Cromer

After a frantic few weeks of organisation, our OU writers’ group met up at Cromer in the last weekend of November 2022. Six of us arrived at West Cottage; the other three turned up on our screens thanks to Zoom. For the first time since 2015, we had all nine of our group gathered together.

We’ve had a long history. We were all students on the Open University’s third level creative writing course in 2010/11, nine of the dozen or so who had taken to the national forum for student chat and feedback on our work after we found that our regional tutor group forum wasn’t lively enough. At the end of the course, we’d all said; “I’ve loved chatting with you! We have to meet up in person! Where are you?” Four of us were based in Scotland, two in northern England, one in East Anglia, one in Sussex and one in Geneva. It’s a diverse campus, the OU. The 2009/10 graduate group from A215 met up in Birmingham, being a Scottish / northern / eastern / Devon / London mix that couldn’t have met locally, and met just the once; the A363 graduates met in the holiday cottage of one student on Tiree, in the Inner Hebrides in 2011 and we have met almost every November since then.

It was my turn to host this year, and I brought them to Cromer on the north Norfolk coast. We’d discussed bringing the reunion south before, and a few people had noticed Cromer as a possible destination. This year I went looking for houses that could allow anywhere up to nine people the chance to live, write and sleep.

Sue Cook has posted on her blog about how the weekend went, and about the value of a writing retreat – you can join a commercially organised one, or you can gather your writing friends and make your own. This is what we look for. None of us want to share a double bed with another, so there has to be a bed or a comfortable sofa to sleep on for each person. There must be a big kitchen (we take turns to cook and wash up, but as with every party, people tend to gather in the kitchen). We need a comfortable space big enough for everyone to sit and talk, and a dining room large enough for everyone to sit down for lunch and dinner. Above all, places to sit and write.

We started the weekend by talking. And talking. We meet like this once a year and we have a lot to say to each other when we do. This year, three of us had had novels published while others had won competitions or had short stories accepted for publication and one person had won a prize for his novel at a conference. We’re a varied lot, writing short fiction, novels, poetry – in various forms, from romance to crime to science fiction.

We went out for walks – in town, along the beach to the lighthouse, along the beach to West Runton, in every bookshop in town (there are three) and out onto the pier. Sue was running an online writing sprint with her other book group, and we all joined in; Mairi ran an online meeting with her writing friends and some of us dropped in to wave. Enza and I discovered that the twin room in the attic we were sharing could only be accessed by spiral stairs that led through the corner of Sue’s bedroom, and we had a quiet battle with the heating before finding that the cleaners had left the thermostat turned so far below ten degrees that only a snowstorm would have switched the heating on. We finished the weekend with our usual look forward to the next year. This was what we always referred to at the next year’s opening meeting… “You said you’d finish that novel! Have you?” “You said last year that you were going to write every morning for twenty minutes…”

This year, we began by saying how we’d done this weekend. Everyone had written something they were proud of – a plan for a novel they’d had an idea for, morning pages, an episode of a serial they’d been commissioned to write. Everyone except me, who writes better after midnight and into the early hours. We finished by saying what we’re going to do next year. Crucially, we’ll hold a Zoom meeting in May that will hopefully focus our minds on these goals (or our excuses for not having met them!).

We left the cottage on Sunday morning and went on to Felbrigg Hall, only two miles up the road, to walk around the Walled Garden and the bookshop and the tea-room. We split up from there, five people going west to join the A1 and on to the north, and me going south, back to my home. Of course, with a few days left on my week-long parking ticket, I brought Himself back to Cromer a few days later, so that he could see the sights and the bookshops, and take a guess at how many books there are in Felbrigg Hall’s Christmas Book-Tree. That’s another story.