On the same warm, almost summery January day I posted about finding a lost dog while on the way to a job interview, I found another while cycling through Mundesley. In case you are unfamiliar, Mundesley is one of several small fishing towns marking the line where East Anglia wades into the North Sea, and the pronunciation rhymes rather satisfyingly with Monkees, hence the little rallying call of Hey Hey! We’re in Mundesley! I like to give myself as I approach. Similarities between this tiny map-dot of a place and the gaudy Boomertastic TV show of the same name do not end there. Examining the opening sequence for reference, I discovered that, like the Monkees themselves, many of the residents are bedridden, can only bathe with assistance, are unable to drive any form of motor vehicle responsibly, habitually wear woolly hats, often look confused, fall over a lot and certainly do ‘have something to say’, although in the case of Mundesley in 2021 it is usually at odds with the notion of ‘just trying to be friendly’.
I am usually there on medicine delivery duty. Since undertaking this, I have discovered that the elderly and vulnerable consider their health more dependent upon their distance from a copy of the Radio Times than any amount of beta blockers or co-codamol I can bike up the coast road. I’ve always assumed the Radio Times was just an eighty page picture of Ainsley Harriot and have never read it, although like a normal person I do buy it at Christmas so that I have something to jot things down on in biro. The infirm are massive fans though, and on the day in question I’d bought a couple of copies from Sheringham Tescos while getting some bits. Sheringham is a larger town further along the coast towards Kings Lynn, considered by Axis High Command a promising invasion site during the war, and also has the only Austrian restaurant I have ever seen, although there would presumably have been more if an invasion had been successful.* It is also notable for its well-mannered, happy and confident children, due to its popularity
with Christian groups and the autistic. Tesco has done much to ingratiate itself by, among other things, employing staff from a local college for young adults with special needs. This laudable policy can sometimes catch those of us who consider themselves to have a good grasp of social appropriateness off-guard when, as in this case, a checkout assistant all but hugged me for saying ‘hello’ to her.
She asked if I had cycled far and if it was raining. I replied ‘no not really’, and ‘no’ respectively.
‘There’s nothing worse than riding a bike in the rain,’ she said, thirty silent seconds later in a – and I’m sorry about this – rather too flirty manner, given the circumstances.
I replied that I’d once known a fella with stomach cancer, and that looked pretty rough, to which she laughed far too much. For the life of me I thought she was going to reach across the conveyor belt and flick me off.
In a bewildered attempt to highlight our considerable age difference, I said ‘Nineteen eighty one? That was a good year’ in response to the amount I was being charged for my shopping, in the avuncular manner of geography teachers and so forth when I was a child. They would’ve been talking about nineteen forty eight or something and be avid Radio Times readers by now, I suppose. She almost fainted with mirth, took out a ring that had been concealed about her person and asked me to marry her.** Hopefully, I reflected as I cycled eastwards along the coast road, she was just a simple 
seaside prostitute working at Tesco’s to make ends meet, because you can’t help but worry about how she might otherwise fare in the outside world.
Despite its efforts, Tesco remains unpopular in Sheringham which, like all the towns along the coast, does not like faceless corporations taking money away from identical tea shops. As I rode, I pondered whether or not the general idea of 90% of wealth being held by 5% of people was really such a surprise. After all, I should imagine 90% of popular music is produced by 5% of musicians, and 90% of popular literature is written by 5% of writers, and so on. I was unable to develop the idea much beyond this point because, as I reached Mundesley a spaniel fell out of my phone. Well, not exactly, of course. What happened was that while checking Facebook on an unrelated matter I saw a post about a lost dog. Closing my phone case and putting it back in my jacket, the actual dog was literally standing in front of me, as I remarked to the owners, ‘as if she had fallen out of my phone’. I said that yes, of course I’d wait with Fern, the dog, for them to arrive, but could they hurry because I only had so much cheese from Tesco and Fern was quickly getting through it, presumably due to the sea air making her peckish. It occurred to me as I waited that maybe this wasn’t actually their dog, and that I was currently kidnapping someone else’s, but this doubt vanished as Fern hopped into a Ford Focus for the joyful journey home, and I went about my business among the senior residents of Mundesley. Philosophically speaking, I am no clearer about the proportion of wealth to people, but I am certain that, in Norfolk, 90% of lost dogs are found by me.
*Not as ridiculous as you might think. East Anglia is flat once you get inland, ideal for assembling panzer formations and building airfields, with tactically important choke points that could, in theory, be captured by paratroopers. In the end though, the plan was abandoned when everyone agreed it was a beastly idea.
**NB This last bit did not happen. If I had ever been married I would have noticed by now.
Photards:
Main: Idiots.
Top inset: Resident of Mundesley being wheeled along the seafront for a complain, taken from the opening credits of the Monkees’ telly show.
Middle inset: Unable to bathe without assistance – again, from the telly show.
Lower inset: Menu of Austrian restaurant in Sheringham. It might be called Crofter’s these days because it is less frightening than Das Krofterhausen but make no mistake – this is pitiless food, ruthlessly served by automatons. They give you an armband with your table number on it when you enter, which is off putting. Nonetheless, it is a highly regarded, much loved and by all reports superb local establishment. I think some people did complain once, but they were never seen again.
that I was with them in spirit, which I felt was the main thing. In the aftermath of the great Christmas upgrade when there was not a single thing we could do because the server had melted, I suggested starting our replies with ‘Hey Baby!’ to cushion the blow, or not writing anything and just sending webcam footage of my dog looking sad instead, but this was veto-d.
Towards the end of last year, a small but ambitious software app which is like Zoom but not Zoom applied a software upgrade to its operating system. The work was carefully planned by experienced engineers, with the co-operation of front-line support staff. A schedule was drawn up and agreed to and, preliminary work was undertaken without incident, and everything seemed to be progressing smoothly. Well, not entirely, as it turned out. The house-sized housefly hurtling towards the ointment was the sudden decision by a major search engine to review and tighten its security policy. For arcane but important reasons, the upgrade now had to bought forward and Frisbee-d at the server with fingers crossed months ahead of time. Initially, the server swayed but remained standing. However, small stress points began to appear deep within the binary algorithms. Stress points became frayed, and then slowly began to dismember themselves. Patch after patch was thrown into the gathering mayhem but the damage was irreversible; whole blocks of code slipped their moorings and drifted into each other. Some parts of the now bewildered server began to shut down. Others started to overload as software that had hitherto performed excellently and without complaint now went bananas, and the whole thing began to buckle as the various components waged murderous war upon each other. The app which is like Zoom but not Zoom begun to stagger and lurch.
overwhelmed. Starved of the support of the engineers, who were engaged in a furious struggle to prevent the entire platform collapsing, they left. There was now nothing between the stricken app and beckoning oblivion. In short, it had all gone completely tits.
st biologically incapable of listening to classic rock, although I didn’t say that in the interview in case they thought I was mad. I got the job, too, although did come unstuck at a previous one where I was able to garnish my ‘Thanks for coming in’s and ‘Did you manage to park OK?’s by mentioning that I had just found a beagle on the A140 at Marsham. It was a heart-warming experience to see an A road – or, as we call it in Norfolk, motorway – come to an immediate and uncomplaining halt as dog food and water bowls appeared out of nowhere and people formed a gentle rolling cordon to herd the lovely old lady, untroubled by the experience, into the car behind ours. From there, she went to the vet at Aylsham for a nice nap and then, I am happy to report, safely back to her owners. ‘Were you looking for a dog?’ asked the horrendous old slag conducing the interview. ‘Yes – and then I found a dog’ I replied, seizing upon a chance to reference the Smiths’ Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, which got minor lols but essentially fell upon fallow ground I think. In failing the interview I became the only person ever to have not got the job they had already been successfully doing for six months, although I did hate it with an intensity that bordered upon homicidal fanaticism, so it was probably for the best.
I found myself on hold to an insurance company on Tuesday and decided to pass the time by tracing my natural father. This proved to be much easier than you might imagine. Facebook had come up trumps with a local builder for my 
y one not obsessed with a) stylised pictures of St George holding aloft an English flag on a presumably English horse and b) Asian grooming gangs. For the record, being English is marvellous, and I can see why everyone loves us. However, while I am sure we English share a human concern for the welfare of children, most of us are usually happy leaving the two happenstances un-conflated with robust yet spurious observations about migration patterns in former industrial regions. Still, it is hardly fair to focus upon one unpleasant aspect of Leeds when there is so much more of this cold, wet, gloomy city to enjoy, and I shall now move on.
e remarkable news, ‘Anton’ offered to scout branches of Asda and report back on the state of my genetic windfall. Usually, his interactions with people from Leeds are limited to chants of ‘That Jimmy Savile – he’s one of your own’ with his fellow Millwall fans to the tune of, now I come to think of it, Sloop John B by the Beach Boys. I declined the offer. It is most likely that, as far as my natural father and his subsequent reproductive triumphs are concerned, I simply don’t exist. I existed at some point, because there are photos of the pair of us, but I was very young when they were taken. In fact, Sid has just wandered downstairs for breakfast saying ‘Daddy, someone has wet my bed’, and I wasn’t even as old then as he is now. Still, you can’t choose your family, as they say. Well, whoever says that is obviously not me, of course, because I absolutely can, and I might just do exactly that by leaving this vast litter of Northern supermarket workers where I found them. We shall have to see.
2020 was a difficult year to love, as you may have noticed, and thus far 2021 isn’t shaping up to be much of a giggle, either. As I discovered shortly before Christmas, you can’t even try and do something nice, such as visit your old dear to reminisce about Christmases past over Gold Blend and shortbread fingers, without someone driving their fucking car through the garden wall. I use the word ‘driving’ generously, because there was no one actually in the car at the time. The owner appeared a few moments later, with the happy-go-lucky explanation it wasn’t really her fault. I mused aloud that it must be someone’s fault, because her ‘…Ford Focus isn’t fucking Herbie, is it?’, referencing a self-driving Volkswagon from an obscure cinema franchise that I had forgotten about until that moment. What had happened, she said, was this: she had parked and nipped into the shop, but the car’s handbrake had then disengaged itself, causing it to reverse out from between two other cars and down a hill, whereupon it turned right and mounted the pavement, before 9/11-ing my old dear’s garden. I said that seeing that as this was obviously a miracle, we should leave the car where it is and charge people to touch it for good luck. With the concept of plausibility looking on in stunned silence, she drove out of the garden again. I offered directions in case she wanted to finish the job by parking in the kitchen, but there was no further calamity.
who isn’t a dog or a horse is a handyman of some description, so it should be alright.
which is very common indeed – as they trawl up and down the inland road. I’ve never been entirely convinced by the general coronavirus narrative, but something out there is certainly happening, and happening often. I feel like someone in Pompeii looking on curiously as the first specks of ash begin to gather on the roof.
The Runton Diaries 