Our trip along the Norfolk coast gets off to a bad start when, early on Saturday evening in Wisbech, we discover that my bike has been pinched off the back of the ’van. An hour later we are standing in a chap's garden in King's Lynn and weighing up a pink mountain bike with white pedals and handlebars – one careful lady owner (his mother-in-law), £40. I hand over the money, strap the bike on the ’van and off we go, problem solved. It helps that I am a man who is not easily embarrassed.
We explore King's Lynn the following day in the rain. It is one of those places, like Boston in Lincolnshire, which has a fascinating history, but has rather gone to seed. Its heyday was from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries when, as part of the Hanseatic League, it was England's most important port.
Two Hanseatic League warehouses are the only remaining ones in England. We lunch with friends outside one of them beneath a dripping umbrella, next to the dead-straight channel of the Great Ouse, which leads to the Wash a few miles north.
A couple of small trawlers moored alongside feel incongruous in these flatlands. The Lynn Museum is closed, it is still
