Our last Norfolk holiday, shortly before the next one

Yes, doing it again. After our pleasant-but-not-quite-cutting-it stay in King’s Lynn in May 2022, we were keen to return to the north Norfolk coast proper (interesting though the KL area is) and booked ourselves a coastal stay for the following year.

12-19 May 2023

Where we stayed

'Lazy Days', Gong Lane, Burnham Overy Staithe

Booked through Barefoot Retreats. Burnham Overy Staithe is a village we’d paid a brief visit to on our 2022 trip. Actually it’s probably a hamlet rather than a village – there’s a pub there (or there was when we were there) but no shops. It's a pretty little place with a harbour and boats moored along the tidal creeks. It's about a mile's walk to actual beach.

It wasn't a long walk down the lane to BOS's harbour, though “barely a pebble’s throw from the iconic salt marshes” is a bit of a stretch; you’d have to have one hell of a throwing arm.

The harbour at Burnham Overy Staithe

'Lazy Days' is described as a “luxury bolthole”. It’s an annexe to a larger house, separated from it by a (locked) door. The owners of the house were not in residence the week we were there, which made it a pleasanter and more peaceful stay. The road it’s on, Gong Lane, is a turn off the main A149, the opposite side from the harbour. There was plenty of evidence of newish luxury second homes: the house that the annexe forms part of looked to be fairly recently built, and the one next to it was even newer and bigger. The annexe itself is lovely, if bijou (it’s only designed for 2) and I think I’d happily stay there again.

'Lazy Days'. The holiday rental was the bit on the left behind the hedge

Our welcome pack

Day 1: walk to Burnham Market, via the Carmelite Friary of St Mary

We walked to Burnham Market along footpaths and country lanes, with a detour to see the ruins of this Carmelite friary, also known as Burnham Norton Friary. This was a short walk of only a couple of miles.

The gatehouse of Burnham Norton Friary

Tne River Burn at Burnham Overy Town

Burnham Market is an upmarket little town (or possibly large village) that's apparently nicknamed 'Chelsea-on-Sea'. We had quite a posh lunch there on our King's Lynn trip at 'No Twenty9' (pictured in the linked Express article), but this time had a lower key lunch at a café whose name I've forgotten, but it was about the least posh-looking establishment we could see.

Burnham Market

Before heading back, I made us locate what can be seen of the route of the former West Norfolk Junction Railway, which used to run between Heacham and Wells-next-the-Sea.

Part of the route of the West Norfolk Junction Railway

Day 2: walk from Burnham Overy Staithe to Brancaster

This was a walk of just under seven miles. Most of this walk is on the coastal path through marshlands – it’s not until you reach Brancaster beach that you actually see the sea.

The route

Setting out

Marshland scenery

Boats at Brancaster Staithe

We walked from the beach to Brancaster village and caught the Lynx Coastliner 36 (a fantastic service, this) back to BOS.

Day 3: bus ride to Sheringham

Ruth had suggested going over to Sheringham, I think to take in a more traditional seaside town. Apparently, as a Guide, she and a couple of other Guides once helped out at a Brownie Pack Holiday there, along with her mother who was the Pack’s Tawny Owl. I thought this might have been the motivation but she doesn’t seem to have retained much memory of what they actually did, so it wasn’t as though we could revisit anywhere.

Sheringham’s OK. Traditional seaside towns are not my favourite but it could have been a lot worse (see: Great Yarmouth). I much prefer Wells – although its harbourside does have fish and chip, ice cream places etc and at least one arcade, the sandy beach is a little way out of the town along Beach Road, while it’s the pretty harbour that’s actually in the town.

We got the Coastliner 36 service again for the c. 15 minute ride to Wells-next-the-Sea, and then had to change to pick up the Sanders Coaches CH1 Coasthopper service to take us on to Sheringham, a journey of about 50 minutes. We could of course have gone by car, but I managed to successfully persuade Ruth that going by public transport would be more relaxing for me. The coastal villages along the A149 are pretty but several of them (notably Cley) don’t look a lot of fun to negotiate a car through. The bus drivers do it with aplomb.

This was a cooler day. We had a short blustery walk and lunch at The Lobster.

My previous visit to Sheringham had been in 2001, when Ray and I had visited Ray's friend Dave and his wife Carol, who at the time lived there as Dave was for a good many years head greenkeeper at Sheringham Golf Club. Here I am by the golf course.

It was a slightly odd visit, as in addition to the four of us, Ray and Dave's friend Richard was also there, together with Richard's then-girlfriend, whom none of us had met previously but who turned out to be a girl I had been at St Barts with in the 1980s and hadn't liked. In fairness, I doubt I had been alone in that; she was objectively not very nice. As the only thing that I could think of to say on meeting her was "Oh yes, I remember you, you were a bitch", I thought it best to keep schtum and pretend I didn't remember her. She also claimed not to remember me, so we were set.

Day 4: walk to Wells via Holkham

Our longest walk of the week, at 7.6 miles. I assume the Strava image reflects high tide; we were not actually walking in the sea at any point.

Setting out from Burnham Overy Staithe

The route map shows the length of walk from BOS village to actually reach the beach, where we turned eastwards towards Holkham and from there on to Wells.

Dunes

Magnificent Holkham beach

We lingered in Holkham Meals (the scrubby woodland at the top of the beach) to recreate the atmosphere from the 1972 film A Warning to the Curious. I'm not sure I succeeded in being as scary as the ghost of William Ager.

At Wells, we paused to have a look at the new lifeboat station. Sadly the visitor centre and shop were closed.

New lifeboat station at Wells

Approaching Wells

We browsed around a few shops and then got the bus back to Burnham Overy Staithe.

Day 5: Felbrigg Hall

We visited Felbrigg Hall , about an hour's drive east from Burnham Overy Staithe. We didn’t actually go into the house, despite the entry fee covering this, as after a few hours walking around the gardens and parkland we’d run out of stamina.

Day 6: walk from the harbour at BOS to the beach, along a bit and back

For our last day, we spent a bit of time on Burnham Overy Staithe beach. Walking from the village, the Norfolk Coast Path follows the Overy Creek for a while then leads up over dunes to the beach. Looking at the map, there’s a whole network of tidal creeks here.

Path through the dunes

The beach is gorgeous, and very quiet, probably helped by its inaccessibility. There's no car park and no road there - the only access is the mile or so's walk along the footpath from the village.

The beach

Our route (about six miles in total):

We had a "last night" dinner at the village pub.

We're off to north Norfolk again tomorrow, returning to Wells-next-the-Sea for a week. It'll be nice to be there again.

Local things

Reading Walks Festival

Sunday 11 May

Back in March I booked Ruth and me onto two walks that were part of the Reading Walks Festival. The festival was organized by “REDA” (Reading’s Economy & Destination Agency), an organization I can’t say I’d heard of but it seems to be a rebrand of the former 'Reading UK'. I note from the web link that one of its aims is to enable Reading "to reach its full potential as a world-class destination and achieve its 2050 City Vision". I like Reading well enough but the first part seems a bit of an unnecessarily lofty aim and as for the second, Reading's multiple failed bids for city status will be passing into legend at this rate. This YouTube video Why British cities make no sense mentions Reading more than once.

Walk 1: University Heritage Trail (Earley Gate)

We met at the Earley Gate entrance to the Whiteknights campus, me slightly agitated as the bus ride had been slower than expected and Ruth and I were the last to arrive, which meant we had to be the annoying people who rush up at the last minute when everyone else is there and waiting to go.

Mustering at the start. Ruth's and my back views either side of the 'hump' sign

Things I learned on this walk:

• Temporary Office Building 1 has been demolished. Last year, apparently. There was a fence around it. A bit sad – even though I was a bit rude about Spur K at the end of this blog post in 2010; see also the end of this one. I only worked in the TOB for the last six months of my three-year stint at Progress South Central, after we were kicked out of the London Road campus to allow for its refurb. Apparently the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), currently on Shinfield Road, is going to move there, once a new building has been built to house it.

Site of TOB1

• TOB2, however, is still standing. We paused by it while the guide pointed out the entrance to a former air raid shelter, and gave us a bit of history. Apparently, the TOBs were originally meant as field hospitals for returners from the D-day landings. (Ruth and I both pondered why somewhere nearer the coast hadn’t made more sense.)



Former entrance to air raid shelter, near TOB2

TOB2

• Close to TOB2, we passed the site of a folly, apparently still visible on the 1890s OS map. We were shown a photo, taken maybe in the 1980s, which showed a small part of it still standing, but there's nothing there now.
• We heard quite a bit about the a former Marquess of Blandford, who acquired Whiteknights Park in the late eighteenth century and built himself a house. The two little lodges at the Earley Gate entrance stem from the same period as Blandford's house (and evidently currently have people living in them). After Blandford's departure, his house was demolished and the estate was split into six units. Park House (which used to house the Senior Common Room; don't know whether it still does) was built on its site. The drive to Blandford's house used to be carried over Whiteknights Lake by a stone bridge, wide enough for a carriage. William Martin’s stone bridge was demolished in the 1950s. Friends Bridge, which replaced it, was built in 1966.

Friends Bridge

Looking across towards Park House

• Walking over through the 'science' side of campus towards the Harris Garden, we passed Young’s Folly, apparently named after a member of the Buildings department as a joke, but I've forgotten the surrounding detail.

Young's Folly

• We went briefly into the Harris Garden for a photo. This is a lovely place which Ruth and I had visited earlier this month, the first time I'd been there since I worked at the university. It used to be managed by the School of Plant Sciences before that closed. It's now managed by Reading's Estates department.



Group photo in the Harris Garden



• 
  We walked through The Wilderness, an area of woodland of, apparently, about 11 hectares (27 acres). There used to be a house of this name, one of the houses built in the Victorian era after Whiteknights Park was split into six units. It was demolished around 1950. (A frustration: it’s very difficult to find photographs online of the former big houses on Whiteknights that were demolished. Pictures were shown briefly at a tour of Foxhill Ruth and I did as part of Heritage Open Days last September, but I didn’t get a proper chance to look at them and a follow up email query has yielded nothing.)



In the Wilderness



• There's a walled garden, that used to be in the grounds of The Wilderness. It's currently used as a big compost heap.



One of the walls of the walled garden



• Returning to the starting point, the guides took us past the Region 6 War Room, which used to be tucked away behind TOB1 and is now "tucked away" behind a building site and hence rather more noticeable. Post-civil defence use, it was used by the university library for storage but was closed after there was a flood and some of the library archives went mouldy. Officially there's no public access, but it's been entered by urban explorers, see YouTube. This drone footage is quite good and also shows TOB1.

The War Room building right-hand side of pic

The walk leads were a collection of friendly chaps, though there was a faint air of genial chaos. Several of the group leads were evidently leading similar-but-different walks over the course of the week. I was amused by one exchange conducted in the middle of the campus:

Assistant guide to lead guide: Are you going to talk about the cedars, Chris?
Chris: No.

After the walk, we walked the short distance over to the Three Tuns for lunch.

In memory of TOB1, here are a couple of pics I took of it in June 2011, around the time I left Progress South Central and started work at the OU.

Walk 2: Exploring East Reading's Lakes

This one met outside the Three Tuns (the reason we’d decided to have lunch there) and was led by two members of Loddon Valley Ramblers. I had had a bit of a fail with this one as I had overlooked the length, assuming it was about three miles and was surprised to hear the walk lead announced it would be five and a half miles. I tried to adopt a breezy “won’t this be good for us” attitude, while Ruth glared at me.

We turned left up Church Road for a while, crossing over the railway and the A3290, and turned in to the right through Highwood Local Nature Reserve. Don’t think I’d ever been through here.

We passed through an area with a pond that I was told is known as the Water Garden. Shortly after that we emerged onto the shores of South Lake. We were led around a circuit of the lake and then through some roads to the footbridge that crosses back over the A3290 and the railway at Earley station.

South Lake

Trains at Earley station

We crossed over Wokingham Road and then walked southwards through roads for a while. Although I had thought of all this area broadly as ‘Earley’, one of the walk leads told us that the area we were in, the poshest bit of Earley, is properly known as Maiden Erlegh. There used to be a Maiden Erlegh House in this area. Here's a picture of it just before its demolition in 1960.

We reached Maiden Erlegh Lake, which is quite small, and did a more-or-less circuit of it. Shortly before we reached the lake, we came across this goose with a number of goslings; there was another gosling the other side of the hedge, seemingly having trouble working out that it needed to push its way through the hedge to join the rest of its family. Hopefully it figured it out.

Maiden Erlegh Lake

We then walked along Beech Lane to where it joins Wilderness Road. This section was a bit tedious as it had got hot by this point. Thankfully we then crossed Wilderness Road and entered the shade of the Wilderness again, just by the walled garden that Ruth and I had passed on the morning walk. We walked past the Grotto and posed for a picture on this little bridge. I think it had replaced several other bridges on the same spot, but I've forgotten the detail.

The last part of the walk did a circuit of Whiteknights Lake, passing Foxhill House, the extravaganza that the architect Alfred Waterhouse built for himself in the 1860s.

Whiteknights Lake. Looking towards the Whiteknights Road end

Foxhill House

Before getting the bus back into town, we ducked into the Three Tuns again for a cold drink, and were joined by one of the other women who had been on the walk. She was evidently taking the upcoming week off work and was having a staycation doing quite a number of the walking festival walks. Sounded just my idea of a nice way to spend leave.

Our route:

Caversham Arts Trail

Saturday 17 May

We hadn’t been to this for a few years, partly because we had started to feel we’d seen everything on it, and there are only so many things that need displaying that you can buy, unless you a) live in a mansion; or b) keep a constant rotation of your possessions going on, which I can’t be arsed to do. However, Ruth noted that this year’s programme featured a few venues we hadn’t been to before. Also, it was a lovely sunny day for a walkabout.

We started by walking up to a property on Uplands Road, displaying its wares in its front garden. I hadn’t been intending to buy anything but surprised myself by buying a star-shaped pendant from SeasprayCove. The stall was also displaying some adorable crocheted (or knitted) sea creatures, made by the jewellery lady’s daughter, but I thought I didn’t really need additional cuddly stuff.

From there we walked to a smart 60s/70s-era house on Woodford Close, featuring mixed media works on paper plus organic handcrafted silver jewellery. The mixed media lady, the resident of the house, was involved in a conversation in the kitchen the entire time we were there, seemingly concerning some sort of culinary disaster that had just happened. The handcrafted silver jewellery lady, Molten Silver Jewellery, went into quite a bit of detail about the process of working with molten silver and the particular slant she puts on it. (This reflects a risk you run at these types of events, particularly if as at this house Ruth and I were the only punters there, where a polite noise of admiration in respect of someone’s silversmithing, appliquéng etc is taken as an invitation to talk in great detail about the intricacies of the production process.)

It’s fair enough for artists to want to talk about their work, I suppose – I just happen not to be all that interested in the creative process that led to the finished object, preferring to just go on whether I like the finished product. Additionally, for my part (and probably for a lot of others’ parts), a substantial ulterior motive in going round these sorts of events is to have a chance to have a bit of a gander at the exposed bits of people’s houses and gardens. In the case of the Caversham Arts Trail, most (though not all) of the host properties are in Caversham Heights, the poshest part of Caversham (and of Reading). I suppose I could imagine cutting to the chase as follows:

ARTIST: Are you interested in how I produced this work?
PUNTER: Not desperately, no.
ARTIST: Are you going to buy anything?
PUNTER: Realistically, no, probably not, but I shall “sweep browse” your wares while making a “Mmmmm” noise of vague admiration.
ARTIST: Are you actually just here to have a look at my house?
PUNTER: Well, yes, tbh.

The owners of the Woodford Close house have – to judge by the house’s ground floor living area – done a great job of respecting its origins, with a gorgeous parquet floor and a collection of appropriate Sixties-style furniture and display units.

After this we made our way to a property on Oakley Road showing off a couple of different things in their back garden (it was, luckily, a lovely sunny day). I bought a cute little pot from Noms Home (I am, shortly, going to do an audit of how many cute little pots I have) and two cakes from a cake sale, with proceeds going to the British Heart Foundation. The cakes on this occasion were very nice, but Ruth recalled an (apparently) particularly unpalatable scone she had had at a property on the Arts Trail some years back which she had ended up smuggling out stuffed into her pocket so as not to offend the host. I still can't understand how a scone can have been quite THAT bad.

Thence to Hemdean Road, to an end terrace with driveway, garage and nice-sized garden (jackpot!) that was hosting three artists, including The Welsh Woodman. I couldn’t resist his gorgeous collection of birds and bought this little oak chap on a hawthorn base. Ruth bought a trug – slightly curiously, but she has lofty garden ambitions.

Finally we called in at a studio behind the picture framers on Church Road. I was a bit done on art by this point so waited outside with the trug while Ruth had a browse.

The trug

My purchases

Walk with Hai via Newport Pagnell and Linford Lakes, 7.5 miles

Saturday 12 April

We wanted to meet up for an activity but decided against a parkrun as we’ve both been crap at them recently; also that would have meant an earlier start, and I wanted some time to recover from my Premier Inn breakfast and Hai had to drive a neighbour to the station.

We set off from Hai’s flat in Great Linford and followed the old railway path under the M1 to Newport Pagnell, where we stopped at a café for a drink. As it was quite warm, I went for an iced latte, which possibly could have done with some sugar. I rarely drink iced coffee as an adult but used to make them quite often as a teenager at home, using “Camp” coffee – I haven’t consumed Camp since and not sure whether it was sweetened or whether we added sugar, but the result is that I expect iced coffee to be sweet, so if I have one again I’ll be adding some sugar. It was quite nice though.

Iced lattes

After leaving the café we walked across the lower part of Bury Field to join Lakes Lane, which becomes the Ouse Valley Way and enters an area of fishing lakes. The footpath was poorly signposted here and I was glad I’d taken my OS map as it enabled me to get us across the correct footbridge.

Crossing Bury Field

Lane

River Ouse from the footbridge

We walked alongside the Ouse for a bit, through an area that looks from my map as though it would be pleasantly tree-lined, but in fact all the trees had been felled and it all looked a bit post-apocalyptic. Strava also shows it as an area called The Cob.

The not-so-green reality

After passing under the M1 (for the second time today), the path eventually reached a road, and we turned left and through Little Linford. There was a bit of roadside verge walking until we reached Mill Lane and were able to turn off into the Linford Lakes Nature Reserve. We followed the path – labelled as ‘Swan’s Way’ for the last bit – to where it joins the canal towpath and meets Wolverton Road. There are some posh new builds here.

Following the path

The path in the picture above is the yellow minor road with the dotted edges in the map snip below. We were about where the little red arrow is pointing.

Ruins of St Peter's Church

We followed the towpath under Black Horse Bridge and back along the canal to Great Linford.

Our route:

Returning to the annoying question of poor/absent footpath signage: Hai and I did a previous walk in July 2023 in the same area that was particularly bad. On that occasion we took a path leading off Little Linford Lane where the stile leading from the road to the path was borderline impassable – we lucked out as there happened to be a chap nearby, probably an angler with a permit, who opened the adjacent locked gate for us and let us in. I had a poke on Street View last night and from this October 2024 photo it looks to have possibly been cleared a bit, but still looks pretty overgrown.

Google Street View image of the footpath entrance (red star on map below)

Once we got in, we had to fight our way along a very overgrown “footpath” and, further on near Hill Farm, dithered for quite a while unsure whether to walk across a field - it did look from the map as though that was the correct route but again, there was no sign and I am not always robust enough to take a path if it's not made clear that it's public access. Hai and I did, eventually, take the path, in the absence of much other choice, and it was fine, but still. Speaking to Matt about it afterwards he reckoned that whoever owns the land just doesn’t want walkers there. Tsk. Needs some concerted Ramblers to complain to the council for better signposting.

There was supposedly a footpath in there somewhere ...

A book I read

‘Riders’ by Jilly Cooper

This March’s Book Group read. Claire, a JC fan, had flirted with putting Cooper’s 2023 novel Tackle! on our reading list, but then thought better of it, I think because she thought the rest of us wouldn’t like it. However, I quite fancied reading a JC as although I read a number of blockbusters in my teens, notably Lace and several of Jackie Collins’ novels, I had never read any Cooper. Most likely I was put off by the horsey theme suggested by Riders’ famous “bum in jodhpurs” cover art. However, I picked it for our book list as being a Cooper novel I knew of, and it’s also the first in the "Rutshire Chronicles” series of which Tackle! is the eleventh and latest (the term "Rutshire" is not mentioned in Riders so must have been something Cooper thought up for subsequent novels).

Characters

The main characters:

• Rupert Campbell-Black, successful show-jumper, Adonis and vile posho. Lives at Penscombe, a country house and estate in Gloucestershire;
• Jake Lovell, half-Romany ex-children’s home boy. When we meet him, he is working at a riding school, being great with the horses and rude to the children and their mothers. Jake’s gypsy father walked out on the family when Jake was eight. Jake first met Rupert Campbell-Black at prep school, which Jake was attending thanks to his mother being the school cook;
• Helen Campbell-Black, née Macaulay, at the start of the novel a 20-something American who’s just come over to the UK and is working for a London publisher. For most of the novel, Rupert Campbell-Black’s wife, after she idiotically marries him despite knowing perfectly well by a few dates in that they have nothing in common;
• Billy Lloyd-Foxe, Rupert’s schoolfriend and live-in chum. Nice but weak;
• Victoria “Tory” Lovell, née Maxwell, at the start of the book a pudgy 18-year-old reluctantly being dragged around the deb circuit by her mother, and later Jake’s loyal and long-suffering wife;
• Fenella “Fen” Maxwell, Tory’s younger sister and, by the end of the novel, champion showjumper at only 19. Behaves in a bit of a bratty way, but then she is still only a teenager by the end of the novel;
• Colonel Malise Gordon, distinguished Chef d’Equipe of the UK equestrian team

Blurb re story

I’m not going to attempt a synopsis of the story as it’s an endless rollercoaster of events, with Jake on top one minute, Rupert the next. It’s structured around a series of horse trials/events/whatever it is they’re called. The horsey stuff was actually reasonably engaging and I did find myself getting quite into the various horses and their personalities.

Much of the stuff in the novel that would nowadays be considered on the problematic side, I was able to reasonably gloss over as being to be expected from a novel of this age and type. It’s all loaded with sexist and boorish behaviour, infidelity and general reckless irresponsibility: the latter including shedloads of drink driving, and several times I found myself chiding characters for drinking so much on empty stomachs (e.g. reading page 141, I found myself shouting at Helen HAVE A SANDWICH). But I think getting too aerated about all that is a bit pointless. What was more difficult to gloss over is Rupert’s cruelty – to his horses, his son, his wife and tbh most of the people he comes across: not content with having bullied Jake in school, he won’t let up when he encounters him again in adult life, calling him “Hopalong”, “Gyppo” and mocking his mother’s suicide.

I was pleased that Jake has slightly rescued his life by the end of the book, though that only happens in the last few pages. I was aghast at his idiocy in starting an affair with Helen Campbell-Black – however pathetic Helen appeared, he should have steered well clear for his own sake. Jake’s genius with horses, plus his excessive nerves before competitions, presumably suggest that he’s better suited to being a trainer than competing as a rider. And I was pleased that he does, against the odds, secure the sponsorship that Rupert wanted, so one over on Rupert. Unfortunately, though, it’s left open whether Rupert’s spite and (completely unjustified) desire for vengeance might mean he continues to try and thwart Jake at every opportunity. We’ll never know.

Rupert Campbell-Black

Skimming back covers and snips of reviews of Cooper’s books over the years, I had got the impression that Rupert Campbell-Black was a recurring character and some sort of hero, albeit a roguish one. Ruth has read another one of Cooper’s "Rutshire" novels – Appassionata, I think – and confirms that RCB is in it, albeit in a more minor role. Reading Riders, I was shocked at how horrible Rupert is. Heroes in romance and other popular novels are definitely of a type: handsome, taciturn, occasionally domineering – but RCB goes beyond that into sheer unpleasantness. He thrashes his horses, punts his toddler son across the room, beats Helen up when she confesses to an affair and constantly baits and demeans others, including his wife (“You must be the only person who’s excited my dear wife in years. I certainly don’t.”). (Rupert, of course, has been sleeping around for years, which he blames on Helen’s frigidity; when Helen is faced with photographs of Rupert cavorting with his groom in one of their fields, he turns it on her, with “Why should I apologize for your inadequacies?”)

In general, cruelty to animals and hitting women and children would completely debar a man from hero status. But I got the strong impression that despite Rupert’s flaws, Cooper was representing him as a hero. There were several points where I suspected Cooper was depicting a character she herself fancied: at one point a horse is “driven on [around the course] by Rupert’s erotic pelvic thrusts”. Wearing a new designer suit, "such was Rupert's masculinity, and the enhanced blueness of his eyes, and the lean, broad-shouldered length of his body" - Christ, calm down, woman. When he attempts sex with his wife when she is upset after their baby's hospitalisation, he was, apparently, trying to comfort her "in the only way he knew". Diddums. The distinctly non-consensual group sex scene that Rupert ropes Helen into with Billy and Billy's wife Janey (Rupert locks Helen in with them and orders her not to be “a fucking spoilsport”) is distasteful beyond the general macho behaviour that permeates the book.

Towards the end of the novel, Rupert jumps a clear round at the Los Angeles Olympics despite having one arm in a sling and is feted even by the usually-disapproving Malise Gordon, who makes a sick-making speech telling Rupert that “without doubt you produced the finest and bravest display of riding I’ve ever seen”. Rupert isn’t brave, he’s an utter pig and sufficiently unpleasant to put me off reading any of Cooper’s subsequent novels, which I might have done otherwise.¹

Riders was published in 1985. The story begins in 1970 and works its way up to the mid-eighties.

 

¹  I've never been attracted to complete bastards, however ropey their arsing childhoods might have been - see Christian in Fifty Shades of Grey, and back in the eighties I remember having a dispute with my sister as to the merits of Judd Nelson’s character in The Breakfast Club. I maintained that he had zero merits; Hannah felt I think that he had some sort of tortured soul quality caused by childhood neglect that excused him. Yeah, sod that.