Northeast of London, there is a village on the Norfolk coast called Salthouse, and in this village called Salthouse, there is a restaurant the way one finds restaurants in salty sea villages. Cookie’s Crab Shop, weathered wooden tables, outdoor eating under a canvas tent leaning on uneven ground, a fishing boat parked by the small gate. If you are an ambulance driver, you may tell the nurse you work with that Salthouse is an hour away from Colchester. However, if you are the nurse the ambulance driver works with, you and your husband pick up your visiting friend at the Colchester train station late Wednesday morning, and find, one hour later, that you are a good many miles still from the Norfolk Coast.

“Suzzan,” I said, and the sky was blue, and the trees whizzed by turning autumn, “you and Christopher are the coolest people I know right now in the U.K., because you will drive two and a half hours for lunch.”

“But this was under false pretences,” she said, as we drove through Norwich, through Cromer, past the hotel The Melbourne hawking donuts and candy floss.

Still.

And, anyway, the truth is, like I told Suzzan, it didn’t seem like three hours’ driving, what with all the English Countryside Views: cows; and beautiful, sturdy Shire horses; and sheep, so many sheep. And windmills, and neat bales of hay, and giant strawberries announcing strawberry farms.

The story with the Shire horses is that in the middle of Christopher saying something about something, I said: “Whoa. Look at that horse”—if you know something about me, it is that I get distracted by horses—and the horse in the field by the motorway was massive, and spotted black-on-white like he was wearing cow pyjamas.

(And I remember now that my friend Maud once said about black-and-white cows, and it is possible that here she sniffed, I don’t quite recall, but in any case, oh, there was so much disdain, she said something very much like: “They are like fucking giant Dalmatians.”)

But with the Shire horse—

“Look at that horse,” I said, and Christopher said, “Yes, that is a Shire horse,” and proceeded to tell about Shire horses, back in the day, pulling barges on the canal.

“Shut. Up,” I said, because sometimes I cannot help being American, and because, well, it seems that the very nature of a boat would be to boat—to move on water, I dunno, to do its boaty thing. And if a boat needs a horse to pull it, does it become less of a boat? Does it become a raft? A woody shape piled high with things?

In any case, there it is, folks, straight from the horse’s mouth, HA HA HA, sorry, couldn’t help it, I meant: there it is, if someone knew about Shire horses, that someone would be an Englishman, and so there we have it, straight from the mouth of a really truly Englishman: once upon a time you could see Shire horses pulling barges along the canal. And today, you can see them hanging out at show-and-tell at the Norfolk Shire Horse Centre in West Runton—but only if you pay the £5.80 entrance fee. If you stand around and kick the dirt outside, that’s free, and if you wait long enough outside the stables, a nice white horse will come by for you to pet it, and that’s free, too.



In Salthouse, finally, the cars were parked any which way on the balding gravel mound, so we did, too.

Inside the Cookie’s shack, injunctions far as the eye could see: Please do not bring your own food or soft drinks, as we serve these here. Please bring your own wine glasses, there have been many breakages. We are not a tea room, we do not serve teas or coffee.

The menu was all salads—Crab Salad, Crayfish Salad, Salmon Salad, Crab and Crayfish Salad, Crab and Salmon Salad, LOBSTER ROYAL SALAD—which is to say, great big meaty servings of fish and shellfish surrounded by slices of tomato and cucumber and beets, and spoonfuls of coleslaw; and all the dishes came with faces on them. The pâté welcomed us with a tomato smile. The salmon looked about with olive eyes lined in pink shrimp. There were sticky toffee puddings on the menu, too, but no chance to find out if those had faces, because our tummies ran out of space.

We tried to work off our feast with a spot of post-lunch bowls, but the Cromer Bowls Club, its green pristine, was silent and closed. And the sea was silent, too, and the wind was picking up.

Later, after Suzzan’s homemade meatballs in a hot noodle soup, after the chocolate pudding, after the screening of “Sin City” (we couldn’t look at it, we couldn’t look away, and whoa!, they made Benicio del Toro look ugly!, and I kept grabbing at Suzzan’s arm)—later, the train back west was quiet like a late-night train journey, save for the violent, surprising wind thumps when passing trains went by in the opposite direction.

Half-past ten in London, the rain was pissing down cold and dark. I ran home from the tube station, my too-long jeans scuffing against the wet ground, the air wicked icicles piercing my lungs.

I stayed up reading till the rainsound on the skylight quieted, quieted, stopped.