I thought I ought to finally write something about Happisburgh - it’s a small village on the north east coast of Norfolk - in fact I think it could be argued that you’d have a hard job getting much further into Norfolk.

There are one or two things the village is known for - it’s been a pouplar holiday destination since .. forever, we have a prominent red and white striped lighthouse that was once painted by Anneka Rice on her TV show ‘Challenge Anneka’, and we’ve got a little problem currently with coastal erosion

We had a bit of a scare on Tuesday night -a combination of gale force winds, a strong swell combined to form a storm surge which added substantially to the natural tides, which were already quite high. The Environment Agency issued a flood warning, saying there was a possibility of sea walls and dunes being topped. A series of phone calls went out telling people to move their furniture upstairs.

It was ‘exciting’ standing on top of Happisburgh cliffs at 9pm on Tuesday night, with one of the biggest seas I’ve seen (not that I can say I’ve seen many) already smashing at the foot of the sandy cliffs with 5 hours to go until high tide.

It turns out we fared relatively well - there was flooding around Great Yarmouth and St Olaves, the railway line at Haddiscoe was damaged, but at Happisburgh we just lost another few bits of cliff.

The other thing that happened was that salt water got into the Broads, killing thousands of freswater fish. BBC News reports the Environment Agency as saying that is was one of the one of the worst incidents of fish deaths from natural causes in the Norfolk Broads in the last 15 years. Yet they are one of the parties who have been trying to push through a new shoreline management plan, which wants to see the majority of Norfolk’s sea defences abandoned to allow natural processes to resume.

I firmly believe that to protect ourselves and our environment from what we are told will be worsening weather conditions, we need to be strengthening our defences not letting them go. We need the reassurance that our homes, communities, services and vital lines of communication are secured against the worst that the weather can throw against us.

This was a small taster of what the sea can throw at us. Have we already forgotten the experiences of the 1953 floods?