The New Yorker has a lovely essay by Rebecca Mead about the decade that ended last night. In almost every way one looks at it, the ‘noughties’ look like a wasted decade.

The events of and reaction to September 11th seem to be the decade’s defining catastrophe, although it could be argued that it was in the voting booths of Florida, with their flawed and faulty machines, that the crucial historical turn took place. (In the alternate decade of fantasy, President Gore, forever slim and with hairline intact, not only reads those intelligence memos in the summer of 2001 but acts upon them; he also ratifies the Kyoto Protocol and invents something even better than the Internet.) And if September 11th marked the beginning of this unnameable decade, its end was signalled by President Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech, in which he spoke of what he called the “difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other,” and painstakingly outlined the absence of any good answers to the questions in question.

In between those two poles, the decade saw the unimaginable unfolding: the depravities of Abu Ghraib, and, even more shocking, their apparent lack of impact on voters in the 2004 Presidential election; the horrors of Hurricane Katrina and the flight of twenty-five thousand of the country’s poorest people to the only slightly less hostile environs of the Superdome; the grotesque inflation and catastrophic popping of a housing bubble, exposing an economy built not even on sand but on fairy dust; the astonishing near-collapse of the world financial system, and the discovery that the assumed ironclad laws of the marketplace were only about as reliable as superstition. And, after all this, the still more remarkable: the election of a certified intellectual as President, not to mention an African-American one.

To Burnham Market, the poshest small town in England, for lunch. It’s still the lovely place I remember from when we used to go there two decades ago, but has gone spectacularly up-market — to the point where it now resembles nothing so much as Chelsea-on-Sea. Streets choc-a-bloc with Porsche Cayman and Toucan Touareg SUVs, boutiques selling trinkets that cost more than the Gross National Product of Ecuador, cheery gels with names like Camilla and Eugenie and Amanda wearing green wellies — you can imagine the scene. But still, unaccountably, charming. I was reminded of the time, years ago, when a good friend of mine dreamed of buying a little house in Burnham Market and settling down to a career writing scandalous novels. (She never managed it, and became an academic instead. But today I imagined her casting an ironic eye on the visiting Yuppies, and using them as characters in a comic novel.)

Our plan was to lunch in the Hoste Arms, but given that (a) we arrived at 1pm, (b) it was wet and cold (and (c) the middle of the holiday season to boot) we should have known better: it was heaving with lunchers. So we found a small cafe and had lovely pea soup and sandwiches instead.

And then we stumbled on the loveliest little secondhand bookshop which had the best collection of biographies I’ve seen in a while — including Chester Anderson’s short illustrated biography of Joyce and the fascinating biography that John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello wrote of John Joyce, James’s reprobate of a father. I walked out clutching both, and only £11 poorer. Bliss.

We reached Cley yesterday afternoon just as the light was running out. It was a grey, overcast day when all of Norfolk seemed to have gone brown (though if you looked carefully at the hedgerows that turned out not to be true: there were red berries everywhere). As we turned towards the beach a huge flock of birds suddenly started into the air, turning and twisting and making those astonishing fleeting patterns that lead mathematicians to work out flocking algorithms. And they headed seawards and were gone from sight, almost as quickly as they had appeared. We parked under the shingle bank, now much reduced since its glory days, and prepared to get out for what we imagined would be a brisk walk. But then I opened the car door the wind promptly forced it shut again, so it was clear that something more than a brisk constitutional was on offer. Something that required firm resolve — and serious outerwear. So we opened the boot and, in the shelter of the lid, dressed as for the South Pole.

When we got to the top of the bank, the full force of the wind hit us. There was an angry brown sea, with a heavy swell and sizeable waves pounding against the shore. Interestingly, they were coming in at an angle of about fifteen degrees to the line of the beach, so suddenly one saw how this coastline is constantly being reshaped.

We turned into the wind and began to walk. It was eye-wateringly cold, with the wind scything through anything (like trousers and hats) that wasn’t comprehensively windproof. And yet the strange thing was that the beach was dotted with tiny, pyramidical structures which, on closer inspection, turned out to be tented bivouacs, each one containing a fisherman who sat there, staring intently at a massive fishing rod, resting on a tripod support, and each at the end of a line which had been cast far out into the raging surf. It was absolutely surreal, and made one wonder what it is that induces people to undergo such discomfort in pursuit of private obsessions. And then to marvel at it, for it is what makes us humans so interestingly perverse.

But much as I admired the fishermen’s fortitude, mine wilted in the teeth of the gale, and we turned back and sought the shelter of the car and, later, the blazing fire of an hotel. Ernest Shackleton would not have been impressed.