I doubt all the perfumes of Arabia would sweeten his podgy paws.

"... the nave is not St Margaret's best feature"

I hadn't intended to revisit this magnificent old thing but Margot had some personal business to attend to here so in I went to get out of the wind if nothing else. Is this place always empty? This was well before the current nonsense struck the world. I hear that all churches are closed now following government dictat, clearly they care more for their mortal bodies than their immortal souls but 'twas ever thus. Here's the nave which I find rather impressive but a guide says "be patient, the nave is not St Margaret's best feature". Well everyone's a critic these days.

The east rose widow is 15th century but restored in the 19th.

The west window over the front door is also 15th century and is a little bit of a stunner.

Take a pew

It was the fashion at one time to carve grotesque figures in churches, you'll find them supporting the roof, hidden on screens but quite often you'll find them on the ends of seats. So here's a couple from St Margaret's. I don't know their age, possibly not as old as they are pretending since the place was renovated back in the 19th century; they might be Victorian projections of medieval fantasy.

And below is the tout ensemble. Weird, eh? These were supposed to ward off evil, they scare the devil as it were, though just what the devil might be doing in a church in King's Lynn I cannot imagine despite the local legend. You could, if you wished, see this a sexual thing, the hare (or is it a rabbit?)  symbolising prostitution and licentiousness, or maybe that devilish figure has too much of a caricature Jewish face for modern comfort? You can read what you like into them like since whoever made them is long gone and past caring. Personally I think they were a bit of fun, permitted silliness that no-one took seriously,  they were a distraction through the tedious enforced sermonising of the medieval church. Nowadays we have grotesque figures beamed into our homes and we call them celebrities or worse.

 The weekend in black and white is here.

All pictures by Margot K Juby.