Holt

So, another awayday, this time in the shape of a broadsheet travel supplement feature.

First a bus, from the rejigged Norwich Bus Station, now entirely made up of aluminium stalks and blue light (shorthand: “futurespaceage”), but still with the same overpriced bottle of travel-sick Coca Cola. Then, accidentally, a steam train on the revived Poppy Line from Sheringham to Holt; a North Norfolk enclave built from tasteful twentieth century cultural reference points. The barbers, decked out in red and white and black and chrome with shiny marble steps and art deco signage, the bakers a patisserie, and the sweet shop a fragrant confectioners. A bobbed lady in a dim shop, arranging swathes of sable and mink and jet beads and old feathers and lace. These things gave me the same pleasure as sugar cubes and a wrapped biscuit with my coffee: most things in Holt were “just so”. And of the rest? Maternity pilates in the church hall, impossible accents, wind chimes and galleries showing vague, impressionistic nudes. This place charmed me with its Let’s Pretend game of representations but unnerved me a little too. Just as dusk set, an auctioneer asked me to mind his lots in the Memorial Shelter, and I spread a tourist map out on my legs, looking for a way home.

Go and look at this: http://www.rememberbutlinsfiley.co.uk/ A strange feeling; someone is making a research project, a book and a DVD for Hull County Council from one of my ephemeral obsessions. One that led me over the fences of a construction site earlier this year, and onto a vast plain of scrubland overlooking Filey Bay. I was too late, they’d cleared away the detritus of the Butlins resort to make way for a new holiday camp. For twenty years past it had lain exactly where it fell, with prefabricated timber chalets collapsed like dominoes in regimented sea view lines signified by a roadside stall selling off the timber piecemeal.