Mortar Attack: Falling in Love in Aldeburgh

Up early on Saturday I was suffering from a savaging at the paws of the canus nigerus hangoverus. It was a foolish move to introduce Wyborowa to my non-vodka drinking family the night before and one we were all paying for. But the boating trip in the Norfolk broads would wait for no man, nor would the on-boat champagne we'd planned to have to celebrate my Ma’s birthday, unfortunately scheduled for 11.00 hours.

Early-morning champagne drinking has been the ruin of me on more than one occasion and so it proved this day. By mid-afternoon I’d had a few beers on top and in a whistle stop tour of some of the best of the UK's brewing tradition, some porter (delicious, from the St Peter's Brewery in Suffolk) stout and Aspell’s Peronelle’s Blush (superb and a favourite of mine, with actual blackberry liqueur rather than the colourant of Bulmer’s Jacques, but I digress). By late afternoon we were in Aldeburgh for a meal and I had to go for a little stroll to clear my head. 

And that’s when I fell in love...

Now it may have been the booze or it may have been the fact that for the past 8 months I’ve lived away from the UK, or it may just be that I’m a silly old sod, but I felt a strong surge of emotion for the beautiful red brick walls around me. Swaying slowly down a deserted side street, I realised just how ubiquitous these red clay bricks are in use in houses and construction of a certain period in the UK. 

I remembered just how long I’d spent inside buildings made of or on top of, or leaning against, these dark red bricks with that beautiful patchwork of red imperial solidity. 

I rembered those walls as backdrops to outrageous fights, games of football and fumbling kisses in the dark with girls from the local High School.

Be they deeply pitted with the initials of over 150 years’ worth of pupils at my school or gnarled with time and the furtive advance of mould, they are nothing other than resolute and so typical of Britain. 

As I stood in the sullen late afternoon heat, drinking in the view (which was, after all, just an average road in a beautiful sea-side town in England) I really did feel all this and even more I can't articulate.  I had a moment of clarity and felt that it doesn’t matter how long I spend away from Blighty, I will always love it for the way it’s shaped me as a person, and that love can be revealed in the strangest ways when you finally leave its shores.

In vino veritas, perhaps, but don't worry, I'm no Karl Watkins.