Charity Walk February 2025

 Wells to Yarmouth

In memory of Amanda

My aim was to walk about 60 miles of the Norfolk Coast Path, from Wells-next-the-sea to Great Yarmouth, setting out on the first anniversary of my wife Amanda's death, and completing the trek within four days.

And my aim was to raise money for the National Brain Appeal.

Accordingly, my friend John drops me off in Wells early on Saturday February 1st, and I start out, a little nervously.....

It is a still, cool, grey morning, but there is hardly anyone about.  The path is puddled and slippery in places, but, despite some worries about my fitness and my knees, the miles begin to fall away.

I encounter a few birdwatchers - one of whom lets me observe a Peregrine on the beach through his telescope - and dog walkers, but through Stiffkey, and Morston, it is quiet.

In Blakeney I stop for a quick drink at the King's Arms, where I stayed with my late friend Lindsay in 2012.  It is unchanged.  Same family ownership; same cosy atmosphere; same beer [Surely a new barrel?  Ed]

Then across the marshes and on to Cley, where a pork pie from the Deli picks me up before the going gets tough on the shingle.

I was dreading this bit, and it is hard going, but the tide is out and so there's a firm strand to follow.  I walk to the rhythm of the plash, surge and withdrawal of the waves - splash, splurge, shlurp; plash, scourge and scrunch - my mind a polished empty plate, as feet and water merge along the miles of empty beach.

These are the deep waters of the German Sea -  Ah yes, what some call the North....  has long been known as the German ..... Pace Mr Strumpot: so little do you understand.

I spy some figures fishing in the distance, near Salthouse.  Then one breaks away and comes toward me, and, for a moment I see Amanda, her hair blowing across her smiling face.  But, all too soon, she is gone, and I am left alone again, thinking of those last few years, when her eyes, so long the sparkling sapphires of her soul, dimmed to dark pebbles in the depth of pools of sadness. 

I spend the night in Weybourne, sixteen miles into my plan, and hardly the worse for the first day.

In the morning the sun shines across frost, and my spirits lift a little.  Much of today is spent tracking the edges of crumbling cliffs, and it's by no means flat - between Weybourne and Cromer I ascend and descend 636 feet in eight miles. 

Amanda and I had a short holiday in Cromer many years ago and I return to the Red Lion for a drink - it hasn't changed much, though it is a sunny Sunday and there are plenty of people about.

Over the golf course, where she and I walked, to Overstrand, where the beach huts are firmly closed,

Then back up and along the crumbling cliffs to Trimingham.  I meet my shadow high above the beach - but I reach out to drag him back....

Another eight miles, and 580 feet elevation gain, and I reach Mundesley - not picturesque, but I have a comfortable room and rest.

Day three dawns bleakly. It is cold (two degrees) and misty and I follow the beach for a while, before taking the signposted cliff path towards Bacton.  What the signpost didn't tell me is that the path is closed at the giant Bacton Gas Terminal....

And it isn't possible to reach the beach from here, so I have to make a miserable detour, following the closely guarded and cctv surveilled fence for what seems like miles.  I then encounter a brace of armed policemen, who fortunately accept my excuses and allow me to traipse on along the busy main road before eventually rejoining the coastal path.

This isn't picturesque scenic Norfolk.  It is a mix of holiday camps, thousands of static caravans and chalets, and wartime relics.

But then the imposing church of St Mary the Virgin at Happisburgh hoves into view, and I know I can find sanctuary.

And as the clock strikes twelve the doors open and I find soup and ale in an old favourite of mine (another that hasn't changed over the years):

But it is all subdued.  There is no sense of summer.  The pub will be there, I am told, until it falls into the sea.....

Yes, some things are reminders of past times.  But....

What good are memories?  These little tombs of the past are dirty and spent.  Not so  very different from remains of the Roman occupation.  Not really so different from the occasional fossil that marks where some forgotten creature died, millions of years ago.....

However some quiet habitations bear traces of life, and I love the idea of these curious refuges:  Sandy Lodge - Sea View - Cliff Top -  Sea Breeze - Dun Roamin - Gulls and Buoys......

Day four and, after a touching conversation with part-time taxi driver Monica from Mulingar, who had recently lost her mother to dementia and who is now watching her father succumb to the same fate,  I start along the dunes, overlooking adult grey seals, grunting and moulting and relaxing after their parental experiences [I feel for them.  Ed]

I meet Larry, a Volunteer Seal Warden at Horsey.  He too has family and friends who are suffering from conditions of dementia, and, bless him,  he makes a donation to my cause.

On to Hemsby, where a sign simply tells me that the footpath is closed.  A cataclysmic tumble has brought the cliffs down to block both the beach and the upper path.  No direction home.  

I slog up past desperate  tattoo parlours and amusement arcades, chip shops and Chinese restaurants.  The bus stops offer no respite, but then a bus careers past me as I hike along the main road.  Fortunately Trivet, a man of about my age, who was born in his home, Dove Hill Farm, is gathering faggots for his wood burner, and he kindly directs me and allows me to pass through his garden to avoid the fearsome traffic.

And so I hit the coast path again, and wearily work my way along the sands toward Yarmouth, thinking all the while of Charles Dickens and Peggotty and David Copperfield and the author's comment that Yarmouth was the strangest place in the wide world and I hold my breath as I pass Caister and its Roman Camp,

And then here it is, part derelict:

Part wishful thinking:

And part fantasy:

But, 62.5 miles on, and barely a blister, and I have achieved my target, exorcised some of my sorrow.

As I sit on a bench and shake the sand out of my boots I reflect on my experience. I recall our move, four years ago, to Norfolk and how Amanda would sit confusedly on the bottom stair, in her coat and hat, with her bag (mobile phone, purse and sheets of pictograms) by her side, waiting for the door to open and somehow for her to be returned to her known erstwhile 'Home.'

And then the descent into incoherence, incontinence, inability to raise herself, feed herself or speak.  She swam slowly deeper into murky depths, encountering strange creatures that would loom out of the blur, and she would look at me, and her distressed eyes would implore me to help her in some way.  Please, I thought she said, dear lord, take me now......

So, there we are.  I have achieved this aim, though quite what it has meant I don't know.  At this point in time, some 100 or so + friends/supporters have donated £3,435.00p (with an extra £546.75p through Gift Aid - so total £3,981.75p) to the National Brain Appeal, either inspired by Amanda's story or by my walk, or both.  

I hope that there may be some more and that, perhaps, some who haven't yet contributed may now feel they can.....

Should you wish to be a part of this, please see my Just Giving page, at:

 https://www.justgiving.com/page/richard-gibbs-1735565578129?utm_medium=FR&utm_source=CL

Thank you

Richard

******

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W B Yeats

Among School Children

******

This is for Amanda, and my mother Anna, and Robert, and for all those who suffer from dementia and for those who care for them

Some passing waves

Byron in Italy

 

I wrote this article in 1983, and it was published (in English and Italian) in the second number of the first volume of the Sheraton Italia Magazine, with the following (slightly fanciful) by-line:

English-born Richard Gibbs has been living and working for the past seven years in Rome. He is a professor of English Literature, a free-lance journalist and one of the owners of a new English pub, located on Via della Madonna dei Monti (near Via Cavour) in the historical centre of Rome.

 

I had a particular interest in Noel, George Gordon, 6^th Baron Byron of Rochdale, as in 1980 I had named one of four new Houses at St George’s English School (where I taught) after him.  The then Headmaster, Hendrik Deelman, decreed that, among other criteria, the names (of the houses) should preferably be of people, probably historical figures, with whom pupils will be proud to be associated and about whom much of interest can be said......

 

When I proposed Byron for mine (the others were Drake, Livingstone and Newton) the Headmaster objected and attempted to block my choice.  I insisted, however, on the grounds that despite a physical handicap (he was born with a short Achilles’ tendon which made running difficult) Byron achieved great physical feats in swimming and riding in particular, and not only supported Italian liberty but died assisting the Greeks in their struggle for freedom.  You want a hero?  Find me a better example.....  Hendrik, to his grumpy credit, acquiesced.

 

Here is the article:

Byron in Italy

Portrait of Lord Byron by G Sanders (1807)
Courtesy of Sir Joseph Cheyne
The Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome

The literary links between Britain and Italy are many and various and deep-rooted.  Perhaps the earliest connection was Julius Caesar’s account of his invasion, which depicted the Britons in their true-blue glory.  However, it was not until the Middle Ages that the traffic of impressions and influence really began. Whether or not Chaucer met Boccaccio in Florence will never be known.  But the Italian influence on Chaucer was marked.  As ‘Pilgrimage’ became more popular – and safer – and as printing made literature more exchangeable the dissemination of ideas grew.

 

Italy has always been an attractive place of northerners.  The stabilisation of Europe under the Caesars and the popularisation of Greek drama in Latin form must have played many a part as did the immensely important role of Rome in the Christian Church, but not all pilgrims are saints, and many with pious hopes also had pedestrian appetites, and so the dissolution of cultures continued.

 

Civilisation, climate, Christianity and curiosity all played major parts in bringing artists and writers, ladies and gentlemen, to Italy.  From the seventeenth century on, with a snowballing increase in more recent years, the tourist trade has developed, and everyone with his sketch-pad or her note-book, or nowadays with the video-camera [smart-phone? Ed] tries to capture a little of the country for the folks back home.

 

Among the millions of visitors Italy has had have been some of the greatest figures of literature, as well as myriads of their acolytes. Certain of their books are still well-known and a few are still quite readable.  Dickens’ Pictures from Italy ranks high as a subjective piece of journalism, determinedly anti-Catholic and yet refreshingly enthusiastic (his appreciation of the effect of the Trevi Fountain contrasts markedly with his denigration of St Peter’s), while Henry James’ Italian Hours is pompously unapproachable, a weak moment in self-appreciation.

 

Direct responses to the country are less available than the influences to be found in novels and poetry, and drama, however.  Many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in  Italy for example, and the Petrarchan sonnet is a major form in English verse.  The Duchess of Malfi, Keats’s Isabella, Forster’s A Room with a View are three examples of works with obvious connections with Italy, but there are many more.

 

One of the most striking relationships between a British literary figure and the people and literature of Italy is that of Lord Byron.  It is now [November 1983, Ed]. Nearly two hundred years since his birth and short, stormy life, and countless books have been written about him, but there is still a great deal of prejudice in circulation against him and at least as much myth.

 

His great strength was activity: he was not content to stay at home and mop his brow in aesthetic ecstasy.  Byron did things like swim the Hellespont, the Tagus at Lisbon and the Lagoon at Venice.  He travelled extensively in Greece and Albania as a young man, helped the cause of Italian liberation in his maturity, and died at Missolonghi from a fever (doctors reported) contracted during the Greek campaign against the Turks [which he partly financed from his own purse, Ed].

 

A few years ago, in Genova, I was trying to locate the villa in which the Dickens family had lodged for almost a year in the mid-19^th century. I knew roughly where it was and thought I might have found it, though I also knew that it might have disappeared long ago.  Dickens had composed The Chimes, one of his popular Christmas Books, whilst living there, and years later, when he died, the bells of Genova had tolled for him, and the local newspapers had announced that Nostro Caro Carlo Dickens è Morto! I asked in an old, Dickensian haberdasher’s shoop whether the two old ladies (undoubtedly residents of the area since the mid-19^th century!) knew anything about this famous scrittore inglese?  They turned the name over a few times, shaking their wise old heads.  Eventually I got an answer: Charles Dickens – no....  But Byron, yes!  He lived over there.... And indeed, he had lived in that street briefly in 1823, prior to his fatal departure for Greece.

 

Byron holds people’s imaginations because he was generous and vigorous, outspoken and brave.  His life was distressing to himself and to some others but it was presided over by an energetic and essentially truth-loving spirit.  As Peter Quennell (a literary historian famous for his work on Bryon) has said, Three-quarters of Byron’s verse is, at any rate from the modern point of view, quite remarkably bad, yet, as a significant literary figure and as an exceptionally interesting and unusually ill-fated human being, Byron can never cease to command our attention, exhorting our sympathy even at moments when we are inclined to like him least.

 

Although he did not write much about Italy, apart from the famous lines in Childe Harold’s Pilgimage that describe Venice, Florence and:

 

Oh, Rome! My Country!  City of the Soul!

The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,

Lone mother of dead empires! And control

In their shut breasts their petty misery.

 

much of what he wrote was inspired by what he saw or read here.  Don Juan has precious little to do with Italy (and nothing to do with Mozart’s Don Giovanni) but it is written in a romping ottava rima that he had learnt from reading Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and it was nearly all written while living in Italy.

 

The prejudice that marks Byron as a licentious libertine, and which brands all romantic poetry as unreadable gush, is one of the main objects of Byron’s satire, and it is most often found in the mouths of those who have never read a line of his.  In fact his work is often witty, readable, and (even) moral, and often contains entertaining thoughts as well as amusing stories, though he never tried to overdo it, as he wrote at the end of the first Canto of Don Juan:

 

But for the present, gentle reader! And

Still gentler purchaser!  The Bard – that’s I –

Must, with permission, shake you by the hand,

And so – ‘your humble servant, and Good-bye!

We meet again, if we should understand

Each other; and if not, I shall not try

Your patience further than this short sample –

‘T’were well if others followed my example.’

 

*****

 

In case you are not persuaded, may I call on Kenneth Clark’s support?  On page 307 of Civilisation, he wrote: appearing when he did, the tide of disillusion carried him along, so that he became, after Napoleon, the most famous name in Europe.  From great poets like Goethe and Pushkin, or great men of action like Bismarck, down to the most brainless schoolgirl [careful, Ken!  ED] his works were read with an almost hysterical enthusiasm.....  Byron, who was very much a man of his time, wrote a poem about the opening of a prison – the dungeon of the Castle of Chillon. He begins with a sonnet in the old revolutionary vein – Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeon’s, Liberty!  But when, after many horrors, the prisoner of Chillon is released, a new note is heard:

 

At last men come to set me free;

I ask’d not why, and reck’d not where;

It was at length the same to me,

Fetter’d or fetterless to be,

I learn’d to love despair.

 

Since that line was written how many intellectuals down to Beckett and Sartre have echoed its sentiment.....  [However] this negative conclusion was not the whole of Byron.  The prisoner of Chillon had looked from his castle wall onto the mountains and the lake, and felt himself to be a part of them.  This was the positive side of Byron’s genius, a self-identification with the great forces of nature: not Wordsworth’s daisies and daffodils, but crags, cataracts and colossal storms: in short, with the sublime.....

*****

 

I rest my case.  A final quote from Don Juan, Canto XV, stanza 99 [which, for the record, I read whilst wild camping on Corsica some 45 years ago]:

 

Between two worlds life hovers like a star

‘Twixt night and morn upon the horizon’s verge.

How little do we know that which we are!

How less what we may be! The eternal surge

Of time and tide rolls on and bears afar

Our bubbles. As the old burst, new emerge,

Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves

Of empires heave but like some passing waves.

 

 

Byron House, 1994

 

London 14 - The Thames & its Bridges

Liquid ‘istory

The river Thames is the aorta of England. It has played an essential part in our culture and history for more than two thousand years. As a division between kingdoms and counties, as a haven for seafarers and a thoroughfare for traders, and as a watermark on the fragile seals of parliaments, its importance is unrivalled.

While its currents are ever-changing, and its banks are never-the-same, the river has an entity that transcends ephemera.  From one end of London to another, the streaming tides are constantly washing the face of history, and as we walk along its length we stumble on shards of stories that shore up the life of this fragment of the world.

And as the centuries pass, despite its wilful energy, the Thames has been to a certain extent tamed, and leashed, and crossed and tied. Basins have been dug to shelter ships from excess; tributaries have been sheathed and tapped and dried; tunnels have been bored underneath, and bridges have been stepped across its mighty flow.

For two thousand years we have endeavoured to span the dangerous flow, and from the time when the river was practically impassable, to the 200 bridges, 27 tunnels, six public ferries, one cable car link, and one ford that today allow passage to humankind, the story has followed in the wake of man’s technological development, and has tallied the history of transport, politics and the language of this land.  Without Chaucer, Shakespeare might not have achieved such fame; without Spenser, poetry might not have flowed so free; without Dickens, our fondness for story and character might not have grown so florid.  And all of these, besides their imitators, have been shaped by the dark coursing waters of the Thames as it scours its way through London…..

Though other rivers far outstrip this stream in magnitude, from the Tagus to the Nile, and from the Mississippi to the Amazon, few may challenge the tales these waters can tell, and to this day, to my mind at least, there is little so pleasantly intriguing, so imaginatively distracting, as a walk beside our father, the Thames.

And now, as Janus looks back and forth, and it is the season of the quiz, I offer you a little game to play.  I realised just recently how often I have spent time beside the river, and then realised that over the years I have followed its course from Surrey into Kent, crossing and re-crossing both above and below the waves, so it seemed fair to create a game. 

And what better than a game of Bridge?

A Game of Bridge

1)     Who built the first London Bridge?  (a) Alfred the Great (b) The Romans (c) Boadicea? 

2)     Why did Old London Bridge fall down?  (a) Fire in 1212  (b) Neglect by Eleanor of Provence in the 1270s (c) Ice in 1281? 

3)     Until when was the Medieval London Bridge the only bridge across the Thames in London?  (a) mid sixteenth century (b) mid seventeenth century (c) mid eighteenth century? 

4)     Where is the 1831 London Bridge (which replaced the medieval one) now?  (a) at the bottom of the river (b) in Japan (c) in Arizona? 

5)     Which bridge carries the following notice:  All Troops Must Break Step When Marching Over This Bridge?  (a) Chelsea, (b) Hammersmith, (c) Albert? 

6)     Under which bridge was Italian banker Roberto Calvi found hanging on June 18^th, 1982?  (a) Blackfriars Road Bridge, (b) Blackfriars Railway Bridge, (c) Waterloo? 

7)     Which is the only bridge across the Thames east of Tower Bridge?  (a) Dartford, (b) Emirates Air Line, (c) Queen Elizabeth II? 

8)     Why is Westminster Bridge green and Lambeth bridge red?

9)     Between which two bridges does Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend begin? In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between ***** Bridge, which is of iron, and ***** Bridge, which is of stone….. 

10)  Earth has not anything to show more fair: Why could William Wordsworth not have composed any lines on the current Westminster Bridge? 

11)  Whose view might this be, and from which bridge?

12)  What is the name of this bridge?

13)  What’s the story here?

14)  Which is the oldest bridge across the Thames in the Greater London area?

15)  Which bridge was reopened in 2002?

And for a bonus point:

16) Between which two bridges are Joanna Lumley and Boris Johnson intending to get into a flower bed together?

Answers: 
1) b; 

2) All three; 

3) c; 

4) c; 

5) c; 

6) a; 

7) c; 

8) Because Westminster bridge is painted the same colour as the seats in the House of Commons and Lambeth bridge is the same as the seats in the House of Lords. 

9) Southwark, and London; 

10) The sonnet was composed in 1802; Wordsworth died in 1850; the current Westminster Bridge was built in 1862; 

11) James McNeill Whistler, from Battersea Bridge; 

12) Barnes Railway Bridge; 

13) The bridge on the left is Blackfriars Road Bridge; the one on the right is the new Blackfriars Railway Bridge; the pillars in the middle are what remains of the 1864 Blackfriars Railway Bridge which carried the London, Chatham and Dover Railway; the eastern line of supporting columns have been incorporated into the new railway structure; 

14) Richmond Bridge, 1777; 

15) London Millennium Bridge, originally opened in 2000, but closed for two years following significant wobbles!

16) The Garden Bridge will be a 366 metre long, 30 metre wide, copper-nickel structure across the Thames between Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridges.  Joanna Lumley and Mayor Boris Johnson are prominent supporters.  It is expected to cost at least £175 million.

How did you do?

For a tie breaker, can you identify from which bridge this photo was taken?  

For the answer, contact me.....


Cheers!