“Very flat, Norfolk” the character Amanda reported in Noël Coward’s play Private Lives, more than 80 years ago. It’s usually the first thing people will say about East Anglia. “It’s so flat.”

But really, it isn’t. Because of course what these people are insinuating is that East Anglia is boring. It’s anything but. Granted, it has no towering Eastern mountains, but it’s not only rock and chalk cliff that make up contour and contrast.

East Anglia is a land in continual argument with water, a land whose turbulent skies were wrestled dramatically onto canvas by John Constable. On his epic journey around Britain’s coast in the early 1700s, the author Daniel Defoe described a terrible night of shipwrecking on the Norfolk coast in 1692, when 200 vessels were lost and 1,000 mariners drowned. Flat indeed.

In ‘boring’ East Anglia a few winters ago, wild storms and super tides broke through the region’s long beaches in many places and pushed saltwater deep inland. Seals were photographed swimming along the flooded A149 road on the north Norfolk coast. Such an everyday occurrence.

And it’s not only the natural world that offers a touch of the dramatic in East Anglia.

When it opens in Suffolk in 2020, SnOasis threatens to be the largest real snow indoor ski slope in the world, with a 415metre-long slope, 70metre-wide run, and a 100metre drop; accommodating 1000 skiers per hour.

Not so flat, not so dull. Even Norwich’s favourite bore, TV’s Alan Partridge would agree.