The Runton Diaries

The Runton Drive-In Cinema Club

Sep 1st, 2021

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.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the first in a series of outdoor film nights that will initially be held in the Restored Barn. The initial response seems to be good; we have already had interest from a sizeable local film club which disbanded during the Pestilence when it became illegal to have more than seven people in the same place, even if two of them are ghosts, which is quite likely in the countryside where everything is terrifying, so that’s a start. If it takes off, we can hire a massive screen and run it like a drive in and, to test the idea while keeping things highbrow, we have a season of Carry On films 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.

While I’m sure Carry On films are all very cool and comforting and post ironic and what not, The Hound of the Baskervilles is more in keeping with Runton, what with it being a slightly creepy shagging retreat for minor Victorian aristocracy in the middle of nowhere and everything. A drive-in here showing, for example, horror films in the bleak, black, midwinter would work well. To spice things up, ‘Anton’ and I could knock on the windows of unsuspecting film buffs during the Blair Witch Project and see if they soil themselves with fright, an idea we had as we unfolded deckchairs and formed them into the seating area. I am not a great cinema buff but, if there was one change I could make in any film, it would be to have Han Solo shout ‘What?’ instead of ‘I know’ when Princess Leia says she loves him in the carbonite chamber during The Empire Strikes Back. This would make sense, too, because it was a hectic moment with a lot going on, it was quite noisy in there, and if nothing else it would’ve saved her considerable faff of rescuing him in Return Of The Jedi if he’d replied that he wasn’t into it to begin with. As we made sure our rows of deckchairs were nice and neat, we rounded off our appreciation of the cinematic arts by reflecting upon how Peter Sellers apparently had eight heart attacks 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.

In summary, I urge visitors to enjoy East Anglia untroubled by concerns around spinal injury and dog theft. I hereby dismiss the dog snatcher story as nonsense as, if nothing else, many dogs here are owned by people who also legally own firearms, and who would happily discharge them at a rogue member of the Society to Prevention Cruelty Animals of Royal. That said, if you should find yourself face to face with the undead while enjoying the scenic delights of the area during the coming winter months, it isn’t me and ‘Anton’ pissing about. It’s actually happening, so stay in the moment and deal with it. In any case, ‘Anton’s proposed change to The Empire Strikes Back would be to have the film exactly as it is, but with ‘…both of Princess Leia’s tits out all the time’, so he is already horrifying enough.

Picters:

Main: Cromer Hall, said to be the inspiration for the house in the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Top inset: My dog, not the inspiration for the hound in the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Middle inset: Likeable cinematic sex pest Soloman Joel Cohen, aka Sid James.

Lower inset: The view from our front room window last winter. Owls all over the place, and probably haunted too, I should think. That said, the dog likes it.
Return of the Glampers

Aug 16th, 2021

I am at Runton and, while summer has been as fickle in Norfolk as anywhere else, I can finally see nothing but sunshine and greenery and warm unhurriedness from my position in the shade of the Restored Barn. There are at last things to do here, because as summer finally settles down, the sound of yoga mats, soya milk, pronouns and ukuleles from the South Field can only mean one thing: the middle class is here, and it wants to go glamping. In case you are unfamiliar, ‘glamping’ is a term for sitting in a tent with a rainbow flag in front of it, looking pleased with yourself. I have never understood the attraction of tents – an animal might tread on it at any moment, how do you relax? and so forth – but, that aside, their return is good news. It’s particularly good news if, like ‘Anton’ and myself, you hire out the tents which the Olivers and Lauras and their Noahs and Tillys glamp in, thus generating a tiny income for yourself. Also, it’s just nice to see people here for the first time since the Pestilence. I therefore welcome the return of the middle class who, in many ways, are just like normal people. Yes, they are physically and morally weaker, have no cultural identity of their own, are very unhappy and rarely breed because they are clearly an evolutionary dead end but, in my experience, they hire a lot of camping equipment. For that alone, they have no case to answer as far as I am concerned.

I’ve never had a heart attack, which is something. However, while wandering around the Estate just prior to re-opening I thought I could be having one when I suddenly got some nasty cramping in both legs. Having never experienced this before, I assumed it was blood clots crawling up my arterial system to kill me, but decided that there was no point making a fuss, as there was no one around and no phone signal to call anyone with, so I put my Spotify Christmas carol playlist on in case I was about to meet God and hoped for the best. In turn, this meant that I was able to get away from my audio book, Lancaster and York by Alison Weir, an account of the Wars of the Roses narrated by the same woman who does the announcements on the Docklands Light Railway, compromising the otherwise faultless literary style. At one point, for example, I thought the catastrophic ineffectiveness of the child king Henry VI was caused by a signal failure at Limehouse, when it wasn’t at all – it was caused by dynastic squabbling between leading landowning families in fifteenth century England, which is a very 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 De La Soul, who would struggle to win a feud against the Clangers. I wondered briefly if that might be my last thought on earth and, if so, how history would remember me.

Archie is a semi working dog, well capable of doing his job of pursuing small game such as rabbits and hares across open land until they collapse, then standing over them with the same expression as a glamper with a rainbow flag until his owner turns up. Otherwise, he is very enthusiastic about being a dog and spends most of his leisure time going happy delighted bananas around anyone he can find. This sounds lovely, but he is no lap dog and will nip any unfamiliar limbs that are unexpectedly shoved at him. Not hard or viciously, but enough for me to keep him under close control around new people and not, for example, to let him hurtle at thirty miles an hour towards a small family of unexpected glamping outliers. To my considerable dismay, he had locked onto a small girl of about six. She remained calm and relaxed, instead of shrieking, trying to shoo him off with her arms or running away, which is the standard middle class response to unfamiliar dogs or, now I come to think of it, working class people. Archie 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.

And thus, life returned to the Runton Estate, the small but undeniably likeable rural shagging retreat for minor Victorian aristocracy in deepest East Anglia. Our conspiracy theorists have gone (‘…or have they?’, as I like to say every time this is mentioned, to annoy Joe) but, although I may have un-Clingfilmed my last sandwich buffet for the Flat Earth Society, yoga, both deaf and outdoor, are fully booked. We may have a bride-less bridal suite in the Old Servants’ Quarters, horseless stables by German Field and allotments full of runner beans and courgettes that everyone hates but I have survived not having a heart attack and we are, if nothing else, still here. Chin up, everyone!

Public Service Announcement: I have no idea what the thing with my legs was, cramp of some kind I should think. I find I get it if I’ve not ridden my bike for a few days. ‘Severe, unexplained pain is never normally something to worry about’, as the old saying goes.

Picters:

Main: Cricket at Cromer. Always a lark.

Top inset: Wheat being harvested prior to being turned into things middle class people probably won’t be able to digest.

Middle inset: Wattle-and-daub interior of the walls in my son’s room.

Lower inset: Archie, a naturally sleek and idiotic, but not starving, dog.
All The Days Are Gone

May 31st, 2021

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.

In the strange minutes since the call from a ward sister at the Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital informing me that she was ‘drawing her last breaths’, I had in turn called Richie, her son and, in effect, my brother in law. Again, unable to properly articulate the situation, I appraised it by explaining that ‘ninety minutes are up, mate – the referee is checking his watch and looking at the linesman’ which, while somewhat bewildering, was more sensitive than my initial response to the call from the ward sister, which was ‘Right. So how do we get her stuff?’. In any case, it got the message across in a format with which we were both comfortable, and I therefore regard it as successful communication.

Her final day at home was odd. I had popped round in the evening to find her battling her way up the stairs to the bathroom. I have never seen anyone look so old or, under the circumstances, so foul mouthed, exclaiming constantly that she was ‘fucking sick of this’. The previous day she had offered to make tea, 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.

Eventually, she reached the bathroom. I retired to the kitchen. Everything went quiet. It remained so for quite a while. I found myself listening for tell-tale thumps indicating she had Elvis-ed it and expired on the lavvy. Some time passed. It occurred to me that this was not a dignified situation for either of us, but to my relief, she re-appeared as her daughter, my current girlfriend, arrived with Sid, and it was decided to call an ambulance. The front room was soon full of flourescent jackets and forthright bonhomie and, unable to bear the sight of house guests not eating, she asked us to get some melon out of the fridge for the ambulance crew. She passed away five days later in hospital, after a nice breakfast, while talking about her grandchildren. Sid later claimed it was because her ‘heart stopped when no one was looking’. In any case, it was not a bad end, as ends go.

Thus it was that the funeral was arranged. This was not without incident. For example, the day before we learned that the service was at one o’clock and not two o’clock as stated on the invitations. Making the best of a bad job, I rang the crematorium and arranged for anyone turning up late and missing the funeral as a result to be allowed in to the next one instead.* In the event, some sharp phone work by Kitty, an unmarried mother who is, in effect, my sister in law, managed to get everyone arranged nicely. The dress code for the occasion being fairly relaxed, she turned up rather brilliantly like someone attending a picnic in an early series of The Crown. ‘God, I’m not even wearing tights!’ she pointed out, prompting me to reply that ‘You’ll find that there comes a time / For taking your tights off’ in the manner of Making Your Mind Up, a 1981 Eurovision Song Contest winner for Bucks Fizz. I have no idea why I did this. Anyway. My contribution to proceedings was a reading of the lovely old 23^rd Psalm, with its still waters and green pastures and rods and staffs and cups runneth-ing over. This had caused confusion when the Orders of Service were printed, as they thought we meant the Lord’s Prayer. It is a short psalm, and I 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.

Sid charmed everyone at the after party by explaining that ‘Grandma isn’t here because she is dead now’. As we got stuck in to the buffet I enjoyed bellowing ‘IT WAS A LOVELY SERVICE, VERY QUIET’ at the top of my lungs to her neighbour Vera, who is all but deaf. I spent much of it near the oven, from which a distant cousin in law produced a seemingly endless steam of baked goods. ‘Why make one cake, when you can make three?’ she said to me. ‘So – are you here on your own, or what?’ I replied, grabbing a bottle of merlot and a couple of glasses.** My dog got all the cheese and chicken in her fridge freezer – it’s what he would have wanted – and, apart from the sadness and what not, everything was remarkably convivial. Joe and I cleared the remainder of her furniture some days later. My dog bit him as we manhandled a G plan sideboard into a Transit van. I like to think he is biting through his grief, and I distinctly remember Joe saying that a nasty puncture wound is a small price to pay for helping him with the healing process, and that all things considered he was glad it happened. There was the material flotsam of course – books of crossword puzzles from 1986, a receipt for a four course Chinese meal in Finchley that cost £6.45 in the mid Seventies, a half finished box of After Eights (which I finished). It struck me, as we emptied the place that all of us, in the end, have a life marked out by a pile of litter in a carrier bag. Ah well.

Someone had been born, and then they had lived, and then they had died, as per Cemetry Gates by the Smiths, who she always hated. In some ways, it’s like a huge waiter’s been lifted off our shoulders, although there was little for her in the way of actual distress. She saw as much of her family as she could, enjoyed the early summer sunshine while it lasted and tapped out at the last moment where the going could be reasonably described as good. This is all very nice of course but, nonetheless, I have lost a dear and trusted friend. Interestingly, she has since become the voice of my inner monologue, not unlike Ben Kenobi, but with the focus very much more on biscuits and being warm enough and, as everyone we love is only borrowed from God, I am quite happy about that.

Picters:

Main: The road to Northrepps. I walk the dog along here quite often.

Top inset: Bit further along. It’s all like this really.

Middle inset: Horse enclosure by the church in Northrepps village.

Lower inset: Unreturnable calls.

*This is not true.

**This is also not true, except for the baked goods.
Unplug The Jukebox

Mar 20th, 2021

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 Dog Eat Dog possibly causing her to urge it closer.

New Romanticism is an overlooked but fortunate development in youth culture, as I probably explained in that small room with the ugly picture of the windmill in the Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital. It happened at a time when the ever po-faced Clash had announced themselves Rebellion Monitors and, while they are great and everything, I can see why the more 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 benefactors 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 Spirit In the Sky. I was reminded of this walking around the hospital that afternoon, as many of the patients closely resembled the dancers in the accompanying video, albeit with whiter hair. Remarkably, one of them, Colette, is a friend of my old ally John the Boxes, the richest market trader in London. These days she lives in Elephant and Castle and has a voice ‘like a cement mixer’, and I am unsure how she would react to me telling her that she is the reason for my attraction to women who look bored. Well, there were two of them, so her or her mate. Either really. I left this snippet out of my discussion of post-punk youth culture, as I felt there was quite enough for someone full of medical grade opiates to be going on with as it was.

She asked about Sid, her sweariest grandchild, of course. The previous morning I stumbled when getting up – a mixture of low blood pressure and Zopiclone, I should think – and knocked myself briefly unconscious on a bedside table. As I came to, Sid asked me to guess what his little eye had spied beginning with ‘b’ and, by way of a clue, was ‘not book or bike or bastard’**, and I recounted this story to her. We had then settled down to watch Yellow Submarine, as I was keen to test its legendary appeal to children. Incidentally, this is attributed to a style of animation that deliberately portrays human characters with long legs and a shortened torso, which is how an adult appears from a child’s perspective. Sid was indeed captivated, once I explained which Beatle was which and that none were Fireman Sam, turning to me during the acid freak out Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds sequence at the mention of rocking horse people eating marshmallow pies to observe ‘Daddy, this is a song about cake, isn’t it?’. I assured her I’d always look after everyone. She was pleased about this, and we spoke for some time longer, making sure that all was right with the world. With that, Sid’s tiny grandmother fell asleep. It was a fitting moment to leave the room.

*

There are some syntax issues to address. Firstly, I do not have a mother-in-law in the strictest sense of the term, because I have never married anyone. The tiny Jewish woman in the Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital’s daughter is my current girlfriend though, and Sid is our son. In turn, she doesn’t actually have a death bed, either. The anticipated catastrophic major organ failure was, in fact, nothing more serious than a four-day heart attack. I didn’t even think such a thing was possible, let alone survivable, but she is at home as I write this, eating an omelette and chatting to the visiting nurse. We have many aspects of post-punk youth culture yet to consider, such as the funk and Motown influences on bass lines across everything from Club Tropicana to This Charming Man and, as a way of ensuring she outlives me, I have promised to explain this the next time she looks like she’s dying.

Picters

Main: Myself and Joe solving all your video conferencing IT issues.

Top inset: Dog waiting outside my mother in law’s house while she was in hospital, wondering where all the treats and fuss have gone.

Middle inset: Sharon Ant: part punk, part pop, part new romantic. ‘Fashion is the last repository of the marvellous’, to quote Malcolm MacLaren.

Lower inset: The dog again, on my mother in law’s sofa and cuddling her blanket while she was in hospital, in lieu of the aforementioned treats and fuss.

*A reference to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s remarkable attainment of the top of the charts with Two Tribes and Relax.

**It was ‘brown horse’.
All The Dogs In Norfolk

Feb 24th, 2021

On the same warm, almost summery January day I posted about finding a lost dog while on the way to a job interview, I found another while cycling through Mundesley. In case you are unfamiliar, Mundesley is one of several small fishing towns marking the line where East Anglia wades into the North Sea, and the pronunciation rhymes rather satisfyingly with Monkees, hence the little rallying call of Hey Hey! We’re in Mundesley! I like to give myself as I approach. Similarities between this tiny map-dot of a place and the gaudy Boomertastic TV show of the same name do not end there. Examining the opening sequence for reference, I discovered that, like the Monkees themselves, many of the residents are bedridden, can only bathe with assistance, are unable to drive any form of motor vehicle responsibly, habitually wear woolly hats, often look confused, fall over a lot and certainly do ‘have something to say’, although in the case of Mundesley in 2021 it is usually at odds with the notion of ‘just trying to be friendly’.

I am usually there on medicine delivery duty. Since undertaking this, I have discovered that the elderly and vulnerable consider their health more dependent upon their distance from a copy of the Radio Times than any amount of beta blockers or co-codamol I can bike up the coast road. I’ve always assumed the Radio Times was just an eighty page picture of Ainsley Harriot and have never read it, although like a normal person I do buy it at Christmas so that I have something to jot things down on in biro. The infirm are massive fans though, and on the day in question I’d bought a couple of copies from Sheringham Tescos while getting some bits. Sheringham is a larger town further along the coast towards Kings Lynn, considered by Axis High Command a promising invasion site during the war, and also has the only Austrian restaurant I have ever seen, although there would presumably have been more if an invasion had been successful.* It is also notable for its well-mannered, happy and confident children, due to its popularity with Christian groups and the autistic. Tesco has done much to ingratiate itself by, among other things, employing staff from a local college for young adults with special needs. This laudable policy can sometimes catch those of us who consider themselves to have a good grasp of social appropriateness off-guard when, as in this case, a checkout assistant all but hugged me for saying ‘hello’ to her.

She asked if I had cycled far and if it was raining. I replied ‘no not really’, and ‘no’ respectively.

‘There’s nothing worse than riding a bike in the rain,’ she said, thirty silent seconds later in a – and I’m sorry about this – rather too flirty manner, given the circumstances.

I replied that I’d once known a fella with stomach cancer, and that looked pretty rough, to which she laughed far too much. For the life of me I thought she was going to reach across the conveyor belt and flick me off.

In a bewildered attempt to highlight our considerable age difference, I said ‘Nineteen eighty one? That was a good year’ in response to the amount I was being charged for my shopping, in the avuncular manner of geography teachers and so forth when I was a child. They would’ve been talking about nineteen forty eight or something and be avid Radio Times readers by now, I suppose. She almost fainted with mirth, took out a ring that had been concealed about her person and asked me to marry her.** Hopefully, I reflected as I cycled eastwards along the coast road, she was just a simple seaside prostitute working at Tesco’s to make ends meet, because you can’t help but worry about how she might otherwise fare in the outside world.

Despite its efforts, Tesco remains unpopular in Sheringham which, like all the towns along the coast, does not like faceless corporations taking money away from identical tea shops. As I rode, I pondered whether or not the general idea of 90% of wealth being held by 5% of people was really such a surprise. After all, I should imagine 90% of popular music is produced by 5% of musicians, and 90% of popular literature is written by 5% of writers, and so on. I was unable to develop the idea much beyond this point because, as I reached Mundesley a spaniel fell out of my phone. Well, not exactly, of course. What happened was that while checking Facebook on an unrelated matter I saw a post about a lost dog. Closing my phone case and putting it back in my jacket, the actual dog was literally standing in front of me, as I remarked to the owners, ‘as if she had fallen out of my phone’. I said that yes, of course I’d wait with Fern, the dog, for them to arrive, but could they hurry because I only had so much cheese from Tesco and Fern was quickly getting through it, presumably due to the sea air making her peckish. It occurred to me as I waited that maybe this wasn’t actually their dog, and that I was currently kidnapping someone else’s, but this doubt vanished as Fern hopped into a Ford Focus for the joyful journey home, and I went about my business among the senior residents of Mundesley. Philosophically speaking, I am no clearer about the proportion of wealth to people, but I am certain that, in Norfolk, 90% of lost dogs are found by me.

*Not as ridiculous as you might think. East Anglia is flat once you get inland, ideal for assembling panzer formations and building airfields, with tactically important choke points that could, in theory, be captured by paratroopers. In the end though, the plan was abandoned when everyone agreed it was a beastly idea.

**NB This last bit did not happen. If I had ever been married I would have noticed by now.

Photards:

Main: Idiots.

Top inset: Resident of Mundesley being wheeled along the seafront for a complain, taken from the opening credits of the Monkees’ telly show.

Middle inset: Unable to bathe without assistance – again, from the telly show.

Lower inset: Menu of Austrian restaurant in Sheringham. It might be called Crofter’s these days because it is less frightening than Das Krofterhausen but make no mistake – this is pitiless food, ruthlessly served by automatons. They give you an armband with your table number on it when you enter, which is off putting. Nonetheless, it is a highly regarded, much loved and by all reports superb local establishment. I think some people did complain once, but they were never seen again.