Blog Norwich

I don’t really like green fields and pastures and all that kind of thing. I’ve always lived in the city so if you want to pave over Cringleford, that’s really fine with me. It’ll probably make it quicker to get to the A11 that way anyway.

And as for Sprowston, well, there’s not really anything worth keeping there anyway so about 10,000 homes is about right. You might want to build a school or something to go with it. Maybe a hospital or at least another garden centre. Don’t worry about a post office though, it only takes about 2 hours to get to castle mall on a motability scooter, so that’ll be fine.

Not quite like it used to be when you could happily fall back onto the Norwich Union worksheet and do a few years of mundane nothingness just to get enough money to be boring. Norwich without Norwich Union is like Ipswich without tractors. I expect Mr Bignold is weeping a silent 200-year-old tear over the inevitable departure of Vauxhall Aviva to Milton Keynes where at least they’ll be able to watch a half-decent football team from Wimbledon.

At least we’ll still be famous for shopping.

I can usually walk around the city quite easily. I do like it when its nice and full of easter holidaymakers and youths with large hair sloping around the forum. There’s so much to moan about on a leisurely stroll along Gentleman’s Walk.

So I’m greatly miffed that I’ll have to keep stepping out of the way for a stupid noddy bus as it rattles around the pedestrianised streets, carrying goons from Essex and Suffolk around the cultural hotspots. I bet it’ll have some really annoying bell that it dings it some really annoying way as well. Bloody tourists. They’ll be wanting anther festival next.

Want to get all continental on us? Ho, you must be joking! We didn’t move up to Norwich and get a house in the city centre to have you locals getting all your tables and chairs out and enjoying yourselves around us. We’ve got our friends coming up from Fulham this weekend and if Jemima doesn’t get proper sleep she’ll have anxiety attacks.

Really there’s no place in Norwich, especially within 1 mile of our fabulously overpriced London-weighted abode, for so-called enjoyment. It was bad enough with that awful racket coming from the concert hall, but people on the streets? Having a drink? On a summer evening? Goodness me.

Get back to Sprowston and have your fights there, or whatever it is you local people do.

I didn’t know the lanes went all the way up St Giles. I saw a map once, but now I know they do, because there’s all those green paving slabs and red posts all over the place. Good luck. I used to work in the lanes when they were just lanes. They were rubbish then, but you could get a newspaper and some cigarettes etc. If I want clothes I go to Burtons.

They start the demolition of the old brewery on King Street next week. That’ll be nice. Its not really the most attractive building in the area. What say we clear that old rubbish out and stick, say, 500 houses and flats there instead. That’ll be nice. You can share the view of Carrow Road and Morrisons with all those other people who paid 250 thousand pounds for a flat now worth 150 thousand pounds and who don’t even live in it. Should be a lively community feel to the place.

Perhaps you could all meet up and go bowling. Oh, wait, you can’t do that.

Bwwuuhahaha. You have to laugh at that. Even the moaners. Just when you think things might be going wrong, they go disasterously wrong. What price the drop? You’re safe, apparently, according to someone on Future FM.

That’s alright then.

Went to the football the other day to see Norwich City get beaten like a souffle by Blackpool. Woeful as it was, it was just one game at the end of some kind of unbeatren run where we lost. But that’s not good enough for Norwich City fans. They don’t just shrug your shoulders and say “Oh well, never mind, there’s always next week/match/sky tv 11 o’clock kickoff”. No, they boo at the end of a match which sees their team maintain a mid-table respectability after the worst start to a season since the tortoise was lagging behind the hare. Many lashings of “Aah Cureton geddorf you’re craap” and “We int got noo midfield ha we? Thas terrible! Was Rooder doin?” and “Pass ut, pass ut PASS UT! Aaaah, get rid of im!” there were. Not not even the sound of the occasional one hand clapping could lift their mood.

It’s just the apathetic grumbly way that City fans attend matches at Carrow Road. Miserable sods. Mind you, I’ve just been told you can get Bonzo Bear with an Easter Egg from the Canary store, so that should cheer them up then.

What the hell is that? Nice to see that PCSOs are sticking sticks in the spokes of pavements cyclists right now and good luck to them. You do want to watch those plebians launch over their own handlebars onto their chins. But that’s apparently not bad enough. I now have to avoid pavement drivers. I know this this, because I have actually had to step out of the way of them.

If you happen to live on one of those streets in Norwich where a line of cars parked on one side of the road leaves enough space for, at most, 1 car at a time to drive on what’s left, then you’ll probably already know what I’m talking about. It depends, however, on the height of the curbs as to just how life-threatening your walk to work/school/pub might be. There are a number of roads in the victorian terraced areas around here with curbs that pretty much don’t exist. I mean, you can see them alright, but it’s not too much of a lurch to just stick your front wheel up there and cruise along for a bit when you can’t be arsed to wait until the person coming in the other direction has passed.

Note to those drivers. Those are my legs you’re driving at. Oh, and the kids on their way to school who now have to not only concentrate when they cross the road, but when they walk along beside it. You lazy arses should be kicked out of the gene pool.

Why is that there? I lived there ages ago and it was miserable. I kind of like the boundary junction though, which will always be a roundabout to me. It’s the most exciting place in the world, and I’ve never even been to Bottoms Up yet.

I guess its too much too ask that I can park in your car park is it? I mean, I will pay and everything, but you just don’t seem to have much space going on there. I heard that Jeremy Vine going on about free car parks in Wales on the wireless today and everybody was ringing him up and saying “they’re full of commuters and people going to Waitrose and I can’t even park there and I’m a nurse”, but that doesn’t apply here, because, unless you’re playing football at the UEA and really are a cheapskate idiot, nobody wants to park in the hospital car park unless they’re going to the hospital.

Which is why it should be big enough. I had to go up there a few times recently and, as I don’t have one of those Land Rovers that they park halfway up a ramp at the garage on Sprowston Road, I had to lurch it up onto the grass verge and take out the manifold. Put some more spaces in damn it. Pave over the UEA or something.

Excuse me. Cheap as it is, I pay for that resident’s parking space. Look, see, there’s one of those purple permits in the window of my car. It’s even for the right zone. You, however, Mr ABC, think that being a taxi means you can park anywhere you like whenever it suits you, which includes in my residents parking spaces every bloody day.

You’re not just parking there, you’re actually winding that seat back in the Mondeo, reclining your miserable fat self and sleeping there. Oh, and if all the resident’s spaces are taken (by builders vans), you’re quite happy to just park on the double yellows by the crossing island, while the number 25 collides with the airport bus trying to negotiate around you.

Why not try and see it from other people’s perspective, i.e. not as a selfish, lazy idiot?

I love the war memorial. I used to spend hours there getting drunk on meths and flicking chips at pigeons. There was a great sense of belonging there, all the wasted and deranged locals gathering together for a good old Thursday lunchtime fight about nothing.
Which is why I’m so glad that there will be an inordinate amount of money spent on restoring it to it’s former glory. It will take a few years, but that’s ok, because it will take that long for me to lose my job, go mad, and end up there for the grand opening with a fresh 2 litre bottle of cider from Tesco Metro and a face like the living embodiment of depair. That’ll make the council proud. I’ll be inviting all my old mates. The ones that are still alive. I think some of them got fenced in when they boarded it up and are actually still there.

I just got a letter from the right honourable mention Charles Clarke MP. Apparently he’s going to stop people riding their bikes at pedestrians with some kind of big gun. I always find its an uncomfortable experience bumping into Mr Clarke in Waitrose. Its an uncomfortable experience bumping into anyone at Waitrose because they mostly have geriatric elbows that pierce your skin. Except the Range Rover 30-somethings. Where the hell do they get their money from? I don’t begrudge them their success, well, I do, but I just don’t understand it. They can’t all own farms or be Mill Hill Road skip merchants.

He’s got a nice car. It’s nicer than mine. I accidentally scratched it coming out of the car park at Greens last time I was there. I’m assuming it was his anyway, because it had a registration something like ‘D HUK7′ and a disabled badge balanced on the sat nav, which was displaying directions to Coventry.