I did not attend the wedding of my old Camden nemesis Plastic Dave who, as some of you may recall had no teeth but was eight inches on the slack, and took place some nine years ago. ‘Anton’ did, however, and recalled the event last Saturday evening amid the first wedding we’ve held at Runton Hall, as we shovelled pizza at sundry guests and attendees. Plastic Dave’s wedding sounds like an enjoyable affair. Unfortunately, an affair that was doubtless also enjoyable ended the happy union four months later, when the rear storage area of Camden Middle Yard become the venue for bleak liaisons between Dave and his business partner’s sister, who had what we may reasonably assume to be an accommodating ‘rear storage area’ of her own, judging by her claimed carnal preferences. ‘Pretty, but an arse like a bin liner’ concluded ‘Anton’, handing pizza to a bridesmaid and enhancing the lilting air of romance drifting from the Fallow Field where the newlyweds were enjoying their first dance, which I believe was Maybe I’m Amazed by Paul McCartney.
I was happy to report to the Trustees during this morning’s weekly board meeting that our Runton Bollywood wedding was a tremendous success. All concerned had a marvellous time and the whole thing went on till dawn. It also raised a healthy chunk of cash for the estate, even after numerous expenses and wages for me, Joe, and ‘Anton’, who drunk heavily for several hours while generally jollying things along. Becka was on the payroll for the day, amusing younger guests with face painting, which sadly did not extend to painting each child to look like one of the other children, as was my suggestion for causing chaos among parents and spicing up the end of the evening. Saturday Night Feverishness and their Seventies/Eighties covers went down a storm, especially their stirring rendition of Adam and the Ants’ Kings of the Wild Frontier. In case you are unfamiliar, this allies a constitutionally untenable claim for ‘…a new Royal family’ consisting of insects with the assertion that Caucasians are, racially speaking, displaced Native Americans. I’m not sure it would get recorded now.
I once chatted to Adam Ant at Camden Market, on an afternoon when Plastic Dave ruined several mugs of my tea by putting his cock in them, as was his hobby. Adam was (and is) a familiar sight around NW5 – like Plastic Dave’s cock, come to think of it, but far more welcome: soft spoken, articulate and funny, and quite open about the fact that he is out to lunch, breakfast, dinner and tea. Former Ant guitarist Marco Pirroni, when asked about Adam’s perilous mental state on a 2007 documentary, said that he first realised things might be on the slide when he started dressing up as a highwayman and telling people to join the Insect Nation, but this meant little where I grew up. Adam and the Ants were so popular among the older kids at my school (who were twelve and otherwise solid Madness fans) that correction fluid was banned because they kept painting white lines across their faces with it, most memorably prior to a school photo taken in, I should think, 1981. By the time I was twelve it had been reinstated, only to be withdrawn again when it was discovered that with minimal concealment it was possible to sniff it for hours in class and be unable to stand up by morning playtime. Happy days.
Anyway. Weddings are nice, and the bride, groom and guests looked marvellous in their Bollywood gear, hired at massive cost by the wedding planner I employed to plan the wedding instead of me. Glampers, wandering over to see what the fuss was about, were cordially invited to join the celebrations, as were a bunch of yoga enthusiasts from Great Yarmouth who had arrived that afternoon. By the end of the night, pissed Flat Earthers were bopping happily among the guests, even when Saturday Night Feverishness played I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me by Nik Kershaw. The sun can’t go down on a flat earth, can it, and stauncher Flat Earthers consider this sort of thing to be propaganda put about by NASA. Yes I know, but they do, and I have to nod indulgently as they explain why, in the line of duty. A flat-earth compliant lyric in this instance would be ‘I won’t let the sun leave the part of the sky directly above where you are standing and transverse to the other end of the planet’, which is less catchy. A few Flat Earthers even got hold of other guests, which they probably didn’t bargain for when they arrived at Runton for a weekend of debunking the Theory of Relativity again, including a couple of gay blokes who doubtless saw the night out with acts of Greek love under the peaceful East Anglian firmament. We have another, smaller, wedding booked on the 8th July, but I shall not be around for it as I will be leaving Hackney that evening at 20:00 to ride to the Suffolk Coast, it being the annual Dunwich Dynamo. Between then and now we shall be returning the Fallow Field back to Sevastopol and sundry other animals, and arranging a nice Treasure Hunt for this week’s Forest Schoolers to get involved in, away from the west and south sides of the estate where Graham will be hunting rabbits with ferrets, dogs and Christ alone knows what else. I might let Archie get stuck in, but suspect he’d be more interested in chasing the other dogs than chasing rabbits, the bloody hippy.
Photards: Top – one of several structures around the estate which, unlike Plastic Dave’s marriage, may not be entirely beyond repair.
Inset top – Adam and the Ants. Hard to believe they were pitched at twelve year olds by the record industry of the day.
Inset lower – Some animals. I don’t know what they want.
op of other stuff and adding a door, but it takes ages – although they had enabled us to avoid the horror of holding a gigantic barbeque, the groom’s first suggestion. I detest every single thing about barbeques. At least with a picnic, the other outdoor dining option, it’s mainly booze and cake, and is over quite quickly. My grandfather courted my grandmother with a picnic in Victoria Park E3, and while doing so acquired a dog, Mickey, from a passing fella he knew in return for some paraffin. That’s the old days for you. When Mickey died many years later, his replacement, and every dog my grandparents subsequently owned, was also called Mickey, although to my knowledge none were acquired in return for flammable liquids on a first date. Victoria Park will be lovely at the moment because Glastonbury’s on and the current locals will be at that instead of talking about Jeremy Corbyn, artisan bacon and cats in Hackney, although such is the overall niceness of the place it’s pretty pleasant even when they are. ‘Anton’ was unable to assist with oven building on account of being away in Leeds rewiring a basement (‘Who rewires a basement unless they’re planning to prison someone up? It’s well Austrian, I swear bruv’***), but has done a fantastic job threading hundreds of small lanterns among the fencing and trees around the edge of the Fallow Field, and presumably connecting them to a car battery or something. Regardless, it looks fantastic.
School kids are kept apart on purpose, but rather that the Board of Trustees consider them two different sets of customers best kept separate. This makes the Board sound harsh and stern, when they are in fact neither – just a bit, I don’t know, disconnected. We have pointed out that unless things change and Runton starts earning its keep the place will crumble away, but they take this to mean we’re threatening to build a commercial airport in the estate grounds, or a Norfolk World theme park, the main attraction of which would doubtless consist of driving slowly in circles behind a tractor for seventeen miles. Anyway. Keeping the pre-adolescent tribes apart seems contrary to the atmosphere of Runton, one of the few places where fat kids from places like Blackburn – the Forest Schoolers – can meet their loud and opinionated counterparts from gentrified areas of London and the Home Counties, and in the spirit of new found kinship, undertake strenuous physical activity for free on behalf of Joe, ‘Anton’, Becka and I.
nton’ and I were putting up a Robens Prospector Tent for some bunch of glamping fucktards or other when a figure approached us through the mist that sometimes makes the Runton estate look uncomfortably like a scene from The Others. It was Graham, who handles the more complex animal culls around the estate with ferrets and dogs and so forth. Graham is every inch a son of the soil, able to tell the time by the position of the sun, whittle things from sticks, get tractors to run on cooking oil, and do that thing where you pull a small sheep out of another, larger sheep. Conversely, ‘Anton’ is a shag happy Deptford wide boy, once the terror of the Lewisham menopausal and now, like myself, little more than a grumbling Cockney in a field. Those familiar with ‘Anton’ and I’s years of trading at Greenwich Market will recall the feud between him and Keith, a fine art and photography vendor, whereby ‘Anton’ would regularly offer to nip round and give Keith’s wife Barbara ‘the full half pint’, among other horrors with which I will not trouble you. My favourite part of the feud was when ‘Anton’ attempted to convince the market management that Keith was incontinent by pouring water over the cushion Keith liked to sit on, advising them to ‘have a quiet word with him about it’, and that Keith was a proud man in deep denial and it might be a good idea to call him into the office to discuss it privately, insisting it’s nothing to be ashamed of at his age and fatness. Sadly for ‘Anton’, his ambition of replacing the words ‘A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight’, which dominated the Nelson Road end of the market, with ‘Keith is a fucking fat fucking wanker’ will now never be realised, as that part of the premises has since been demolished and lost forever. Sometimes we can just dream a little too far. Anyway, as an adolescent, ‘Anton’ used to flog zoot suits outside the Lacy Lady* and, like myself, has time for someone who knows how to dress themselves properly. Incidentally, I don’t want any backchat about not judging a book by its cover at this point, because judging a book by the cover is efficient and speeds up the judging process a great deal.
most importantly well away from him and his numerous children. As we talked, we waved to the Flat Earthers, who were jogging past at that moment. Most people don’t think of hard core conspiracy theorists having an exercise regime, but then most people don’t think there’s a gigantic ice wall stopping the oceans from sloshing over the edge of the planet and into outer space either. Incidentally, the Flat Earthers are off next week, to be replaced by PID believers. In case you are unfamiliar, ‘PID’ stands for ‘Paul [McCartney] Is Dead’, and the theory is roughly as follows: McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a look and sound alike by the Tavistock Institute, a front organisation working on behalf of shape shifting lizards from the rings of Saturn for the purposes of spreading drug use among the young, thereby making the human population easier to control. Obvious really.
The Runton Diaries 