I WRITE this from my little summerhouse in the garden in North Walsham, largely because there seems to be more floorspace and elbow room in this six-foot-by-eight-foot shed than there is anywhere in the house. We moved in yesterday, and the house itself, which seemed adequately roomy when it was empty, is now a conglomeration of towers, islands, even mountains, of piled cardboard boxes, between which are threaded precarious passages so narrow that Maggie and I must both breathe in if we are to pass.

Somehow, by miracle, by ingenuity, by a liberal sprinkling of TARDIS-dust, the contents of these boxes will eventually be distributed to their proper places, and there will be room to live and move and have our being; but, for now, it is enough to find the kettle, the teapot, and the bed.

Whereas the new house is about one third the size of the old vicarage, the new summer house, the Temple of Peace Mark II, is, in contrast, actually larger than the old one, with room for a pipe-rack, a wine-rack, a chair, and a table sufficient for a few volumes of verse, a manuscript book, and my trusty laptop.

As before, I look out on roses (Ancient Mariner and Poet’s Wife), on the lovely haphazard, insect-friendly chaos of an unkempt garden, and on the wide, open, infinitely suggestive East Anglian sky. But there is this difference: whereas in Linton I might hear the robins, the wood pigeons, the blackbirds, and, on a good still morning, even a distant cuckoo in Rivey woods, here there is another, and distinctive note: the cry of gulls!

We are just five miles from the sea, and, as the gulls fly over with their distinctive cry, they seem to bring with them the tang of the sea and the memory of its long surges, and of childhood holidays.

For someone who loves the sea, I seem to have spent most of my working life as far inland as is possible on a small island — but not any more. And our reward for tackling the next big cardboard mountain will be a trip to Mundesley, and a walk along the beach snuffing the sea breeze and listening to the sound of the waves. “It keeps eternal whisperings,” as Keats said in his sonnet “On the Sea”, which also has that lovely line, suggesting that when one’s eyes are “vexed and tired” — as ours certainly are, with the sheer monotony of packing and wrapping, unpacking, and unwrapping — then one should “Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea.”

That was early Keats, of course, still feeling for his line. Later, in the immortal poem “Bright Star”, he imagined himself transported into the heavens, and gazing down on the sea from above, glimpsing, for a moment, the sacramental — indeed, sacerdotal — nature of that eternal motion: “The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores. . .”

I shall see the sea at Mundesley from the cliffs, not the heavens; but the sight and sound will still be all the richer for Keats’s lines.