The board of trustees at Runton Hall are mainly comprised of an offshoot from the Gurney family, who own most of East Anglia. The Gurneys came over with the Conqueror*, made a fortune from the wool trade, built Norwich, and then invented the commercial banking system, whereupon their already gargantuan fortune took on interstellar proportions. It has continued to grow ever since, incidentally, hence the phrase ‘as rich as a Gurney’, in common use around these parts. Under ordinary circumstances, a couple of washed-up chancers such as ‘Anton’ and I are unlikely to cross paths with bona fide English aristocracy such as this; however, Runton is not an ordinary place, and these are not ordinary times. To this end, we met two of them at the Old Servant’s Quarters on Monday for tea in the sort of semi-informal sit down that will henceforth be a feature of life at Runton, as discussed last time. The Gurneys are firmly in the top 10% of people who own everything, a point made obvious when they arrived with a Swiss roll instead of biscuits. In their situation, I’d have gone classic with digestives or Bourbons, whereas ‘Anton’, who is very common, would probably have bought a six pack of Wagon Wheels and already had two of them. Swiss roll, though. That’s old money for you. All the Lottery wins in the world won’t buy that sort of class.
It’s worth mentioning that although the Trustees are part of the Gurney family, Gurney is not their surname. I couldn’t tell you what that surname is, because they inhabit a strata of English society so well-heeled that it appears to be speaking a different language, even to native English speakers such as Anton and I. Thus, when the man introduced them it sounded like he said ‘I am After Lunch, and this is my wife, Falafal
For Lunch, and we like your dog’. My dog, Archibald el Fantastique is an enthusiastic animal, and after saying hello and running up and down the stairs a few times to show how fast he is, retired to keep an eye on proceedings from atop a pile of curtains in the corner. All the curtains in the Old Servant’s Quarters have been taken down for spring cleaning, and much of the place is to be wallpapered before Easter, when bookings start coming in in earnest. Wallpapering was the reason for the meeting as, along
with myself, ‘Anton’, After Lunch and Falafel For Lunch, there was a wallpaper consultant present. She was necessary because if you’re restoring a mid-nineteenth century building, you can’t just have a feature wall and put inspirational canvasses up everywhere else, as is the way of twenty-first century interior decoration. There are too many walls in this country with ‘You Are Capable Of Amazing Things’ or similar obvious untruths written across a polar bear on them, and I will not be part of the problem. I’m sorry but I won’t.
I wish I’d heard of wallpaper consultancy before deciding to pursue my new career in barbering though because, unlike barbering which is a skill both complex and subtle, wallpaper consultancy involves sitting at a table with a pile of wallpaper samples and saying ‘There’s this one, or this one’ over and over again. Occasionally I would say ‘Is there that one?’ to amuse ‘Anton’, who asked if there was anything with Snoopy on it. The wallpaper consultant replied rather sharply that Snoopy was not in keeping with the mid nineteenth century. I asked if there was anything depicting increasing urbanisation and the golden age of European imperialism, which certainly would be in keeping with the mid nineteenth century, but she said no, then got her face out and gave me a look with it. I ignored this, because I know from Runton gossip that she met her future husband in a threesome. Anyway, Falafel For Lunch wanted to have a pale neo-classical motif throughout, I agreed with her because she is posh, and our consultant was sent away to liaise with the good people of Bradbury and Bradbury in California at a horrifying expense thankfully not being incurred by ‘Anton’ and I. I will, however, be putting the valuable new wallpaper up because, despite having no training whatsoever, I have always been good at paper hanging. I put this down to evolution, and suspect we can all do it these days.
‘Anton’ and I spent the next half hour chatting with After Lunch and Falafel For Lunch, becoming accustomed to their whip-crackingly clipped tones. They were nice people, all tweed and shotguns, who seemed to think I was related to Joe. I said that we had been lovers once and that Becka was just a beard, which they found amusing, and went on to explain how we had worked at Camden before he came to Runton and that I had been the vicar at their wedding, which is literally true, except that I am not a vicar or to my knowledge venerated by any religious group. I also explained that Joe had basically rescued ‘Anton’ and I when the markets collapsed.
‘And here you all are,’ said After Lunch, ‘a bit like the A Team’.
‘Anton’ replied that although this was true-ish, the difference was that when the A Team were accused of crimes, they were innocent, which is a fair point. They departed, and we took Archie out for a gallivant around the now snow-free East Field. The Lunches had left their Swiss roll behind, and it being in our possession meant that for a tantalising moment we were gaining on the super-rich. Then like idiots we ate it, so must remain poor for the time being.
*William the Conqueror, but also a plausible name for a sex toy or male stripper.
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Photards:
Main: Joe’s wedding, on a boiling August day in the west country, ten years ago. Joe second from the left, myself in the centre. It was lovely hazy afternoon, and those of us making up the Away support, being on Joe’s side of proceedings, deported ourselves well, especially considering we had got trashed before kick off on the minibus between Bristol Temple Meads station and wherever the ceremony took place.
Inset top: Archie, nonplussed by recent snow. Being of a breed favoured by Persian nobility, he is not cut out for a European winter. That said, his paws have especially thick pads to protect them while running for long distances on hot desert sand, and I think they took the worst of the cold away, too.
Inset middle: My old pitch at Camden, the best in the East Yard. The Goat Bag Man had it for a while when I left, before he migrated to the other side of the steps where Bibbsy used to be. Now selling skirts and whatnot, by the look of things. Odd that it’s so different now, but it was busy when I visited and that pleased me.
Inset lower: East Yard again. Many Camden notables have worked this pitch, most notably Supertone, with whom I invaded the east and south London markets when it was the done thing for Camden traders to do, circa 2009. Who’s van this is I have no idea, but this sort of thing is always a sign that the managers are running out of ideas.
Runton Hall is a Georgian country estate that mainly consists of ramshackle houses, crumbling gazebos and derelict pigeon lofts, all of which require restorative work. This work ranges from subtle wallpapering to outright demolition, and broadly speaking ‘Anton’, Joe, Becka and I are funding this in return for blind eyes being turned to our little side projects. This arrangement works well. However, there is a limit to what we can do, and the overall plan has always been to secure a Lottery grant once the spending gets gargantuan. We have never questioned this – when you have as much money already tied up in the place as we do, the prospect of plentiful free cash from people who buy scratch cards, don’t fold pushchairs on public transport and regard sentences such as ‘everything happens for a reason’ to be philosophical truisms is not the sort of gift horse you look in the mouth, after all.
I am still low-carbing, and as I washed down a nutritious bowl of clotted cream and peanut butter with a flask of Nescafe Gold Blend, our master plan took shape. Again, it goes on a bit, but basically involves buying the Estate building by building, returning each in turn to working order, then selling them back to an expanded Board of Trustees, upon which Joe, ‘Anton’, Becka and I will sit to ensure that the agreement can’t be voted out of existence halfway through. At length, the owners will get their Georgian country estate restored at our expense, and we make a few quid from property sales and incidental side projects. Marvellous. There was some stuff about a suicidal cocktail of mortgage commitments and bank loans, but there’s been a lot of pictures of snow on social media this week so I was mainly looking at my phone during that part. It’s a bold plan that has the Trustees’ blessing, but for arcane legal reasons that were explained while I was once again looking at pictures of snow on my phone, they can’t forward any cash to get the ball rolling. This means we have to go to a bank for a loan, and that means I have to become a barber.
Despite ‘Anton’s assertion that hairdressing is ‘all benders and slags’, it will be invigorating to learn something new. Anyway, although I am a straight man, I have Faith by George Michael on Spotify, which around these parts is considered at least bisexual. I have less than no idea how to barber a haircut, and wouldn’t even know which way round to hold the scissors, but I have a course in such matters booked and am excited by the prospect of going at the follicles of East Anglia, clippers-ablaze. What larks!
That said, as we wandered around the Quarters bleeding radiators and talking about haircuts, I was reminded of our great strength as de facto building contractors, which is that we have no idea what we’re doing. Or rather, that we know we have no idea what we’re doing, so consult everyone we can before doing anything – a level of cautious deliberation appropriate to Runton, with no pressure from the Estate itself to get work done, and no-one paying us in any case. We’ll recover our considerable costs and shake a few quid from the Quarters when it becomes a boutique bridal suite (or ‘enchanted bridal wonderland’, as I referred to it in some website text I wrote this morning) in the summer. Outside wedding season, it would work as a standard holiday cottage. Mulling over ideas Joe and I have had for a while, I reckon we could offer the public something I have christened ‘ultra self-catering’. Under this arrangement, guests at the Quarters would hunt, shoot and prepare their own food from around the Estate under the guidance of Joe and Graham. Originally, this was mooted as an activity for the glampers, but they are Guardian readers, and I’m not sure that people with their psychological mix of self-loathing and social superiority should be given access to firearms. Anyway, I’d also like to get Beggar’s Canyon, Runton’s resident survivalist, to help with ultra self-catering. She is adept at skinning and making meals from recently deceased Runton livestock and contributes nothing to the place in return – I’m not having anyone survive an apocalypse on my time, thankyou very much, so she’ll have to pull her weight.
None of this means that we will be getting rid of the conspiracy theorists, nutcases and Reiki healers who rent bits of the Quarters for their various get-togethers, of course. Even accepting that Reiki healers are a bunch of shameless charlatans preying upon the easily lead, the assorted Runton nutters are an agreeable and unobtrusive bunch, and have been washing up here since the Sixties, when the place was a magnet for Christian/hippy dropouts. Also, many of them have long standing agreements with the weirder Trustees, essentially making them part of the furniture – perhaps I should get the table-shy bloke at Gatsby’s to eat off them, come to think of it. In any case, they are what, in our market trading days, we would’ve called regular Hillmans*, and you always look after your regular Hillmans, because they represent money walking into your pocket. There are several buildings around the Estate that we could press into service on their behalf when the Quarters are being rented by hunting parties or the freshly married, so I am sure it’ll all probably be alright. And so, with the probable alrightness of everything acting as a tremendous reassurance to us all, and spring sunshine prodding the slumbering year awake, 2018 at Runton can begin in earnest. Happy New Year Everyone!
In Norfolk, home of Britain’s flabbiest arms, January has finally ended. For those of us involved with the Runton Hall project, it was an unhappy contrast to the carefree Januaries of our market trading past. Back then, January was January: a month on the sofa listening to the footie and eating biscuits in the commercial afterglow of a Christmas trading run. There were left over advent calendars from Liberty of London too, as large numbers of these would find their way to from Regent Street to Camden Lock courtesy of the Theft Fairy and, as December went on, formed the cornerstone of every traders’ diet. I never found out exactly who was bringing them in, but Plastic Dave, who once mugged a postman for his shoes, would be substituting them for fruit by the middle of the month, and eating five a day. What a treat for the public we must have been. Sadly, January 2018 was less certain and less delicious. There was no snoozing and no planning of summer festival trading over snakebite and fried egg sandwiches at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1. The world has turned and, for those of us struggling to turn with it, Runton is as dead as a doornail. No one is even there except Graham, who leaves his caravan twice daily to shoot things, and the trustees who live in the Hall itself, the Big House into which only Joe is ever invited. At the end of the second decade of the twenty first century, January is a very different kettle of coconuts, and I am not entirely keen on it.
It’s not all gloom, though. We have, after all, had a few weeks off. ‘Anton’ who, as you may recall now resides in a part of Leeds he describes as ‘well Basra’, spent part of the break being chased along his own street when Millwall played at Elland Road which, in case you are unfamiliar, is the home of Leeds United. In the interest of context, Millwall fans such as ‘Anton’ are composed of poor genetic stock, historically bound by law to stay the fuck in south London and, put simply, are terrible, terrible people. To illustrate the point, I once made the mistake of cycling through Bermondsey, a place overlooked by God and infested with generations of Millwall, in a West Ham shirt and was subjected to ribaldry, with which I will not trouble you, at almost every set of lights from Deptford Creek to Borough High Street. It wouldn’t happen now obviously, because the place is as full of depressed media consultants and Ocado vans as every other part of London, but still. The thing is, in Millwall areas, social cleansing has been especially disastrous, because when the colonists moved into Bermondsey and Deptford with their gluten intolerances and pulled pork, Millwall fans were driven from their natural environment and started turning up as far away as Acton. Yes, Acton is west London and who knows what goes on out there, but can we really claim that spreading Millwall across the capital represents progress? I, for one, do not think we can.
with stairs, walls, doors, flushable sanitation and sundry other things that you just don’t get in a yurt. I presumed they’d put a tent up in the back garden and use the house for livestock, but during my recent visit they were quite the urbanites, and Joe especially was a far cry from the person who, on three separate occasions, has had people trying to kill him. As we drank wine and discussed the benefits of permanent rooved structures it struck me that for the first time in a decade I was able to talk with the pair of them without the shrillness and running around that make children so fucking annoying – the only competing sound was George Michael’s Symphonica wafting from a discrete wall mounted speaker. The whole thing was rather civilised and, I realised, the first time since 2008 that I have heard Becka finish a sentence without having to shout at, feed, rescue or otherwise manage her numerous children halfway through. They move back to Runton next week. I am sure their many children will re-adjust easily, but predict epic tantrums from Joe and Becka.
As for my time off, I spent some of it studying old floorplans of Sheffield city hall because one of my Christmas presents was a ticket for the Beatles’ 1963 show there, and I wanted to see what sort of view the person would’ve had. Quite a nice one, as it goes. I also saw West Ham at Stoke and, unlike ‘Anton’, managed to do so without getting on public transport with anyone I had been cajoling with references to ‘gobby northern wankers’ and ‘Bell End Road’. Things could’ve been different though, as I found myself on a train carriage with forty Stoke fans after the game, but they were a right old larf, especially considering we beat them 3-0. It was mainly mums and dads going back to the small towns between Stoke and Derby, and we passed the time discussing the fattest team to win a major honour – Nottingham Forest under Brian Clough, as far as I’m concerned. There was some mention of Liverpool when Neil Ruddock was at Anfield, but I refused to be swayed and in evidence suggested that the only reason Clough played John Robertson on the wing at Forest was because it was nearer to the chip van in the car park, and by the time we all parted company, I felt my argument had carried the day.
Runton Hall is not the only stately home in Norfolk. There are others, and at this time of year many of them put ‘enchanted’ in front of their name, string lights all over the place and let reindeer loose in the grounds for the delight of local children. At Runton as December deepens, Joe and Becka dress their numerous offspring as Christmas puddings, whereupon the smaller ones are rolled around like marbles by their older siblings, no matter much they cry and/or throw up. Elsewhere, ‘Anton’ can often be heard shouting at a peacock to fuck off. This is Sebastopol the Peacock, Runton’s mascot, hated by all and fortunate to dodge the festive roasting tin. There are other reasons I feel that ‘Runton’ and ‘enchanted’ do not sit easily in the same sentence. Certainly, it looks nice if you like endless skies, meadows silver’d with frost, birch trees in the midday mist and all the other things that make the countryside so insufferable. At heart though, Runton is a workplace, and better for it. In any case, if a reindeer wandered around Runton, Graham would shoot it – that’s why Santa comes here last.
eing someone twice in a short time, and a Christmas association was born. Played next that morning would have been Mull of Kintyre by Paul McBeatle, which replaced Name Of The Game at number one, and to which I credit my genuine love of bagpipe music. It was a significant ten minutes in a tiny life, and both tunes, yuletide playlist stalwarts, are as Christmassy to me as mistletoe and mittens.
My playlist has permeated the Old Servants’ Quarters, where ‘Anton’ and I are tidying up a couple of bits prior to departing for Christmas. Other than us, Runton is almost deserted. The film crew are long gone. The yoga groups are not back until January. Even the conspiracy theorists have gone home to tiresomely point out over and over again that Christmas is the Christian appropriation of a Pagan festival, overlooking the fact that before that it was the Pagan appropriation of a perfectly ordinary day of the week. Joe, Becka and their numerous children are housesitting elsewhere for the duration. Graham is still here, feeding some animals and killing others, but his children are with their mother, who he refers to as Stabby Onassis, in a caravan on Harlow Common. ‘Anton’ leaves for Deptford tomorrow, and while there are things I could be doing about the place over the festive season, I am simply too frightened to be here on my own, being a civilised person in the middle of nowhere. The whole point of civilisation is to eradicate the middle of nowhere, something that passes most country people by. Leaving aside intelligence and overall physical attractiveness, attitudes towards solitude are the major difference between urban dwellers, typically engaged in honest toil, producing the Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations that benefit us all, and their country counterparts, scratching about in fields and polishing cattle. I would find being at Runton alone terrifying because there is no one around for miles. A country person would find it comforting, for exactly the same reason. In turn, this reminds us that there is a serious side to Britain leaving the EU, all-too-easily lost amid the amusing spectacle of Guardian readers dying of rage and shrillness: after Brexit, we’ll have to subsidise our country folk ourselves, without seven hundred and fifty million other Europeans doing it for us. This, surely, is madness.
The Runton Diaries 