Remember the Vicar of Stiffkey?

WE are in Norfolk for a few days. I always assumed it was flatter than this. We are nestled under a hill big enough to wipe out the mobile-phone signal. When was the last time you were in a pub restaurant where not a single person was nattering inanely into a mobile? Blessed relief.

HOLKHAM Beach has been on my must-visit list for years. It's that amazing white-sand strand on the north Norfolk coast where Gwyneth Paltrow, as Viola, strides ashore from the shipwreck in the closing scene of Shakespeare in Love. So wide, so white, so dazzlingly unforgettable. Anyway, to cut a long story short, when we arrived the tide was in at Holkham. Not a grain of sand to be seen.

IN fact, the tide was so high that it was spilling over the top of the quay in Wells-next-the-Sea. In this part of the world no-one panics until the sea is actually in the living room. Unfazed and relatively safe behind its new sea defences, Wells was decked with bunting and Jolly Roger flags, ready for its Pirate Festival. It was a joyous reminder that England is probably the only country in the world where pirates are folk heroes. It goes back to Drake, Raleigh and stealing Spanish galleons laden with silver. We see grand larceny on the high seas as yo-ho-ho jolly good sport. The Spanish, and most of the rest of the world, regard pirates as no better than paedophiles.

DURING the 1982 Falklands War, the Argentine newspapers used images of Maggie Thatcher in a pirate hat to express their scorn and disgust. Thatcher had been seen as many things, from Iron Lady to wicked witch, but her portrayal as a latter-day Captain Pugwash did her ratings in the UK no harm at all.

WE are staying in a fine old pub but its bathrooms have been refurbished with monobloc taps to bang your head on and those plug-on-a-rod devices that empty the sink while you are washing. My Campaign for Real Authentic Plumbing, doomed by our love of gadgets and possibly by its own initials, is over. The battle is lost.

THE church in Sedgeford, near Hunstanton, has a plaque recalling that in 1852, 20 people of the parish died in a typhus epidemic and another 130 were infected. It offers the biblical text: "For He doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men." Which raises the obvious question: If the Almighty doesn't inflict natural disasters willingly, why does He inflict them at all?

JUST down the road is the village of Stiffkey, home of the notorious "Randy Rector of Stiffkey," Harold Francis Davidson. Never heard of him? I bet your grandparents had. In the 1930s he was at the heart of the biggest church scandal in Britain. Accused of multiple counts of indecency with girls and young women, Davidson was sacked by the Church. Endlessly proclaiming his innocence, he joined a sideshow at Skegness where he appeared in a lions' den. He died in 1937 after accidentally treading on the tail of a lion called Freddie. We don't seem to get stories like that these days.

CHUGGERS, harassment, suicides and the selling of personal details. The year 2015 will go down in history as the year when we learned to dislike charities.

MIND you, the Victorians were there first. They gave us the expression "as cold as charity" and I bet a lot of us know exactly what they meant.