Do Daleks discuss discourse with a definite defined Dalek dialect dialogue?

One of my guests told me yesterday that he knew he was in Norfolk when he saw a lady stop at the 'Give Way' markings on the side road outside our house. The appearance was that she was about to make a right turn as she was near the centre of the road. Having stopped she undid her safety belt, got out of the car and casually sauntered across the road to the letter box where she then posted a letter before slowly returning to her abandoned vehicle and finally completing her right turn.  .....NFN*

Try doing that in Brent Cross and you'll soon have a lynch mob after you.


It is not that unusual, along our main street, to see two cars driving in opposite directions and as they approach each other slow down eventually coming to a halt and then with windows wound down they have a little chat for a few minutes. The conversation only being terminated when another car approaches the road block, then off they go again. No one beeps their horn, why would they it's NFN.*



We had a stall in the local arts and crafts fair in the village this weekend. A few months back we also had an exhibition of everything arty or crafty that had been produced in the village itself. It was truly amazing how many people had something that they had made and such a vast array of items from a homemade cuckoo clock to wickerwork and even beautiful doll houses. So much talent in such a small village!

~I took some of my photographs along and Alison her quilts. It was an exhibition and not a sale but one of the other exhibitors came across to me at the end and asked how much was the photo of the trawler because he really loved it. I said £10 and he ummed and arrred and said he would be back to buy it later. He never returned and I assumed he thought it too expensive.
   So three or four months later Alison is running our stall at the craft market when he comes back and says once again how much he admires my photo of that trawler and that he will definitely buy it "some time soon". Well I really don't know what else we could do to assist him in this process, He was there, Alison was there, our cash 'float' was there and even the bloody picture was there and I know he had the money because he had been selling things all day. What else could we do?

Once again another typical trait of Norfolk folk, dithering. Very NFN*.



Norfolk local radio isn't anywhere as near as bad as the Alan Partridge character portrays BUT that's not to say that it doesn't have it's moments too. Some time ago, on a Sunday in the car, I tuned in to what appeared to be two old....   very old guys chatting away inanely in very heavy Norfolk accents about the dullest of dull things....

"Wha ye upta 't weekend Jethro?"
(What are your plans for the weekend Jethro?)

"Ooo r'm eading oot on a lang ol' journey t other side of tha couny t pick up a coople of Speckledey Pols". 
(Oh, I am heading out on a long old journey to the other side of the County where I aim to collect a couple of Speckledy [a type of hen] Pols [Point of Laying]).

And so it went on. Alison was getting furious at me because I wouldn't change channels you see it wasn't just a short bit of banter, no far from it, this was the show. It should have been called Two old men that talk about nothing of any importance for two hours. A bit long winded I know but it would do what it said on the box. You know when you go to those rural museums and someone has made it his life's work to record and capture all the old dialects and when you listen you wonder why they bothered because you can hardly understand a word they are saying, well this was like a live one of them.


"Arrr, well Ermine glaaad ye asked meh tharr, arm arff ta get me car waash'd at ... "  (some place unknown to me).
(Ah, well Ermine glad you asked me that, I'm off to get my car washed at.........)

"Oarr, I ear thy do a good jaab thar don't thy, all don by pols by 'and."
(Oh,  I hear that they do a good job there, all done by"......


Well at this point I thought they were going to wash his car by using the said Pols that Jethro was looking to collect from the hen breeder. I envisaged a Croat washing a car with a chicken, then I realised he meant Poles..... as in Polish, you know, people from Poland!....

"all done by 'Poles', by hand.")

Well humour is an odd thing isn't it, very personal. So while I was trying to drive the car in tears of derision Alison found absolutely nothing funny in it at all and just found them irritating to the point of distraction. This ambivalence just served  to make the whole thing that much more funnier to me and in the end the channel was changed.....       I was not consulted :(

Now, talking of Dialeks

So when the chance came recently for myself to irritate half of Norfolk with a personal and fairly boring story I naturally jumped at the chance. I happened to hear a request a few weeks ago on BBC Radio Norfolk for any stories from anyone with a connection to Dr Who over the last 50 years as they wished to share such stories with their listeners over the week of the Doctor Who anniversary.

You had to be prepared to be recorded and heard on air.

Well, I thought, I have gotta be at least as interesting as Jethro and Ermine ANNND perhaps a little more coherent!

And I had a story to tell too.

So dear reader here is the link to my one and only radio appearance. Sadly it doesn't match the two old boys in time as it only lasts 3 minutes or so.

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01lzcpf

Some seek fame and some have fame pushed upon them (Sorry Shakespeare not quite the real quote).

I have no idea how long this clip will be available, perhaps they'll stick my voice in a rural museum as an example of some one who has nothing very much to say. Although they may get a better capture of life in the early 21st Century if they record the mind numbing waffle spewed out by dumb brain dead zombies on their phones on a train.

The producer of this Dr Who documentary can only have been in his late twenties and when I explained that I didn't know which episode they were recording but I remember that Jamie was there (Fraiser Hines) then he immediately, straight off the top of his head said that he could tell me that it was The Evil of the Daleks in 1967 because that was the only time that Jamie appeared with the Daleks.

It was 46 years ago, nearly a 1000 episodes later and about 25 years before he was even born, that has to take geekism to another level!

Even more annoyingly this is one of those series missing some episodes from the BBC archives and me and my brothers systematically destroyed the scripts!!        Oooops.

I've no doubt that we are now on some Whovian {Doctor Who Fans, Sue} HIT LIST......

EXTERMINATE,  EXTERMINATE, EXTERMINATE,  EXTERMINATE, EXTERMINA.........

*NFN = Normal For Norfolk

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The story so far.....

In 1977 things were changing, Disco was was being savaged by Punk, the Queen was celebrating her Silver Jubilee, The King of Rock'n'roll died, whilst our Glam Rock king, Marc Bolan was driven into a tree by his partner. Things were all a little topsy turvy then, the Government were kept in power by the Liberals, the Firemen went on strike and Manchester United lost their Manager, wait a minute.......


AND we were only on our fourth Doctor, Tom Baker.

In and amongst this mayhem a wet behind the ears 17 year old kid was offered and took his first full time job working in a Supermarket in a suburb of Birmingham. I was lost, a little lonely, shy and had absolutely no life plan. Within the next 18 months there would be massive strikes, bread shortages, 3 day working weeks and to top it all the Sky Lab was about to drop out of orbit and nobody really seemed to know quite where it would hit the earth. All I really knew was that a 'Hard hat' wouldn't be up to the task!

Frankly that Autumn when I started my first job just seems like light years away now but rest assured that there are still kids out there in villages, towns and cities throughout the country and, I guess, throughout the world going through the same process with the same fears and concerns for both their futures and indeed the future of us all.

However life went on and time passed by, we didn't run out of oil as they predicted and I put my head down and knuckled on and 30 something years later after marriage, kids and several cats I resigned and ran away to Norfolk with my wife Alison to open our little holiday business.

And once again it was all a little bit scary and unknown, but this time I didn't feel lost, I wasn't alone, I probably couldn't be accused of being shy and my life plan was finally drawn up.


We opened in a modest way with just one B&B room so we could generate an income whilst we created an attached holiday self catering cottage and then a second (and final) B&B room.

We chose to break with the 'safe' life in Corporate land to try to steer our own destiny even if it meant a less affluent one. Not quite Barbra and Tom from The Good Life but certainly on their side of the fence. We obtained an allotment and have grown much of our own vegetables, make & sell our own jams, Alison teaches patchwork in the village hall and I've started to sell some of my photographs.

The B&B, we thought, would generate a small amount of income to keep the wolves from the door.
However plans were made to be scuppered and very early on the hand of fate slapped us in the face as Alison was 'displaced' from her job at HSBC which required her to either look for another job within the organisation or face redundancy. This was not part of the master plan as there is still a mortgage to pay off and the B&B and cottage on their own could not cover this.

So shit happens and whilst we had a healthy concern about how we now progressed one thing was for sure Alison wanted to take the redundancy and get out of the bank and find work more locally based so she could enjoy The Old Bakery and what we were building here.

Time moved on and Alison now has a temp job (although by the time it is due to end it will have been going on for a year!) at a local NHS trust helping me at weekends and some mornings before going in to work and helping serve dinners after work. Meanwhile our hospitality business has steadily grown year on year and the workload too.

We have won an award for our breakfasts and obtained separate 4 star ratings for both the B&B and the Holiday cottage as well.

Alison has also spent the last year completing a diploma in Coaching and Mentoring. After about 200 hours of study and practice (or at least that what she tells me she was doing) she has passed and can now describe herself as a professional, qualified coach. She's started working with a local journalist to write some press releases to publicise coaching retreat weekends which she'll launch in the spring. The idea is to get people to come to us to stay in peaceful surroundings with great food and spend some time being coached either in the chapel or out on the beaches or in the woods of North Norfolk.

Oh and when we get a spare five minutes (or more like five days) we'll be putting together a course on 'How to Run a B&B' based on our experiences of the last few years and Alison will coach them once they've completed the course as they set up their own B&B.


So here I sit looking back at the 17 year old remembering all the old haunts that I had worked in, some 40 supermarket branches. So many weird and crazy things have occurred in that time a few of which I have documented through this blog over the last few years.

We happened to go to Coventry a week or so ago and whist there I persuaded Alison to let me try to find a few of those odd haunts of mine. We drove around that ring road several times whilst I struggled to get my bearings. In the end we gave up trying to find two of the stores and headed off to a third in a mining town called Keresley.

My memory was poor and we drove around several times before we finally found what I recalled to be a small village stores in the middle of a mining village. My memories offered that of a nostalgic sense, not unlike the feeling that you get when you watch that lad on the Hovis bread advert pushing his bike up Gold Hill in Shaftsbury. But memories can be fickle and as most of the time I didn't know what day of the week it was I guess it is of little wonder that the image of Keresley in my tiny little lost in a world of his own brain just didn't tally with reality.

Back in a blog in March 2012 I recalled a little about my time there......

When we at last found the collection of 6 small shops most of them were boarded up. My old store is now a church and the estate did not appear as I remembered it. It was a Council owned estate filled with larger than life people each with a miner at the head of the household. As I looked at it today it seemed to have lost that 'life', I wondered where all the people worked now the pit had closed, probably in one of the shiny Malls in Coventry itself. The huge winding gear wheels were always in sight at the top of their tower but not now, no they now live half sunken into a patch of grass by the side of the road as a monument to Keresley's heritage. A sense of melancholy came over me as I stood and looked at this sad row of half empty shops,  perhaps it was the icy cold rain whipping my face or the realisation that actually the good times really were not that good, which ever it left a bleak feeling inside. I think my memories just lost their virginity. That nostalgic warm glow blew away as did we, leaving nothing but a distant memory in the rear view mirror of a lost boy on an unknown path about to start a 34 year career in a business that he would never quite feel suited him.




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Preserving Time.

The Apples are falling and there is a chill in the air for sure Autumn is back and along with it harvest time. We have once again been very busy at the Old Bakery converting our produce to jams and chutneys. Also freezing whatever else we could.

There is a garden store room at the back of the house, it is dark and it's flint walls keep the area fairly cool thus enabling me to store our apple crop, onions and Marrows for a reasonable time whilst we prioritise the other produce preservation.

Our Apple tree despite being hit by a late frost still produced over 120lbs of fruit. This is an excellent variety called 'Lord Derby' which starts off as a cooker then slowly matures to a sweet eating apple. In the next week I really need to start making apple sauce and slicing and freezing them for the winter crumbles that we serve our guests through November and December.

Then there were the grapes from the vines. I really worked hard on these this year. As a novice I turned to the wonders of YouTube for advice. This was helped by the fact that our office opens straight out onto the garden and so I could make quick trips in to look up on the PC how to prune and thin out.  

I had instructors from all over the world teaching me and as a result I obtained quite a crop. However despite this good advise I don't think I was harsh enough in thinning out the individual grapes within the bunches (although I easily removed at least five hundred grapes) and so ended up with a crop of fairly small ones.

They gave the garden a Mediterranean look and were spectacular against the red roof tiles and blue skies. I made a point of ensuring that there was a couple of bunches and just a few vine leaves artistically hanging in front of the Cottage's kitchen window to give a little exotic feel whilst the guests washed up.

Regardless of the small size of the individual grapes I picked the lot, about 14lbs worth deciding to make grape jelly from them.

Having found a suitable recipe I had to boil them down in batches as there were far too many for my preserving pan.

They may have been small but the taste was exquisite as they burst in your mouth sadly though the skin was tough and had to be irreverently ejected along with the pips. So it was either jam or juice and as jam is propbably the more stable of the two that is what I went for.

So boiled down, then the juice filtered through a muslin bag and reboiled with the sugar I produced 11 jars of Old Bakery Grape Jelly to join the preserves stall that we have set up in our porch.

Our 'Shop' was looking really depleted only a month or so ago but with all the homemade jams, marmalades and chutneys we are open for business again.





We are, however, getting a little concerned because we are selling so many we believe that at this rate we will run out of stock early next year.

Still hopefully the Apple sauce and also the Mincemeat that we produce will help stretch it all out a bit longer.













Another product that I have over produced on is the humble Pumpkin. I planted 2 packets of seeds and some old seeds that I saved from a pumpkin last year in some seed trays. The only ones to germinate were the seeds from last years pumpkin. I got 5 plants and so planted them in the allotment and ended up with 27 pumpkins to my surprise.

Whilst these were not the biggest averaging the size of a small football don't be fooled by the carrot in this picture as it was really, really large and extremely tasty too.

So I used the three biggest to make soup (my absolutely favourite soup flavour), I saved two of the  smallest  for decoration in the house and stuck the rest on our front wall with a price on each one.

One by one they sold as every now and again a car would drive by then turn around and come back to buy one. Once again Mike's market stall was in business. I had a cunning ploy to make people think that they were selling faster than they were thus making them think Oooh, I'd better buy one now before they are all sold out. When I placed them on the wall I carefully left a space every now and then to give the image that an odd one had sold in the neat row. I know this trick worked a treat (did you see what I just did there?) because Alison came in and said wow you sold some already!

Going back to the ones that I kept back, I used an idea that Claire gave me and by cutting the top of a small Pumpkin you can make a nifty little vase for you autumnal flowers.....

Here I have used Dahlias that we grew from seed, Hydrangea flower heads and vine leaves from the garden as a base.

I'll be doing the harvest festival soon!!

All home grown.





A final thing that I have sussed out is that I can get £1 for a medium size pumpkin before Halloween. If I try to sell ALL of my pumpkins before Halloween then I can buy a pumpkin at least TWICE the size after Halloween for exactly the same value £1. Thus for every pumpkin I grow I can make TWO pumkins worth of soup!

Now they don't teach you that kind of economics at school.

More home grown (therefore free) jam, The Old Bakery Apple & Blackberry Jelly, a real authentic Autumn jam this. I think we produced 15+ jars of it.


A final indulgence. I take photographs as a hobby but have started to sell them and have happily found that I have a market for them thus giving me more confidence in producing more.
I paint and draw with less confidence and I also feel the urge at times to jot down a little prose, again with less confidence.

However on reading one of my past blogs I came across the following poem from a couple of years ago and for the first time 'I' felt that, actually, it was quite good. So I bring today's blog to an end with my own poem.....

The ticking of the clock

And despite Summers hazy lazy relaxed days,

Autumn takes over, slowly, subtlety in so many ways.

As indiscernible to perceive as the movement of a clock

whose hands steal our time away seemingly as still as a rock.

Don't be fooled by the resurgence of the rose,

It's colour and scent the essence of the garden prose.

Don't be fooled by the Ladybirds, Butterflies and Bees,

They'll all be gone soon and the message they send is but a tease.

The apples are dropping onto the dew dampened lawn,

whilst the herbaceous borders are looking weary and forlorn.

The Brambles are rotting and the silken cobwebs glisten in the cold sun,

It will not be long now, the signs are there that Summer is all but done.

So mow your last cut and prepare to battle the carpet

of brown, red and yellow leaves that will fall to mark it.

For Autumn is coming with more gust than you'll know

and tomorrow you'll be lighting your fire and comforting in the glow.

But don't be despondent all full of gloom and piteous sorrow

for there is always something to look forward for tomorrow.

The dappled sun through the conker coloured trees

and even the freshness of the oh so sharp breeze.

Filling that awkward gap between the yellow of the sun

and the cold frosty snow when we know winter has begun

Autumn serves us well and allows us to manage our seasonal shock

for whatever happens there is no stopping that slow, ticking hand of the seasonal clock.

M.Thomas

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