I often refer in these columns to the following local Norfolk themes and topics.

Norwich City Football Club makes frequent appearances: the club and the team are supported in the EDP circulation area by very many more than the 27,000 or so spectators who turn out to watch them at every home game at the Carrow Road ground, and who represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to local interest and concern about how “City” are getting on. I mention Norwich Market rather often: this is said to be the largest permanent open-air market in England (it runs six days a week), and has been on the present site, in the heart of the city, since the eleventh century; I always think of the market as being the heart of working-class Norwich. See www.visitnorwich.co.uk/shopping/shops/listing/norwich-market.

Radio Norfolk also makes several appearances: this is our local BBC Radio Station, one of the most successful in England, with a weekly listenership of about 200,000.

FOND is the Friends of Norfolk Dialect organisation, which was founded in 1999, with Keith Skipper as one of the prime movers: the society is dedicated to conserving and recording Norfolk's priceless linguistic heritage, to engendering positive attitudes to the dialect and to keeping the dialect alive. See www.norfolkdialect.com/index.htm.

The “Boy John” letters, which are cited a number of times, were written to and published in the EDP between 1946 and 1958. Sidney Grapes, their author, was the proprietor of a bicycle shop, later a garage and motor business, in Potter Heigham, in the Broads area of eastern Norfolk. In the years before World War II, he acquired a reputation as an amateur Norfolk dialect comedian, performing at social functions in many parts of the county and on the radio. His highly entertaining letters appeared in the newspaper at irregular intervals – Grapes would simply write them when he felt like it – and they were always signed “The Boy John”. They are a work of not a little genius, and are a brilliant and accurate representation of the Norfolk dialect of his time.

Thorpe is the eastern Norwich suburb where I was born and grew up. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorpe_St_Andrew.