Seen in the Eastern Daily Press, a case of unfortunate naming:-
‘Save Happisburgh Action Group’ - known as SHAG.
Happisburgh is a village on the North Norfolk coast that is rapidly falling into the sea due to severe coastal erosion. From my time living in Norwich over 40 years ago, I believe that locals pronounced the village name ‘Hazeborough’.
For any Happisburgh residents reading this, I do appreciate the seriousness of your situation & you have my greatest sympathy.
Well this is the second story I’ve written about Norfolk only to find out (after writing it) that it’s actually about Suffolk.
So sorry to the OP. Anyway, I’ve written it now…
I don’t know if anybody remembers Tim Hunkin, English engineer, cartoonist, writer, and artist.
He had a TV series in the 1980/90’s called the secret life of Machines.
Every week he’d discuss the history of a household item and then take it apart and show you how it worked.
He was (still is) a very wacky English eccentric inventor type and lived in an ex commune (country manor) in (Norfolk) Edit Suffolk near Southwold.
He had been commissioned to design and build a number of automata type art installations for Meadowhall shopping centre to go in the arcade fun/leisure section above the food hall.
He’d farmed some of the build out to some of his wacky Art school friends around the UK and we had to go and photograph the different bits to show how it was progressing.
One of them being at his house or more accurately in his inventor garden shed.
It really was a hoot and his and his friends ideas and designs were hilarious, unfortunately in the end the shopping centre pulled the plug.
A great shame, just a bit too wacky for them I think.
Anyway a lovely, highly intelligent, creative and entertaining guy.
30+ years ago I worked for The Halifax and this was a time when they were still a Yorkshire B/Soc and retained some quite strong principles.
One of the things they did was help regional teams of employees put together local care initiatives with technical and financial assistance, way before it was fashionable. It was genuinely a very good thing.
It was generally known as community development circles but some bright spark figured it would be great if we could come up with an acronym for this ‘…using the letters from H-A-L-I-F-A-X’, without twigging the X may be a little tricky and the whole thing seemed somewhat contrived.
I sent an internal message suggesting as much and that ‘Big Office Lardy Lump’s Oily Xits’ may be more appropriate. Clearly no-one read the message attached though, chucked it in the final draw and it got 13 votes
For those interested in seeing Hunkin’s wacky inventions and amusements, many are installed on Southwold pier, including a brilliant water powered clock.
Mrs SinS, a nurse in Suffolk, East Anglia, tells me they used to use the acronym NFN in medical nursing records… ie ‘normal for Norfolk’, ie patient not quite all there… I think our current culture of diversity and inclusion frowns upon such things now…. And to be fair far more people have moved into Norfolk now.…
Talking of which, another acronym you hear amongst locals especially in areas popular with holiday homes or weekend migrants, perhaps more a Suffolk thing, is DFL that is down from London
My favourite recent ‘unofficial’ has been coined with the growth of hybrid home and office working… where people are required to work Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays ie T W a T in the office.
Lol that is often a really effective way of winding some one from Suffolk up and the other way around I am sure … in the nicest way of course…ie getting the counties mixed up… I am sure much of that stems from old rivalries perpetuated by the East Anglian football derby, Ipswich vs Norwich… if nothing else tends to produce great banter in pubs etc.
