With Happy Hour dramatically transformed into Misery Month in most pensioner-friendly saloon snugs, I am working overtime to create a Hopeful Hub for stoic stalwarts in north Norfolk as winter worries mount higher than 1947 snowdrifts.

It’s all part of Poppyland Enterprise Powerhouse's (PEP) bid to bring back the good times to places like Cromer where old age is like waiting in the departure lounge of life fully aware, that as it is in England, the train is bound to be late.

Some of us believe the secret behind staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly and lie about your age. It stands to reason those weaned on fiscal fundamentals shared by likes of Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George must form the backbone of my movement to celebrate a quote from Anne of Green Gables over a century ago.

As she sized up the gloriously changing colours of a Canadian landscape she exclaimed: “I am so pleased I live in a world where there are Octobers!” Despite all our current financial and political turmoil, there’s still scope to savour autumnal delights and find restorative powers in our Norfolk countryside.

Hedges, trees, bushes, narrow lanes and stubbled fields are dripping with irresistible gold-edged invitations. Not for opportunist politicians, greedy developers or compliant planners - but those who seek a rich source of free consolation and support in straitened times.

I didn’t have to look far for an inspiring and invigorating figure to lead the Hopeful Hub charabanc outing along that nature trail Granny Biffin, by a country mile Bronickle End’s oldest and wisest indigenous remnant, answered the call with rousing relish.

Blessed by a pragmatism born out of vast make-do-and-mend experience and a refusal to take any politician too seriously, she still manages to feel rather sorry for anybody entrusted with a certain amount of misery and a duty to distribute it as fairly as possible.

She knows little has changed throughout all economic storms – although most chancellors have added a few noughts to help the rich and confuse the poor. Seems to work.

I recall how a decade back she subjected George Osborne to what he graciously termed “quantitive teasing” in her own Autumn Statement with a telling combination of proper joined-up writing. good Norfolk logic and waspish humour..

“Perhaps it might help a bit if a woman with a useful track record as household manager and family organiser got your job. We do know what it’s like to clear up after everybody else – but there’s no point in mocking a mere man who neither knows the price of milk nor where it comes from!” claimed the sage of Bronickle End

She also upbraided the man in charge of our nation’s purse-strings “for sticking labels on voters in the hope they’ll be flattered enough to send them back to Westminster for at least one more attempt to get it right.”

This was her well-aimed swipe at Mr Osborne’s constant praise for an “aspiration nation” and it earned memorable plaudits in a New Statesman article saluting unlikely power of “rural Biffinomics.” A stinging rebuke from deepest Norfolk trumpeted: “It is but a small step from ‘aspiration nation’ to ‘opportunity community,’ ‘area for the superior.’ ‘satisfaction attraction’ and a few more I am working on to boost tourism in our neglected district.”

Part of the old girl’s loquacious tongue may well have been firmly in her dappled cheek

In that final comment. After all, many have watched Bronickle End in general and Granny Biffin particular stick needles into small effigies of people carrying maps, laptops, suitcases, bottles of sun cream and expectant smiles. The explanation is as simple and honest as a Liz Truss interview.

“We can’t stop the gravy train. So it makes sense now in this dreadful economic situation to hop aboard and try to steer it into more meaningful stations. We have reservations about some of the platforms on which our tourism industry is built … but difficult times call for difficult decisions” declares the Bronickle End website Rustickrama.

There are bold plans to bury a few rusty hatches from the past and team up with neighbours Little Coughwort and Muckwash Magna to form an umbrella development department for a part of Poppyland still shrouded in mystery.

An official spokesman for Lostdaze R Us has confirmed signposts in the three parishes left pointing in misleading directions on the outbreak of wat in 1939 will be allowed to stay as they are as “puckish contributors to holiday adventures where getting away from it all is taken to new levels”

A reasonable assumption is that tourists will continue to seek out uncharted territory both for pleasure and enlightenment: “We don’t want to turn into part of what that nice Mr Osborne might have termed ‘a grab-the-bounty-county’ but scope is there to garner mutual benefits. Our emphasis will be on offering the visitor a new brand of life-enhancing experience … while we lighten his or her wallet in return.”

In the meantime, Hopeful Hub enthusiasts are lining up behind well-proven community values to underline how “growth” can have as much to do with mind, soul and mental and physical wellbeing as flagship partnerships along improved opportunity corridors leading to creative local initiative zones specially designed to tick all the positive progress boxes.