Eng-er-land Next The Sea

It is incredibly hot and sunny again today, high summer, and as it's Easter Saturday there are lots of tourists. Thelma cooks us a great breakfast while Bill weeds the lawn. I've never seen someone weeding a lawn before, but now I understand how people have such great lawns: an apple corer and graft: weeding the lawn is the open-cast coal mining end of the gardening enterprise.

Thelma and Bill are having us to stay out of simple kindness. They are part of the Friends of Wells-Next-The-Sea Granary Theatre. It strikes me that they work very hard to keep the theatre open and as we walk past it, wandering through town on this gorgeous day, before I actually get to see the inside of the theatre, I'm thinking how glad I am that they do.

Martin experiences a little altercation with a woman in a grocery shop. She does not appreciate all these incomers with their buggies and backpacks and wheelchairs. The place is full of tourists, but I wonder how the economy would fair without them. It's a sunny day so Bartelt takes it on the chin.

Wells appears to be the main street down to the front and the road along the front. That's it. Well, there are pubs and houses and other roads, but it's a little place. We go to see my friend Nicky. She runs a coffee-sandwich-tea-cake place with her husband Howard on the main road down to the sea.

The cafe is also a tiny little place, with just a couple of stools at a bar at the window, a couple of little tables outside and a queue which seems to be keeping three people pretty busy serving. The sandwiches and cake look great. Nicky's so pleased to see us that she treats us to coffee. It's a difficult coffee for Bartelt to swallow as there is one chair in the sunshine outside the shop and this chair – his chair! – is being sat upon by someone other than him.

Nicky and I used to work together in a gift-cum-cookware shop. I was 17, Nicky was... older than me. Mum worked there for ten years as well, and both my brother and sister did some time there. It was called Serendipity and was owned by Paul and Pam, a couple of the best salespersons I have ever met. They insisted on selling what they thought the customer needed, which was often not what the customer thought they needed and was often cheaper than what the customer thought they needed, to boot. They had an absurdly loyal clientele and the kind of patience I only experience if I am actually asleep.

I've never been very good straight after lunch, even if I don't have any lunch, I have an often overwhelming desire to go to sleep. I've been to sleep standing up, I'll have you know. There were a good couple of very long hours, often, in the shop after lunch. We would entertain ourselves however we could. Amongst other things I used to talk about wanting to act; Nicky used to joke about me being on Eastenders. The first thing she had said, then, when I'd contacted her to tell her we were coming to Wells was “I told you you'd be on Eastenders.”

She is right, I have been on Eastenders now, but only in the briefest of possible ways. I had one line earlier this year. The filming was great fun and everyone was lovely, but the most extraordinary thing for me was that, when I came to watch the episode, I actually look alright. It's not that I think I'm hideous, but, well, I am striking rather than... anything else, blessed with a character face, prone to being cast as older, scarier, maler, deader than I really am. Yet, as I open the door and deliver my line “Veronica, is it?” I actually look... okay, verging on... character-actress-who-plays-ordinary-looking-non-vengeful-/-deranged-/-undead-everyday-women. It's quite a shock, but a pleasant one. Great make-up artists, lighting people, camera operators, directors etc have my thanks. Nicky is still a big Eastenders fan and so she was very pleased to see me on the show.

As Bartelt and I wander along the high street we cannot help but marvel at all of the all the Eng-er-land stuff in the shops: a royal wedding is nearly up on us and Wells is clearly captalising on this fact. It's just too good to be true and we have, as ever, trouble getting down the streets, and not just because it's Easter Saturday in a lovely little holiday town in mid-summer in April. We have trouble because Bartelt wants to take pictures of all the Union Jack memorabilia which is jammed everywhere.

We're not teching until two so we decide to walk to the sea. We do kind of look at a map, but it turns out the sea is further away than you'd think. And everyone's at it. Of course we are stopping endlessly to take photos, of the views, of the flowers of each other taking photos of the views and the flowers.

When we get to the beach its muddy! Not silty, or rocky, or shingled, it's muddy. Horrible, brown, slimy mud. Bartelt is in an ecstasy of enjoyment. It turns out he loves the slimy. I guess it was going to be a passion in one direction or the other, and I suppose if I had been pressed, I'd've gone for love it rather than hate it, but, oh my, he loves it a lot. It reminds him of having been two mud baths in the past... and I guess that's it: basically anything which reminds him of having been warm is a winner. We take photos of our feet in the mud. I'm not so sad that we have to head back for something to eat as there is quite a wind on the beach. When the sun's out it's really warm, but when it goes, less so: it's April again.

We sit and eat fish and chips on the front, next to a bin, surrounded by people and seagulls. Blinking marvellous fish and chips. This is such a nice place to be, and I know it will be lovely to do the show tonight, but it is really gorgeous sitting here, soaking up the sun, watching people queuing up in the fish and chip shop. Overeating has to be one of my favourite things... but it's not very good for me.

A fantastic group of people are running the theatre tonight and they look after us very well. It's a shame for us that the sea shanty singers are singing in the space next to the theatre. And it's a shame the weather is so fantastic. The theatre staff feel these will both reduce our audience numbers.

And then my school friend Caroline and her mother Sally turn up. Caroline and her family all live in north Norfolk now and we barely see one another. In fact, the last time I saw Caroline was at a mutual friend's wedding, six months after Kate died. Caroline had had her second child four days after Kate's death. I remember talking to her from her hospital bed – I was at Johannesburg Airport – we were both in tears. My BBC 'minders' couldn't find me, and I'm not sure who we were waiting for... maybe my aunts. Caroline, the mutual friend and I shared a house together in London back in the 90s, before that she and I travelled south America and southern Africa together, before that we got drunk in the countryside, and way before that we became friends at school, good friends, best friends. It's strange to wonder where all that went. So much went when my sister died, and in so many ways for me; I have no idea where or how it went and nothing has come to replace it.

Caroline laughs a lot through the show and we have a great time talking to the audience afterwards, one of whom is in his 90s and tells us it's the most moving piece of theatre he's ever seen. He also worked in Africa and... the show chimes for him.

We go to the pub with Caroline and Sally, we talk a bit about Lionel, Caroline's dad, who died recently after 35 years of multiple sclerosis. They, but especially Sally, are enduring the terrible early days of loss. In fact, of course, I'm wrong. It wasn't at the mutual friend's wedding that I last saw Caroline. The last time I saw Caroline was at her father's funeral.

Bartelt and I are going to stay with Caroline and her family tomorrow – Easter Sunday – but for most of the day we intend to walk and walk and walk, to nowhere in particular. I'm hoping for plenty of silence, and I'm sure he is too. Silence and escape. That part of the north Norfolk coast reminds me of... utter desolation, basically. It feels a bit like the edge – the end? - of the world. I can't wait.