I recently took Gilda away for a few days in Norfolk. Gilda’s not my wife, she’s my green Mini Cooper, and she just loves the open country. Like a dog unleashed, she speeds off into the distance and I really have no say on where we end up. When you own a Mini, you’re never a driver. You’re a passenger.
Norfolk, I discovered, is full of suppressed Catholicism; every field seems to contain a ruined abbey, every house a priest hole. The most impressive hideout is in Oxburgh Hall, home to the recusant Bedingfields. It’s an assault course: you have to lower yourself down a trapdoor right onto your bottom, slide along the floor beneath a sunken wall and then pull yourself up the other side into a tiny cell with a wooden bench.
