Happy New Year from the Nordelph Community website

Because there is a considerable amount of material on this home page, we've added a new navigation feature alongside: the 'quicklinks' box. Clicking on an entry here will take you directly to the place on this page where the story begins.

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Carol singing

Christmas was started off in good festive style by the

now-traditional carol singing around the village by the members of the Nordelph Arts & Crafts Club.

The evening raised £86 which was donated to the East Anglian Air Ambulance Heli-pad appeal. The club also enjoyed a Christmas dinner at the 'Heron' in Stowbridge, and you can see more photos of the carol singing and of the dinner,on our latest Arts & Crafts Club page.
The club restarts on Wednesday 11th January at 1.30pm in the Vilage Hall, and new faces will be most welcome.
The earlier Christmas Carol Service in the Village Hall was very well attended by people from all parts of the village and a collection for a 3rd world charity also received a very generous donation from those attending.

Norfolk churches

When you manage a website like this Nordelph one, it is always tempting to view yourself as being positioned at the centre of the web -- setting up links to other content, on other websites, but always imagining yourself as the focus. So it comes as a (pleasant) surprise when you are given notice that other websites have found your web, and want to link to you.
Exactly this happened just before Christmas, when we received an e-mail from the webmaster of the Norfolk churches website. He wrote: "I have been unable to trace an interior photograph of (Nordelph) church - until now. I find that you have one on your site." Of course, we do -- in the Nordelph Past section: a rather grand, coloured one on our page of photos of School, Mill and Church. And now, as just one of the functions of a community site like this, that same photo is available on the Norfolk churches site -- which by the way is well worth a visit -- and it has more photographs of the church. You'll find it a lovingly crafted work, growing month by month in pursuit of the aim of cataloguing all Norfolk (and Suffolk) churches. Among other things, you can read about John Betjeman's visit to Nordelph!

Neighbours

This isn't the only website that links to us, of course. One of our abiding embarrassments since last Spring has been that we instituted a 'neighbours' page linking to the communities around us as almost our last contribution to the previous version of this site -- and that it has taken until now to reinstate an updated version. But this most definitely isn't our work. Contacts representing the communities around us have agreed to pen their own introductions to their communities -- perhaps lulled into a sense of goodwill by all the Christmas cheer!
If you use the new Neighbours link in the index panel, that will take you to the Neighbours Master page, where you can examine what our neighbourhood looks like from above; clicking on the map takes you (at present) to 'placeholder' pages awaiting the promised contributions. As these are filled in, we'll let you know!

Nordelph Past

There is a temptation to see 'the past' as being a long time ago -- a temptation enhanced by the material that resides on the Nordelph Past section of this website. But in truth the past begins yesterday: in some sense, most of this website should be filed under 'past'! A small contribution to redressing the imbalance has been posted this month, when we've added photographs of the village celebrations of the Queen's Jubilee to the website.

WAGN Trains

Other new material this month includes a look at the punctuality records of WAGN, our local railway service. This was prompted by the coincidence of being held at Littleport (see our description of travelling from Nordelph) for the up train, while simultaneously reading the figures in the national press!
WAGN is worth our attention for a couple of other reasons as well. With the changes due to the rail franchises in the Spring, there are reports (aka 'wishful thinking') that we might soon enjoy through trains between Kings Lynn and the South Coast -- maybe you don't want a day by the sea in Brighton that often, but a direct link to Gatwick Airport might make holiday travel one tiny step easier! But here now is one useful innovation: since the installation of electronic departure displays at Downham Market station, it has been possible to read this information live over the Internet. Our new index entry for 'Train Information' will take you directly to the page on WAGN's website -- and of course you can bookmark any other station you're interested in.

Clearing Well Creek

There was some interest in the photographs of the specialised craft clearing the creek that we posted in our November update. So much so that we've tracked down an (undated) newspaper account and photograph of a much earlier, but similar, craft during the initial clearing of mud from the creek; you can see a thumbnail alongside, but we've also added a better sized photograph, and some more details, to the original page of pictures.

Broadband and web matters

In our last update, we asked for any experiences of Broadband, now that it had at last arrived in Nordelph. The responses have been quite interesting -- and not at all predictable (?). You can read them in the Nordelph Future section, under Broadband: first impressions.

The ready availability of Broadband prompts us to ask for your responses in another area -- one that could transform the look and feel of this website! It is always easy to forget that not all users of the site enjoy computers as modern or as fast as those of us who submit contributions. We try to pay attention to this -- no huge photographs, for example, because not everyone is on Broadband, and perhaps never will be. One area that we'd welcome feedback on is just how wide the pages ought to be. For most people, these webpages will load with a wide right-hand margin -- potentially wasted space. This is deliberate: if your computer is more than a few years old, the screen resolution may not be sufficient to display a full page without having to scroll left and right across the page. But it may well be that no one at all out there needs this safety net that we've provided. On this month's home page, we've highlighted the issue by placing some photos and text in this hitherto sacrosanct area. Did this cause you a problem? If so, we'd like to know (at info@nordelph.org as usual). And we'd quite like to know if you didn't have problems -- the more we know about regular users, the better we're placed to give you what you want!

Favourite images

Just before Christmas, we had a suggestion for a website feature from one of our regular readers: "A thought, for your website ... how about a favourite digital photo (so it has to be fairly recent) and why we enjoy it so much? Not a competition, but a growing collection, which would hopefully encourage contributors and add a very important human interest to the website. Everyone could contribute equally and everyone could express themselves! Isn't that what your website is all about, now that the excitement of broadband has subsided?" This seems like a worthwhile and interesting idea -- so we've implemented it! Under 'Favourite Images' in the index panel (just below 'Picture Galleries', which links to pictures of Nordelph) there's a link to a sequence of images for you to savour -- and to make up your own mind about: the brief descriptions of why the photograph pleases the photographer is initially hidden until you reveal it!

Finally ...

We are not at present receiving details of the church services and readings -- so these have not been updated.
Our regular vegetable of the month feature continues -- this month with celeriac, the vegetable that stars in a comic strip!.

There's a Parish Council meeting on Wednesday January 11th at 7.00pm in the Village Hall -- as always, any parishoner is more than welcome to attend. There will be a full report of the meeting in our next update, but in the meantime the minutes of the previous meeting are available now.