NORTH SEA SUMMER

Sitting on a bike all day I needed to find something to do with my brain at times.   This was especially the case when dealing with steep hills, where I started to find snatches of songs insinuating themselves into my mind and repeating over and over again.   The first of these was a song called ‘Nancy of Yarmouth’ in a version recorded by a Suffolk singer named Cyril Poacher back in the 1960s. I don’t know why it got into my head, but it did, and I thought I’d better learn the whole thing, so I found a transcription of the words on my phone then copied them onto a piece of paper and slipped it into the map case on my bar bag.  The pace of the song seemed to fit the rhythm of my pedal strokes perfectly, especially when going uphill.  And of course Yarmouth was over on the other side of the North Sea.  Learning this song took me through most of Norway, and when I wasn’t practising the song I devoted myself to learning to count in Norwegian. It was a ...

For the next two days I travelled through a landscape of sand dunes and pine forest.   The forest was planted over a hundred years ago to stabilise the dunes, which have a habit of moving around if left to their own devices. The weather remained unseasonably cold, but at least it didn’t rain.   Bunkers overlooking the road Suspected WW2 concrete Holiday village On this part of the coast the remains of the Second World War are everywhere.   Bunkers nestle in the dunes, overlooking the road and the sea.   Where there aren’t bunkers there are vast holiday villages, often linked by stretches of concrete track that must also be remnants of the war.   At Lokken the NSCR takes to the beach for 14km, but I’d had more than enough sand coating my bike in the last few days, so I kept to the road past a famous sand-engulfed lighthouse, through farmland and forest and eventually into the teeth of a bitter NW wind as I headed back to the coast and cam...