The Runton Diaries

The Runton Reiki Cull

Jul 28th, 2017

If the Runton Hall Estate was a brothel, I would be the madam at the front, taking the money and looking after the coats. What happens in the rooms upstairs is none of my business. However, when the rooms upstairs are full of Reiki healers, action needs to be taken, because your reputation is at stake. This situation has recently occurred at Runton, and it falls to me and the implementation of the Smith Plan – my contribution to working life here while I recover from the Tennyson Road Incident – to deal with this bunch of Jedi wankers.

Reiki healing is, as they say, not exactly rocket science. This is true, because rocket science has credibility. You really need to know what you’re doing to be a rocket scientist, spending many years studying and researching at the limits of human knowledge in a volatile and high risk pioneering technology. A Reiki healer is just some menopausal woman who wears a lot of purple, and who you’d usually expect to find doing bad charcoal drawings of cats in an Outer London sixth form college evening class. I imagine that talking to a rocket scientist about rocket science is interesting and impressive. Talking to a Reiki healer about Reiki healing fills your head with pleasing images of brutal and sustained violence and inventive ways to dispose of corpses. That said, I should like to acknowledge the disservice I am paying to the Runton Reiki healers. Most of them are Reiki masters. The difference between a Reiki healer and a Reiki master is a certificate you print yourself at a time when you consider you deserve it. It is literally that simple.

Whether or not I believe in Reiki healing is immaterial. It’s not my job to believe stuff at Runton, because to revisit our earlier metaphor, I am the madam. I don’t have to shag the punters. I just oversee an environment where shagging might take place, and pop in now and again to open a window and spray a bit of Fabreze about. Therefore, while I don’t necessarily believe that the Earth is flat, or that Paul McCartney was replaced by a body double in 1966, or that humans are ruled by shape shifting lizards from the rings of Saturn, I am entirely happy for people who do to come to Runton and get it out of their systems because, ultimately, it is harmless. The problem with Reiki healing is that there are circumstances – such as being persuaded away from conventional medicine to receive Reiki care in the belief that you will be fine in the morning – where it isn’t. It is these exact circumstances that ‘Anton’ discovered the Runton Reiki coven attempting to establish, while asking if one of them could magic him up ‘a spare set of bollocks for Christmas’. With the exception of his genuinely charming children, I think I am right in saying that this is the first time the world has any reason to thank his bollocks for anything.

As I write, it strikes me that there is a similarity between a rocket scientist and a Reiki healer after all, and it is this: if either make a mistake, someone could die. You’re just as dead either way of course, but if you died due to a rocket scientist’s oversight, at least it would be in the noble cause of human advancement. If you died having trusted a Reiki healer with your deteriorating health, you’d look like a dick. I understand that exposure to conventional medicine has the potential for side effects, such as addiction and depression. Exposure to Reiki healing has the potential for side effects such as believing in Reiki healing, making it far more dangerous. I mentioned this to a Reiki healer, who said I was encouraging a form of fascism*. Anyway. There will be a meeting between Joe, myself and the Reiki coven before the weekly Trustees meeting next Monday, where I shall state that they can have Reiki conventions and Reiki discussions and talk about Reiki things as much as they want, so long as they don’t try to use Runton as some kind of hospital for broken fairies. One of the main aims of the Smith Plan is to help Joe get a proposal for a sizeable Lottery grant past the Trustees, and if someone pegs out in the Old Servant’s Quarters because their aura wasn’t sparkly enough, we’re all in trouble.

Elsewhere on the Estate, things are gently decaying in their usual leisurely manner. I am sitting in my traditional spot by the Restored Barn, and can almost hear the sound of Brillo pads on ironmongery as Becka sets the Forest School fun groups to work in the Victorian greenhouse. The Goat Bag Man has mastered the intricacies of the Sandstone Bell Tent and is performing admirably with ‘Anton’ and the glampers. He was once an actual teacher, too, so there is scope for him to pitch in with the Forest School, especially if we turn more of the outbuildings into dormitory space, doubling its capacity. As far as I can make out, his teaching experience mainly involved fighting with nutbox adolescents in the Luton area, which will stand him in good stead with Graham’s children, who only respect people they can’t beat up. As for Joe – well, if you’re of a mind to watch the Emirates Cup games this weekend you might spot him, as he’s letting off the fireworks on the pitch when the medals get awarded. I have no idea how this turn of events came about.

*Not the first time some hippy has levelled such an accusation. Many years ago at Camden, Joe and I sold t shirts, some of which had Dolphins Are Gay Sharks written on them, on the basis that as far as I’m concerned that is exactly what they look like. Some dismal old slag tried to sue us for ‘subconscious racism’, but to my considerable disappointment the case never got to court. She probably changed the fuck out of her tune when the same phrase was adopted and plastered all over season two of Glee.

Photards:

Main: Sloping football pitch near Runton. No one lives within five miles of it, and I can only assume it is used by the numerous ghosts which lurk in these parts.

Top inset: Joe at one of the pizza ovens installed by Forest School fun groups for the Bollywood wedding.

Middle inset: Archibald al-Sadique looking pleased with himself.

Lower inset: Livestock enclosure at Runton. It looks quite sweet when you can’t smell it.
Enter the Goat Bag Man

Jul 24th, 2017

It is unusual for visitors to get far into the Runton Estate without attracting the attention of Graham’s children, who patrol the grounds on their bikes with the territorial ferocity of a pack of wolverines. Last Friday, as I sat in a deckchair by the Restored Barn, his youngest daughter rocketed past me on her small pink bike, stabilisers creating a mini whirlwind of dry earth behind her. She was hurtling into the rising summer haze between the Fallow Field and the untroubled East Anglian sky, from which a figure was emerging. It was a man in a Panama hat, and I had been expecting him. The tiny wolverine circled him as he approached.

As my deckchair and I fell into her orbit, she jumped off her bike, ran up to me, and with the infinite earnestness of a six year old demanded ‘Who the fuck is that and why the fuck does he smell of paraffin?’

*

The recuperative process, such as the one I am working through in the wake of the Tennyson Road Incident, is annoying for the self-employed. This is especially true at Runton, when earnings are usually linked to physical labour which remains arduous and tiresome no matter how half-heartedly I go about it. For me and ‘Anton’, this is mainly putting up, taking down and hefting about tents as part of our glamping hire enterprise, as well as tinkering with general restoration work around the estate. Joe tends to orchestrate much of this, as he is the only one of us officially employed by the Runton Estate, giving him a greater measure of credibility with the Board of Trustees. As we have seen, larger, boring projects such as cleaning of the Victorian greenhouse are undertaken by Forest School ‘fun groups’ of inner city children, arranged by Becka. ‘Anton’, a reasonably qualified electrician, is of value among the 1930’s wiring, as there are many miles of it around the estate, sparking gently away. Amid all this activity, I can’t, as ‘Anton’ rightly points out, ‘just sit around all day thinking about stuff, like that Stephen Hawkings’, and this is where the Panama hatted Goat Bag Man, now no longer regarded as the subject of a search and destroy mission by Graham’s children, comes into the equation by way of a major fire at Camden Market.

Major fires at Camden Market occur so often that the council should stop putting them out and use the place as street lighting instead. In 2008’s Great Fire of Camden, myself, Joe and the Goat Bag Man were fortunate that the prevailing wind blew the flames across the High Street away from our Lock Market stalls and towards the old Canal Market, destroying that instead. There was still tragedy enough: the old Canal Market entrance, from which the letter ‘C’ was removed so many times that it once appeared in the Rough Guide to London as the Anal Market, was lost forever, as was the legend ‘A.J. Gives Toothy Blow Jobs’, written across the railway bridge overlooking the beer garden of the Hawley Arms. The next morning, Vinny, landlord of the Duke of Wellington, the Whitechapel interchange for market traders from north, south and east London, gave us to a Hero’s Breakfast – a fried egg sandwich – on a table thoughtfully situated next to the emergency exit, in case the pub caught fire. Joe was at Runton and I had moved to Greenwich Market when the next inferno struck, but the Goat Bag Man was lucky for a second time as it affected only the Stables Market, and he again received a Hero’s Breakfast from Vinny the next morning. The luck of both the Goat Bag Man and the Lock Market ran out on July 10^th this year, when fire finally got the opportunity to make an absolute mess of the place, and while his business was largely unscathed, trade will inevitably suffer. This time there was no Hero’s Breakfast, because Vinny, who looked after us for so long, died in 2013. I’m sure this was due to his horrified response to the Goat Bag Man’s decision to give up the booze, making him technically guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

Emerging from the Barn with a roll of insulating cable under his arm, ‘Anton’ all but jumped on the Goat Bag Man, desperate to see if he still smelled of the Northern Line, joined in quick succession by Joe and myself. Incidentally, the aroma of paraffin comes from the process by which goat leather bags are waterproofed, ie immersion in gallons of the stuff. This takes place in the bath, kitchen sink and several barrels in the Goat Bag Man’s tiny flat, three floors up in the Highgate sky, but I all but sobbed as I detected about his person a hint of the escalators at Kentish Town, and the smell of warm air vented from the 214 bus as it meanders from Liverpool Street to Chalk Farm. To complete the scene, Becka appeared, fresh from the Screaming Car, where she been since one of her younger daughters irretrievably slid her phone, purse and keys into a hollow tree while shouting ‘Post box!’, and general revelry ensued. Later that evening, a member of the Christadelphian Isolationist League (currently glamping in the Fallow Field) appeared and played Chas and Dave tunes on a piano in the Old Servant’s Quarters, prompting a rather rowdy singalong, and I discovered that drinking heavily on top of several hundred milligrams of daily codeine gets you very tipsy indeed. I decided to stop codeine the next morning. It works as painkiller, but it’s nasty and I’d rather save it for lifting weights when I am fully healed.

For the time being, the Goat Bag Man will take care of the glamping tents with ‘Anton’, popping back to London to tend his Camden business at prudent intervals. I will lounge about formulating a strategy regarding which groups of people are too much trouble to have at Runton in the future, and sort out some kind of plan with Joe that he can place in front of the Trustees in due course. I have already commenced work. It looks like curtains for the Bikram yoga lady and demands for open fires burning in the middle of her Bikram yoga room 24hrs a day. Even if this was possible, it would be potentially disastrous: the Runton Estate is heavily wooded. Imagine the situation if a Bikram yoga fire got out of control in Autumn. Some bunch of white girls escaping through the trees could compromise an orderly evacuation by stopping to take pictures of their shoes among the fallen leaves – a risk I am simply not prepared to take. Arrivederci, stupid Bikram yoga lady.

Photards:

Main: Camden Market with its evening lights on.

Upper inset: A goat bag. Nice bit of stuff, I’ve had loads of them.

Middle inset: The Goat Bag Man (left) and myself at the Duke of Wellington, a couple of years ago.

Lower inset: The goat bag stall in the East Yard, Camden Lock Market. Customer being assured that the smell of paraffin fades after a couple of decades.
Tennyson Road Incident, Part II

Jul 20th, 2017

When regaining consciousness in a hospital bed, it is customary to sit up, blink a few times, and say ‘Where am I?’, but this is a redundant question. You’re in a room full of nurses and medical equipment. It’s not like you’ve wandered in to Carpet Right, is it. With this in mind, my first question to a ward sister after waking in similar circumstances recently was a pragmatic ‘Is this a good hospital?’, quickly adding that I didn’t wish to seem ungrateful or anything. She replied that she hoped so, as I’d had a good accident, which was a decent response. By way of an encore, she treated me to a rundown of my injuries, featuring a more liberal use of the words ‘cracked’ ‘lacerated’ ‘detached’ and ‘dislocated’ than I would otherwise choose in a report about my physical well being, and phrases such as ‘potential nerve and organ damage’ which didn’t seem like much of a giggle either.

It’s also customary under such circumstances to pay tribute to NHS workers. I’m sure they were performing acts of selfless heroism somewhere thereabouts, but keeping up to date with my National Market Traders’ Federation insurance for all these years meant I was in a private room in a private ward, and didn’t see any of it. People would wander in and check things and look at stuff now and again, and visitors would come and go. I spent my time having morphine mainlined into me and watching classic war films, which backfired somewhat when the theme tune to Where Eagles Dare gave me the fear for about three hours. The film itself is enjoyable if cartoonish, and Richard Burton is at his finest in it, but blasting the theme tune through your Skullcandy Smokin’ Buds in a silent hospital in an opiate haze is not something I would recommend, because it is the sound of every paranoid thought you have ever had marching up the corridor to get you. Two minutes in and I even became suspicious of a pot plant my old dear had bought me – a Princess Diana clematis, deemed appropriate because ‘she was also in a car crash’ – and thought the Gestapo might be hiding in it.

As it turned out, they weren’t. However, I was all but screaming by the time the opening credits had finished, at which point a consultant popped in for a quick hello-how-are-you. On his part, this was conducted in the lovely chuckle-y Norfolk accent usually confined to the more rural parts of the county – ‘Yer shoulder tendenz – thass all gorn, look hee hee, none of that bodypoppin’ fer yew haha, new charnce boi, kill yew that wud hee hee might as well put a gun to yer ‘ead and pull the triggar ha ha’ etc – which made me think that perhaps his main job was hiring out wherries on the Broads. At various points he produced x-rays with a hearty commentary about how close to permanent injury I had come, delivered in a back slapping ‘and then I said’ manner – ‘See that thar? Thass yer spinal cord see, ha ha. Millimetre to the left an’ you’d have no feelin’ in yer legs fer the rest o’ yer life look boi hee hee!’, and so forth. It was not an appropriate tone to use with someone convinced that his mother has been hiding Nazis in a pot plant, but his joyous countenance revived my spirits no end, and I was glad of it. In his estimation, I had missed ‘four different fatal injuries ha ha!’ but by some miracle had sustained no significant long term damage. In fact, the only issues were a cracked ribs, extensive lacerations, some spectacular bruising, damage to the coracoacromial ligament and supraspinatus, and torn adductor muscles in my left thigh. All this meant that for two weeks I could hardly walk, my arms flopping about uselessly like those on the mighty Dinosaurus Rex, but with bed rest and codeine everything would get better. I had lost track of time what with all the drugs and sleeping, but knew it was the Fourth of July when he delivered this happy news because Instagram was full of drunk American white girls in stars and stripes bikinis waving guns about, in the kind of independence celebration that presumably made Scotland think better of the idea.

That, then, was my road traffic horror smash. It was a narrow escape, but an escape nonetheless. Writing this eighteen days later, I am more chipper by the hour, and able to dress and undress myself unaided, to the relief of all concerned. I am reluctant to refer to the whole episode as an accident, because to do so implies that it was unavoidable, when it wasn’t – Andrew the taxi driver was looking at his phone while accelerating onto a roundabout at forty miles an hour, and didn’t see me until I surprised us both by hurtling towards him in mid air. It was entirely avoidable. If he was indeed looking at his Tinder matches, as I suspect was the case, I hope he was swiping whichever way signifies interest, because if a relationship comes of it, he and his partner will have an amusing anecdote about how they met the night a Cockney came through the windscreen to tell their grandchildren. Who knows – they might make a thing of it and run me over every year on their anniversary. Then again, if the criminal negligence charges being brought against him by the old bill stick, he’ll miss the first few of them, what with being in prison and everything, but still.

I was officially discharged by the ward sister five days after admittance, nodding my way through the standard ‘take these twice a day and this with meals and don’t get run over by any more taxis’ advice, before being wheeled towards the car park, where ‘Anton’ was waiting to take me home.

‘There’s also this’ she said, holding up the whiteboard on the end of my bed as I was about to leave. This usually displays information such as name, date of birth, and blood group, but instead had ‘Very Small Penis’ written across it. ‘Anton’ had done this a couple of days previously while I was asleep, he proudly informed me over homecoming fish and chips later that evening.

‘I’m here for a transplant’ I said.

‘I wish you well with it’, said the ward sister, ‘I’m the one who cut you out of your clothes when you came in’.

Photards:

Main – Never mind your expressos and cappachinoids – Gold Blend is the best coffee. Ask for it by name next time you’re in Costa, raising your voice and demanding to see the manager if necessary. Goes nicely with co-dydramol, I have discovered. Note Battle of Hastings 950th anniversary commemorative mug in the background. I am absolutely the kind of person that pre-orders that sort of thing so they have it ready on the day.

Inset upper – Promotional material for Where Eagles Dare. The text alone would have had me bewildered and weeping during my hospital stay.

Inset lower – Pints of snakebite with gin and tonic chasers, through a straw. More fun than co-dydramol, let me tell you.
Tennyson Road Incident, Part I

Jul 18th, 2017

When you find yourself strapped to a trolley in the back of an ambulance, it’s important to remember that things are looking up. Yes, you’re in a bit of a pickle, but at least whatever put you in the ambulance in the first place has stopped happening, and this represents a considerable improvement in fortunes. In my case, what put me in an ambulance was unexpectedly plummeting through the windscreen of a taxi as the driver was ‘texting’ (we can assume this means checking Tinder) while cycling round an otherwise unremarkable East Anglian roundabout a couple of Sunday evenings ago. I then bounced back out, and bounced along the road for a while before coming to a halt in a surprised heap, having bounced through a red light, something I would never do on the bike but appeared to have done as an airborne pedestrian. Satisfied that I had come to a standstill, I rolled onto my back, and everything stopped. The world is never as still as at moments like these, because it is looking at you, looking into you, waiting to see what will happen next. I was quite curious myself.

What happened next was that the cabbie, who had a name badge informing me that his name was Andrew, asked if I was alright, and in return I asked if he was ‘fucking blind’, both reasonable questions under the circumstances. My right leg was the only limb in working order, and using this to lever myself to the side of the road, I made further enquiries as to ‘What kind of fucking ISIS bullshit was that?’ and ‘Where’s your fucking van, you fucking terrorist?’, because I had discovered that adrenaline and indignation make you quite gobby. His passengers were also remonstrating with him, and as they called sundry emergency services my guardian Rastafarian appeared. A long time ago in a London borough far far away en route to Greenwich Market, I slid off my bike on Peckham High Road, and was helped up, dusted off and jollied along by two passing Rastas. Rural Norfolk, however, is an unlikely place to chant down Babylon, and my baffled state was further enhanced when, at this latest moment of peril, a bona fide follower of Haile Selassi appeared from a passing car, asking me which football team I supported by way of determining possible head injuries.

‘West Ham’ I said.

‘Dey shit man. Try again’ he replied.

‘It’s that fucking stadium’, I protested through clenched teeth, because various parts of me were starting to sting a bit, ‘should’ve let Spurs have it. No use to us. Then you let Tomkins and O’Brien leave and unsettle the defence too close to the start of the season, then there’s that wanker Payet to deal with. Shove all that in a stadium with no atmosphere, change the club crest and what do you think’s going to happen?’

‘Is that why they’ve been shit for a hundred years, then? Could they see it coming or something?’ he said, and our conversation went back and forth in this manner for several minutes. He was an Arsenal fan, and by way of a riposte I mentioned that when you have a West Ham fan and an Arsenal fan in the same place, it’s usually the Arsenal fan that’s lying on the floor, severely injured. By now, Andrew the cabbie was being arrested and I was being placed in a neck and spine brace by an ambulance driver who looked like Jeremy Corbyn, adding to the overall surreal nature of the evening. This caused me to think that perhaps a middle-class ambulance had picked me up by mistake, and I prepared myself for quite a long discussion about, probably, Brexit. These fears increased when, on the way to the Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital, the first question asked by the ambulance lady was if I had any food allergies. My experience with glampers at Runton tells me that there are a lot of things middle class people can’t eat – nuts, gluten, meat, dairy, fish, stuff from Israel etc – as they are an evolutionary dead end, which is also why they don’t breed. Upon reflection, I think this was the moment I realised I was going to be in hospital for some time, so I just said that while I have no allergies as such, I don’t like tapas as it is annoying because there is never enough of anything. Attempting to wrestle the conversation back to that evening’s headline news, I asked if I was badly hurt. The ambulance lady said that if I was a cat, I’d certainly have lost one of my nine lives. I pointed out that if I was a cat I wouldn’t have been riding a bike in the first place, and she admitted I had a point.

‘I live in the countryside,’ I said, ‘if I’m injured, they’ll shoot me’.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘the good news is that the crunching sound you can hear is not your bones. It’s all the glass in your shirt and hair. That said, if I was to hazard a guess, I’d say you’ve broken several ribs and your left shoulder, hip and possibly knee.’

‘And if you were to hazard a lie?’ I replied.

‘I’d say you were right as rain,’ she smiled.

‘Well that’s good news, then’ I said, and fainted.

Postscript

This was a long post, so I have split it in half. Well, I say that, but I haven’t written the other half yet, so there is no way of knowing exactly how long it will eventually be. When I started this blog, I wanted to post every Monday and Thursday, in keeping with the traditional broadcast days of Blue Peter, and while it is plain to all that this has gone by the wayside somewhat, I’ll try and put the other half up on Thursday evening, and stick to the format henceforth.

Pictards:

Top – The Iron Lady, not the bike I was riding when I was mown down. I use this for charging about the countryside. These days it has khaki panniers, and is covered in mud, straw, and animal droppings.

Inset middle – a VW Passat, similar to the one that hit me, although this one still has a windscreen of course.

Inset lower – Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital, unrecognisable without the crowds of people smoking in the entrance.
Rabbits, Dogs and Glampers

Jun 29th, 2017

My solution to the Runton Hall rabbit infestation is simple: build a city. This is also my solution to everything in the countryside, from nettle stings to lack of public transport. In a city, rabbits would be licensed by a governing authority, like cabs. If they misbehaved they would be issued with a caution and moved along, with unrulier ones detained overnight and presented to local magistrates in the morning. The countryside is not like this, and unfortunately the countryside is where Runton Hall is. It exists in a state of anarchy and bloodlust. If country laws were to be adopted in the city, Graham would flush shoplifters out of their houses with ferrets and chase them with dogs until the point of exhaustion, whereupon Joe would extinguish any remaining life by breaking their necks and skinning them. Living in the countryside is an affront to God and civilisation, and we must never allow it to be regarded as desirable, acceptable, or British.

I pointed this out to Graham today at dawn as he prepared his ferrets and dogs for a bit of rabbit culling. ‘Anton’ was supposed to be helping him, but is wary of Graham after an incident prior to the last cull when Graham asked him to hold up a roof beam in an outbuilding we are renovating and, with ‘Anton’ fully committed and visibly shaking under the strain, placed two ferrets in his shirt. Some say that it is still possible to hear the words ‘I’ll kill you, you bastard fucking pikey cunt’, and sundry other sentiments with which I will not trouble you, dancing in the wind on the west side of the estate on still, moonlit nights. We Cockneys are kind, gentle, trusting people, and all too often this is our treatment at the hands of country folk. Anyway. ‘Anton’ was instead employed installing nets across gaps in the fences where rabbits might escape, the sound of his hammering filling the morning air. ‘Sounds like he’s crucifying one of yer glampers’ said Graham, and I was moved to agree.

You probably can legally crucify a glamper in the countryside. It’s chaos out here. In their defence, the quality of Runton glamper has risen now that ‘Anton’ and I are stricter about who glamps and who doesn’t. For a start, they pay more, in accordance with the old market trading rule that if you want to sell something, put the price up, which here translates to better behaviour when paying a premium. Also, we have the nice tents I bought for the Bollywood wedding to rent them, providing us with a useful side line income. Joe is on the payroll at Runton, Becka gets the Forest School money, so the Trustees usually allow ‘Anton’ and I to do whatever we like as long as it brings in revenue and is ‘the right thing to do’. Often, the ‘right thing to do’ would be to hold pillows across the faces of the Board members and, when they stop thrashing about, dismember them and feed them to Graham’s dogs as an act of Freeganism – but this is, I suspect, a legal minefield. Nonetheless, by charging the glampers more, encouraging tent hire and fining them when they go to sleep and leave their camp fires to burn uncontrollably, thereby requiring Joe to put them out at all hours of the night, they are far more welcome than they used to be.

They are messy though. This is what happens when you put the white middle class in a field – look at the state of Glastonbury when they’re done with it. Joe and I no longer wake them up in the morning by wandering through their enclosure shouting that someone’s found a way Jeremy Corbyn can still be Prime Minister, or that there’s going to be another EU Referendum, or that Great British Bake Off is not going to commercial television after all, and so forth. These days, we let them sleep in and ask them nicely to clean up after themselves, and almost all of them do so quite happily. I give the details of those who refuse, or who are basically dicks, to Graham’s kids, who then aggressively sell re-treaded tyres to them until they see the error of their ways. Graham’s kids, the oldest of whom is twelve, are fantastic. As you may recall, I acquired my dog, Archie, as part payment for teaching them how to read (‘A is for fucking apple, B is for fucking ball and my fucking bollocks. What’s this fucking book now? ‘I Don’t Like Fucking Snakes’? Who the fuck does? Rare old pile of shite this is’ and so forth) and they are inventive, hilarious and friendly, if relentlessly foul-mouthed and aggressively territorial around uncooperative glampers. ‘That’s what makes your holiday – the people you meet’ I usually say in a cheery manner as some Barney or Sophia drives back to Crystal Palace with tyres all over their back seat, and I’m sure they agree in principle.

With regards to the rabbit coursing, there isn’t much to say, other than it wasn’t a good day for Thumper and Bugs. Never likely to come out on top, were they. Incidentally, Archie does not participate in this sort of thing. He is a Saluki, and we Saluki owners treasure our dogs: I put great effort into every aspect of his well-being, from grooming (daily) to feeding (raw meat, bones and offal) to training (varied and extensive, and involving a sports psychologist*) but am obviously curious to see how well he could do the biz, if push came to shove. To this end, I shall be trying to get lure coursing past the Trustees at next Monday’s Board meeting. This is where a carrier bag is attached to a fishing line which is in turn attached to a motor, and dogs chase it hither and yon across a predesignated course like a bunch of nutcases. Larks ahoy!

*this is untrue.

Photards: Top – Saluki investigating a tree that fainted in the recent hot weather.

Middle inset: Cows in a field. This was taken in the early morning, when only the one on the left had been fully inflated.

Lower inset: Some white people nipping off to save the NHS. Picture taken from the BBC, who I believe are warmly supportive of my decision to use it here.