The Runton Diaries

Council Estate Teds

Aug 29th, 2017

I remember when I first met Graham, around tea time on a watercolour grey afternoon in the East Field at Runton. I was with ‘Anton’, and Joe had introduced us as a couple of fellas from East London. I believe I once said that Graham has the manner of someone who has been standing in the rain for thirty seven years – this is true, but is not to suggest that he is a downtrodden figure. Quite the reverse, in fact. He is every inch the rural beast master, with a weather beaten face and clothing a mixture of tweed and oilskin that often contains live mammals other than himself. By contrast, ‘Anton’ and I looked like a couple of Disney orphans as we stood by ‘Anton’s car, which had all but skated across the field in grass made slick by days of rain. No, I don’t know why we didn’t just park and walk over, either. At length, Graham stopped what he was doing, which was putting fishing rods or shotguns or something in the back of a Land Rover, and took stock of us.

‘Are you the feckin’ Kray twins?’ he enquired in a voice that the strength of his Irish traveller accent made appear louder than it actually was.

‘One of us is black, though,’ I said, ‘kind of breaks the spell a bit’.

There was a pause.

‘Him,’ I added, pointing at ‘Anton’.

‘We could be the Kray cousins, if you like,’ said ‘Anton’, by way of reconciliation.

There was another pause, and I noticed the first drops of what would turn out to be a four hour deluge on my jacket. We were Londoners out of our environment, like the first Romans to splash ashore and encounter the ancient Britons. We felt slighted.

‘You don’t want to sling a bit of tarmac on this, mate, do you?’ I said, indicating the field, ‘we’ll never get the car out otherwise’. This was, in hindsight, not a diplomatic triumph.

‘You want me to tow yez out?’ offered Graham, climbing into the Land Rover.

‘Yes mate, please,’ replied ‘Anton’.

‘Ah be useful now, wouldn’t it?’ said Graham, starting the engine and driving away. We followed, twenty minutes of stationary wheel spinning later, during which ‘Anton’ remarked that the one time he didn’t want a pikey to fuck off, he actually had. We agreed that they were a tricky bunch.

Things have, of course, improved considerably since then. Graham is a genuinely skilled man, able to breed, kill and make things out of any animal you care to name, and I regard him as the only person on the Runton Estate who actually knows what they’re doing. This is perhaps harsh on Becka, who has built a successful forest school out of nothing, and Joe, who as a fence mender and livestock wrestler is among the region’s finest, but you get my drift. Graham regards ‘Anton’ and I as lost, overgrown children. We repay this with a sense of reluctant awe. While mourning the loss of porn in carrier bags as we manhandled still-beshitted fittings from the crumbling pigeon loft last time, ‘Anton’ and I discussed other sepia memories of our vanishing childhood world. These included aerials on cars which, not being a legal driver, it took me until 2014 to realise were no longer a thing, and aging council estate teddy boys. The father of the first girl I ever kissed, in an alley in Plaistow, was a council estate teddy boy, and they are a fixture of a late twentieth century British upbringing which I consider worthy of dwelling upon.

The father of the first girl I ever kissed, who must’ve been 60, was typical of the breed: wiry, tattoos all over his arms and neck, and as game as you like. It was law to have one every four streets or so, and you could tell where they lived by the Southern Comfort mirror glimpsed through their front room curtains when you did your morning paper round. They all had these, presumably either stolen from pubs or donated by grateful sovereign ring manufacturers after decades of loyal custom. Graham has no Southern Comfort mirror, but what he does share with the council estate teds is the pervasive air of avuncular menace. The thing is, they know stuff that you don’t about things that directly affect you, and manage to convey this by way of bootlace ties (council estate teds) or familiarity with soil types (Graham). What they transmit isn’t necessarily dislike, but more akin to an absolute understanding that you need them more than they need you, with a further absolute understanding that both of you know this. The first girl I ever kissed’s father worked ‘on the scrap’, which in London at the turn of the nineties meant dismembering stolen cars – the stealing of cars is something that also doesn’t happen anymore, come to think of it – and distributing the parts to far flung scrap dealers in outer London. Members of my own family were notorious for this around Mile End and Canning Town, and could have a Vauxhall Astra chopped to pieces and in scrap yards in Alperton, Uxbridge and Southgate in three hours, presumably via a network of council estate teds. Incidentally, my first paid employment was related to this, and involved walking along lines of parked cars in Highgate with half a tennis ball which could be pushed against the passenger side door in such a way that compressed air deactivated the central locking, for later theft by persons unknown. At the time, middle class people could eat peanut butter on toast without collapsing from anaphylactic shock, so were at least able to console themselves while reporting their missing Volvo 740 to the old bill.

I once asked Graham why he had left the travelling community. He explained it was ‘alright if you don’t mind all the travelling’ but that he’d subsequently recognised the importance of registering his children with a local primary school, and then never sending them to it. He considers primary school a purely social activity, and that they will have a far richer one hurtling around the Runton Estate with an eagerness for territorial confrontation rarely seen in children aged four, eight and ten. It is hard to dispute this. Secondary education is a different thing, however. When they finally get there I believe they will thrive – when I taught the eldest two to read (receiving Archie as part payment) they were eager pupils once past the stage of trying to intimidate you by asking why you’re a wanker a hundred and forty nine times. Interestingly, Graham’s children are formidably well versed in current affairs. This is because, in lieu of primary education, he only allows them to listen to Radio 4 in their caravan, and it amuses me how they will shut you up if you talk over the World at One. I look forward to their future adolescent tantrums and hearing them stamping up the stairs, slamming their bedroom doors, and blasting out the shipping forecast at full volume. This will never happen, of course, because you don’t have stairs in a caravan, but still.

Photards:

Main: Elderly pigeon bedrooms recovered from the East Field.

Top insert: Another crumbling building on the Estate. I think this may once have been an ice house.

Middle inset: Exciting mechanical digger for mucking about on.

Lower inset: Aging council estate teddy boy. Very few still left in the wild. They declined at the same time as the second hand car parts industry – coincidence?
The Trouble With Frankie Vaughan

Aug 20th, 2017

One of the Runton outbuildings I should like to demolish using the power of middle class angst – which you may recall we discovered how to harness last time – is a disused pigeon loft. The field where it is gently collapsing would be ideal as a second glamping area, which would in turn raise the possibility that Runton could host small events – literary fairs, dogging, public executions, that sort of thing. From what I ascertain among obscure paragraphs in dusty books in the Big House*, the loft was in use until the 1970s, when Runton fell into the nosedive from which Joe, Becka, ‘Anton’ and myself are now trying to wrestle it. Over the last few days, Joe has been tied up constructing improved fencing around the fucking petting zoo, while Becka is at Folk East. The Guardian Festival Guide rates Folk East among the ‘…top 10 folk, roots, world and acoustic festivals’, and we must hope for her safe return, because everyone who attends is, as you might expect, immediately executed. Still, ‘Anton’ and I are firmly in charge of glamping operations these days, so it has fallen to us to poke about and decide what to do.

Thus it was that we found ourselves in a field last Wednesday, perusing a small ruined building with Archie bouncing and thrashing around the long grass thereabouts. The field, or ‘East Field’ if we’re going to get fiddly about it, needs considerable sorting out and fencing in, and Archie was invisible except when leaping above the grass like a delighted salmon to make sure we were still alive and as magnificent as he remembered, thirty seconds previously. The loft itself is roughly the size of three domestic garages joined together, and in its day could house two hundred racing pigeons, or four terrifying non-racing ones. That’s history now though, and the interior is dark, damp, mildewed, and exactly the sort of place you’d expect to find porn in a carrier bag. Using this last premise, I was able to persuade ‘Anton’ to go inside and have a rummage around.

Coincidentally, the last time I had anything to do with porn was also with ‘Anton’, during our trading days at Greenwich Market. At the height of the marathon feud between himself and Keith (a fat photographer in his fifties) it was his habit to place copies of Razzle in the large portfolio bags that Keith would take to galleries interested in exhibiting his work. The effect of this is unknown, but he once secured a six-week residency at the Hayward Gallery by – according to ‘Anton’ – agreeing to ‘put on a blonde wig and flick off Mehmet the security guard in the disabled toilet every day at three o’clock’, a story that, despite its rich narrative detail, is probably untrue. Incidentally, my avoidance of Frankie Vaughan** is in line with a discussion in a copy of Marie Clair I noticed in my dentist’s waiting room this morning, while awaiting the replacement of several hundred pounds’ worth of dental implants that skittered irretrievably across the tarmac during the Tennyson Road Incident. It was the current edition of Marie Clair (I have a good dentist) and, ironically the kind of thing you could probably stab the cat over quite happily, in an emergency.

My issue with modern porn is not that it exists, but the pervasive immediacy of it in the digital age. When porn was found by chance next to railway lines, in graveyards or bus shelters or – a feature of my own childhood – folded between seats on the Central Line, there was a sense of occasion. You understood that this was not a normal thing, and it existed separately from expectations you may have had about the females in your class, school or general peer group. Who was leaving the porn and why remains one of the mysteries of a British adolescence in the late twentieth century, of course. I mean, someone was. Anyway. I’m not suggesting that pornography consumed in print form is healthier in itself than that consumed via the net, just that it’s harder to saturate a means of transmission with something that physically exists and needs to be paid for and stored somewhere. If it had had the same impact upon print media that it has had online, every branch of WH Smiths would be stacked floor to ceiling with extremely hard core pornography, which anyone of any age could take away for free, in any quantity they chose, and I suspect someone would’ve said something by now.

I am not qualified to speculate upon whether online porn promotes sex crimes and associated grimness. However, it certainly promotes dehumanisation of both participant and viewer, which I should imagine is a useful first step in the process. In any case, with the sexualisation of children rushing to meet the infantalisation of adults at a point where our society will soon best be represented by sexually promiscuous twelve year olds telling us how boring we are, I am uncomfortable with the whole thing – which is why, some years ago, I decided to abstain. Abstinence is not the same as militancy, I should like to point out. It’s also not the same as absinthe, as ‘Anton’ misheard while we wandered back across the estate. I’m not particularly militant about anything – although I do have a genuine hatred for Frazier and the Big Bang Theory for being so fucking pleased with themselves – and porn aficianos can pursue their proclivity without offering me any justification for it.

There was, as it turned out, no porn in carrier bags in the pigeon loft. ‘Anton’ had to be led away weeping when night came, vowing through clenched teeth and hot tears to renew his search at first light**. Sadly, the world was a better place when you could reasonably have expected that there might’ve been.

Photards

Main: Marquee used for the second of the two weddings at Runton this year, which I missed due to hospitalisation. Norfolk Seventies tribute band Saturday Night Feverishness once again played for the delight of guests. I understand they said ‘Is this Runton? Or Funkton?’ at one point. I shall be putting them very straight about that next time I see them.

Top inset: Outside the kitchen in the Keeper’s Cottage (essentially the back of the Old Servants’ Quarters), featuring a Forest School plan of action. Quite an exciting one, if the balloons and different coloured pens are anything to go by.

Middle inset: The Old Servant’s Quarters, taken while leaning slightly backwards. As I write, there are eight Flat Earthers, a Buddhist of some kind and a new yoga lady in there, who last week held classes wearing sunglasses to hide the aftermath of surgery to have her eye bags removed. She also habitually holds classes while steaming drunk, which is something I have to see.

Lower inset: A whole evening of Frankie Vaughan, at the Birmingham Hippodrome if you please. Is nothing sacred?

*Runton Hall itself, still a residential property and off limits to everyone except by special permission, or when Joe goes in for the Monday morning Trustees’ meeting.

**Rhyming slang – Frankie Vaughan = porn.

***This is plausible, but not true.
Conspiracy Sandwiches

Aug 18th, 2017

With the sun dawdling across the huge East Anglian sky, the Restored Barn is a busy place in high summer. The mornings find Becka’s Forest School kids measuring stuff and noting things amid the waft of creosote and mown grass, referred to by the names they are encouraged to adopt for the duration of their stay on the Runton Estate. Glamper children, who occasionally wander in, having mistaken the dock leaves there for kale, call themselves things like Sparkle Swan or Blue Fairy Horse. The Forest School kids tend towards Terror Attack and Kim Il Jung. My favourite, however, was a lad from Sheffield who insisted upon being called Alan because it was his granddad’s name and he thought it was cool. The glampers and Forest School kids are not the only groups at Runton, of course. There are the conspiracy theorists to consider.

I organise more buffet lunches for conspiracy theorists than most people. In fact, if you want to hear about how the Queen is a lizard, or how the ice caps are the borders of a flat earth, or how false memories are generated by wandering in and out of alternative timelines because silly old physics is falling apart, Runton’s your destination and I’m in charge of your quiche. This level of catering merely entails hefting a trestle table into Restored Barn and putting trays of stuff on it. I don’t make the sandwiches but I do introduce them by saying ‘These sandwiches are cheese and pickle – or are they?’ and all that, to get a conspiracy feel going. The Forest School kids, marshalled by Becka, spend the afternoons restoring the Victorian greenhouse or playing Manhunt in the substantial woodland to the south of the estate, on the other side of the fucking petting zoo. The conspiracy theorists pretty much take care of themselves, and if they ever got tired of talking about conspiracy theories, we could organise them into five a side football teams and place bets on them instead. This is all well and good, but it does raise the question of what the adult glampers, the most prominent Runton group, actually do all day.

Runton is an isolated place, and there is only so much time middle class people can spend trying to conceive gay children. Accordingly, most glampers do nothing, except popping into the village six miles away to stock up on wine, avocados and books by Richard Dawkins, who became a multi-millionaire at the turn of the century when he found a way to turn Guardian readers into cash. Since ‘Anton’ and I took over the Runton glamping operation, they are no longer a bunch of beta males and unhappy modern white girls who expect everyone to listen to their shouty nonsense like we’re all in a Star Wars film or something. Even if they were, though, we would still need a middle class. Having a middle class is proof that your society has evolved, and it would be the worst kind of medieval nightmare without one. At heart, middle class people are the just like everyone else, and in many cases, much prettier. I prevented Graham’s children selling retreaded tyres to an Emily/Laura the other day, and once she’d cleared up the Glastonbury-esque litter around her tent she told me all about her shop in, probably, Sussex. I should imagine it had something to do with baking. Anyway, she was spending afternoons at Runton drawing a side line of greetings cards for sale in whatever her shop was about. Yes, they featured Rey from the Force Awakens rather too heavily and there were a lot of cats, but they were otherwise perfectly nice. It’s important to look beyond appearances; I accept that middle class people are physically weak, easily led, ruin everything and go on about things all the time, but they are paying an awful lot of tax – and I, for one, am glad that somebody is.

While watching Archie and a ratter of Graham’s called Lucy put each other through their paces in the Fallow Field last Monday, ‘Anton’ and I discussed how the glampers might be given useful things to do for the advancement of the estate in general. As we did so, I remembered something at Spitalfields years ago, whereby some bloke – the ex-drummer from Transvision Vamp, as it turned out – charged people to go berserk with a sledgehammer at a load of old desk top computers he’d bought from bankrupt businesses nearby. People loved it, for much the same reason that Becka loves the Screaming Car. It occurred to me that the glampers could do the same sort of thing in the dilapidated out-buildings around the Runton estate, as these are too small to be turned into accommodation and too expensive to restore. With Archie and Lucy tearing around after each other at impressive speed – Lucy is nippier in the turn, but Archie makes up ground on the straight – we calculated that if you fired up a couple of Bens or Joshes by telling them that clean eating is anorexia for wankers, or that bacon makes tattoos fall off, handed them a sledgehammer and aimed them at a derelict nineteenth century store house, it would be a pile of sand in eight minutes. If this energy of this kind could be stored, perhaps by way of a battery attached to pedals in a craft microbrewery where a conversation about the European Union is taking place, it could provide endless sustainable fuel. The world may die from many things, but if we can harness impotent middle class anger we will have taken the first step in making the ice caps safe, and if you believe in a flat earth, this will enable them to continue preventing the oceans from sloshing off into outer space. Phew.

Photards

Main: the Drive at Runton, leading from the Big House (ie the Hall itself) to, eventually, the rest of the world.

Inset top: large outbuilding of some kind converted for use as accomodation for the Forest School kids.

Inset middle: partially collapsed barn which now houses the Screaming Car.

Inset lower: glampers. Not Runton glampers, but you get the idea.

*Archie is a saluki, bred to run long distances in a straight line across sand. When operating in a European environment, it is wise to exercise the abdominal oblique and latissimi dorsi muscle groups of a saluki, as they can become strained in close pursuit of smaller game, such as the forty million rabbits that live on the Runton Estate. Belting around like a hairy whirlwind after Lucy strengthens his chassis nicely, and is hilarious.

Even though I keep him in tip top physical condition as if he were a working dog, it is unlikely that Archie will ever go rabbiting. This is because in a traditional setting saluki chase Thompson’s gazelle until the luckless ruminant collapses with exhaustion, then wait for a Persian on a horse to pop along and break its neck. I’m not sure what he would make of an ailing rabbit. That said, I’d never rule anything out – this is the countryside, it’s a bloodbath, and sooner or later we’re bound to have to kill something.
Oh What A Circus

Aug 14th, 2017

It is summer in Britain, and everything smells of unhappiness and Lynx. Well, nearly everything: by a broken fence next to a violent East Anglian petting zoo, the Goat Bag Man smells faintly of paraffin. Three weeks in the country air have all but purged the aroma of a leather waterproofing industry based around a Highgate bath that makes him so easily identifiable to the visually impaired, and his time as my body double in the wake of the Tennyson Road Incident is almost at an end. In fact, unbeknown to him, it already has ended. Had he not suggested, following my discharge from hospital with working legs but non-working arms, that I earn a living among the cast of River Dance, I would not be feigning continuing muscular trauma, he would not have to mend fences with Graham on my behalf, and there would be one more ice cream sale on Primrose Hill on weekday afternoons – but I can’t help that.

The constant mending of damaged fences should not be underestimated. The goat that urinated into its own mouth while Archie was bitten by a deer last time we spoke got its head stuck in fencing nine times that week, requiring several fence posts to be hacked through in order to retrieve the silly bastard. Usually, when tedious physical labour is required around the Estate, Becka organises Forest School ‘fun groups’ to do it – appropriate in this case, as petting zoo goats regularly ruin their games of Manhunt. This is essentially hide and seek, with nine year olds scouring the wooded area on the south of the Estate for one of their number who lies on the ground, covers themselves with leaves, and pretends to be dead. While macabre, there is little chance of an actual fatality. Goats indicate the vicinity of the ‘grave’ by battering at nearby fencing, giving the game away somewhat, and in any case Forest School kids are as fat as they are endearing, and therefore unlikely to summon the physical energy required to bury themselves properly. They are also inept woodworkers (as Becka discovered while trying to get them to make bird boxes amid spirited enquiries about what a bird needs a box for and how will it carry it about) and can take over an hour to saw through a five inch fence post. This simply isn’t good enough. Once the entrapped livestock is once again free to caper about all over the place like a fucking idiot, repairs are undertaken by Graham, hammering at one end of a fence post with the uninsured Goat Bag Man and ‘Anton’ holding it steady and swearing at him, from the other.

If Graham, a Romany gypsy, is anything to go by, the travelling community are very bad at travelling. I say this because, to my endless amusement, he is the only official permanent resident on the Estate. Not even Joe, who is on the Runton payroll, has an address or proof of identification, to the extent that he recently had to ask the Trustees to falsify a tenancy agreement thereby proving where he lives which, surprisingly, they did. I fondly recall trading at the Thames Festival in 2010 with velvet-toned posho Supertone, and realising that we had no public liability insurance certificate as the organisers did their rounds. It was an impressive thing, all calligraphy and swirls, and failure to produce one meant being thrown off site and barred from trading there in future. Usually, groups of traders deal with this by passing one certificate surreptitiously between them for repeated inspection, but we were trading away from anyone we knew and were unable to join in with this elementary bluff. Calligraphy and swirls look nice, and made the certificate a gift for the skilled counterfeiter, so Supertone drew one, flashed it tetchily at the organisers while pretending to be busy with something else, and we went on to have a blinding weekend of it. The last time I saw him, we passed a quiet trading afternoon at Leadenhall Market trying to translate correspondence by nineteenth century French romantic poet and novelist Victor Hugo (who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame), mysteriously acquired by Jigsaw John. As I recall, most of it was tetchy letters to his sister complaining about how difficult it was to get shirts laundered around the Paris Commune. I sometimes miss the incongruous sophistication that trading among such people often produced, because the countryside is awful. Still, the bite wound inflicted upon Archie by rampaging petting zoo animals the other week has healed nicely and without complication, leaving nothing more than two small puncture wounds. I might jazzle him by popping a sequin in each, and take him along to Norwich Pride.

Post Script

For the record, I love the smell of paraffin. I’ve inherited this from my old dear, who often sniffed the paraffin heater in the ridiculous house in which I was born until she regularly made herself ‘quite dizzy’. If she’d turned it on now and again I might not have contracted tuberculosis in front of the Generation Game at eight months of age, but that’s east London in the Seventies for you. Still, before I met Graham, my only exposure to Romany gypsies was collecting Colgate lids for a poster of David Essex. In case you are unfamiliar, Essex was a notable British singer of the 1980s, and latterly President of British National Gypsy Council, whose autograph I later attained by chance at Upton Park when West Ham were home to Everton in 1984, and when I still had no idea who he was. The Colgate poster initiative had been intended to instill the concept of value in me. Instead, its only lasting impact has been that whenever I see a caravan, I taste spearmint. This is of course not true. However, when I hear Name of the Game by Abba I genuinely smell cardboard, as it was on the radio as I opened my presents one distant Christmas morning and clearly made an impression, as did tuberculosis, toothpaste – and however obliquely, David Essex, after all.

Photards:

Main – Mysterious crop circles near Runton Hall. What can it mean?

Top inset – I was stationary while taking this picter for six seconds tops – quite enough time for this convoy of wankers to form.

Middle inset – Joe delightedly interrupts a curry to break the news that we are to receive three new pygmy goats.

Lower inset – One of the rooms in the Old Servant’s Quarters rewired by ‘Anton’. Note goat bag, lower left.
Punching A Deer In The Face

Jul 30th, 2017

Violence towards animals is unacceptable but, even so, I punched a deer in the face the other day near the Runton petting zoo, maintained by Joe and Graham. If you’re unfamiliar with petting zoo maintenance, remember this: once you have a petting zoo, you’ll always have a petting zoo, because you can never re-home a petting zoo animal, except to another petting zoo, which won’t want it. Why? Because petting zoo animals are a bunch of dicks, that’s why. They live an incredibly spoiled existence – every time they see a human, they get treats and fuss, and they have to do nothing in return. Realising a good thing when they see it, they subsequently become extremely territorial and aggressive. Try going near petting zoo animals without treats and see what happens. Never mind all the bleating and fluffiness and what not. They’ll fucking kill you.

The glampers love it, though, and now that ‘Anton’ and I have regulated the quality of glamper coming to the Estate, the Smith Plan recommends that glampers are welcomed in a more accommodating manner. There are many reasons for this volte-face. For a start, ‘Anton’ and I would like to expand our tent hire business. Also, Beggar’s Canyon would like to profit from arranging further wholesale tent purchases on our behalf from her survivalist contacts. Finally, Graham’s kids would like more opportunities to aggressively sell retreated tyres to Instagram foodies from Stoke Newington. That’s how important glampers are to the short and mid-term fortunes of the Runton Hall Estate. Joe’s even thinking of building a little chapel where they can pray for a second Brexit vote, if it will help secure our Lottery grant.

Much of Joe and Graham’s work consists of repairing fencing that the animals routinely destroy to get to humans who they then, essentially, mug. Not all animals at Runton are ungrateful little bastards, however. For example, my dog Archie exhibits all the noble gentleness and good nature of his Saluki bloodline, latterly displaying a touching concern for my welfare in post-Tennyson Road Incident physiotherapy. During these sessions, fearing that the physiotherapist will take advantage of my weakened condition to kill and eat me, Archie places himself between the pair of us, literally clambering onto my lap as my shoulders and torso are manipulated hither and yon in the name of skeletal health. The deer I punched – actually squared up to, shouted ‘Fuck off Bambi’ or something similar at, and then struck not once, but twice – had charged up to and bitten Archie for no reason other than that he was a mammal walking along with a potential food source. Furious, I leapt to the defence of my baffled dog, but could only punch with my right arm in a manner strongly reminiscent of Frank Bruno against Oliver MacCall during his successful 1995 WBC World Heavyweight Championship bid. Unlike Frank Bruno in 1995, I am no longer among the greatest sportsmen of my generation, and while I boxed enthusiastically until I was 21, there was no Morrissey, Ian Brown and Jamiroquai at ringside urging me on, no Harry Carpenter yelling through tears of joy into his microphone, no Nigel Benn dressed like Mozart and no Prince Nazeem bobbing every bob and weaving every weave at my elbow. I was a lost Cockney in a field, punching a ruminant, and that was that.

For its part, the deer seemed incredulous, perhaps detecting that while Archie and I are happy companions, we are ill matched brothers in arms. This was evident as Archie launched himself gamely at our attacker, in the process unbalancing me as I tried to restrain him on his lead. A Saluki will certainly defend itself, but they are reluctant to bite or nip; their principal modus opperandi is to startle prey into running, then chase it until it collapses from exhaustion. Playing to his strengths, Archie was trying to rattle the deer into flight, but it remained stationary. Feeling increasingly foolish, I hit it again and, perhaps out of boredom, it began to turn away. Unnoticed until now, a goat had also broken out of the petting zoo, and Archie, teeth bared and hackles up, prepared to hurl himself at this new foe. The goat cocked a hind leg and, unfurling a fierce erection, proceeded to piss into its own mouth in an unhurried manner for fifteen seconds, all the while maintaining eye contact. Count slowly to fifteen, and consider how long that amount of time seems when watching a goat piss into its own mouth, in what I later discovered was a gesture of contempt. Point made, he adjusted himself and wandered back through the same hole in the fence he had eaten earlier with a countenance suggesting he was going to run a nice bath and listen to the Archers in it. In solidarity, the deer evacuated its bowels and followed him. Archie, livid and attempting to salvage our dented honour, all but dragged me along the ground, while simultaneously trying to bite through his lead in order to commence the pursuit, becoming calm only after I carried him to the safety of the Fallow Field, squirming furiously and trying to claw around, over and through my face as I did so. At length, serenity was restored.

‘None of you were exactly the Fonz there, were you?’ said Graham, with a roll of barbed wire from the Restored Barn in front of him to strengthen the petting zoo fence. I had quite a lot of thoughts going through my mind, many of them complex, vengeful and involving venison burgers, but upon reflection, I decided it was simply easier to agree.

Photards:

Main: Sundry petting zoo animals. Check out their welcoming faces.

Upper inset: Archie and Bill, one of our Runton donkeys, contemplate each other. The donkeys have nothing to do with the petting zoo, and are a right larf. Currently in Scarborough, doing donkey rides along the seafront until September.

Lower inset: Puncture wounds on the side of the dog. Needed sixty quids worth of antibiotics, which fortunately Graham not only had but was able to administer.

Video: Frank Bruno, being barely able to stand after twelve rounds, hangs on by his fingernails to to become 1995 WBC Heavyweight Champion. Marvellous stuff.