Shortly after Landfall, Colchester, Norman Franke

Some of the walk I cycled on my first trip
to England in 1979. The Northwesterly
had chased white horses from the Dogger Bank,
Prinz Hamlet was gleaming on the emerald
backwaters of a Constable-painted Stour,
and it was not until Manningtree that I regained
a proper sense of balance. The rain gear stayed
in the panniers for three weeks. In the shade
of St Botolph’s Priory I had my first picnic
watching a Bobbie adressing a homeless man,
sincerely calling him ‘Sir’. ‘Happy old town’,
I thought as I was trying to decipher some Latin
inscriptions in a local museum using
my useless high school Latin, ‘stay that way
for the next 2000 years’.