When it comes to a no-nonsense accompaniment to tea, halfway between a cake and a biscuit, it’s a scone you’re after. There are scones, and there are scones, but no-one makes scones like an Anglican, because an Anglican scone is a timeless scone, steadfast, trustworthy and British. In case you are unfamiliar, Anglicans are baby boomers for whom the Sixties were too noisy, and they live in a kind, optimistic world of raffle tickets, tea cosies and Rich Tea biscuits. Young Anglicans usually have the traditional old testament names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, George and Ringo. They drink squash and colour things in until they stop being seven and, overnight, become seventy three, using phrases such as ‘…pardon my French’ to excuse Anglican swearwords like ‘blast’ and ‘damn’, and ‘…it’s gone a bit dark over Bill’s mother’s’ to warn of oncoming rain. Anglicans have a particular way of buying scones, biscuits and tea from each other in places such as Itteringham parish hall, where I met my old dear yesterday. It involves saying things like ‘…and four makes twelve’, ‘…I’ve got the seventeen’, and ‘…eighty three, ninety three, ninety eight and two’s a pound’ when counting change, and is curiously civilised. All in all, Anglicanism is like a Masonic code, if the purpose of Freemasonry was to make sure that everyone had a nice sit down of an afternoon. They are a lovely bunch.
These are exciting times for my old dear. For a start, there is a royal wedding to get her teeth into. We are both delighted with the Markle girl, who seems a good sort and has a name that rhymes with Sparkle, like a real princess. I imagine we’ll watch the ceremony on her sofa with a union jack across our knees, as is customary on such occasions. She has also been asked to lead the choir at her local church, which represents something of a coup because when she first arrived in East Anglia, two years after me, her proposals for streamlining the Wednesday morning Prayer ‘n’ Praise marked her out as ‘something of a flying cannon’. It is a progressive church, ‘with all the equipment for Catholics’, and she is fond of it. She lives in one of the small and remote villages on the north Norfolk coast, closer to the King’s Lynn end than the small and remote village where I live, which is so small and remote that they were still burning Catholics on public holidays until 2004, equipment or not. She is, if anything, even more suspicious of the countryside than I am, attributing the death of her cat, who I hated, to the ‘change of air’. Renal failure at nineteen was no more than veterinary superstition – Norfolk is so guilty it might as well cackle about the place in a mask and cape. Slough, her former home, is so maligned that I once carried off a joke about it during a funeral eulogy in the town’s crematorium, but my old dear actively misses it. The death of the cat was traumatic – certainly more traumatic than that of her husband, which she announced to me over the phone with an astonished ‘You’ll never guess what – your father’s dropped dead’, although as it was his eulogy I carried off the Slough joke in, I can hardly claim to be a paragon of sensitivity, myself.
Anyway. After several scones, each on a doily on a saucer, we were scone drunk, so Joe picked us up, stopping for a final quick round of scones before taking us to Runton. Upon 
arrival, he parked next to the Screaming Car, from which Becka emerged looking blissful, having been pounding her fists on the steering wheel for, by the look of things, about fourteen minutes. In far off days, I would treat my old dear to shandy at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1, and Vinny the Landlord would ban swearing among the villainy therein for the duration of her visit. At Runton, Graham echoed this tradition by keeping his children in their caravan until she went home. This says something about my old dear’s overall bearing, a mix of charming old lady and forgotten Kray sister, rather than her as someone fazed by unruliness – indeed, she once demonstrated a disdain for authority by punching someone to the floor, even though he was a fireman, in a fireman’s uniform. Nonetheless, ‘Anton’ respectfully stopped listening to Piss Whores In Training when she came to inspect the Old Servant’s Quarters, where he has all but finished the rewiring. This marks the culmination of an impressive eight months of work, especially considering he was only a qualified electrician for the last three weeks of it, and means that in addition to Flat Earthers and so forth, we might one day be able to have people who believe in normal things staying there. Imagine that.
‘Anton’ and my old dear have always got on well, with her referring to him as ‘a bit like a black Tom Jones’ even though I’m not entirely certain you can say things like that anymore. I called Joe and ‘Becka’ up to the Old Servant’s Quarters to bask in ‘Anton’s’ achievement, and the afternoon was spent reminiscing about the markets, my old dear having worked on my grandfather’s Petticoat Lane curtain material emporium as a teenager with a bouffant bob. The bonhomie diminished only when my dog crept in and ate four mini sausage rolls and some crisps from ‘Anton’s lunch. I pointed out that he’ll think he’s at a wedding reception and that we should probably open some cava and put You Can’t Hurry Love on, whereupon ‘Anton’ told me to fuck off, immediately apologising to my old dear, who said that she rather fancied some cava now I’d mentioned it. ‘Anton’ drove to Saxthorpe, bought cava, fish and chips for everyone, and a lovely afternoon turned into a lovely evening with a bit of a sing song at the end. And that, you see, is how the Runton Estate won my old dear’s approval, which is not an easy thing to win.
Photards:
Main – Joe in an anorak by a white board with a balloon and a master plan.
Inset top – the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1. Stanton (left) and Chrissy boy. I forget the context, but Stanton seems to be about to produce pictorial evidence of what happened to the last person who didn’t agree with them.
Inset middle – my dog, with an injury to his front driver’s side leg caused, again, by a deer from the petting zoo.
Inset lower – two of our beautiful donkeys having a lovely time outside a Norfolk cathedral. Very strokey faces.
Well, not entirely in silence. As the splintering yawn of ‘Anton’ crow-barring floorboards mingles with the ambient burble from outside, I declare the quickest way from Euston Square to Cally Road to be up Euston Road, past King’s Cross, left onto York Way, through the lights, and over Regent’s Canal. In return, ‘Anton’ points out that to avoid the Holborn Viaduct on the way to Hatton Garden you need to pick up Ave Maria Lane from High Holborn, straight off Cheapside. Since jointly working on the Old Servant’s Quarters we have found ourselves doing this sort of thing often, in what I believe to be an abstract expression of homesickness, as even the names of streets in that unhappy city chime in our grubby Cockney chimney sweep ear flaps. Also, we know more London street names than most, because we are former Knowledge Boys***, an apprenticeship we hampered somewhat by leaving town three years into the projected six year timescale for full Knowledge absorbtion. Incidentally, when you see someone on a moped in London with a clipboard on the handlebars, that’s a Knowledge Boy putting some work in. Myself, I was a cycling Knowledge Boy, zipping hither and yon amid the traffic with directions flapping from my handlebars on cardboard luggage labels. It’s an enjoyable way to earn your spurs. I’d love to go back and finish it; sadly, rural East Anglia is a long way from Charing Cross – when you see the distance to London on road signs, the numbers are in light years – and I fear it may be some time yet.
Apart from that, the only obstacle to my becoming a licensed taxi driver is the fact that I cannot legally drive. This is due to a common ocular complaint, keratoconus, which renders my vision atrocious. It’s a condition, rather than a disability, so we don’t get our own Olympics like those look-at-me landmine people. Then again we’d wander in front of the hundred metres by mistake and cause a pile up, so perhaps it’s for the best. In any case, you can’t keep a good man down, so I fight adversity by driving illegally instead. Concerned road users may rest assured that I have never driven on the public highway, limiting myself instead to private roads such as those surrounding the Runton Estate, teeming with dead wildlife mown down by Joe, Becka and delivery vehicles of every description. It was briefly suggested that instead of letting glampers hunt their own food with Graham’s dogs 
There are two forms of measurement in Britain: imperial and metric, depending upon what you’re trying to measure. For example, imperial measurements, such as ounces and inches, are used for fun things like drugs and cocks. Metric milligrams are for calculating legally incriminating blood-alcohol levels and such like. Horses, being undeniably hilarious, fall squarely into the imperial system, and are measured from ground to shoulder in imperial units known as hands. For example, a Shetland pony, such as the little bastard that lives in the petting zoo at Runton, is ten hands high. Like everything in the petting zoo, he does nothing other than destroy fencing and lark about, and is richly deserving of measurement in stroppy old centimetres like a hub cab or lamp post. We have discussed petting zoos before, and I once again urge you never, ever, to have one. It’s worse than having children. You can put children up for adoption if you decide it’s not really for you, but once you have a petting zoo, you’re stuck with it.
to a horse, silently weeping, as it moved along at 1 mph. I can therefore confidently claim to have seen a horse, but genuine horsemanship is difficult to bluff, especially when confronted with all the stirrups and saddles and swishing and sheer horsiness of what an actual horse is. They are massive, they keep fidgeting, and our ancestors must have been pretty desperate to get somewhere slightly further away a little bit more quickly than usual to domesticate them in the first place. I asked if they could blue screen the shot and cgi Conkers in later, but it was already evident that I cannot do a decent American accent in any case, with my line – ‘Sir, you are to maintain your fire and hold fast your ground. General Meade will send reinforcements presently’ – sounding as if Worzel Gummidge was saying it, thus detracting from the gravitas of the scene. I looked at ‘Anton’, watching proceedings from an upstairs window of the Old Servant’s Quarters, but to no avail. He is black, and not allowed to ride horses. The debacle bought a snort of amusement from Joe, which I thought was a bit fucking rich considering the much-vaunted ‘affinity with animals’ that secured him the only paid employment on the Runton Hall Estate stems from nothing more than being born next to White City greyhound stadium.
Despite this, and unlike the original glampers at Runton for whom threats of this nature were commonplace, everyone likes the key grips, gaffers, boom mike holders and so forth and, accordingly, Joe and/or Graham mediate such exchanges. The crew are indeed having a party for those of us constituting the staff at Runton, and usually Joe’s children, being as numerous as Graham’s are profane, would act as tiny, endearing waiting staff on such occasions. This time, however, Graham’s team of infant extortionists will also help, sharing in the generous whip round the crew have promised to have for us. Good mediation, if you ask me. It would be poor form to name the film, so discretion must prevail. That said, I will exclusively reveal that it features the grand-daughter of a very famous Hollywood star indeed, and some bloke who has a great aunt in common with Olive from On The Buses. Box office potential was adroitly summed up by Graham’s son, who pointed out that ‘You could sell their autographs on eBay if anyone knew who they fucking were’.
November is slow at Runton Hall. Slow, yes, but not entirely at a standstill. For example, we still have conspiracy groups about the place, although in winter they prefer to stay in the Old Servants’ Quarters where they can gather around flip charts and sort everything out in the comfort of a warm nineteenth century building. The yoga never really goes away either. We have all three sorts at Runton – Bikram, drunk and deaf. I murdered our previous Bikram yoga lady for her own good, and the new one doesn’t expect Joe to maintain open fires all day in the Forest School dormitory where she holds her classes, and thereby clings to life. Drunk yoga is something of a misnomer, now I come to think of it, as only the instructor is drunk. Last week she took her class wearing sunglasses to hide plastic surgery bruises and spent an hour talking about her holiday in Cyprus, and I’m not sure how much longer her tenure will last. Of the three, deaf yoga is the most popular. I’d assumed that in rural areas deaf people would be shot as poor breeding stock, but the instructor claims to be able to ‘fill a coach from Norwich’ twice a week. I for one applaud the East Anglian deaf for their flexibility and commitment, and long may it continue.
just hide all the lettuce and hope they go away either, as they feed off a low frequency energy field put out by humans in distress, the little buggers. Although there are millions of people who believe this, it’s not for everyone. As ‘Anton’, currently re-wiring the Old Servants’ Quarters, put it recently – ‘it’s not for us to have opinions on all this total fucking bollocks’ and it’s not for me to, broadly speaking, agree with him.
While Runton does have links with Freemasonry, which I’m not sure the conspiracy groups are aware of, religious visitors are less common and mainly confined to the hermitage in the remotest part of the Estate. Officially, Runton’s religious affiliation is secular humanism. In case you are unfamiliar, secular humanism replaces an irrational faith in God with an irrational faith in humans, leading me to wonder how many humans the average secular humanist has actually met. Recently, this line of thought enabled me to formulate my own non-conspiracy theory about the space lizards, centred upon my belief that humans don’t really need help to exploit and suppress each other. Humans are perfect vessels for malice, and while kindness and civility exists on a local and interpersonal level, these qualities are scarce in a wider context amid societies which ultimately exist to be pitted against each other. Therefore, the space lizards act as a form of interstellar ‘othering’: they can be blamed for everything, because the fundamental realisation that humans tacitly demand a permanent state of atrocity in which to flourish is simply too much for us to admit. I am therefore inclined to think that the interstellar shape shifters are a product of a flawed human psyche that refuses to accept that we are all a bunch of wankers. There, I’ve said it.
them is tricky though, and this is main reason I want to promote self-sufficient glamping. Truthfully, it’s the only option that can be made to work, practically speaking, as I have stated in the Smith Plan for Runton, due to go before the Trustees in March. As you may recall, getting glampers to hunt their own rabbits with Graham’s dogs was 
ere avocado was served as a starter for the adults, probably with chips and Carling Black Label. I think the rest of us had Chewits. This was followed by a forgotten main course and a real coconut smashed open with a hatchet in the back garden by Uncle Roy for pudding, and with which I was disappointed. How and why this was considered fun is entirely beyond me, but we both swear that it was all to celebrate that evening’s screening of the Incredible Hulk, starring Lou Ferrigno. Yes, it seems bizarre to me too, but we both independently recalled it, so it I can’t just be some story from the Blitz that we’ve mis-remembered as happening to ourselves. Whatever the occasion, it was clearly a fancy evening, and I shall ask Helen, who took to weightlifting and is now officially the strongest woman in Colchester*, for further info the next time I see her.
The Runton Diaries 