It's many months since we've been further away from Cromer than our feet will carry us. But yesterday, on account of my unfortunate breakage, we needed to go to Norwich. (The hospital in Cromer will X-ray you, and give you a temporary splint, but for a specialist consultation and heavy-duty plastering, you need to go to Norwich.)

So we thought we'd hire a car, and make a day of it.

I'll get the boring hospital bit out of the way first.

It's a very minor fracture, with no displacement, and I still have "excellent" range of movement (I do love a compliment).

I have a cast (it's PURPLE!), and would normally wear it for four weeks, but if we have to climb on board a plane earlier (I don't know what the chances of that are, since the requirements for re-entering Malaysia are STILL changing...), then the injury is sufficiently minor that the cast could responsibly be swapped for a splint, which we could then remove ourselves if we're in quarantine by that time.

So it would have been a whole lot better if I'd not done it, but given I have, I'm lucky it's not a whole lot worse...

On the way to Norwich we stopped off in North Walsham, one of the villages that's been tantalizingly beyond our walking range. The massive church, dedicated to St Nicholas, is notable for its pretty porch and its dramatically collapsed west tower. It's a great pity we can't enter these churches at the moment, as we're missing all kinds of gems. One day, when this is all over (and one day, we have to trust, it will all be over), we'll have to return, and visit them again.








It was perhaps a bad idea to stop off here on the way to the appointment, as we then got badly lost... But never mind, I made it more or less on time.

Afterwards, we ate our packed lunch in the middle of a housing estate near the hospital, which sported a magnificent display of poppies:


On the return journey to Cromer, we stopped to look at St Andrew, Bacton, whose magnificent tower apparently serves as a landmark for navigators.




Just down the road is Paston, which boasts not only an unusual, thatched-roof church, dedicated to St Margaret, but also an ancient thatched barn, and a fine windmill.







(This, incidentally, is the Paston of the famous Paston Letters, a historically very significant collection of correspondence written between 1422 and 1509.)

To make the most of our hire car, we packed a beef sandwich breakfast this morning, parked up at Trimingham, and walked the coast path to Mundesley.

We started amid another bout of Norfolk's hugely atmospheric sea fog:






Of note en route are the remnants of a WWII emergency coast defence battery:




It was the promotion of "Poppyland" that led to the restoration of All Saints, Mundesley: "Until 1905, it was just another clifftop ruin. Inside, a plaque records that 'from this point eastward the nave and chancel of this church were in ruins for over a hundred years'... Mundesley's reinvention as a resort created a need for a new church, and so the ruin was rebuilt, spectacularly well, in two stages."

It looked very dramatic this morning, looming out of the mist:



And Mundesley, like so many of its Norfolk siblings, hosts a jolly collection of beach huts:


After so many weeks of a very limited radius, it felt very strange to be venturing further afield. I'm starting to worry that the coronavirus mega-event has irreparably broken something in us all...