Author: East of Elveden

Hidden places, secret histories and unsung geography from the east of England and beyond
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North-South divide?

Back in 2007, Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield wrote a piece on the nature and geographical extent of the so-called North-South divide in Britain. This was nothing new: as most of us already knew, the north-south socio-economic divide was not simply a matter of drawing a horizontal line through Watford, nor was it a case of delineating the southern boundaries of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire. Rather, it was more complex – a meandering line between the River Severn to the southwest and the Humber to the northeast.

According to Professor Dorling, the transition from north to south is not as gradual as one might expect, and shows little sign of that psychogeographic favourite, a borderline ‘zone of liminality’. The imagined divide is, in fact, a fractal line sharply defined by all manner of factors – voting patterns, house prices, wealth, health (average life expectancy is a year less north of the line), life chances, Oxbridge university access, language – particularly vowel sounds – and even preferences for flat or sparkled beer. Of course, the line roughly follows distinct features of physical geography too – the division between upland and lowland Britain, and pastoral and arable farming – features that have stongly influenced British history and culture. The divide also delineates the territory colonised by Saxon invaders and follows uncannily close to the route traced by the Roman Fosse Way.

I was reminded of this theoretical divide twice this week. First, by an article in the Big Issue written by Professor Dorling to accompany a feature on George Orwell and then by a BBC Radio 4 programme, the second part of a documentary called North and South: Across the Great Divide presented by Ian Marchant, in which the writer travelled to various places either side of this imaginary line to investigate what local people thought of the notion.

What was pleasing was that Marchant looked closely at some of my own old stomping grounds. I was born in Stourbridge in the West Midlands and grew up in Redditch, a small town just north of the divide that became a new (and suddenly much larger) town just before I left (and which earned the dubious honour of once being dubbed ‘the most boring place in the known universe’). Marchant interviewed people in Henley-in-Arden, a posh, leafy Tudor-beamed town that lies just south of Redditch across the north-south frontier in Warwickshire. The view of the Henleyites was that people from Redditch tended to be more common, while that of the Redditchers was that they would love to live in Henley given half the chance but they simply could not afford to. Hardly groundbreaking stuff but, certainly, growing up in workaday Redditch, places like Henley – and Stratford upon Avon and Warwick – did seem to belong to another, altogether more glamorous world despite their relative proximity. But then, so did Worcester (which actually lies north of the line) and even some parts of Birmingham.

If this north-south orientation is correct then, having journeyed east and slightly north in adult life to move to Norwich from the West Midlands, I have actually crossed the divide – the Tudor line, as Dorling sometimes calls it – southwards. A geographical paradox perhaps – West Midlands to East Anglia, sort of north to kind of south. I still say bath not ‘barth’ but, there again, I do prefer my ale unsparkled.

Marchant ended the program in Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean, a small but very distinct enclave, squeezed between the Severn and Wye, which stands at the most southerly ‘northern’ point of this cultural divide. I used to know this area quite well and was always impressed by its strong sense of place, wilful isolationism and warm-hearted yet tough natives. To me it always seemed somehow closer to the spirit of South Wales than to the rest of Gloucestershire. Despite having the same latitude as Watford, with working-class forestry and mining traditions, and hardly a trace of tweeness in its villages, there are plenty of stereotypical ‘northern’ characteristics on display here. The ‘Forest’, as natives always call it,  really does seem a very different place compared to the opulent sandstone villages of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds just across the River Severn.

In essence, the BBC4 programme is as much about social class as it is about geography but it raises some interesting points. You can listen again here. For a very different point of view, you can read what Simon Jenkins makes of Dorling’s analysis here. The fact that he scathingly dismisses the Sheffield professor as ‘geographer royal by appointment to the left’ might give you some idea as to what to expect.

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Patience (After Sebald) – Walking The Rings of Saturn

About a year ago I wrote a post about an Aldeburgh Music weekend at Suffolk’s Snape Maltings that celebrated the life and works of the writer W G Sebald. A new film by Grant Gee, Patience (After Sebald), was also previewed on that occasion but it has taken a full year for it to have been finally been put out on general release in the UK. After such a long wait, ‘Patience’ might seem a wholly appropriate choice for a title but I finally got the chance to see the film last Sunday at a sell-out screening at Cinema City, Norwich.

The film is based on what is probably Sebald’s best known work, The Rings of Saturn, which  describes a long meditative walk in the Suffolk coastal region. In German translation the book is subtitled ‘Eine Englische Wollfahrt – an English pilgrimage’, but this is misleading as The Rings of Saturn is not really about pilgrimage at all, nor is it a work that concerns itself that much with landscape, although the shingle and wide skies of coastal Suffolk do make a cameo appearance.

Although genres such as travel, history and memoir are appropriate up to a point, The Rings of Saturn is a work that boldly defies categorisation and which cannot easily be placed into any single literary pigeonhole. Sebald’s Suffolk odyssey is really as much an internal journey through one man’s mind as anything else. Far from the normal notion of travelogue, The Rings of Saturn is more a psychogeographic exploration of one corner of East Anglia. Certainly, the physical geography here is spectral, a melancholic landscape of ghosts, personal reflection and dark cultural memory. The term ‘Proustian’ might be used to define Sebald’s style to some extent but a better word would be Sebaldian: W G Sebald is one of those rare writers, like Dickens, Kafka and Ballard, whose name can be confidentally used as an adjective thanks to a distinctive mournful style and typically digressive, fragmentary narrative.

Part of the Sebaldian trope is to include images – black and white photos and line drawings – as part of the narrative flow; images, sometimes unsettling, that are tangential to the geography of the walk yet central to the narrative’s solipsistic digressions. Many of the book’s already familiar images are replicated in Patience (After Sebald), serving as a backdrop for talking heads like Robert Macfarlane, Iain Sinclair and Andrew Motion who have been recruited among others to give their personal take on Sebald’s oevre. Other images on display in the film are immediately resonant to those who have read The Rings of Saturn even though they do not appear as photographs within the pages of the book itself. A brief glimpse of a naked couple lying on a beach clearly represents the lovers that Sebald stumbled upon at Covehithe and, panicking, described as ‘like some giant mollusc washed ashore… a many-limbed, two-headed monster’. A shot of a distressed-looking plate of food undoubtedly refers to the joyless pub meal taken by the author in Lowestoft, which contained a fish that had ‘doubtless lain entombed in the deep-freeze for years’ along with tartare sauce ‘turned grey by sooty breadcrumbs’. Apart from an occasional colour inset frame showing a walker’s boots on the tarmac (the film-maker himself perhaps?), the images used are monochrome throughout, as grey as Sebaldian tartare sauce.

Also permeating the film are grainy 8mm-like shots of some of the locations that Sebald passed through on his long walk – places that get scant mention in The Rings of Saturn but which clearly inform its telling; places familiar to anyone who knows the Suffolk coast reasonably well – Southwold’s Sailors’ Reading Room, Boulge church, Yoxford, the ruins of Dunwich and the formerly top secret research pagodas of Orford Ness. If anywhere could be described as an archetypal Sebaldian landscape it would surely be Orford Ness.

Patience (After Sebald) complements Sebald’s book admirably. It encourages those unfamilar with his work to read The Rings of Saturn for the first time, while those already smitten can find nourishment in the distinctly Sebaldian imagery of the film and the generous personal accounts of the man himself. To be nitpicking, there are a couple of small details that some Sebaldophiles might find slightly incongruous – Andrew Motion reading his poem about the merman of Orford, perhaps, and a scene near the end that involves a puff of smoke at the roadside where Sebald died in a car accident. The latter I found quite thrilling although some might consider it borderline tacky – I can say no more.

Sometimes writers can seem to influence the reader’s view of landscape to such an extent that it is hard to come to it with innocent eyes. Once The Rings of Saturn has been read and absorbed, coastal Suffolk – in the right conditions – can easily transform into a Sebaldian landscape for those passing through it. Yet, as Robert Macfarlane recounts in Gee’s film, it is imposible to replicate Sebald’s journey exactly. Macfarlane’s own well-intentioned attempt to retrace Sebald’s steps was thwarted by sunny, distinctly non-Sebaldian weather and by simply having too much fun swimming at Lowestoft.

Even with fine weather and a light heart, it seems impossible for anyone who has read The Rings of Saturn and walked the Suffolk coast to not have some sort of Sebaldian connection. Whether we like it or not, his prose and dark historic musings have encouraged us to see the coastal landscape in a thousand shades of (tartare) grey whatever our proclivities. But we cannot replicate Sebald – and why should we? Even following those exact same footsteps, we all do our own walk, make our own pilgrimage. The psychogeographical dimension of any walk through any landscape is as dependent on the mindset of the walker as it is on the territory itself.

On a personal note, the book’s geography resonates more than I might ever have imagined: the site of the old Norfolk and Norwich Hospital where Sebald opens the text (finding himself there with a back problem a year after the completion of his Suffolk walk) is located immediately across the road from where I live.

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Gloomy Sunday

It is Sunday in Edinburgh and the city streets are filled with Frenchmen in blue shirts and black berets all come for the Six Nations rugby match against Scotland at Murrayfield stadium. Preferring the game that favours a more spherical ball it seems like a good opportunity to take the train to Glasgow for the day.

The previous day, on our mentioning Scotland’s largest city, Colin, our bed and breakfast host, remarked, “Well, I’m Edinburgh man so I’m biased but I think Glasgow makes the most of what it’s got to be fair.” It is no secret – Edinburgh and Glasgow may be less than 50 miles apart – one hour on the train – but there is a cultural gulf between the two cities. Or so they would have you believe: rough, working class Glasgow versus genteel, middle-class Edinburgh; Billy Connolly versus Miss Jean Brodie; deep-fried pizza versus herb-infused foccacio. This is, of course, a misleading generalisation but it cannot be denied that the two cities do have a markedly different feel. Edinburgh is no longer ‘Auld Reekie’ but a stylish European capital with a beautiful skyline. Glasgow, on the other hand, remains a Victorian city par excellence – famously, the second city of the British Empire. While Edinburgh seems to thrive on its glorious past and embody the spirit of the Georgian Enlightenment, Glasgow, like Manchester and Sheffield over the border in England, is a place in post-industrial transition, a city trying to find its rightful place in the 21st century. Despite its City of Culture makeover a decade or so ago, Glasgow still manages to look a bit threadbare around the edges in a way that central Edinburgh does not. This is only part of the picture though – take a bus out to one of the outlying ‘schemes’ in either metropolis and peripheral Edinburgh looks every bit as unattractive and dysfunctional as the wastelands of outer Glasgow.

In Glasgow, the Willow Tearooms still operates in the city centre, a working shrine to the distinctive secessionist style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, one of the city’s most famous sons. The Glasgow School of Art designed by Mackintosh when he worked as an architect in the city lies just around the corner. The ‘Room de Luxe’ at the top of the stairs is a delight – elegant high-backed chairs, roses in vases and a view through stained glass windows down onto Sauchiehall Street below.  The window glass (original we are told) distorts a little, affording a slightly twisted view of a boarded-up Pound-Mart store opposite, humdrum 1960s and peeling paint. A solitary busker, clearly audible from the tearoom, plays the trumpet to passers-by, belting out jazz standards like Summertime in fast rotation. But summertime it is not – the day is dreich and chilly, the sky the colour of cold porridge – Gloomy Sunday might be a more apposite choice.

A mile or so to the east, beyond Queen Street Station and George Square with its Modern Art Gallery, St Mungo’s Cathedral sits next door to the Royal Infirmary, a proximity that is surely no mere coincidence. Beyond the dark glowering sandstone of the cathedral and across a footbridge (‘the Bridge of Sighs’ utilised by funeral processions) lies the Necropolis – Glasgow’s city of the dead. The most obvious monument, looming high on a Doric column at the top of the hill is a memorial to John Knox, the Protestant reformer but the first that we pass on the winding road uphill is a monument to William Miller, ‘The Laureate of the Nursery’ responsible for the children’s nursery rhyme Wee Willie Winkie, which was originally written in Scots:

Wee Willie Winkie rins through the toon,
Upstairs and doonstairs, in his nichtgoon,
Tirlin’ at the window, cryin’ at the lock,
“Are the weans in their bed? For it’s now ten o’clock.”

We climb the path to the top. Low cloud has drained all colour from the view apart from that of the glowing rust brown of the neo-Norman Monteath mausoleum, which brings to mind an Armenian church but was apparently modelled on the Knights Templar Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Further up, the William Rae Wilson mausoleum is decidedly Moorish, a fitting monument to someone who travelled and wrote about the Middle East. Next to this, the entrance of the Graeco-Egyptian mausoleum of John Houldsworth is flanked by stern white angels, Hope and Charity, while Faith lies within glowing almost praternaturally in the gloom.

The view is the thing here. From the vantage point of the Necropolis it is easier to grasp the scale of Scotland’s largest city, even on a dull day such as this. The concrete, brick and stone of the city centre sprawls to the west beyond St Mungo’s spire and buttresses. Elsewhere, the land dips and rises gently to trace the valleys of Glasgow’s rivers, the Clyde and Kelvin. High-rise housing schemes dot the horizon east and north, an architectural echo of the serried ranks of tombs that line the Necropolis thoroughfares – a world of folk that once belonged to Glasgow’s inner city but now find themselves detached and isolated. If you believe the clichéd image, a realm of ne’er do wells – bampots, malkies, and chiv-wielding neds – but also pensioners, terminally unemployed steel workers, young single mothers and beleaguered immigrants. Whatever the reality, it is a long way from the fancy designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and certainly no place for Wee Willie to wander alone at night.

Heading back to Edinburgh our train squeezes past another returning to Glasgow at Croy station. Not quite as crowded as those we saw heading for Edinburgh on the way there, its carriages are full of middle-aged men in kilts and Scotland rugby shirts. They look somewhat subdued – clearly Scotland has lost the rugby.

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Suffolk Coast Walks 2

Just to update the previous post – Nick Marsh, countryside officer at Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB, went on BBC Radio Suffolk a couple of days ago to talk about my new Cicerone guide and the walking potential that the Suffolk coastal region offers. You can listen again here (fast-forward to around 2:37). It is available online until March 5.

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Suffolk Coast Walks

If I might be allowed a little shameless self-publicity, my new book Suffolk Coast and Heaths Walks: Three Long-distance Routes in the AONB is published today by Cicerone. A bit of a  mouthful, I know – let’s just call it ‘Suffolk Coast Walks’ for the sake of brevity.

The book gives a detailed account of all three long-distance trails within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). All three routes make for excellent walking, either in their entirety or as selected day stages.

OS map extracts for the various stages are included and the book also has considerable background information outlining the history, geography and wildlife of this attractive region.

It is lavishly illustrated too, with photographs taken by yours truly (the cover shows the River Blyth at Southwold).

For a look inside the book, a sample chapter and downloadable PDF file you can visit the Cicerone website here. It is also on Amazon.co.uk here.

Here’s a brief sample from the introduction and a few images from the book.

Introduction

The sky seems enormous here, especially on a bright early summer’s day, and the sea beyond the shingle almost endless. Apart from the gleeful cries of children playing on the beach, the aural landscape is one of soughing waves and the gentle scrape of stones, a few mewing gulls and the piping of oystercatchers. Less than a mile inland, both scenery and soundscape are markedly different – vast expanses of heather, warbling blackcaps in the bushes, and a skylark clattering on high; the warm air is redolent with the almond scent of yellow gorse that seems to be everywhere. This is the Suffolk coast, and it seems hard to imagine that somewhere quite so tranquil is just a couple of hours’ drive away from London.

The big skies, clean air and wide open scenery of the Suffolk coast has long attracted visitors – holiday makers certainly, but also writers, artists and musicians. The Suffolk coast’s association with the creative arts is longstanding, and its attraction is immediately obvious – close enough to the urban centres of southern England for a relatively easy commute, yet with sufficient unspoiled backwater charm for creativity to flourish.

It is not hard to see the appeal – east of the A12, the trunk road that more or less carves off this section of the East Anglian coast, there is a distinct impression that many of the excesses of modern life have passed the region by. The small towns and villages that punctuate the coastline and immediate hinterland are by and large quiet, unspoiled places that, while developed as low-key resorts in recent years, still reflect the maritime heritage for which this coast was famous before coastal erosion took its toll.

The county of Suffolk lies at the heart of East Anglia, in eastern England, sandwiched between the counties of Norfolk to the north, Essex to the south and Cambridgeshire to the west. The county town is Ipswich, by far the biggest urban centre in the county, while other important centres include Bury St Edmunds to the west and Lowestoft to the north. Much of the county is dominated by agriculture, especially arable farming, but the coastal region featured in this book has a wider diversity of scenery – with reedbeds, heath, saltmarsh, shingle beaches, estuaries and even cliffs all contributing to the variety. There is also woodland, both remnants of ancient deciduous forests and large modern plantations. Such a variety of landscapes means a wealth of wildlife habitat, and so it is little wonder that the area is home to many scarce species of bird, plant and insect.

This region can be broadly divided into three types of landscape – coast, estuary and heathland, or Sandlings as they are locally known – and the three long-distance walks described in this guide are each focused on one of these landscape types.  All three have plenty to offer visitors in terms of scenery, wildlife and historic interest, and the footpaths, bridleways and quiet lanes found here make for excellent walking.

Almost all of the walks featured here fall within the boundaries of the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), which stretches south from Kessingland in the north of the county to the Stour estuary in the south. The whole area – both coast and heaths – is now one of 47 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, having received AONB status in 1970, a designation that recognises, and protects, the area’s unique landscape.

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Pink

I  will let the pictures do most of the talking in this post.

Buddhist nuns in Myanmar always dress in a fetching pink colour. A nun’s life is tough but they seem cheerful enough, collecting alms in the market, studying Pali sutras or sorting out clothes at the nunnery. The commitment is actually finite, as most Burmese girls only join the nunnery for a period of a few weeks at a time.

As with Burmese boys, time spent in monasteries is viewed as a right of passage and it is considered an honour for the family to have their child wear robes for even a short period. Naturally, it brings good karma too.

Young nuns at Mingun nunnery and at Amarapura market, Myanmar

The character below is actually a boy, despite the makeup and pink get-up. He is on his way to a monastery to become a monk for a few weeks. The boy is accompanied by villagers who sing stirring valedictory songs to him as he rides along on his pony. Most of the village seems to go along for the ride – it is a party atmosphere and drink (palm toddy perhaps) has certainly been taken by some of the happy entourage. Remarkable as it may seem, this is the sort of chance event that you stumble upon every day of the week in Myanmar.

Young novice processing to Buddhist monastery near Hpa-an, Myanmar

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The Road to Moulmein

‘By the old Moulmein pagoda lookin’ lazy at the sea

There’s a Burma girl a-settin’ and I know she thinks o’ me’

These words by Rudyard Kipling form the opening lines of the Road to Mandalay, an evocative poem that manages to capture the mysterious spirit of the East as seen through Western eyes. The work holds such an important place in the colonial canon that it comes as a surprise to discover that Kipling only spent a total of three days in Burma (now known as Myanmar). What is more, he never actually set foot in Mandalay itself. He did, however, briefly visit the southern coastal city of Moulmein (now known as Mawlamyine or Mawlamyaing) and it was the sight of a beautiful Burmese girl climbing the hill on her way to the city’s Kyaikthanlan Paya pagoda that inspired Kipling’s muse in this instance.

Kyaikthanlan Paya is the most prominent of a number of glistening Buddhist stupas that line the high ridge bisecting the city. Having arrived in Moulmein by means of a nine-hour train journey from Yangon in which the buckled rails made us bounce in our seats like cantering equestrians, a leg stretch seemed in order and there was just enough time to pay a visit to the pagoda before darkness fell. As things turned out I did not walk all the way up to the top as halfway up to the temple complex an elderly gentleman stopped to offer me a pillion ride on his motorbike. Such events are not out of the ordinary in Myanmar; after just a couple of days in the country I was already aware that thoughtful yet undemonstrative gestures like this were commonplace.

Watching the sun set over the sea from the viewpoint beneath the temple I met another old man who seemed delighted when I told him I was English. I am not sure if this was because he simply approved of my nationality or whether he was just pleased to have the opportunity to use the English he had learned long ago in school. Either way, the warmth seemed entirely genuine. ”It is a pleasure to see you here. I do hope we can meet here again”. (We did, the following day).

As previously mentioned, Kipling did not spend long in Moulmein – just enough time to pen his famous poem and take a fancy to a local beauty. The novelist George Orwell, on the other hand, had a far stronger relationship with the city. Orwell’s mother’s family came from Moulmein and it was also here that he underwent training with the Burma Police Force. This and subsequent Burmese experience would provide raw material for Burmese Days, his first novel and a damning account of British colonial life in which most of the colonial characters seems to be alcoholic, racist or both.

Moulmein also provides the background for Orwell’s 1936 memoir Shooting an Elephant, a work that opens with the arresting line:

‘In Moulmein, in Lower Burma I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.’

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Wat Phou

Get there early – this is the sound advice usually given when visiting popular tourist sites. This is exactly what I did in Siem Reap, Cambodia when visiting Angkor Wat a week or so ago but it seems like several thousand others also had the same idea. As I tuk-tuked my way into the vast ancient complex the site was already crawling with a vast number of hot and sweaty camera-clicking visitors – mostly large tour groups obediently following their guides over the stones like human snakes. All I could do was join them in the fray.

Wat Phou in southern Laos is another ancient Khmer site. While it may not have the enigmatic stone faces of Angkor Tom’s Bayon, or be as enormous in scale, it makes up for it with a gorgeous hillside location close to the Mekong River -that, and a lack of crowds.

A couple of days ago, I got up at sunrise – it is difficult to sleep late in steamy, low-lying Laos. After a quick breakfast watching the sun lift over the Mekong, I hired a bike – a much-abused machine that misleadingly bore the name ‘Turbo’ – to cycle the 10km to the site. Forty-five minutes later, I arrived at the entrance to Wat Phou on my squeaky ‘ladies’ shopper’. The dusty road that lead there was the sort of terrain that most cyclists would probably consider ‘off-road’ – but it was an interesting pedal alongside dry paddy fields and through tiny villages where the day was just starting as people burned joss sticks and prayed in front of the bird table-like spirit house that stands in front of every house, however modest, in the country.

A processional way leads through the Wat Phou temple complex, passing between large baray or ceremonial ponds before climbing steps steeply up the hillside up to the sanctuary itself. The steps were lined with flowering frangipani trees so voluptuously aromatic that you could almost eat the air with a spoon. Pleasingly – or should I say, smugly – I seemed to be the first to arrive. First, apart from a few locals who were setting up their pitches at the top selling shrine offerings and soft drinks. With the place to myself, I made a leisurely tour of the sanctuary, originally Hindu, now Buddhist, seeking out the sacred Shiva spring, the rock-carved elephant and crocodile, and the library. I never did find the Buddha’s footprint but it was a pleasure to survey the shimmering plains below from this breezy elevated viewpoint beneath the deep shade of mango trees.

Eventually, a few others arrived – a friendly Lao-American family, a couple from Manchester who were staying at my guesthouse. Later still a few small tour groups turned up, French and German mostly. Even then it was hardly the circus that Angkor Wat seems to have become these days. Wat Phou may not be ‘undiscovered’ but it is certainly very low-key when compared to its sister site to the south in Cambodia. And let us not forget, Wat Phou is also the older of the two.

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Mekong musings

This post comes from somewhere firmly east of Elveden – from Southeast Asia or, more precisely, the deep south of Laos.

Last week was spent travelling along the Mekong River from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam north into Cambodia. Then, courtesy of Lao Air, a quick crossborder turboprop hop from Siem Reap to Pakse in southern Laos.

Angkor Wat near Siem Reap was, of course, astounding but the vast crowds and grey-skied humidity were debilitating and within a few hours I found myself to be in that state universally known as ‘templed-out’. Angkor Wat, Angkor Tom and the other religious sites around Siem Reap are by far the country’s biggest draw but elsewhere Cambodia is a poor and savagely scarred place. Quite understandably, almost everyone over the age of 40 seems to have a haunted look, although these survivors of the Khymer Rouge period will tell you that contemporary Cambodian youth simply doesn’t want to know about the horrors of the past. The dreaded Killing Fields just outside Phnom Penh and the city’s infamous S-21 prison are just as bad as you might imagine – even worse perhaps. The continuing tragedy is the fact that several erstwhile senior Khymer Rouge officials still hold high-ranking government posts. These are the ones that parade around Phnom Penh in black-windowed Lexus, eating at fancy air-conditioned restaurants while the vast majority of the population barely scrapes a living farming rice in the hinterland.

Laos – or rather the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos – feels different. Poor certainly, but seemingly a happier place despite its unenviable reputation as being, in per capita terms, the world’s most heavily bombed country of all time – this, during The Vietnam War (or, as they call it in Vietnam, ‘The American War’).

Stopping for a coffee this morning at a place that serves as an outlet for local organic coffee production there was no coffee to be had as the machine had just broken. So I drank tea instead and listened as a table of saffron-clad Buddhist monks start chanting as soon as they had finished their noodle soup. No-one reacted in the slightest: monks are everywhere here; an almost quotidian part of Laotian daily life. In Laos, the future may be orange, but so was the past.

Another ubiquitous sight here is advertising for Beerlao, the nation’s favourite beer.  The beer – pretty tasty by the way – is sold everywhere in no-nonsense 640ml bottles. Everywhere, too, are the yellow signs that advertise the brew, as well as beer mats, table cloths, menu covers, waitresses’ aprons and café clocks. Its cheerful yellow and green logo is so widespread here in Laos that Beerlao appears to fill a semiotic niche even more comprehensively than Coca-Cola manages throughout much of the rest of the developing world. Unusually, signs advertising the familiar fizzy sweet are nowhere to be seen.

As the Hermetic philosophers might say:

As above, so Beerlao.

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Elveden – Gateway to the Land of Nod

So why Elveden? And why east of it? Obviously there’s the name itself – E(lve)den, close enough to Eden for a cheesy pun – and let us remember that in Biblical terms the territory that lies ‘on the east’ of Eden is the Land of Nod, where Cain was exiled after murdering his brother. Of course, as well as a place of banishment for betraying siblings the Land of Nod also has connotations as a mythical place of sleep. Given Elveden’s real life position at the western end of the Suffolk-Norfolk border perhaps one of the Snorings (Little Snoring or Great Snoring – take your pick) forty miles or so to the north in West Norfolk could substitute for the aforementioned slumberland? (A real-life Land of Nod actually does exist in the East Riding of Yorkshire – it’s a tiny hamlet apparently).

Elveden itself is not without interest. The Suffolk village straddles the A11 just south of Thetford. There are traffic lights there these days and it has subsequently become quite a well known spot for traffic delays. In the bad old days, though – before the traffic lights and imposed speed limit – the stretch of single carriageway here was an infamous accident black spot. Norfolk-knockers like that nice Jeremy Clarkson have always been quick to point out that Norfolk is one of the few counties in the country that does not have a motorway leading to it and for many years there has been a strong campaign to get the whole of the A11 dual-carriagewayed right up to Norwich. As things currently stand, the A11 between Mildenhall and Thetford is one of the few remaining stretches of single carriageway. However, now that the powers that be have finally agreed to allow road widening to go ahead around Elveden, it looks as if a continuous dual carriageway will become a reality in the near future. No doubt the five minutes that will be knocked off the current London to Norfolk journey time will quickly elevate Norwich’s currently modest economy to Shanghai-like heights.

Those whizzing past the village in the future might want to consider a little of Elveden’s, frankly strange, history as it flashes past in an automotive blur. Here’s a brief extract from my Slow Norfolk and Suffolk book:

Elveden

Situated astride a busy road just beyond the Little Ouse in Suffolk, to most people this is little more a sign on the A11 and an inconvenient bottleneck for traffic. It used to be an accident black spot too before traffic-calming measures were introduced. Some will tell you that there have been more people killed on the A11 since World War II than there are names on the obelisk-like war memorial south of the village. Elveden is a small estate village centred upon Elveden Hall, a somewhat bizarre private residence. The estate, which has the largest arable farm in the country, is in the possession of the Earl of Iveagh but the hall itself was emptied of its contents in 1984 and stands empty.                                                   

Elveden Hall is best known as the home of Maharajah Duleep Singh, a deposed Sikh prince from the Punjab who was exiled to England for his part in the Sikh Wars during Queen Victoria’s reign. The Maharajah purchased the estate in 1863 and refurbished the Georgian hall in lavish Moghul style using Italian craftsmen – a North Indian tradition apparently. He also built an aviary where he kept exotic birds and in an unselfconscious effort to outdo the English squirearchy he took up the habits of English country life with a passion, leading parties that shot thousands of pheasants on his estate on an almost daily basis. Naturally, if you have a 17,000-acre estate and a vast private fortune, you can do that sort of thing without worrying too much about the cost of it all. The Maharajah was always keen to impress the inhabitants of his adopted home and tended not to do things by halves. He was even good enough to hand over the Koh-i-Noor diamond to QueenVictoria and to cheerfully convert to the Anglican Church such was his willingness to fit in. An equestrian statue of the Maharajah stands in Thetford and, although he died in Paris in 1893, his surprisingly modest grave lies in the churchyard of Elveden’s St Andrew and St Patrick Church.

Elveden Hall passed into the hands of the Guinness family after Duleep Singh’s death and the first Earl of Iveagh went even further, building a new wing and adding a replica Taj Mahal to the complex. If the hall sounds as if it it would make a perfect film set then you are quite right as, since its interior was emptied in 1984, Elveden Hall has been used as a location for films such as Tomb Raider, the Bond movie The Living Daylights and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. The bad news is that the hall is not open to the public. You might try getting a job as a film extra here, as a friend of mine did on Eyes Wide Shut. He reports that he didn’t see much of the interior but did learn that Tom Cruise was unable to find any suitable accommodation in the area and had to be helicoptered in each day from afar for filming. You can just about get a glimpse of the hall from the rear of the village churchyard and make out its green dome.

NB: The photograph at the top of this post does not represent Elveden. It was taken east of it though – at Brockdish in the Waveney Valley. I just liked its ‘fish out of water’ feel.