Lost in Norwich

A waking dream set in Norwich, although the places I was visiting in the course of the dream do not seem to have much to do with the Norwich I can remember now, a place we lived in maybe thirty years ago.

I was rather lost, somewhere in a large and hilly town, involving a castle and some large churches on hills. Fair enough to the extent that Norwich did have both a castle and some large churches. And the name was enough to hang a few facts off.

Trying to make my way to the railway station to get home, via a station called Cringleford. For some reason, in the dream, I was not living where we actually lived in Norwich, just off the Newmarket Road, rather in the next door village which was called Cringleford, although I am fairly sure it did not actually have a railway station. It did have a river.

Someone tells me about a fine new way of buying tube tickets - not that Norwich had a tube then or has one now - which involved buying squares of tickets, say about nine inches square, and the idea was that you broke off enough tickets to make up the necessary amount. With the irritating catch that if you were buying several tickets you had to buy each one separately, which meant that there were a lot of rounding errors working to the advantage of the railway. In the dream I did not think, as I probably would think waking, that they probably needed the money, so it did not really matter. I wound up with lots of loose tickets and loose change in my pockets.

Made my way through town to a roundabout which I thought was somewhere near the station. A way which involved going through a very long and narrow alley, with a name - something Lane - I no longer recall, but vaguely associated with the red light district. Couldn't see the station at the roundabout, but there were some bikers in the road - bikers on large and flashy motorcycles - and I asked one of them. He pointed it out, as it turned out, just beyond the far side of the roundabout.

A grand if run-down station, complete with lots of arches and stonework. I get inside to find that in order to buy tickets I have to climb down onto the tracks of a branch line and climb up onto a bale of newspapers in order to be able to reach the window of the ticket office. Ambience all very mid sixties rather than mid eighties. Dark, wet, lots of overcoats and cloth caps. Cheesecutters as they were sometimes called. I vaguely associate with Peterborough Station, I place I sometimes changed at on my way back to Norwich from up north, a change which did involve branch lines.

There are trains to Cringleford, but the ticket office clerk tells me that there has been a terrible fire there. At which point I remember that I have only just moved there, only have the dimmest idea of where I live and have neither address nor telephone number. At which point I wake up.

At which point I start to remember a bit more about the house in Cringleford, a house I have visited in my dreams before, but which has not and does not, as far as I can recall now, actually exist.

PS: all of which reminds me of the irritating fact that it is very hard these days to buy a coat of a sensible length. They all seem to stop at the knee, not much good if it is either cold or wet.