One of the benefits of living nearly a hundred miles from a motorway is being within 20 minutes of some of the country’s best beaches. This has been a godsend during this Summer of the Five Suns. There’s no queuing on the A11 for us, behind what one of my old Norfolk friends calls ‘absolute SCUM coming down here with their caravans’. We just chuck paddleboards, towels and buckets and spades into the back of the knackered Land Rover and are in the water within half an hour.

If George Orwell had written an essay about the perfect British beach, he would have had Cromer in mind

If George Orwell had written an essay about the perfect British beach, he would have had Cromer in mind

But we don’t bother with the beaches that regularly top Condé Nast Traveller and Sunday Times polls. We swerve Wells-next-the-Sea where you’ll be tripping over influencers snapping the Instagram-friendly beach huts and Yummy Mummies braying at each other in the Joules outlet like PG Wodehouse’s mastodon aunts across the primeval swamp.

Holkham – which the aspirational middle classes insist on pronouncing ‘Hoke-am’ (don’t) – is also best avoided. Once the county’s best-kept secret, it is now a bunfight (actually, make that a Matcha Danish fight) and if you make the mistake of heading for the only quiet bit, you’ll see things that can never be unseen, viz naturists flying kites. Blakeney and........

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