The Runton Diaries

There is frost under the white sky of East Anglia, hammered into place by winds howling from Scandinavia, and never afraid to outstay a welcome. Across open land – ie, the whole region except Ipswich, Norwich and the bead string of towns around the coast – muddy puddles are frozen shiny and everything smells of cold. Runton, squarely in the middle of East Anglia, is an ice box. Happily, I am writing this in a nice jumper in the cosy Old Servant’s Quarters, amid the smell of toast crumbs and tea, with century-old radiators providing a reassuringly permanent warmth. When summer arrives, the Quarters will once again assume their primary commercial function as a romantic venue for newlyweds, but for now the Flat Earth Society are in residence as is normal off-season, their comings and goings audible from the dressing table where I am sitting. They are a friendly bunch, especially considering that, in common with all conspiracy theorists, they assume that everything is false and everyone is lying to them. No matter: they always buy me shortbread fingers when they go on food runs to Morrissons, and while I don’t think that the Earth is flat, I do know free biccies when I see them.

Until recently, another sound, or collection of sounds, could be heard from the Old Servant’s Quarters. They were as follows:

Click click.

Bang!

Bang!

Wanker.

Click click.

Bang!

Bang!

Wanker.

…and so on, over and over, accompanied by laughter and heated conversation. This was ‘Anton’, untroubled by talent or skill, discharging a shotgun at passing grouse. Observing the scene one morning, I leapt upon a rare opportunity to combine Purple Haze and poor marksmanship by saying ‘Excuse me, while I miss the sky’, which made Joe, his impromptu instructor, chuckle. In return, ‘Anton’ advised me to go and fuck myself. This charming countryside tableau occurred, now I come to think of it, on the last day of the grouse shooting season. That we even know what a grouse season is illustrates the extent of our assimilation into rural life, although the fact that the grouse population at Runton actually increases during it illustrates our general attitude towards countryside sports. Joe is less squeamish – he skins rabbits in front of Strictly, I am informed by Becka. We are tin pot country gentlemen, with ‘Anton’s shotgun licence not yet applied for, Joe’s defaced by a crayon, and mine employed as a bookmark in a large volume of pasta recipes by my current girlfriend. We certainly don’t look like country gentlemen. We look like armed robbers. Graham, Runton’s gamekeeper, has suggested that our aim might be improved by wearing balaclavas and leaping from the back of a Transit van before firing, and he might have a point.

‘Anton’s firearms training was a rare mid-winter meeting of he and Joe and I. We had considered working on the stable complex we bought from the Estate last year, as we’ll be able to sell it back to the Trustees when it’s done, but it involves the re-laying of cobbles and historically-appropriate installation of rooves, and we’ll only balls it up if we do it ourselves. When finished, it’ll be a riding school for summer glampers, which should be a larf. ‘Anton’ spent the winter in his adopted corner of Leeds, undertaking private electrician work for his growing clientele of untrusting Asian homeowners. Joe, Becka and their numerous children went house sitting in Suffolk. I spent it in our temporary home, where the war for Nid’s identity geared up a notch. My current girlfriend, middle class to the core and hop

ing for a weak, gender fluid son, bought him a play oven for Christmas. She has also been giving him quinoa crisps behind my back. I responded by telling him that he is the oven repair man and feeding him fish fingers and spaghetti hoops like a normal person, and he seems to be alright.

Balance is everything, however; last month at nursery he punched a fellow toddler over a disputed sandcastle, and I can’t be having that. Genetics are perhaps to blame. His paternal great grandmother once hurled a doctor down the stairs of a terraced house in Gillingham for suggesting she was unwell, demonstrating the family’s fondness for, and skill at, physical confrontation. Indeed, he will have myself and generations of scrap-happy Mile End ne’er do wells in the great pub car park in the sky cheering him on, as long as he is acting in self defence and hasn’t just kicked off for no reason. Genderless, cultureless, food intolerant, middle-class weakling or robust working class mini-geezer – either is ok. Well, not the first one, obviously, but both are preferable to him being a dick, as I’m sure we don’t need any more of those in the world.

Incidentally, for Christmas I got a job in the public sector. It wasn’t the one I wanted but I don’t have the reciept, so I’ll have to keep it. Anyway, we’ll deal with that remarkable turn of events next time.
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Photards:

Main: First light in Norfolk, which at this time of year is just after midday. Vapour trails left by aircraft stationed at RAF Marham, I should think.

Inset top: My dog, Archibald el Fantastique, wondering why he has been charging across fields in the rain for the past two hours.

Inset middle: Dog guarding staircase for some reason.

Inset lower: Bathroom in our house. Still needs a couple of bits done.

To pick up where we left off last time, side effects of anti-depressants include eating and sleeping more – ideal, with Christmas coming up. Also, they are easy to get hold of. All I did was nip to the doctor for a routine examination of a wrist injury sustained in the Tennyson Road Incident and walk out with enough Citalopram to keep me in hysterical larfter for about eight months. The wrist will never be the same, but there is a broader context: it was a nasty prang, and my doctor wanted to monitor PTSD-type symptoms, of which there have been several. For example, I am now a nervous, rather than simply physically attractive, passenger, convinced that anything at a left-hand junction is about to pile into us. Not that it would matter in our Land Rover mum wagon, which could withstand Godzilla throwing it through a skyscraper, but this sort of symptom does not understand rationality: on long journeys my right leg aches from incessantly pumping a non-existent brake pedal. Then there’s the nightmares, the waking up shouting, the jumping at shadows, and so forth. It’s not much of a giggle, all things considered.

Then again, it’s worth remembering that I came out of the incident in better condition than the cabbie who drove into me. Facing prison for criminal negligence, he committed suicide shortly before the case came to court. This is inexpressibly sad. For a while I

replayed the event over and over, convinced it was my fault in the way that I now understand is common among victims of physical trauma. It wasn’t. He was drunk, speeding and jumped a red light onto a roundabout, and in ninety-nine alternate universes, I never got up off the tarmac. My doctor asked if I felt suicidal, as she is obliged to do. I said I didn’t, but admitted that my facial hair was not the beard of a happy man. She agreed, rather unprofessionally. ‘I’m a barber,’ I said, ‘imagine what it’s like for me, going out in public like this’. She already knew I was a barber because I cut her husband’s hair. The first time, I covered up a lazy haircut with combing and gel – this was also unprofessional, so I suppose we were even. In my defence, the first thing you learn at barber school is that if in doubt leave it long and chuck a load of product through it, so I was only following protocol. I’ve cut his hair several times since, incidentally, and he remains of the few clients I have who is not either extremely old, clearly dying or possibly already dead.

We had discussed PTSD, male depression and similar phenomena before. This was at her house, after the lazy haircut, perhaps because we were all depressed about it, even though only two of us were male. This isn’t true, actually, as only I knew it was a lazy haircut and was keeping it to myself. Anyway. Male depression is in the spotlight, with current thought citing perceived loss of masculine roles and, indeed, perceived loss of masculinity itself as the main causes. This seems reasonable, although I th

ink it is part of a wider issue with identity in contemporary society. To paraphrase enormous Edwardian essayist GK Chesterton: ‘when people stop believing in God, they start believing in anything’. To paraphrase any number of nutcases at Runton, society is being routinely homogenised so that we lose our identity and become even more unhappy. Unhappy humans emit the low frequency vibrations that multi-dimensional shape shifting lizards from the rings of Saturn feed upon, and considering they are already keeping us in a state of constant fear via social media for this exact reason, it is no wonder they are secretly running the planet. My professionalism keeps me from having an opinion on this brilliant nonsense. Be that as it may, pointing out that society is unhappy is hardly breaking a story, but it’s a long ride to the doctor from here, especially during the boring bit of the coast road between Eccles on Sea and Mundesley, and I have to think about something.

I am writing this on Remembrance Sunday, about which I have mixed feelings. No one fought a war for this useless pantomime of a society, but then few people fight wars for anything in particular. Humans are their own tragedy, war is a by-product of this, and most people fight wars simply because there is a war on to fight. Also, a fine example of dignified national reflection has in recent years attained a mawkish sentimentality that no one walked slowly towards machine guns for. That said, wandering across the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Northrepps with my dog at half past ten as the village was gathering, it would have been terrible form to simply pass through. We walk here often, chatting to the verger who is struck by Archie and his enthusiasm for literally everything. Also, I’m no slouch when it comes to medieval architecture and know a fifteenth century ecclesiastical building when I see one, so we discuss this while he regales me with tales of smugglers, highwaymen and how the vicarage had the only bath in the village until 1900, while Archie leans against his legs. ‘He’s being very quiet today,’ he said, as the vicar read out the names of locals killed in World War One. It was a long list for such a small village, and it never really recovered. The list for World War Two was shorter but perhaps sadder, because there was no one left to fight in it. ‘Yes,’ I wanted to hiss, ‘he’s at a fucking Remembrance Day service,’ but decided against it. The Last Post sounded, the wind rushed up from the sugar beet fields, leaves scurried about the gravestones, and the world turned a-new.
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Picters:

Main – St Mary the Virgin, Northrepps. At full flight my dog would cover the ground between here and the tower in slightly under four seconds. Takes two minutes to get him off the sofa, mind.

Top inset – War memorial in the churchyard.

Middle inset – Horses in pasture behind the church. They are lying down as a mark of respect.

Lower inset – Churchyard, facing out across the sugar beet towards Sidestrand and the North Sea. It is a peaceful place.

Watching children’s tv makes me feel like I’ve been abandoned in a care home, and I think this may stem from an episode that took place shortly before Nid was born. Finding myself in front of a Home Counties telly one tea time, I was obliged to watch In The Night Garden because the people I was with had a daughter who liked it. This is fine of course, except that the daughter wasn’t even in the room – she was asleep upstairs, but we had to watch it anyway, which I found disconcerting, and also credible evidence of Illuminati mind control via mass media. That was then, though, and this is now. My current girlfriend, Nid’s mother, has a decent career as an arms dealer for the Russian mafia*, and there is little point sacrificing it for me to bugger about with my shaky-at-best portfolio of casual income streams. As a result, until we move back to our house and Nid returns to his nursery, I have to stay at home with him all day like some kind of wanker. Yes, I can pop to Runton at the weekends and cut hair in the evenings, but there is no denying that my formidable earning power has effectively been put on hold for the duration. We could get a nanny, but they would have to come from an absolute mess of a country to work for what we could afford to pay. For the time being, therefore, I am left both holding and entertaining the baby.

Twelve nanny-less weeks in, and I absolutely understand how parents stuck at home go a bit nuts. I also see how it is possible to be a devoted parent while being gently trashed all day and swiping through Tinder to pass the time (not yet a coping mechanism of mine) – or indeed why Becka goes to the Screaming Car now and then to shout and shout and shout. Actually, I’m not sure how Tinder would work out here, as there is not much in the way of wifi and only four people. Anyway. I consider myself a shameful lightweight, as I only have the one child to look after and know this situation will not last much beyond New Year. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people who live like this for years on end, with little prospect of any change whatsoever. Nid is in fact a familiar toddling presence at Runton, and attended the first of two weddings held there this summer, where he and I danced to Lionel Ritchie’s All Night Long, prior to going home at seven o’clock. There is also respite in the regular appearance of a convoy of utility vehicles belonging to the Coffee Mums, who cart us off to a beach or a playground in a blur of diesel fumes and Help For Heroes window stickers. [Writing this, it has just occurred to me that you could easily change Help For Heroes to Help For Herpes, if you wanted someone called Darren to batter you]. The Coffee Mums are a nice bunch, and I am grateful for them. We do, incidentally, have a mum wagon of our own these days, in the form of a Land Rover Defender purchased from a sugar beet farmer, my current girlfriend having stated that she wanted something she could drive through hedges in. I don’t drive because I consider it common, so it is of little use to me, but it is a fine vehicle nonetheless.

I discussed children’s telly with ‘Anton’ recently as we secured the folded glamper tents under tarpaulin sheets in the restored barn for winter, the final part of an arduous task whereby they are hosed with disinfectant in case non-middle-class people come into contact with them and catch veganism. As children, we had never heard a Welsh person speak and, to our innocent inner-city ears, Dai the Station Master from Ivor the Engine sounded like an Asian shopkeeper. At some point during the intervening decades the series was banned for racial insensitivity, hopefully not because of Anton and I, who had no other frame of reference at the time. Things have certainly changed since then. For example, Nid and I watch Biggleton, which portrays a town so diverse that the vet is a child with Down’s Syndrome, who would struggle to find work in a rural environment. We also agreed that Justin of Justin’s House would’ve been assaulted if he turned up at either of our schools dressed like a clown and inviting children back to his place to wiggle their bottoms. ‘We live in a compassionate society,’ I explained to Nid the first time we saw him, ‘and instead of imprisonment, that man is obliged by law to wear bright clothes as a warning that he is a danger to children’. I like to think the message sunk in.

I have since reversed my position. Justin is a skilled comedian and choreographer, loved by his audience, the host of a deaf show he does at lunch time featuring Mr Tumble’s Spotty Bag and also a ton of stuff with disabled children, who form 80% of the population in CBeebies world. Actually, all children on CBeebies are either disabled or Scottish. The Scottish children are usually subtitled, presumably because they are often drunk, aggressive, and slurring quite badly. On the other hand, you never see a disabled Scottish person on CBeebies, which is odd because the Highlands are all slopes and presumably handy for wheelchairs, although only on the way down I suppose. Be that as it may, I put the telly on just now and Justin was doing an Antiques Roadshow skit on Gigglebiz. He certainly gets plenty of work, and long may it continue.

Our task complete, ‘Anton’ and I sat on the pile of tents drinking tea from our flasks and watching frost creep across the East Field where Joe and Graham were waterproofing the derelict pigeon loft we cleared last summer. As we did so, I had a moment of sublime realisation about a phone conversation between the pair of us ages ago, which ‘Anton’ ended by cryptically saying ‘Gotta go – Maddie Moate’s having a bath’. I took this to be rhyming slang and never questioned it until I discovered that Maddie Moate is the blonde chipmunk lady from Do You Know?, where she contemplates how everyday things come into being with one facial expression and a demeanour suggesting she scrubs herself with powerful antiseptic every couple of hours. In the episode I now realise he was watching during the phone call in question, she was explaining hot water by running a bath, having already upped the ante by saying stuff like ‘Do you know what I like to do every night before I go to sleep?’ and then discussing toothpaste. It’s nice to see something for the dads in children’s television scheduling, but the thought of ‘Anton’ stabbing the cat while watching a blameless television presenter going on about lagged boilers and pipework is too much to bear.

All things considered, it’s no surprise that this afternoon I was prescribed Citalopram, especially after listening to a list of things ‘Anton’ would like to ask Maddie if she ‘knew’, and with which I will not trouble you. I’ll probably just sell it to ‘Anton’ like all the codeine I got after the Tennyson Road Incident, but still. No fucking surprise at all.

*This is not true.
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Picters:

Main: Joe either closing the door on his van or replacing it, as it comes off if you open it fully.

Inset top: I often write things while looking after Nid – it’s that or go at the sherry all day – and as a result of watching me he has learned to hold a pen at quite an early age.

Inset second: He wrote this himself. It’s the first part of his autobiography, covering his birth. He said he wanted to get it down while it was still fresh.

Inset middle: Justin of Justin’s House. Top notch stuff, and I am sure he doesn’t dress like that off-camera. Nid loves him, and he’s not an easily impressed boy.

Inset lower: Maddie Moate, who I suspect would maintain that expression even if you blew her kmees off with a shotgun.

The house in which myself, my current girlfriend, our tiny son and our dog live was built in 1771. This is a long time ago although, as it is only 1842 in Norfolk, not as long as it could be. It was originally a small dairy farm house, built by the cows who worked here and, apart from a tile roof, a smattering of replacement windows and some new-fangled central heating, has barely changed. In fact, the main difference is that the ceiling has fallen in. Well, ‘fallen in’ is an exaggeration, but ‘falling in gradually, due to the accumulated effect of seasonal temperature fluctuations’ isn’t, with cracks creeping across the interior wattle and daub at an alarming rate. Happily, wattle and daub is a formidable building material, and ours only needs minor work to be lovely again for the next couple of centuries – not bad for mud, straw and clay left to dry and whitewashed when America was a colony. All things considered, things could be worse. We’ve had to move ourselves and all our stuff out for three months while the work is done though, and among the things that could be worse, this ranks quite highly.

Joe has not been seen in public without birthday cake on his clothing for over a decade, due to having so many children, and – perhaps because of this  – is handy in a crisis. During fourteen journeys to and from our temporary home in his transit van, his trademark stoicism prevented me piling our stuff up in the nearest field, setting fire to it, and driving off. We could’ve accomplished this with confidence because, despite every single panel on the van being damaged, along with both wing mirrors and most of the lights, it performed admirably throughout. This is especially true considering it was purchased to bounce around the Runton Estate in (and on, if you are one of Joe’s older children. I once heard him shout the memorable line ‘You have to be seven to ride on the roof’ at the younger ones). Amid the hefting and loading and unloading and the dust, cobwebs and swearing the only trouble it gave us was at a municipal waste site near North Walsham, where it aroused the suspicion of a man in a fluorescent tabard whose name, if there is any justice in the world, is something like Barry Tits or Peter Cocklength.

Among our cargo were some dismantled flat pack bookshelves, donated by an acquaintance of mine who found Norfolk too exciting and went to live in Canada instead. During my market trading days they held stock and a canvas print of the Beatles walking to the stage at the Shea Stadium in 1965 but now, at the end of their career, Barry Tits or Peter Cocklength judged them to be signifiers of dishonest intent.

‘Are you commercial traders?’ he asked.

I pointed out the word ‘Royal’, the word ‘Mail’ and the Royal Mail logo still visible on Joe’s van, and that unless the Post Office now offered a house clearance service, this was unlikely. He was unimpressed. I asked if we could leave the stuff here if we also left a little card saying no one was in when we called. He stated their policy that furniture could not be accepted if it had been assembled at home. Of course it had been assembled at home, I replied: it was flat pack furniture. Joe reasoned that it had also been disassembled at home, and was now just bits of wood. Barry Tits or Peter Cocklength’s objection seemed to be that we had the look of people who would hire a van, put disassembled flat pack furniture in it, then attempt to abuse local recycling byelaws for kicks. This sounded like van shaming to me and we have come too far for that. On this occasion, all the way from my house.

It wasn’t that Barry Tits or Peter Cocklength wasn’t doing a worthwhile job, objectionable though he was. It was that his objection was based upon nothing and backed up with variations on ‘We get a lot of professional house clearers in here passing themselves off as private homeowners to avoid paying to have stuff disposed of’. When I protested our innocence, he held up a clip board to silence me. Come to think of it, he didn’t, but he was so much like the kind of person who would that I now can’t un-imagine it. He then rattled on about the time someone smuggled a flat pack bathroom cabinet past him in a Renault Kangoo and when an IKEA bed base was waved through in a Luton van by a colleague who has since retired. It occurred to me that if I was to give Barry Tits or Peter Cocklength to a decent right hander, his jaw would break because his mouth would be open when it landed. The Krays’ famous ‘cigarette punch’ uses the same science, and is easily reproduced: offer your target a cigarette, and as he accepts a light, get your identical twin brother to punch him in the mouth. Bingo. Sadly, it was impossible for me to do this because I am an only child, I don’t smoke, and municipal waste sites are council property and if public sector workers see cigarettes they feel threatened, start crying, and have to go home. The impasse went on for several minutes until Joe agreed that he was doing a difficult job, at which point he said ‘Right, chuck it over there, then’, indicated a large pile of similarly disassembled furniture, and fucked off back to his Portacabin. I suppose he just wanted to be appreciated, which is fair enough, although it was a strange way to go about it. It’s handy to know that if Joe and I should find ourselves doing bona fide house clearance, we can pop back, get Barry Tits or Peter Cocklength talking about how he’s expected to do three peoples’ jobs and so forth, and get rid of a ton of stuff.

House wise, we’re in and settled and that’s that. I like both our temporary home and Waxham, where it is located. It is a typically tiny Norfolk village where a blacksmith once sold his soul to the devil, which seems a bit rash, and where numerous ghosts had a dinner party at the manor house, if local undisputed fact is to be believed. Back at Runton, I am missing a visit from the American Civil War re-enactors who lived on squirrels and pine nut coffee in the more remote woodland areas last summer. Also, there are Flat Earth Society lectures in the Restored Barn which, with an eye to increasing revenue, I double booked with deaf yoga. My time away has hardly been wasted, however. For example, apart from cutting hair and moving house, I have been teaching Nid to say ‘Alright my love?’ over breakfast when he is at his most vulnerable, so he can use it as a standard greeting to staff at his nursery. The nearest he can get is ‘All wah wah wah?’, but it’s a good start.

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Photards:

This week’s pictographic jaunt is:

Main: Joe’s gallant transit van, since returned to thrashing around the Runton estate carrying firewood and excited children.

Inset top: Elderly wattle and daub bedroom ceiling.

Inset middle: Runton petting zoo sign. It would start ‘Please count your hands’ if I had my way.

Inset lower: Dog inspecting controlled burn of Runton shrub land by Graham and Joe. The Flat Earth Society will think they are sending signals to orbiting alien space craft if they see it.