Cosmopolitan Norwich

Ploughing through the innumerable supplements to the Friday edition of the Times, while I was in London last week, my eye alighted on the property section and an article headlined 'Focus on ... Norwich', which begins:

'A cosmopolitan, buzzing and beautiful city...'

Cosmopolitan? 

Norwich?

And why is cosmopolitan a term of approval? 

I hoped Norwich was still provincial. What is the point of Norwich otherwise? If East Anglia is not the provinces where is?

Perhaps nowhere is.

What would Norfolk men such as Sir Thomas Browne or George Borrow have made of a cosmopolitan Norwich? Or the poets of Eastern England like Cowper or Crabbe? Or John Betjeman or H.L. Morton?

I do not want to live in the provinces myself - I should hate to do so. I would not choose to live anywhere but the centre of a capital city, and I love living in an odd, seedy Balkan capital, but I want the provinces to be there and be provincial, the ballast in every country that keeps the boat from overturning.

The article in the Times went on, balefully, to declare that Norwich is one of the ten most important shopping destinations in England. 

Camus said, 'Modern man fornicates and reads the papers. There is nothing more to be said.' Modern man (person, sorry) in our day fornicates, shops and is cosmopolitan.  

All in all, The Times put me off the idea of going to Norwich. Private Lives comes to mind. 

I met her on a house party in Norfolk.

Very flat, Norfolk.

There's no need to be unpleasant.

That was no reflection on her, unless of course she made it flatter.

Minette Marin said in an article a while back that as we grow older we all of us find ourselves living in a foreign country. At least I really do live in a foreign country, Romania, and one that, happily, is reassuringly old-fashioned.

P.S. I looked on the net to see if Sir John Betjeman ever wrote a poem about Norwich. It seems he did not but I found instead a poem that he wrote about somewhere else in Norfolk. It is one of my favourites among his poems and I feel like quoting it here, though it has nothing to do with the subject of this post.

Oh Lord Cozens Hardy Your mausoleum is cold, The dry brown grass is brittle And frozen hard the mould And where those Grecian columns rise So white among the dark Of yew trees and of hollies in That corner of the park By Norfolk oaks surrounded Whose branches seem to talk, I know, Lord Cozens Hardy, I would not like to walk. And even in the summer,  On a bright East-Anglian day When round your Doric portico  Your children's children play There's a something in the stillness  And our waiting eyes are drawn From the butler and the footman  Bringing tea out on the lawn, From the little silver spirit lamp  That burns so blue and still, To the half-seen mausoleum  In the oak trees on the hill. But when, Lord Cozens Hardy, November stars are bright, And the King's Head Inn at Letheringsett  Is shutting for the night, The villagers have told me  That they do not like to pass Near your curious mausoleum  Moon-shadowed on the grass For fear of seeing walking  In the season of All Souls That first Lord Cozens Hardy,  The Master of the Rolls.