Norfolk.... fountain of fun

So Norfolk is boring. That's official - because it was in the Daily Telegraph last month. Nothing was happening in the world that day, so the nation's media descended on the county to investigate. Television cameras were poked into our faces, and microphones shoved up our noses. We were not a happy bunch then. But we Norfolk people don't take that sort of thing lying down. When Noel Coward described the county as "very flat, Norfolk" in Private Lives he was sued. We have not changed.We thump you if you say we are boring. We telephone you in the middle of the night. We put curious things through your letterbox and tell you that our granny will pay you a visit. We put you on mailing lists for plastic surgery to correct bad ears and we ensure that you receive a substantial volume of very large catalogues.

If you walk into the street we push prams in to you and form large bus queues so that you can't get round us (these queues last for days, as the bus runs only on Thursdays). If you are in your car we get our caravans out and drive in front of you slowly very slowly. If you go to a supermarket we crash our trolleys into your ankles. So don't say we are boring. Understand?
I shouldn't be so defensive. Officially I'm no longer a Norfolk solicitor but it is difficult to shake off the yoke(l). A local paper recently referred to our firm as "Norfolk solicitors Hodge Jones & Allen who have an office in London".
My new partners would have put up with that, if only you hadn't started to call us boring. Now I am under a directive not to bring the tractor to Camden Town and, please, to wear a belt instead of my normal piece of string; to take the straw out of my mouth and to wipe the manure off my feet before entering the hallowed precincts.
All of us in Norfolk know we are not in the least bit boring. We are fascinating, riveting, brilliant, dazzling, radiant, scintillating, refulgent, glittering, captivating and spellbinding. In fact, your thesaurus names it, and we have it.
And leaders among the intriguing people of Norfolk are of course Norfolk solicitors. Let me introduce you to some of them.

Albert Cod. His name is almost eponymous but not quite. Albert is a thrilling character. He is the reigning Welney and Three Holes Roach fishing champion, a position which he has held now for 37 years. During the day he does conveyances but in the evenings and weekends his life is transformed. Instead of sitting silently at his desk, occasionally shuffling a piece of paper from left to right or lifting an old telephone receiver to his left ear (his right ear is deaf) he goes out into the flatlands of Norfolk and sits beside a drain with a thin piece of cane sticking out at an angle and a thinner piece of string hanging from it. From time to time a piece of wood attached to the string disappears under the water. This is a signal to Albert that once again he has struck lucky. His reflexes are rapid. In next to no time he picks up his rod and winds in a 3 inch long dirty wriggling fish. As he adds it to his keep net he makes a careful record of its colour, dimensions, number of fins, date and time that it was caught. Albert has so far filled 1,178 bound notebooks with details of his catches.
Albert's office is festooned with glass cases full of stuffed fishes which stare down lugubriously at his clients, making them squirm in their seats. If anyone so much as mentions the subject of angling, the interview is prolonged by at least another thirty minutes. But Albert, being such a great character, charges only at half rates when he is boring (oops, I meant enthralling) his clients.
One subject which Norfolk solicitors find really bewitching is conveyancing fees. I am sure you will too. The Little Snoring and District Law Society has debated little else since scale fees were abolished. Framed above the President's chair at the society's hall (actually it is a converted chapel from a long forgotten fringe religion: the Norfolk Quiverers) is one of the last remaining scale fee manuals. It is always referred to as "the Bible". Before every meeting, all members (or to be more precise, both members) face "the Bible" and bow. All oaths of allegiance are sworn on it. When issues of great importance have to be decided, it is consulted. The President has devised a means of using it to foretell the future. At night he can be seen pointing the guide to constellation of Cassiopeia, then performing complex calculations using a 1956 calendar and some small sea shells which he always carries with him.
Norfolk has many other wonderful legal characters - judges who give decisions with the consistency of blancmange and the predictability of lottery numbers; articled clerks (trainee solicitors have not reached the county yet) who roam the streets and terrorise clients who defect to other firms, and of course there is my vegetarian ex partner who tells me that he now spends most of his working day in the office cellar playing with pumps. The truth is that he is probably growing mushrooms down there, but please don't disturb him.
I could go on, and on and on, but too much excitement in one day is not good for Solicitors Journal readers. Besides, I must now indulge my own hobby and do a spot of train spotting. That's a good one isn't it - a spot of train spotting? Geddit?
Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho

This article first appeared in Solicitors Journal in October 1998