Suffolkation

Jen and I recently spent a couple of days in Southwold on the Suffolk coast.

I’d booked us a room at The Crown, which, not entirely coincidentally, is one of the hostelries at which W.G Sebald stays in his marvellous, enigmatic book The Rings of Saturn. It is in his room at The Crown that Sebald—or, perhaps I should say, the narrator with an uncanny resemblance to Sebald—falls asleep while watching a TV documentary about Roger Casement. It is in the bar of The Crown that he falls into conversation about the wine business with a Dutchman named Cornelis de Jong. And it is in the restaurant of The Crown that he notices ‘the grandfather clock, with its rising and setting sun and a moon that appears at night’. Jen and I did not turn on the TV in our room during our stay, but we did fall into conversation about crossword puzzles with a Welshman in the bar, and, I was delighted to note, there was indeed a grandfather clock ticking away in the restaurant—although the sun and moon mechanisms seem to have been characteristic Sebaldian embellishments.

While we were in town, Jen and I also visited a couple of other locations that feature in Sebald’s book: the wonderful Sailors’ Reading Room, where Sebald leafs through various documents, including a 1914 military logbook; and Gun Hill, where he gazes out on the ‘German Ocean’ while recounting the 1672 naval battle of Sole Bay. I was pleased to discover the Reading Room now has a small cabinet dedicated to Sebald and the documents he consulted there.

When I showed my dad some of my Southwold photographs, he expressed surprised at how I’d managed to go on a seaside holiday and take a whole bunch of photos without a soul in them. I hadn’t even noticed. I think I must have been unconsciously channelling the late Herr Sebald, who had a melancholy knack—although I prefer to think of it as fortuitous—for finding himself in curiously deserted landscapes.