SHERINGHAM DIARY 77 - A Bit Of Catholic Gothic

Last weekend was glorious weather here on the North Norfolk coast. Hubby and I took off on Sunday in the car to visit Oxborough Hall. I've been here three times now, and its finally fully reopened after a six million plus refurb of its roof. Currently it is my favourite local stately home. Though the cafe under the stairs continues to underwhelm. 

Oxborough has been lived in by the Earls of Bedingfield for around five hundred years, and what an odd lot they truly were. It has rooms and rooms of dark richly carved furniture, really heavily patterned wall coverings including embossed leather panels, highly coloured and decorated . Then there are the portraits, which are shall we say characterful and if I'm honest the weirdest looking array of ancestors imaginable. Some seeming to have stepped out of a Gothic novel or Gormenghast. Eccentricity on steroids. I love it to bits.

The family have also been devote Catholics all this time. So it must have been tricky, if not a diplomatic minefield, avoiding falling under the executioners axe over it. This visit we also took in the snowdrops which at this time of year beautifully bedeck the woodland surrounding the architectural mish mash that is the house. Surrounded by its magnificent moat. Was this there to keep everyone else outside, or to keep the family securely barricaded in?.

Snowdrops and Catholicism then became a bit of a theme. The next day we traveled to Walsingham, via Stiffkey Stores, a favourite cafe pit stop. We visit Walsingham quite a few times every year, to get a top up on my Anglo-Catholic bling. Christ and crucifixtion I can take or leave. But I do seem to respond strongly to the feminine archetypes in Catholicism. So the Walsingham shrine is right up my street. 

This time I've added to my bling collection a glow in the dark virgin, a ring with ten pictures of Christ on it that rotates, and a beautiful multi coloured cut glass rosary. I really am fascinated by how a piece of very ornate religious jewellery contains the elaborate structure of a daily ritual in the simple arrangement of its beads. There is something I find quite beautiful in that.

We came initially to view the snowdrops in the Abbey grounds, which we have somehow missed in previous years. If you ever get the chance go and see them, there are literally millions of them, forming soft white carpets underneath numerous woodland dells. They are everywhere. I have never seen so many snowdrops in one place. It was simply stunning. 

I am largely over 'the cough perpetual'.  A throaty chesty cough in the mornings remains. I have had some uncharacteristically long nights of sleep. This is where I've had to acknowledge I'm still in recovery. There are days when I feel there's little energy in reserve to draw on. I've begun swimming regularly which has its benefits in improving joint flexibility. But it has also tended to temporarily knock my energy for six.  By the time I get home I'm exhaust-y-pooped. Yet with every week, it exhausts me that little bit less. It is, however, proving salutary to note how draining a two month chest infection/cough has been on my 65 year old body. Particularly as I am used to things not lingering on and on like that, my immune system normally giving them short shrift. Maybe its a sign.

After the frankly hopeless half term trade, the following week has recovered a little credibility, relatively. Takings remain modest yet unremarkable. We continue to plan ahead, particularly with our making. My making list has suddenly grown quite lengthy. Currently half way through building up stocks of hand made notebooks. With coasters, soap dishes, clocks and boxes on my to do list. As we enter March a strong and prolonged cold blast is hitting the coast, sending folk scuttling back to their poorly heated homes. So its not looking like we'll be seeing any Spring uplift in trade anytime soon. 

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This months brilliant business name, a joinery company specialising in sheds and fences, called Plankety Plank.

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Currently trying to lift my jaw off the floor, after listening to our miniature PM extolling the virtues of his new Windsor Framework to a handful of Northern Ireland business folk. About how economically fortunate they now are to be part of the UK and have access to the Single Market in the EU too. Yes, we all had that once upon a time.

And, whilst we are in the political sphere there is Matt the Rat and his former ghost writer Isabel Oakeshott. She of the thousand Whats App files and that strange folded crease in her forehead. What a gullible fool Hancock is. Oakeshott has done this for the public's benefit, so she says. But the Daily Telegraph's advance and her dodgy ethical reputation precedes her, and I wouldn't trust her with holding my cafe latte whilst I bent to tie my shoelaces. She only wants to highlight what she believed all along, that the lockdown was not just too severe, but unnecessary. 

Unfortunately what has been revealed so far demonstrates just how incompetent, corrupt and slow to respond of our government was. And the slower their response was the worse the likely lockdown would become. You only ever need a lockdown in a pandemic when you've completely lost control of the situation. And these What's App messages show is exactly how that happens.

It was World Book Day recently, a bit of a nightmare /mixed blessing for bookshops, so I'm told. And so it also is for parents, who have to dig deep into their own creative skills, or back wardrobe in order to dress their kids up in costumes of characters from books. One Cambridge Mum recently opined how unfair this all was on children from poorer households, particularly when three children in her child's class came dressed as characters who feature in their own parents book. Only in Cambridge, only in Cambridge.