The Runton Diaries

Advance The Flag Of Runton

Nov 10th, 2017

Instagram foodies are ten a penny and routinely hated. This is understandable, because you can’t claim to really love food until you’ve wept over a Wagon Wheel on a low carb binge day. Low carb binge days are the sublimest pleasure. If they’d come along first, no one would’ve bothered inventing sex, drugs and rock and roll, and we’d all be happier as a result. Anyway. Carb bingeing dominated the meeting with the Confederate re-enactors which you may recall was something of a hot topic the last time we spoke. It went well, or at least I assume it did, as after two minutes I was tripping balls on complimentary Hob Nobs and would’ve agreed to pretty much anything. There was little to be concerned about, however. Our Confederates were a couple of amiable heating engineers from Stockport, somewhat different from what Joe and I managed to convince ourselves we were expecting – essentially, Tammy Wynette and Deputy Dawg – and it was difficult not to like them.

As also discussed previously, sturdy British readers will be mystified by the controversy surrounding the Confederate flag. It’s a contentious issue in the States though, and considering we have Americans among the various conspiracy groups that come to Runton, and also that we need to be squeaky clean for our Lottery grant, it’s best to be on the safe side. It’s not like in Britain, when every time something happens that Guardian readers don’t like (ie, literally every time something happens at all), Brighton declares it wants to leave the UK and become a republic. (By the way, I’m not sure where the threat is with this. It should just get on with it, and give us back our fag hags and anti depressants). No, when the Confederate south left the Union north, it caused no end of bother. That’s all history now of course, but we have twelve Confederate re-enactors re-enacting it in the East Wood, eating authentic rations as nutritional research for the University of Portsmouth. They are portraying an army close to collapse, so this means catching and eating squirrels, frying ground acorns in rancid bacon fat and making coffee from corn meal and sugar cane seeds. Grim. I have promised the squirrel scoffing mad men a table full of pizza with extra rootin’ and tootin’ when they leave, as long as there’s been no banjo music or lynching, and wish them fortitude against their oncoming peckishness.

I spiced up the Norfolk Shred* with an American Civil War playlist prior to meeting the Confederates so I’d have a bit of small talk. The mix of sentimentality and relentless jauntiness would be ideal for soldiers, because it makes you want to kill people. Not that I am without sentiment, I should like to point out. For example, I make a point of sniffing my dog’s legs of an evening because they smell of popcorn, and I love 30 Rock so much that I refuse to watch the last two episodes because I can’t bear to have seen it all. Sentiment can be a fine thing, but there is a place for it – and that place is not among endless banjo pickin’ references to rallying round this and shouting about that and Maryland, cotton and hearts the other. I’m sorry but it isn’t. It was a short playlist, and after going through it a few times I’d hear ‘protect our heritage’ from the Bonny Blue Flag as ‘protect our hair and tits’, and ‘advance the flag of Dixie’ as ‘advance the flag of Ipswich’. This last point would be fighting talk indeed among the gentle folk of Norfolk. In case you are unfamiliar, Ipswich is in Suffolk, a part of East Anglia where the feeble minded, ugly and malformed are sent to live happily among their own kind. It serves the same function as south London, which God separated from the rest of the world with the River Thames – originally, a valley full of disinfectant – and rightly so.

Horrible nineteenth century yee-hah banjo nonsense was not my only source of light conversation, mind you. I once cycled from Georgia to the outskirts of New Orleans and back up again, straight through the former Confederate heartland, for reasons I can no longer recall. It was fucking terrifying. I was treated with kindness by each human I met, and hatred by everything else. The rattlesnakes I narrowly avoided stepping on were disconcerting enough, but the real danger came from lethal pit bull/coyote hybrids living in packs around the many abandoned farms in the region. They have a particularly enthusiastic hatred of Cockneys, and would chase me along the dirt roads, all teeth and rabies, which was especially disconcerting at night in the middle of nowhere, five thousand miles from the nearest pie and mash shop. After the fourth or fifth such incident, I took to chucking beef jerky behind me to distract the little bastards, and this worked so well that I assumed that’s what it was for until I saw people in Monroeville eating it voluntarily. It all sounds ridiculous, recalling it now in the comfort of the Keeper’s Cottage at Runton Hall with a flask of Nescafe Gold Blend and forty custard creams, but they were desperate times. God I hate the countryside.

(The Norfolk shredding and low carbing have come about because I want to be at my fighting weight for the 2018 cycling season. I gained thirty six pounds after the Tennyson Road Incident, in which I demonstrated solidarity with the victims of the London terrorist attacks by having a van driven into me at forty miles an hour. Actually, it was a taxi, but it still beats changing your Facebook avatar and then forgetting why, in the standard modern expression of remorse.)

*an exercise regime invented by me. It is similar to the more usual types of Shred, except that hi energy dance music is replaced with a nice Audiobook. In my case this is currently The Aquariums of Pyongyang, an account of political re-education in a labour camp run by the Workers’ Party of North Korea. It is among the most depressing things I have ever heard.

Twitter: this has a Twitter account, you know, and I make up a quarter of the follower count. It’s a riot in there!

Facebook: it has a Facebook page too, with twenty five followers – twice as many as Jesus.

Photards:

Main: my dog, Archibald al-Fantastique, who smells of popcorn.

Insert top: Joe at the Compleat Angler in Norwich. The bookshelf behind him is wallpaper.

Insert middle: ‘Anton’ in cartoon format – perhaps the only one in which he is considered acceptable – drawn by Cartoon Ben at Greenwich Market, in a different life.

Insert lower: Abandoned building somewhere in rural Alabama, fourteen years ago. I rode past hundreds of these, and would often go in for a bit of a poke about. I had one cd – Original Pirate Material by the Streets – which I listened to incessantly while cycling. At times, I started to think that I had been riding a bike forever, and that my life at home and all the people and places in it were the product of some weird daydream. Also, I was so homesick that I would go to sleep at night imagining the smell of the Northern Line – sentimentality again, you see. Still, it was an adventure alright and, despite the terror and loneliness, I retain a fondness for the people, if not the wildlife, of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and all the southern States. I saw Belle and Sebastian in a baseball stadium, watched NASCAR racing, was mistaken for a cop in downtown Montgomery and got free food in restaurants by reciting the menu in my normal speaking voice, which everyone thought was Australian. The whole thing was bananas, and I should’ve written about that instead.
The Yellow Rose Of Runton

Oct 12th, 2017

One Saturday morning long ago, I found myself deeply impressed with Adam Ant’s watch, which he was mucking about with on Swap Shop. At least, I assume it was Swap Shop, because it was definitely a Saturday morning and, although barely out of infancy, I knew I wasn’t the sort of child to be watching Tiswas*. The thing about Adam Ant’s watch was that it played an actual tune if you pressed a couple of the buttons at the same time, and was the greatest thing I had ever seen. To make things even better, the tune in question – The Yellow Rose of Texas – was also played by our local ice cream van, with Andrew Sayer’s hilarious uncle at the helm. Could it be that Adam was reaching out to us, amid the Zoom lollies and rum and raisin choc ices favoured by Jackie Fulbridge to show how sophisticated she was at seven years of age? If so, it was in vain, as my primary school was staunchly aligned to Madness in the beat combo politics of the day. Nonetheless, his musical wrist watch was such a hot playground topic the following Monday morning that our infinitely patient music teacher, Mr Allison, promised to put The Yellow Rose of Texas into rotation for the coming week’s morning assembly. This never happened. Untroubled, the world turned, and it has taken over thirty years for the reason to reveal itself.

The Yellow Rose of Texas is not an actual rose. Then again, Adam Ant is not an actual ant. The similarities do not end there. Neither are strangers to insurrection: at the height of his career, Adam Ant called for the establishment of an Insect Nation in the hit singles Antmusic, Kings of the Wild Frontier and Stand and Deliver. The Yellow Rose of Texas was popular with Confederate troops seeking to establish a new nation separate from the existing United States, thereby bringing about the American Civil War. However, whereas Adam Ant is merely a militant insect activist, The Yellow Rose of Texas is – to quote the original lyrics – ‘the sweetest girl of colour that this darkie ever knew’, which is a bit much. This, along with claims by the narrator that ‘no other darkies know her, no darkie only me’ is, I suspect, the reason that Mr Allison quietly shelved his morning assembly plans in a bewilderingly multicultural East End school. Also, the Rio Grande and banjos, also referenced among the lyrics, were a Stepney brothel and a popular form of wafer biscuit respectively, and may have caused confusion.

Decades later, and I am become a man. I am become quite a superstitious man too, with no desire to wear a military uniform of any kind, as I feel that being shot at might bring bad luck. The same cannot be said for re-enactors portraying Confederate soldiers, who can’t get enough to if it. We have forty such re-enactors descending upon Runton next month, and their visit has prompted protracted discussions between myself, who arranged it, and Joe, who will have to explain the sudden outbreak of whoopin’, hollerin’, yee-hawing and so forth to the ever-delicate Board of Trustees. My primary reason for turning Runton into a base for dressing up as soldiers is sound enough: I thought it would be a larf. Also, I have a soft spot for people who are really into stuff, and military re-enactors certainly fall into that category. Camping at Runton Hall, like the fat paratroopers and their slobbery dog a few weeks ago, is the sort of thing they enjoy, and with no Forest School kids or glampers till next spring, they bring in useful revenue during otherwise lean months. So far, so fluffy. The rather large iceberg that has hurled itself into the choppy waters just ahead of us is that no one wants Confederate flags all over the place, because the Confederate flag is, to say the least of it, a bit of a talking point. It wouldn’t be as weird has having swastikas everywhere, but still. It’s tricky, because our re-enactors are portraying troops from 1861, when a Confederate flag was perfectly reasonable thing to wave about during a rebellion against the Yankee government. People in the nineteenth century weren’t like people today. When things went wrong, they didn’t just make a flag out of a rainbow, write ‘Hope’ across it, and stand next to it weeping. They were much more focussed.

This may all be somewhat baffling for gentle British readers, for whom the Confederate flag is a positive symbol of either being near a burger van or watching the Dukes of Hazard. Confederate soldiers were fighting for – well, not slavery as such, but a system in which slavery was permissible, whether or not they were willing as individuals to partake in it. Also, they had been invaded by Union troops, which is the sort of thing that galvanises people. The American Civil War thus arose from debates about the legality of opting out of the United States, rather than any weird notions about freeing the oppressed. Indeed, it is best to think of it as a vast court case in which everyone is shooting at each other, instead of a specific crusade against slavery, which was far from everyone’s minds at the outset of hostilities. Militarily, socially and politically it’s a fascinating conflict, although there aren’t many chuckles to be had except when you mistakenly touch-type ‘Civil Ear’ instead of ‘Civil War’, as I have done repeatedly while writing this. Anyway. The Union won, and the United States were preserved. You can tell they were the good guys because they promised to free the slaves when they were losing and felt that thousands of extra soldiers might come in handy, even if they were black and everything. A hundred years later, they got round to making routine racial segregation illegal, with the result that now, fifty years after that, there are no racial problems in America at all.

Despite neither Joe nor I being black or American, and the loss those two fine communities doubtless feel as a result, it wouldn’t do to be flippant with other people’s sensibilities, or contribute further droplets of unhappiness to an already unhappy world. Most of the time at Runton, I am simply a lost Cockney in a big field. Being asked to construct a philosophical argument about the impact of nineteenth century cultural symbolism in contemporary society is beyond my cognitive threshold when all I want to do is find somewhere warm to have a cup of tea and six four bar Kit Kats, because I’ve been low carb for weeks and it gets to you after a while. That said, I am certain that our Confederates are entirely benevolent, and we’ll have a natter with them on Monday to be on the safe side. Also, there is a possibility that Runton could be a location for an upcoming film about the Battle of Shiloh** with which the re-enactors are involved in a consultative capacity, and I’m going to say I can ride horses to get a speaking part as a cavalryman. Ahead of the meeting on Monday, nervous readers may rest assured that I have made them promise to treat the N-word*** with respect and not perform any authentic music of the era. Banjos and sentimentality are simply too much for an Englishman to bear, and they really will have a war on their hands if I have to put up with any of it, let me tell you.

Historical note: Even the Confederacy found the lyrics of The Yellow Rose of Texas questionable, and changed ‘darkie’ to ‘soldier’.

Pictards:

Main: The General Lee, a Dodge Charger with a massive Confederate flag on the roof. General Lee was a famous Confederate during the American Civil War, and this was his car.

Inset top: Norfolk’s main link with the rest of the United Kingdom.

Inset middle: American Civil War in full swing. In reality there were far more people on each side than this.

Inset lower: Never mind civil wars and all that – America was still a colony when my house was built.

*Attention foreigners: Swap Shop and Tiswas were staples of British Saturday morning telly in the early 1980s. Swap Shop was hosted by Noel Edmonds, latterly notable for Deal Or No Deal, upon which I unsuccessfully applied to appear, and for being one of the few celebrities of his generation not serving time for touching up kids. It featured viewers swapping Blue Peter annuals, Star Wars figures and Incredible Hulk merchandise with each other, having often first stolen it from unknowing siblings, and as such was the ideal preparation for life under Marvellous Maggie.

Tiswas comprised a yowling rabble throwing buckets of water about for no reason and pronouncing ‘grand prix’ incorrectly. Every child who watched it dropped out of midlands polytechnics in the nineties, to be employed at minimum wage by those who had watched Swap Shop. Even now, you can tell a Swap Shop viewer from a Tiswas one. You can’t like both. It’s Swap Shop or Tiswas, Beatles or Stones, Rangers or Celtic, mods or rockers – to which I need hardly point out that the correct answers are a) Swap Shop, b) Beatles, c) Rangers, and d) mods.

**A battle fought in Tennesse in 1862. Something of a bloodbath, ending in a narrow Union victory.

***Norfolk.
The Norfolk Shred

Oct 8th, 2017

Gentrification has ruined London. Everyone knows that. Even the Guardian readers know what they’ve done, inflicting their weird culture, constant whining, numerous genders and strict dietary restrictions on the rest of us without bothering to ask first. It’s now all but impossible to find a scuffle in a chip shop, or enjoy the aroma of fried onions, fag smoke and piss around Upton Park or White Hart Lane or Highbury or Stamford Bridge. We are poorer for it, but such is the world. When gentrification jumped the water and came to south London, it hit ‘Anton’ harder than most, as the sudden influx of slimmer and more physically attractive females all but ruined his sexual appetite. Prior to this, he would rampage happily among the thirty five year old grandmothers at Wavelengths Leisure Centre in Deptford, where they traditionally gathered to sell contraband Benson and Hedges to each other, and discuss how many tattoos were needed to avoid getting themselves harpooned by whaling fleets in offshore waters when visiting Clacton for the Bank Holiday weekend. No one at Wavelengths was putting money aside for their children’s gender re-alignment surgery, let me tell you. I believe it’s on offer as an evening class there now.

I was reminded of ‘Anton’ and his reign of terror recently, while in the process of becoming a frequent flyer at my own local* gym. I enjoy going to the gym, which puts me in something of a minority. Also, I have to go there because my dog won’t let my physiotherapist near me, which I suspect this puts me in an even smaller one. The physiotherapy is the aftermath of the Tennyson Road Incident, in which my shoulders were quite badly damaged, and my dog, Archie, is an affectionate saluki with a thieving, kind and greedy little face. As befits his breed, he is quietly protective of his people, and demonstrated this by insistently laying across me whenever the physiotherapist came to my house. I tried putting him out of the room, but to save me from the therapeutic intentions of a medical professional he would try and tunnel under the door, so visiting her at her gym was the only solution. Undaunted, I made the best of a bad job and, while there, invented the Norfolk Shred. This is not dissimilar to the usual Shred format of concerted physical exercise, except that instead of working out at a high intensity to dance music, you run slowly on a treadmill to an Audiobook. Try it – it’s awful.

While grinding out the stationary miles to Professor Gary Gallagher’s peerless series of lectures on the American Civil War, it occurred to me that the gym is a rare blast of honesty in a frequently deceptive world. You go in, have an unpleasant time, and come out better for it. You’re not meant to enjoy yourself, for the same reason that you aren’t meant to serve paracetamol with roast potatoes and gravy. Cycling and the robust nature of life at Runton Hall already keep me in fairly decent shape. This is handy, because a single pound of fat will take around seven hours to work off. There is no getting away from this, although by praying for death you could probably make the time pass more quickly. Only on posters is the gym about carefree afternoons spent laughing on a running machine, then going for a baguette in a leotard with your insufferable friends. Anyone can run gloriously and well when they are already good at running: instead, find glory in repeatedly running an extremely short distance and then throwing up on your trainers, because therein a greater glory assuredly lies. The Varsity Boat Race is a marvellous thing, especially if like me you enjoy drinking all day with toffs, but real glory comes in using a rowing machine for eight seconds and then weeping openly with shame of it all. Put that on a poster, and anyone who still signs up for membership will achieve literally anything they put their mind to. Everyone else can ponce about doing yoga**.

Happily, my physiotherapy is nearing an end. I feel much better thank you, although I will keep going to the gym to lift weights. I have a suitcase full of codeine I didn’t take as prescribed, saving it instead for making this very purpose funner, and it seems a shame to waste it. I suppose I could always sell it to ‘Anton’ if I get bored. Anyway, it’s been a protracted convalescence, and although it’s likely that my left shoulder will never fully recover, I can take comfort in – to quote the consultant who oversaw my hospital stay – having managed to ‘miss four different fatal injuries’. This seems like a fair trade to me, and I am grateful for it. Come to think of it, my sundry non-fatal injuries would doubtless have cleared up earlier had I not refused to admit a level of physical discomfort greater than three on a scale of one to ten during treatment, but no one wants their physiotherapist to think they’re some kind of wanker, surely.

*ie nine miles away. I hate the countryside.

**That said, we have two yoga teachers at Runton Hall. One does Deaf Yoga, and the other teaches class while drunk. Both are overcoming adversity in admirable style, and we can all learn a lesson from them.

Photards:

Main: Sevastopol the Peacock’s summer palace, well away from where his racket can get on Joe’s tits.

Top inset: Archie finishing off a physiotherapist.

Lower inset: My current steed, an inexpensive but reliable single speed road bike. Got a bit bashed about in the Tennyson Road Incident, but is fine again now.
The Great Runton Bake Off

Oct 1st, 2017

I watched the Great British Bake Off for the first time this week, in an uninsurable building at Runton Hall with Joe. If you are unfamiliar, Bake Off is a weekly romp through Great British Middle Class-ness: the men are gay, the black people are white, and worrying about pastry is acceptable on a starving planet. That said, it’s possible to be too harsh, and once I established that Paul Hollywood wasn’t the Scouse fraud from Most Haunted, I rather enjoyed it. The uninsurable building was Keeper’s Cottage, notable for blue flames shooting from plug sockets, but otherwise safe, warm and dry, and used as a stop-over by ‘Anton’ and/or myself on the frequent occasions when we are unable to get home. Over the winter, ‘Anton’ will put everyone’s mind at rest by having ‘a bash at’ the wiring, so it can become the centrepiece of my 2018 ‘Get Married At Runton Hall Or Your Love Is A Sham’ campaign, which may need to be re-worded. It would be a lovely place to celebrate a matrimonial union, and if the bride and groom could do so without dying in an electrical fire, then so much the better as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway. Jollied up on snakebite*, we watched as the various contestants drizzled this, dusted that and caramalised the other and, taking care not to elbow naked flames into flammable upholstery (it is too dangerous to turn the lights on in Keeper’s Cottage), discussed how a Great Runton Bake Off might work. Quite easily, actually, and it would give the glampers something to do. Glampers are among the most middle class people in the world and it is, I argued, hard to see how a Great Runton Bake Off could be anything other than a success. Joe, who would need to get the idea past the Board of Trustees, raised certain questions of practicality. My response – that acquiring several ovens, finding somewhere to keep them (assuming they could be powered in the first place), then providing ingredients, refrigeration, preparation areas and so forth were ‘the sort of problems that solve themselves’ – was impassioned but failed to convince him. By way of a sulk, I listed everything wrong with the countryside, including Wuthering Heights (both the novel and the song), the poetry of Wordsworth, trees (‘which are shit’), country pubs (‘full of wankers and scampi’) and ‘every cunt on Spring Watch’, only stopping because a) I had elbowed a naked flame onto flammable upholstery and b) Joe had had an idea.

We scampered to the kitchen, guided by the burning cushion which Joe then held under a tap in the sink until the tiny blaze was extinguished. As I wept into a postcard of Waterloo Bridge*, he explained that what the countryside did have was wildlife. By combining the Great British Bake Off with Spring Watch (another staple of middle class television whereby children called Milo and Elspeth make charts about mammals), he pointed out that Runton offered a rare opportunity to hunt your own dinner. Yes, it would consist of rabbit and the hunting would consist of standing in a field while Graham’s dogs did the tricky bit, but he could show participants how to gut and skin the main course, with squeamish guests picking vegetables from German Field. The ensemble could be turned into a hearty stew, prepared over camping stoves and called Small Game Hunting or something. In order to add a dramatic edge to my contemplation, I opened a window and stared out into the flat blackness of a rural East Anglian night, the smell of wet earth balancing the more insistent aroma of freshly scorched cushion. The moment was lost when Joe, as is his habit when drunk, suddenly capered off into the gloom, shouting and singing about how much he loves his numerous children before throwing a quantity of garden furniture into the petting zoo in an exuberant celebration of fatherhood and retiring to bed with a doubtless thoroughly charmed Becka. It was too cold to contemplate things dramatically by an open window if no one was there to see, so I closed it again and fell asleep in front of the football.

Like socialism, Small Game Hunting is an idea that works best on paper or, as in the case of Joe and I at Keeper’s Cottage, when drunk. Also like socialism, I am not sure a demographic that once voted for a polar research vessel to be called Boaty McBoatface is prepared for the realities of what it would actually entail, and if nothing else I can’t believe we’ll get our Lottery grant with traumatised Guardian readers all over the place. The next morning, as I helped a sheepish Joe retrieve a deckchair from the vicinity of a Shetland pony, we decided to shelve the idea. Most of the culled rabbits would just end up being sold to a local butcher or fed to Graham’s dogs because too many of the glampers are vegan, and this is what happens now anyway. Joe stumped off to make Becka a large breakfast, informing me that there are now four vegan Members of Parliament. As I cycled to the train station, I found myself thinking that it probably seems like quite a lot more than that because they won’t be able to stop going on about it, but still.

*My cocktail of choice – Fosters and Strongbow blended in a pint glass. The Latin name is Poor Man’s Black Velvet, but this is considered insensitive. Serve with crisps in a bowl for that extra flourish, or to impress during a first date or job interview.

*This did not happen.

Photards:

Main: New trees waiting to be dressed and planted.

Top inset: Some kind of overgrown building at Runton, considerably newer than most. Basically a spider factory at this time of year, and best avoided if you don’t like that sort of thing.

Middle inset: The Great British Bake Off team.

Lower inset: My saluki, Archibald al-Fantastique. He can sprint at 40 mph, then forget why he’s doing it.
The Re-Enactors

Sep 19th, 2017

My grandfather spent the Blitz as a fire warden, exempted from front line military service after accidentally shooting his own ear off in the 1930s. I once asked him what he’d done in the aftermath of this – it rendered him partially deaf and ‘made hats slip down on that side’ – to which he replied, ‘I shat myself, and then had to walk home like it’. Undeterred, the Whiteheads of Mile End dealt Hitler a slap in the chops at D-Day when his brother wandered ashore at Sword beach with the County of London Yeomanry and ‘hid behind things until we were winning’. I am certain that this insight into a civilian army at war is more typical than history would have us believe. In a satisfying postscript, one of his sons also saw beach combat, against the Rockers at Clacton in 1964, and thus a family tradition was born.

Runton Hall has a colourful wartime history. German Field, the huge organic vegetable patch near the Old Servant’s Quarters, was started by beastly Hun officers held here during the conflict, hence the name. I mentioned this to some Second World War re-enactors camping in the woods on the south side of the estate recently, among the uniforms and equipment of the 1^st Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron. Actually, now I come to think of it, they might not have been re-enactors, but ghosts of former actual soldiers, although this seems unlikely because there are several 1940s events across East Anglia at this time of year and I presume they were something to do with one of them. They were a friendly bunch, and it seemed unkind to point out that the elite airborne warriors they had gone to such lengths to portray were twenty-five years younger and forty pounds lighter than any of them. Then again, combat troops of that size would have provided valuable cover to my great uncle during amphibious assaults, and for that we must salute them.

They had a large, drooling dog, who drew the attention of Graham, Runton’s Romany beast master. Dogs are controversial at Runton, in case they alarm the Forest School kids or annoy the glampers, although these two groups are scarcely in evidence at this time of year. Graham has seven assorted sight hounds and terriers, but they are professionals, in so far as a dog can grasp such a concept, and have no interest in being anything other than gentle to humans, who they adore. The re-enactors’ dog, slobbering among replica ammunition cases, presented an unimpressive sight. Graham nodded towards a thick white string of spittle hanging down from the left side of its mouth.

‘If I pull that’, he said, ‘does he say stuff?’

‘He’s a secret weapon,’ replied one of the fat warriors, ‘pull that and ten seconds later he’ll explode’, a good comeback under the circumstances, especially to a man surrounded by highly trained canines and carrying a loaded firearm. From what I gather, the dog spent his time at Runton in a tent, his endless drool turning the woodland into marsh, while the re-enactors endeared themselves to Graham by knowing a lot about guns, and to Beggar’s Canyon, our resident survivalist and tent expert, by knowing a lot about starting fires with flint sparks and dry moss.

For all their girth, the would-be 1st Airbourne Reconnaissance Squadron represent the sort of thing I’d like at Runton next year, if only because I have a soft spot for people who are really into stuff. I’m quite happy for them to go chucking smoke grenades about and attacking things very slowly. I have mentioned this in the Smith Report, which as you may recall is my blueprint for how to make the place profitable enough to pay for its own restoration work while preserving its low profile. It’s tricky, because we have to invent a way of advertising it, without going so far as to advertise it. This conundrum can be contemplated over winter. As I write, it is September, and the year is unravelling. Sevastopol the Peacock, hated by all, caws his last caws of summer across the copses and fields and outbuildings, louder for being back in his winter quarters near Joe, Becka and their numerous children. The sunlight is thinner, the yellows browner, the reds rustier, and the morning mist no longer in a hurry to burn off from between the clumps of trees in the East Field. ‘Anton’ and I put up and take down fewer glamping tents, with the glampers all but vanished, taking our income from tent hire with them. In our former lives, mid-September was the pistol shot announcing the coming of Christmas, a hundred-day charge through the street markets of London, finishing in a delirious heap at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, E1 after the last trading Sunday of the year. All that, we reflected while stacking tents under tarpaulins in the Restored Barn for winter storage, was when we were in an environment we understood. I am not a great sentimentalist, but the realisation that we might not be about to wake with a jolt on the Northern Line at Archway after all is well and truly sinking in.

Photographs:

Main: I have no idea what this once was, but it might be an idea to find out before we spend £120,000 to restore it.

Inset top: Norfolk car boot sale road side A-board. Where have you seen an apostrophe in an abbreviation for a day of the week, Sal? The world is watching, so make an effort, you fucking imbecile.

Inset middle: Keep your Hans to yourself, Adolf! Plucky British lesbians prepare to defend East Anglia.

Inset lower: A rather chunky SS assault battalion determined to get a seat near the buffet in this recreation of an attack on a railway station. This isn’t my picture – it’s from the Daily Mail, and also rather accurately depicts their target readership I should think.