A Coeliac-Friendly Pier
As I walked down Southwold Pier, I saw this notice.
A Coeliac-Friendly Pier
If you can’t read it, it says that on the first Saturday of evry month, gluten-free fish and chips are served in the restaurants. I went to investigate and found that they had Aspalls on draught, coeliac-friendly crisps and that they always have gluten-free cakes available.
If you check the Pier’s web site, they have a Coeliac-UK logo on the front smd here‘s details of their fish and chips.
Perhsps we’re not so silly here in Suffolk.
Quantum Tunnelling Telescope
This quantum tunelling telescope is on Southwold Pier
Quantum Tunnelling Telescope
Find out how it was made here.
The Brewing Capital of the World
Milwaukee in Wisconsin claims, this but they don’t produce beer, but some form of pasturised chemical fizz, that has about as much in common with real beer, as CAMRA would know it, as petrol has with the finest Scotch or Irish Whisky.
I should say though that a Suffolk friend, once claimed that the sign on the outskirts of Milwaukee, proclaiming the city to be the brewing capital of the world, had been painted with a Chad and the phrase “Wot About Southwold”. I suspect, if it had, he’d done it himself.
Southwold is a sleepy seaside resort on the Suffolk coast, with a pier, a nice beach,a lighthouse, proper beach huts, restaurants and pubs and of course Adnams brewery.
After Dunwich, we travelled a few kilometres up the coast and parked by the pier, before walking along the front and having a coffee.
On To Dunwich
After Sizewell, we moved on to Dunwich, a city that disappeared into the North Sea. Read The Lost City of Dunwich by Nicholas Comfort for more details.
These days, Dunwich is just a beach, some ruins and one street with a good pub and a very good museum, that cost just a pound to enter. Surely, it must be one of the best little museums in East Anglia, if not in the whole of the UK. But then Suffolk people don’t do things by halves or wait for large amounts of Government subsidy. They just get on with it and use their own resources to do what is best.
Main Street, Dunwich
The Car Park at the End of the World
Or should I say the end of Suffolk?
To many it would be an odd place to go for a walk. But the beach is pleasantly part-sand, you have lot of birds, including kittiwakes nesting on the rigs, interesting plants and protection from the wind because of the dunes. There is also a nice cafe and toilets.
Who would have expected it all, in the shadow of two nuclear power stations?
In the 1980s, I went over Sizewell A, which is the square station in the front. It is a Magnox station, was built in the 1960s and will soon be completely decommisioned. To plan their annual shutdown, they had one of the best planning systems, I have ever seen. It was a long white perspex wall, where the critical path network was drawn and updated. Different colours meant different things and through the months before the shutdown, all information was added in the correct place. Like everything I saw on that visit, it was all very professional.
I must relate a hunting story about Sizewell. We were hunting from Knodishall Butchers Arms and were about a couple of kilometres from the sea with Sizewell A in the distance. You might think that we were all against the station with its environmental implications. But being on the whole practical people we realised that you have to get electricity from somewhere and that the plant was a large local employer in an area of the country, that had suffered large job losses with the closure of Garretts of Leiston. But what really annoyed us, was the fact that the local farmer had grubbed out all of the trees and hedges. It was like riding in a lifeless desert.
I feel that we must build more nuclear power stations, but perhaps more importantly, we should be more economical with our energy use. Incidentally, as Sizewell is well connected to the electricity grid, from works we saw yesterday, it is being used as a ditribution point for the electricity generated by offshore wind farms. But I for one would not mind seeing Sizewell C and possibly D added to the Suffolk coast
The Butley Oysterage
In life, evreything chnges, except at the Butley Oysterage in Orford.
The Butley Oysterage at Orford
The decor is still the same, the menu is just a development of what C and I probably had, when we first ate in the restaurant in the early 1970s. Even the staff are related to those who served in those far-off days.
One thing that has changed is that I am now a coeliac, but no problem as they can accomodate that! I had Dover Sole with new potatoes.
It was good to eat my first meal in a restaurant since the stroke and there was no better place.
The Kettleburgh Chequers
Yesterday, we went for a trip to East Suffolk, an area I know well, as I used to live at Debach. It was also an area, in which I followed hounds for seventeen seasons with The Easton Harriers. If you want to read more about those days in the 1970s and 1980s, read Tony Harvey’s book, Not a Penny in the Post. Hunting in that part of Suffolk, was as much about the community as it was about the hunting. Everybody, and I do mean everybody was totally welcome. It has to said that in those yeas, I learned more about the countryside, famring and wildlife, than at any other time in my life.
We passed the Kettleburgh Chequers.
The Kettleburgh Chequers
On the 10th of February in 1981, we held a gentlemen’s day in this pub to raise money for hunt funds. We met at the Kettleburgh Chequers at eleven and started hunting at about three, after quite a few drinks. C had dropped me and my horse at the meet and in the end, I hacked home to Debach, so there was no danger of drinking and driving. But when you hunted, it wasn’t always like that, but I can’t ever remember anyone getting into trouble, except from falling off a horse.
That day for a bet before hunting, Jimmy Wickham, the kennel-huntsman, actually brought the hounds into the bar.
As Tony says in the book, it wasn’t the best days hunting, but after a meal at Snape in the evening, it will be one of those days I’ll always remember.
For those who criticise hunting remember this. The hunts in those days used to collect and often humanely destroy all those animals that had died or needed to be put down in the countryside. We all come to our time in the end.
I always remember Tony Harvey once saying after a day, when we had hunted three packs of hare hounds in one day; harriers on horseback before breakfast, bassets in the morning on foot and beagles, again on foot, in the afternoon, the following. “We’ve had a very good day, but we haven’t caught anything. Ask a shooting man, if he’s had a good day, when he hasn’t shot anything.” That is the difference between hunting and shooting. I am passionately anti-anything to do with guns, as they kill people. It needs skill and in some cases courage to ride to hounds.
The last epitaph on hunting, is that on my stud since the hunting ban, I never see or even smell a fox. The ban has done nothing for the fox. All sorts of things can be postulated, but remember our foxes are rabies free, so have they been trapped by those who don’t value the countryside for their fur. I don’t know, but they have all disappeared. Or perhaps they’ve all gone to London, where they are a true menace.
Note that in Suffolk, you always name a pub with both the village and it’s actual name. This avoids mistakes, as there are numerous White Horses for example.
The Anonymous Widower 