We're in Cromer, Norfolk.

We weren't supposed to be in Cromer. We were supposed to be tucked up again with our family in Newark, and then off to the Isle of Man in a week's time. But there's this damn virus...

We're absolutely fit and well; we've no reason to think we've been exposed; and there's no official government directive covering the areas we have travelled from.

But given that the virus seems to be a stealthy thing, that can apparently be passed on by people who have no obvious symptoms, and given that cases in Spain have leapt up in recent days, and given that some of the family members we were due to be staying with are not in the best of health, we thought it best to keep ourselves to ourselves for the first couple of weeks we're back. We're not self-isolating exactly, but we're definitely minimizing contact.

We arrived here on Monday evening. We're staying in a former fisherman's cottage, which (we're told) belonged to a shoemaker in the early 1900s. Originally a one-up-one-down, it's been extended slightly over the years, and though still quite tiny, it's very comfortable.





Over the course of yesterday and today, we've paced out the town (dramatically positioned on a cliff overlooking the sea, the beach, and the pier), and walked along the cliff path to Overstrand and back along the beach.











Cromer is slap in the middle of North Norfok's Deep History Coast. "Deep history" is apparently now the preferred term for "prehistory", and finds along this 22-mile stretch of coast "have provided the earliest evidence for human occupation so far discovered in northern Europe. They place early humans here in Norfolk some 350,000 years earlier than had been thought, at over 850,000 years ago. They also inform and provide a focus for the emerging story of Doggerland -- an area of land, now lying beneath the southern North Sea, which connected Great Britain to mainland Europe during the last Ice Age."

Cromer's chalk (formed from the marine deposits of ancient seas) is foundational. Just offshore is the largest chalk reef in Europe, a feature that gives Cromer crabs their particularly flavoursome flesh.

The crabs are caught using pots, and the boats that go backwards and forwards setting and clearing the pots launch from the shingly beach with the aid of tractors.




We got our crab from the J. Lee Crabstall. "Try it just as it is first," said the salesperson. And he was right. It's so delicious it needs no help from anything else.


Found naturally in chalk is flint. Used by early man for tools, it's also a beautiful and really characterful feature of both the natural and the built environment round here.













We'll be very happy here for a little while. But it's kind of frustrating that our family -- who we don't see for so much of the year -- are so close but so inaccessible. Hoping against hope for a speedy resolution of some kind.