Ever since Barack Obama proved that even a black Freemason can be President, there has been a pervasive belief that, for anyone, anything is possible. This is socially, culturally and literally untrue in the case of every person who has ever lived, but I get the general idea: we all have within us the ability to amaze ourselves, and that’s lovely. Indeed, I amazed myself recently by outperforming several other applicants, presumably goths, for a job wheeling corpses around a morgue at a popular East Anglian medical facility and, while this does not carry the same gravitas on the world stage, it was nonetheless quite a turn up for the books. I should state immediately there is more to the job than that, as I am to be trained to a surprisingly high level for, essentially, a hospital porter, but the corpse wheeling is where my predecessors have struggled. Well, that and the lifting and hefting of people, living and dead, ‘who aren’t getting any thinner’ as my new manager adroitly put it.
I enjoyed the interview. I usually do enjoy job interviews, and am considered ‘good in a room’, but was thrown by the question ‘Are you comfortable around cadavers, especially of those who may have died traumatically in accidents, or by suicide?’. The question intrigued me, because my career has things like ‘postman’ and ‘telecoms engineer’ and ‘market trader’ all over it, and an absence of anything that might be useful in this regard, like serial killer or murderer, so the answer is ‘No’. In fact, my initial thought was to say ‘Of course I’m not, you fucking weirdo, who the fuck is?’ but, remembering just in time that this was a job interview, I said ‘Yes’ instead, to be on the safe side. And lo, after a bit of to-ing a fro-ing, a job offer was forthcoming.
At Runton, response to the news was varied, ranging from Joe’s warm congratulations 
to ‘Anton’’s assertion that I only want to work in a morgue so I can go ‘nonce-ing and Savile-ing up the corpses’. For the benefit of foreigners, Jimmy Savile was an enthusiastic British paedophile and necrophiliac from a toxic time in the world of mainstream celebrity. My current girlfriend was once told she ‘…fills out her jumper nicely’ as a twelve year old by Rolf Harris, another notorious wrong ‘un of the era although, in his defence, at least he was good at drawing. At the height of his ubiquity, Savile was known for advertising the then-new Inter City train links criss-crossing the country. The service was only two years old at the time, which is presumably why he was interested in it, but while Jimmy Savile and I do both have several jobs – hospital porter, IT support, estate work at Runton, and a bit of UberEats delivery on the bike for me; television personality, charity fundraiser, paedophile and necrophiliac for him – we otherwise have nothing in common. Jimmy Savile was, by any measure except marathon running, a worse man than me, and I consider the matter closed. I mean he really was awful.
The fact remains, though, that a significant part of my new working life will be spent in a morgue, on my own, surrounded by the dead. I feel that my time up the council among colleagues who also had no brain function or dress sense might come in useful here. Sometimes, I would have wheeled people to the morgue 
a few hours after wheeling them into theatre for what turned out to be unsuccessful life saving surgery, which will at least give a sense of continuation, but still. For all that, though, dealing with the newly dead, and being responsible for their dignity at an undignified time, is a privilege. Also, a morgue is a place where, if nothing else, there is no suffering, which is an extra incentive to be chirpy. I’ll probably start by addressing the room to the effect that can anyone who isn’t dead make themselves known before I start rearranging limbs and writing labels and so on, because I am likely to freak the eff out if someone wakes up half way through. As far as I am concerned, going about my tasks with the demeanour of a 1950’s bus conductor is a way of remembering that my subjects, embracing mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything were, until an hour ago, as alive and embroiled in the lunacy of the days as you and I. And, when the cycle ride home has blown the formaldehyde out of my hair, and my son is brandishing implausible Lego creations at me and my dog is trying to climb into my shirt, it will remind me to be grateful to still be here.
So there we are. Once the references are sorted out, which should be OK as I’m writing them myself, I will be an NHS worker, entitled to gentle applause and people giving me rainbow hearts with ‘Thank You’ written on them wherever I go. Now I think of it, I’ve also worked in a food hub during this pandemic, so I’m basically Marcus Rashford. Sid’s about to start school any second now, too, and it will be strange to be among the recently deceased on a professional basis, for thirty-nine hours of exceptionally physical work split into thirteen hour shifts over a three day week, instead of looking after him all the time. Then again, a cornerstone of my parenting style is the old adage that ‘a tired boy is a good boy’ so, bearing that in mind, I might get him to do it.
Pictards
Main: They have mown the wheat in the field behind our house, and not before time because it was all overgrown.
Top inset: Leeds fan dressed at Jimmy Savile. ‘Why did West Ham run at Leeds? Because the Under 5’s were scared of Jimmy Savile’, as the old joke goes (the ‘Under 5’s’ were a useful West Ham hooligan firm back in the day, essentially functioning as understudies to the better known ICF).
Middle inset: Leeds fan Jimmy Savile, dressed as Jimmy Savile, in a style that immediately marks him out as not at all sinister or anything like that.
Lower inset: I cycle past this quite often. Lower Street is a patchwork of small, unkempt fields and wooden shacks where plague victims were banished to fend for themselves during an outbreak of the Black Death in 1349, and which is still generally avoided. There is an Upper Street too, where you were allowed to live if you didn’t have plague. Norfolk is extremely pretty, but there is low key sinister stuff like this at every turn.
Allegedly, there is a dog snatcher operating in the Runton area, although I am unconvinced. I discussed the evidence with ‘Anton’ recently as we took delivery of a projector and screen for a showing of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which also features a crime involving a dog, and which is part of a broader plan of Joe’s to revive the estate’s post-pandemic fortunes. Coincidentally, the bloke delivering the projector was, like the Baskerville hound, also once the subject of legal scrutiny, as the subject of the popular rhyme Ellie and John, Ellie and John / Legally right, but morally wrong, a reference to the ages of he and his girlfriend, being at the time 51 and 17 respectively. Anyway. My source for the dog snatcher, a Northrepps simpleton, claims that he drives around in a van with RSPCA spelled incorrectly on the side ‘Which is how you know it’s him’. Apparently, last week he drove into a woman at speed, breaking her spine. He then stole her dog. ‘Stole her fucking what?’ said ‘Anton’, identifying the point at which he felt the behaviour had become unacceptable. After further discussion, we agreed that not being able to spell ‘RSPCA’ correctly is likely to draw attention to yourself and was an oversight we would be keen to correct. In possession of a screen and projector and exciting spools of actual celluloid film which we hoped Joe would know how to make work, we watched John drive off. ‘Do you think he can spell ‘paedo’ correctly?’ mused ‘Anton’, which was a bit much.
scheduled for autumn. If you are unfamiliar, Carry On films are an oddly likeable cinematic franchise consisting of Barbara Windsor’s bikini top falling off while Sid James furiously stabs the cat under a copy of the Racing Post dressed as a doctor and shouting ‘Blimey!’ to a soundtrack of slide whistles and ‘arooga’ style old school car horns, over and over again, for an hour and a half. They are every bit as wonderful as they sound.
in three hours after huffing a bucket of poppers prior to having a go on Britt Ekland, and how, all things considered, that must have been quite a remarkable evening.
different thing. I had my dog with me and, stumping painfully across land nominally loyal to York during the conflict but more interested in pursuing an ancient feud with the de la Pole family in Suffolk, I reflected that if anyone was going to eat my corpse, it was only fair he had first go. Also, ‘de la Pole’ sounds like amiable Nineties jazz-rap hip-hoppers 
stopped. The little girl stopped. They regarded each other, him looking down and her looking up. She shoved her hand into his face and stroked all of it, including his teeth and eyeballs. He was unfussed. I jogged closer, relieved that he wasn’t about to cause the whole estate to be closed down by savaging an infant. Perhaps, if middle class people can learn to get along with dogs, they can one day learn to get along with the rest of us? Just a thought. Anyway, dizzy with relief, I exchanged ‘Hellos’ and ‘Well, he’s never done that before’s with the family, who were enchanted with him. I didn’t want to trouble anyone by mentioning that I might be having a heart attack in my legs, so I let it go, and the girl pointed at me and said loudly ‘Daddy, that man’s dog is starving’, signalling the end of the encounter. I later learned they had been looking at Becka’s Forest School, a special place where children who are fucking intolerable go to collect pine cones in a shoe box. She seemed unsuited to it if you ask me.
Recently, a microlight aircraft chugged across the sky above our house. Usually, this is one of the well known and well liked local gentry flying home from Northrepps International Airport – a field with an elderly shed in it – after a few breakfast vodkas in the village. This particular microlight, however, was being piloted altogether more purposefully and, as it buzzed across the mid-morning blueness, I explained to Sid that this was his grandmother, who had died ten minutes earlier, flying to Heaven. He found this a satisfactory explanation of a difficult concept, jumping up and down shouting ‘Hello Grandma!’ and waving his arms at the tiny aircraft until, at length, it disappeared from view. 
whereupon I explained I could make it, drink it, wash the cup up and re-grout the tiling around the sink in the time it would take her to sprint to the kettle, whereupon she told me to fuck off. In retrospect, I feel that foul language became a great comfort towards the end of her life – probably more than I was, now I think of it. Her imminent decline was not unexpected; I had been doing my half of Joe and I’s IT job in her kitchen over Easter, and rushed into the living room at the sound of the choir from King’s College, Cambridge, which she had been watching on the telly, saying that I thought the angels had come for her. Although I cannot now remember, she probably told me to fuck off then, as well.
considered Hey Jude-ing it by repeating the last few lines over and over as a kind of singalong to pad it out, but in the end I left it as it was, grateful that the printers hadn’t left me to style out Away In A Manger or something.
I thought I had dreamed Adam and the Ants until I was in my twenties, a fact I explained to my mother-in-law on her death bed recently. For a start, I continued, they were referred to as ‘Sharon and the Ants’ by my uncle, on the basis that Adam Ant wore make up, and for a long time I had them in the same cultural bracket as the Banana Splits. I now accept that Adam and the Ants did exist and are both significant and wonderful, as it seems was their wider social context – a time when people dealt with bipolar disorder by escaping electric shock treatment in a Victorian lunatic asylum, reinventing themselves as an eighteenth-century dandy and encouraging adolescents to join the Insect Nation. I was concluding my point when Sid rang. With the directness of a four-year-old, he asked if Grandma – a tiny Jew who, in nappies in Whitechapel, defied Hitler by sleeping through the Blitz – was ‘…going to die today’. I paused for a second. No, I replied, but only because this was Friday afternoon and she wouldn’t want to waste the weekend, so would probably leave it till Monday. I knew this was optimistic, as surely as I now knew that filling air with words for the benefit of a dying person who just wants you to talk about anything makes you babble on about New Romanticism. I continued to chatter while she smiled at the approaching horizon, my discussion of the rockabilly gigantisism of 
fun young people of the time put on ballgowns and went back two hundred years for a much needed giggle. I had myself also rejected the soundtrack of my youth after attending a Phil Collins themed birthday party for a fourteen year old, for which I blame Bob Geldof. Live Aid, for all its noble intentions, was a cultural disaster, ensuring that efficient, flaccid adult rock dominated popular music for years thereafter, instead of, for example, the Jesus and Mary Chain. In fact, I should think that the biggest ben
efactors of Live Aid were probably U2. Occasionally, however, a glimpse of fun did get through; I remember a student teacher bursting into our classroom to joyfully shout ‘Frankie are One and Two!’*, and on the threshold of adolescence I had loved 
was which and that none were Fireman Sam, turning to me during the acid freak out
The Runton Diaries 