I have never married anyone I can’t stand. In fact, now I come to think of it, I have never married anyone at all. Neither of these things can be said of ‘Anton’, whose dearest wish is to see his ex-wife bombed. I think it’s worth underlining this point: his dearest wish, outside the continued good health of this children, is to see his ex-wife literally subjected to aerial bombardment by the Royal Air Force. The saturation bombing of ‘Anton’s ex-wife is a subject that comes up regularly, and arose again as we de-cluttered a disused bedroom in the Big House at Runton recently. The Big House is the private residence of After Lunch and Falafel For Lunch and, as a rule, only Joe goes there, and then only for the Monday morning Board of Trustees and reptilian shapeshifters meetings. Last year’s redecorating and rewiring of the Old Servant’s Quarters seems to have elevated Anton and I’s status to a point where we are called upon, on this occasion, to carry dusty boxes of books, yellowed copies of Melody Maker and sundry bric a brac from a disused bedroom to Joe’s van, and I suppose this constitutes a promotion of sorts.
It was a programme from the 1993 Duxford ‘Flying Legends’ Air Show that sparked ‘Anton’ off, sliding from amid a pile of pre-internet clothing catalogues and diverting the conversation from testing the Knowledge on each other, which we do regularly to keep our Plan B of becoming London cabbies in play. I am fond of pressing him for practical details concerning the bombing of his ex-wife and, over the years, the procedure has become well established. She would be in a field on her own, not expe
cting to be the target of an air raid – a detail I have insisted upon on humanitarian grounds. The raid itself would be carried out by iconic World War Two era heavy bombers, such as the Avro Lancaster, which would be well able to do the job while adding a touch of class and a certain whimsical charm. The payload would be mainly high explosive, with a complement of Grand Slam bombs, capable of penetrating a reinforced concrete bunker fifty feet below ground. ‘Anton’ has often suggested the use of bouncing bombs such as those on the dam busters raid, but these will not work on dry land. However, the Dambusters theme could play during proceedings – a straightforward decision, as the only other option is Ride of the Valkryies as per Apocalypse Now. Incidentally, when I said ‘Apocalypse Now’ to ‘Anton’ we were in mid-heft and he misheard it as ‘apologise now’, replying ‘What the fuck for?’. Anyway, the Dambusters theme is jauntier, and in any case Ride of the Valkryies was Hitler’s favourite piece of music, which seems a bit much.
A man called Ray Stevens, who has never been to a Millwall game, once recorded a song called Everything Is Beautiful. I put much of ‘Anton’s bitterness towards his ex-wife down to the fact that he supports Millwall. Remarkably, he couldn’t stand her before they were married and, as far as I can tell, the only nice time they ever had was against an outside wall of the main lecture theatre at Leeds University, a liaison resulting in their oldest daughter, who later attended her graduation ceremony in the very same building. As a West Ham fan, I can never foresee a time when I would want to have my current girlfriend carpet bombed in a field, despite my interes
t in military aircraft but, as Ray Stevens would agree had he ever encountered them in the wild, Millwall fans are not beautiful and, genetically speaking, of very poor quality indeed. There is no kind way to say this. Indeed, Sir David Attenborough spent eight months living among Millwall fans in New Cross in the early 1990s, rapidly coming to the conclusion that they were ‘all fucking mouth’. Part of the problem of course is south London itself, which is backward, Godless and resembles the surface of the moon. The first time I visited ‘Anton’s old flat in Deptford, people saw that I was wearing shoes, and thought I was a duke. I said all this to him as we hefted box after box down the stairs and into the van and, to his credit, he agreed with me on every single point, bursting into tears towards the end of the afternoon when he admitted that, like so many Millwall fans, years of jealousy towards West Ham had stunted his growth. I am a compassionate man and let him put on my West Ham shirt for a bit. He said it was the proudest moment of his life.
Among the clutter was an old copy of A Tale Of Two Cities, among the Dickens novels I have ploughed through on Audible while walking the dog. We salvaged it for Joe, who has ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ tattooed on his forearm. This, incidentally, strikes me as an archly Stoic thing to say, as per our observations in the last entry. However, neither the Stoic philosophers nor Charles Dickens are clear about the correct moment to leave a girlfriend you cannot stand, so I shall clear this up for them: the best time to leave a girlfriend you cannot stand is literally any time before you marry her. Easy.
Photards:
Main – ‘Anton’s ex-wife’s passport photo, if ‘Anton’ had his way.
Top – Page 22 of Melody Maker, June 3rd 1995. Note the Boo Radleys – as I think I have already mentioned, my boss up the council claims to have been the drummer in the Boo Radleys. He clearly wasn’t, but continues to claim it anyway.
Middle – An Avro Lancaster. Like all planes in World War Two, which I often think of as the Great Art Deco War, it is a beautiful thing, although we should also remember it is designed with the express intention of inflicting horrific damage upon anything it flies over. In the hypothetical example of a thousand of these v one ex-wife in a field, I know where the clever money’s going..
Lower – South London, 2019. The black building is Lewisham Town Hall.
It is July in rural Norfolk, and the Runton Estate is beautiful. Sunshine bathes the fields and chequers the architecture. It is hot, but not too hot. Sebastopol the Peacock hoots from everywhere, and people are even flying kites, something I assumed was just an urban myth. Occasionally, a light aircraft trundles across the sky from a nearby airfield and is waved at by those on terra firma, where everything smells of picnics and Zoom lollies and strawberries and tiny sticky faces. Everyone is happy and looks lovely, even those I know for a fact are quite ugly and miserable. Even in the petting zoo, where Joe hands out lambs and piglets to enthralled glampers, the animals’ impulse to attack everything that isn’t a) feeding them or b) food has mellowed for the duration. Elsewhere, the clumps of woodland scattered across the estate are leafy, alive and heavy with colour, and full of Forest School dinosaur hunts, sketching expeditions and adventure of every kind, under the supervision of Becka and her limitless tolerance of the young and loud. This is Runton at its best.
In keeping with the theme, I had suggested that we get him drunk on rum and send him to the West Indies to steal someone else’s pirate outfit instead, but this was vetoed by my current girlfriend, whose idea of a terror campaign on the High Seas would be to hunt ships full of treasure, board them, and ask if they need anything from Waitrose. That said, it was nice to hang out with the glampers, something I don’t do as often as I feel I should, because technically only Joe and Becka are recognised by the shapeshifting lizards of the Board of Trustees as staff. ‘Anton’ and I occupy a twilight world between estate management and general helper-outery, for which we are unpaid but allowed to generate our own income as long it is to the furtherance of the Estate – hence why we run a tent hire business from Joe and Becka’s old yurt. Still, the most exciting thing about Pirate Day was what was going on in the East Field, just behind Pirate Day: an Open University lecture on Greco-Roman Stoicism.
writing it, as I wanted to demonstrate a link between the stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off. At heart, stoicism is entirely concerned with ‘shaking it off’ – indeed, the central message is, surely, that the playas gonna play play play play play and the haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate, and I am sure Marcus Aurelius would’ve have said exactly that had he been a popular country singer from Pennsylvania and not a second century Roman Emperor embroiled in a vicious war with rebelling German tribes. If Marcus Aurelius wasn’t ‘dancing on his own’ and making the moves up as he went I don’t know who was, although he would probably have had you thrown to some lions – or, if no lions were available, lots and lots of cats – for saying so.
Demolishing a pigeon loft with a sledgehammer is not one of my favourite things. Neither is being up to the eyeballs in debt as a result of buying bits of a Georgian country house estate, renovating them, and selling them back to a bunch of Freemasons. My favourite things include putting four Weetabix in a bowl with full fat milk and 100ml of double cream and having them for supper, illustrating how far from perfect yesterday was. There is little opportunity for finesse when demolishing a pigeon loft with a sledgehammer; you just hit it until it collapses. We – Joe and ‘Anton’ were also on sledgehammer duty – had been doing this for an hour, sweating profusely and lost in the contemplation of brick dust and pigeon droppings from the last century, when Graham’s small pack of lurchers bounded into view.
m’s caravan would roll off it. The debate continued in a spirited manner for some time, pivoting around words such as ‘wanker’ and ‘twat’, until my phone rang. It was Taylor Swift.
I was pondering how strange it would be if it actually was Taylor Swift and, if you were one of her friends, would it be awkward to have Shake It Up as your ringtone. It was more likely to be Open University, as it had occurred to Joe and I over the winter that Runton would be perfect for Open University retreats, and in keeping with the intellectual/philosophical debate ethos that was the original idea for Runton. If it hadn’t been a bunch of hippies in charge of this it might have come to pass. Sadly it was a bunch of hippies, which is why, apart from Graham saying ‘How about I shoot your fucking balls off?’ to ‘Anton’ in the background, the only discourse at Runton is from Flat Earthers and chemtrail obsessives. Securing the Open University as a client would put Runton on the map. Runton wouldn’t enjoy being on the map, but it would give us credibility among, well, everybody, get us back in line for a Lottery grant and, in my case, prevent me having to hold down a stupid job up the council to bank roll my involvement.
Amid al fresco yoga, Flat Earth society lectures and changeable early summer weather, two displaced Cockneys are hosing down tents with freezing water behind a barn in an untidy field. The field and barn belong to the East Runton estate, and the displaced Cockneys are ‘Anton’ and I. We own the tents and hire them out, and the hosing is necessary to clean the tents after glampers have written all over them with chalk. This season’s glampers are standard issue middle class Labour voters – ie, Labour voters – presumably attracted to Norfolk because there are no Jews here, but the chalking of truisms is a new thing. We were recently reminded in this manner that ‘Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change’, a phrase apparently once beeped by Stephen Hawking. He is wrong, because the word is ‘versatility’, or perhaps ‘pragmatism’, but he was mainly a numbers guy so we’ll let it go. Why must Bens and Lauras do stuff like this? I don’t know – I’m a displaced Cockney, not a Jedi – but put a white girl in a tent and suddenly she’s Maya fucking Angelou, as ‘Anton’ sagely observed. We left the tents to dry.
t these days because, in a turn of events I have difficulty accepting, they and their numerous children don’t live in it anymore. Joe is still here as estate manager and Becka’s outdoor school for uppity little bastards with many, many food intolerances is as strong as ever, but they now live in a house like the rest of the post-Roman world. This came about after a proposal among the Freemasons and shape shifters of the Board of Trustees to, as they would say in my council job, move Joe upstairs into a formal management role. One of the things about living in a yurt is that you don’t have an upstairs, so this was impossible. In any case, a decade of outdoor living is enough for anyone, even if you do what Joe did and marry a hippy, and it was simply time to move on.
ates something akin to cognitive jetlag between the two, making my entire life surreal. That said, being forever a mod, the chance to wear a suit every day is a considerable benefit of working up the council. In my interview, I was asked what would improve the public sector and replied ‘half a million shareholders’, and still got the job. Well, it wasn’t an interview as such, but an informal chat. I know it was an informal chat because I said ‘Just checking – this is an informal chat, isn’t it?’, got the answer ‘Yes’, and said that I was pleased about that, because I was drunk. I wasn’t really drunk, the interviewer was a distant hair cutting acquaintance, and I had the edge over the other candidates because there weren’t any. I can see why – my time managing the women of the public sector and their fringes, cardigans and ankles, all of which get more shapeless by the year, has been largely unhappy and ridiculous beyond words. It has outlined what many belief systems teach us about all things being connected, though, because I would like to hose my staff down with icy water behind a barn every Monday morning, too, to show them what inconvience actually is, instead of what they think it is, which is doing an easy job that you can never lose, followed by a comfortable retirement. I bet it would be illegal though.
ployment, she came to work in her Barclays bank uniform, would take her breaks at the same time as she did when working at Barclays bank, and when someone started there who coincidentally also used to work at Barclays bank, refused to come to work until they were either sacked or moved to a different building. This at least provided relief from the hour or so of locker door slamming every afternoon at three o’clock: for reasons unknown, she must slam every locker door four times to test the lock. There are fifty-eight of them and the reason she does this, now I come to think of it, is because she is fucking mad.
The Runton Diaries 