Palm Sunday service at St Michael's Church, Swaton, Lincolnshire, commemorating the arrival of Jesus into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey a few days before his arrest and crucifixion.
Negotiating a burst water main, Great Yarmouth,Norfolk,UK
Two young men from Lithuania out shopping in Boston, Lincolnshire on Saturday afternoon. They’ve adopted the ‘gopnik’ look, popular amongst fans of 'blatnaya pesnya' - literally 'criminal’s songs’, a genre of music popularised by East European hip-hop artists but with its roots in 19th Century czarist Russia.
Squash for sale down the Fen off the A10 near Southery during the recent cold snap. Payment via honesty box is a familiar sight in Norfolk and I suspect in many other rural areas too. Relying on honesty isn’t a great basis for a business as it depends on the buyer believing that dishonesty, directly observed or not will be at some point be punished. Until recently that belief was known as having a conscience, now all you need is a Ring Doorbell.
A room (kolhata) to rent advertisement in a newsagents window, King’s Lynn. The text is in Russian cyrillic and deliberately designed to appeal to prospective East European migrants tenants of a certain age.
Anyone who went to school behind the Iron Curtain before 1991 learned Russian as part of the curriculum, and as part of the USSR’s cultural domination of its occupied territories.
Although widely loathed and abandoned after the fall of communism, the practise of having a common language proved useful for migrants when those countries joined the EU under the A8 accession rules in 2004 and they were given the right to come to live and work in the UK. That meant Czechs, Latvians, Lithuanians, Slovakians, Slovenians, Poles, Hungarians and Estonians could communicate with each other. Quite useful if you’re trying to make yourself heard on a factory floor or field in the Fens. Even today If you go into any of the East European shops in the town the transaction will often complete with the assistant exclaiming “Spasiba”, the Russian word for thanks.
Children playing a clapping & rhyming game on a street in King's Lynn, the meaning of which is probably only known to them. It went 'Ribena, sassatina, big boy,crazy girl....STATUE!'. It stuck me how unusual it was to see children playing without the intervention of technology, just using their imagination. The location is Garden Row, just off Windsor Rd. If you're local you may recognise one of Lynn's great pubs, the Livey on the left. Garden Row also contains one of the few remaining cobbled streets in the town which survived the slum clearances in the 1930s.
The Bicafe on on Albion St, King’s Lynn, behind the bus station. One of the half-dozen or so establishments serving the Portuguese community in the town. Usually family businesses run by ladies of a certain age they serve traditional dishes like Bacalhau à Brás - salt cod and potatoes that offer a little taste of home to those that perhaps haven’t been there for a while. Portuguese cafes take their very coffee seriously and everything starts with espresso. If you go ask for a Cortado, a double shot, with a layer of honey then steamed milk.
Being a romance language Portuguese has gendered words, so it’s Obrigado to say thank you as a man and Obrigada as a woman. Naturally I got it wrong, although in recent times the language has tended towards the masculine, something that apparently doesn’t meet with the approval of the older generation.
One of my favourite towns is Great Yarmouth. Like all port towns it’s got a bit of an edge and swagger to it, but unlike most of its neighbours along the Norfolk coast it has managed to resist commodification by the well heeled Guardian readers fleeing the the depravities of London in a search for an England they remember from their childhood. Much of the old town including the market, where once you could see the herring catch, or traders juggling plates has, of course gone, having been replaced by something ugly designed by an expensive architect. Despite that Yarmouth still retains the spirit that Dickens found in it. If you go make sure you check out the Market Tavern - a proper local pub and Klobber & Western World on Regent Rd.
The growing of pumpkins in the peat rich Cambridgeshire Fens is a profitable business thanks to the proximity of a number of US airbases and the American enthusiasm for celebrating Halloween. For almost fifty years the community of Soham has come together in the autumn to show off their husbandry skills and compete to grow the heaviest pumpkin or the longest leek.
