The Runton Diaries

I am writing this during only my fourth visit to Runton Hall Estate of 2020, in the Old Servant’s Quarters, now an un-booked wedding venue and bridal suite. During my last visit, in May, ‘Anton’ and I had to send opportunistic glampers back to Croydon with cries of ‘You’ve only got to stay at home for a few weeks – you’re not Anne fucking Frank’ and sundry other observations. Now, though, the Estate is silent except for the screech and bark of unidentifiable wildlife and, if it wasn’t for the periodic discharging of shotguns indicating that somewhere Graham is awake, I could be the last person on earth.

Some miles away amid the Norfolk Broads, a QPR fan is making sure that alpacas are being cuddled properly in land adjoining a residential home for the terminally ill. Happily, they always are being adequately cuddled, because alpacas are easy to care for, even alpacas that used to live in the petting zoo at Runton, who are absolute dicks. All petting zoo animals are absolute dicks, as you can discover for yourself by being near them a millisecond after they stop being endlessly fed by visitors and go into a violent panic because they think that a) they are starving and b) they are starving because of you. The QPR fan is Joe. He is not currently required at Runton, or indeed anywhere else except now and again among the residential home alpacas. He can’t even escape from his numerous children at home by nipping down to see QPR because Loftus Road, where they play, is deserted, due to the Pestilence. It has been a difficult 2020 for Joe.

The New Den, where Millwall play, is also deserted – not because of COVID 19, but because someone has told them that West Ham are coming, and no-one in New Cross, Bermondsey or Deptford is brave enough to leave their house. Two hundred miles away, however, one Millwall fan – an electrician – does feel safe enough to venture out. In an area of Leeds he describes as ‘well Basra’, ‘Anton’, earns not enough money to live by repairing elderly household appliances on behalf of his untrusting local client base. Last summer he laid the wiring for the new stable block at Runton, designed to spearhead the Estate’s confident swagger into the third decade of the twenty first century. Now he mends toasters for people ‘don’t know what Argos is’. The stable block has yet to hear a single clip or revenue-generating clop. This is a shame because, as he points out, if we’d managed to get some horses, at least we could’ve eaten them.

As for myself, also part of the fancifully-named Runton Park Estate Management Team, I can be found in a cottage on the Norfolk coast having conversations with my son that, at teatime on Mondays and Fridays, often go like this:

‘Did you have jammy dodgers at Nan’s today?’

‘No, Daddy’

‘Is that what Nan told you to say?’

‘Yes, Daddy’

‘So how many jammy dodgers didn’t you have at Nan’s?’

‘Eight, Daddy’

Asked one Lockdown morning by my current girlfriend what he wanted in his packed lunch for nursery, he said ‘Tell the man I’ll have a chicken chow mein’, providing one of the more remarkable moments of recent weeks. I told her not to argue and get one delivered to the nursery pronto as he sounded pretty pissed off, but after spirited debate he got a cheese sandwich with crisps in it instead.

I have missed Runton a great deal. I miss the Flat Earth Society and their ability to believe almost literally anything, and the various other conspiracy theorists, who I imagine are quite busy at the moment what with one thing and another. I miss the deaf yoga and Forest School scavenger hunts. In particular, I miss the glampers, fresh out of gentrified and therefore Labour-voting London boroughs with their pronouns and genders and food intolerences and little rainbow flags. In March, the rainbow flag symbolised the triumph of gay culture over oppression but, now that November is upon us, is more likely to be a sign that you are middle class, fond of the National Health Service, and either generally pretty fucking pleased with yourself, or own a child with access to crayons. They must’ve had a field day during the great liberal middle class coming out party sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite black people being around for some time now, their dignity as a race traditionally featured somewhere below concerns over plastic drinking straws, gender neutral toilet provision and declining bumble bee numbers in the liberal middle class socio-political landscape until mid-summer, and I attribute the subsequent shift from telling us that we live in a post racial society to saying that actually, on second thoughts, we don’t, to their realisation that black people exist at all. The white liberal is the worst enemy to America, and the worst enemy to the black man as Malcolm X said. He is not wrong, no matter the decade or location, although the liberal middle class would doubtless tell him off for not being black properly.

While the wider world whirls about, the localised net economic result of the Pestilence is that I no longer have an income. My stupid job up the council petered out without incident once we all had to work from home, although I continue to administer to my former colleagues as their Union representative. It is a worrying time, but there is always hope. Well, now I come to think of it, there isn’t, but I am reminded of a friend of my old dear’s who she described as having ‘retired, then gone disabled’ and who now checks face masks at Morrissons. Social distancing guidelines are easy to observe in the countryside, which Norfolk invented; where I live you are more likely to be within two metres of an owl than a human being. Despite this, Norfolk has proved itself equal to a pandemic which, according to the latest Government figures, has killed every single person in the world. I witnessed him in action recently when my L A Dodgers mask malfunctioned while popping in for Gold Blend. I must say, he looked entirely able bodied to me, so I am not sure what this disability of his is. I should have asked him, I suppose. Anyway, the elastic had come out of one side and, while attempting to mend it, he said ‘it was too bendy to go into the hole’ which I pointed out was the story of my life and, because we are British, we laughed for about twenty minutes.

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The Lockdown has affected those of us connected with Runton in different ways. For example, in a terraced house in Leeds, ‘Anton’ has ‘wanked his balls flat’, according to a recent text message I received from him. Here, I have potty trained my son and installed what he refers to as a jumpoline in the back garden, so he can bounce his way through these nursery-less times. Joe and Becca have discovered they cannot get their numerous children into the same bath, even if they all stand up and, elsewhere, my old dear, perhaps not fully understanding how a virus is transmitted, assured me that we will get through the COVID-19 pandemic ‘if we stick together’. I have resisted the temptation to dress up as the Grim Reaper and tap on her front room window with a scythe for a larf, but it’s still early days.

What coronavirus has not done is usher in the food riots that Twitter, the middle class Mein Kampf, assured us would happen as soon as we left the European Union. I can speak with authority here because I have transcended my usual role up the Council as the non-entity who collects mail from the post room and organises the laundry by becoming the bloke who divvies out the carrots in a food distribution centre. This is voluntary work, although the fact that I get paid for it is very much the icing on the cake. Anyway. Norfolk is an enormous field with my house in it, so there are a lot of carrots to divvy – and a surprising amount of cakes with icing on, now I come to think of it – and at least everyone’s night vision will be a lot better at the end of all this. Actually, I think carrots’ ability to help you see in the dark is a myth, but nonetheless they are an excellent source of Vitamin D and often look like cocks, and occasionally tits, causing peals of delighted laughter among myself and my fellow former inmates of the County Hall admin dungeon.

Working in the Hub, as it is known, is more interesting than you might think. The deliveries we receive are random, so instead of a standard food parcel, we instead try to make them nutritionally similar, leading to debates about how to get a sugar beet’s worth of Vitamin C from a van load of walnut whips, and so forth. It’s also interesting to see staff of all levels thrown together, and otherwise unthinkable hierarchies develop: I told the Member of Parliament for North Norfolk to count a load of sour dough rolls for me the other day, which he did accurately and without hesitation. I didn’t know he was the Right Honourable Member for Cromer any more than he knew I was a disgusting admin drudge from County Hall, although the word ‘member’ would doubtless have caused hysterics for those already drunk on innuendo among the fresh vegetables. I suppose, in a distant way, it’s almost a microcosm of the unprecedented class mingling that happened in the First World War which, like working in the Hub during a lockdown, was also a valid excuse to get out of the house.

It has occurred to me that a bit of clever Hub networking might see my contract up the Council extended. This would be handy, because every income stream related to Runton has vanished. There is no deaf yoga and no Forest School. All is still in the glamping fields, although we had plenty of enquiries from Bens and Lauras putting aside the sentiments on their ‘We Are One London’ fridge magnets to get the fuck out of Herne Hill. Side hustles are in disarray: as a mobile barber, potential clients won’t let me into their houses due to social distancing. As an electrician, ‘Anton’s potential clients won’t let him in the house because he is black. There will be no conspiracy theory debates in the Restored Barn, which is a shame because conspiracy theorists must be absolutely loving this. Even the Flat Earthers have gone, sailing away over the horizon that they don’t believe in. I almost wish I hadn’t culled all the Runton Reiki healers a couple of years ago as it would amuse me to see one get poorly and try to cure her useless self with Jedi nonsense. Among the thickening copses and deep green fields the only movement is provided by Graham and his dogs, catching rabbits for Joe to eviscerate, skin, dice, freeze and keep for a rainy day. Our new stable block, all shiny and smelling of cut wood, is horseless and silent. Of Runton, at present, there is nothing to say.

Still, as the old saying goes, the worst things happen at sea – or, as in this case, on land. So far, the pandemic has been easy for my little family: both myself and my current girlfriend remain fully employed, if only in the short term in my case, and it is tricky to catch a virus in the middle of nowhere. It has also been a largely existential experience: before COVID we were merely living during history; post-COVID you, me, and everyone we know are part of history. Coronavirus will never be forgotten and, by association, neither will we. It seems breathtakingly pompous to view events in this manner from a kitchen table in a cosy cottage on the silent Norfolk coast, with full cupboards and plenty of shortbread biscuits, when blameless people are gasping to death in hospitals or corridors or stairwells all over the world but, if it’s any consolation, I am deeply, deeply, thankful to be able to do so. God, even that sounds patronising. Such strange times, not least because, remarkably, I am now a valued keyworker. Please don’t applaud me from your doorstep because I honestly don’t deserve it.

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Photards:

Main: Birth of food hub. This was the first stuff we recieved, mainly rice and pasta and a load of ready meals.

Top inset: Sign greeting visitors. We’re not storing medicines yet, but you never know. In any case, laughter is the best medicine, so we can keep a selection of root vegetables that look like old tits in case the Paracetomol runs out.

Middle inset: First food parcels, ready to go. These were packed by a Norwich born man who loved Wolverhampton Wanderers so much that he moved to Wolverhampton to be closer to them as soon as he left home at eighteen. West Ham were about to play Wolves when luckily the season got cancelled indefinitely, so we may never know how much they would have beaten us by.

Lower inset: Another picture of the early stages of the Hub. It’s more interesting to work in than it is to look at.

North Norfolk is becoming both more cosmopolitan, and more gentrified. In Cromer alone, there is a restaurant for dogs, and also three gays and a black lady – it’s the Brighton of Norfolk, if you overlook the black lady, of course. The dog restaurant can be found near the town centre just past the food bank, and my little team up the Council handled the paperwork for it – we handle the paperwork for everything hereabouts, making us a great source of gossip. We even got involved in moving pieces of paper from one file to another for a recent outbreak of anti-Semitic graffiti on a bridge in Weybourne – probably disaffected Labour voters moving into the area, and therefore further evidence of gentrification. To find the presumably vegan culprit should be easy enough, although the message itself – ‘Jews Get Out’ – is baffling because there aren’t any Jews in Norfolk – they were expelled by King Edward I in 1290, and Norwich Primark is built upon the site of the old synagogue. The only Jews here now are my current girlfriend and her old dear, leading me so assume that the message was intended to be ‘Jews – Get Out More’, as her old dear can’t really go further than her garden and the recent spell of appalling weekends has seen us cooped up in our house with a toddler, which can sometimes be trying.

One of my colleagues knows Nid from Sunday School, where I taught him to sing ‘the number of the Beast is 666’ to the tune of The Wheels On The Bus for no reason other than to annoy my old dear, who takes him there after she goes to church, and prior to them having a bun and some Ribena in the refectory. By all accounts, it was regarded as a merry jape, although I am reliably informed that The Wheels On The Bus has been quietly dropped from setlist in favour of Five Little Monkeys. In case you are unfamiliar, this shout-a-long features an indeterminate amount of primates jumping on a bed until one falls off and bumps his head, whereupon Daddy calls the Doctor who says ‘No more monkeys jumping on the bed‘. I argued that anyone, of any profession, including admin staff up the Council, would offer the same advice, and that calling a Doctor under such circumstances was a waste of NHS resources. Anyway. Conversations of this calibre made me all the more astonished to find, just before Christmas, that my colleagues had nominated me as their Union Rep.

I am the most right-wing Union Rep ever. Actually, no – that was Hitler, who did this sort of thing on behalf of German soldiers in World War One. Nonetheless, having people nominate you to speak on their behalf is an honour, and in accepting the post I overlooked my traditional disdain for Unions on the understanding that none of my fees went to the Labour Party – there is a little box you can tick on the form to make sure this is the case. This is not to dismiss the Left, of course. I am above all a Democratic Parliamentarian, and although the Labour Party considers people like myself who are working class, male and heterosexual as a weird and embarrassing disease, I understand that if the Left can find a means to express itself which isn’t electorially suicidal, we will all be better off – including non-Labour supporters, whose parties would also have to work that much harder to get votes. I would also argue that anyone joining a political party should forfeit their right to vote, as they have voluntarily removed themselves from the democratic process, being that democracy is built upon the floating voter. Labour simply does not understand this. The clearest evidence for this can be found during the recent election when, with the much vaunted ‘secret weapon’ of tactical voting, it hoped to gain twenty thousand votes that it already had, instead of listening to the electorate and picking up an additional forty eight million. Make an effort, middle class chumps.

I seem to have gone off on a tangent – or, as a someone said during a meeting I recently attended – ‘a tandem’. The thing is, although I have become a minor elected representative by chance – well that, a lifelong fascination with politics, and studying for a Master’s Degree in Politics and Economics on my lunch breaks – I take my tiny little role very seriously, and shall act promptly and diligently when called upon to do so. Jesus. I hope I’m not good at it. It would be just my luck to have to reinvent the Left, and I’m busy enough as it is.

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Photards:

Main: Donkeys that I legally own.

Top inset: part of my workplace, the other main bits being the post room and the laundry.

Middle inset: Nid getting to grips with my Union stuff.

Lower inset: Joe and Nid mucking about in our living room. Dog also in attendance.

My department up the Council comprises six people of such little collective significance that we don’t even have a manager. Instead, we have a Team Leader, whose role is secondary to her main job as the assistant to the Head of Contingency Planning, and being someone else’s secretary gives you an idea of how far down the food chain we are. My only real contact with her is our weekly ten minute catch up, where I am invited to discuss any difficulty I might be having putting things in envelopes or counting the jumpers in the uniform cupboard. I usually get bored and guide the conversation in such a way that I can claim, for example, that gravity doesn’t exist because everything would be too heavy if it did, or that if dogs aren’t people why does mine like Tia Maria, and so on, because having a thick person speak to me like I have a learning difficulty is often the highlight of my day.

My experience of office work hasn’t always been like this. Once, I strode like a mighty colossus among the water coolers and yucca plants of a global telecoms company at the end of Old Street, EC1. I was a senior databuilder: I ‘built data’ to a high standard, and constructed, repaired and maintained digital connections around the various London telephone exchanges (or ‘switches’, as they are known) with it. My wingman was Hynesy, from deepest Lancashire, who I called Northern Baloo on account of his overall demeanour being strongly reminiscent of the stoner bear from the Jungle Book. During moments of stress I would shout stop eating fucking ants you fucking weirdo and so on at him, and I feel this helped. It was not a straightforward co-worker arrangement, however, because in the same way that my current Team Leader’s job is less important than organising biscuits at departmental meetings for the Head of Contingency Planning, my job as a senior databuilder was of secondary importance to nursing Hynesy through the bankruptcy of Oldham Athletic. In this regard, he had very much not, in the words of his Disney counterpart, forgotten about his worries and his strife.

Prior to meeting Hynsey, my only experience of Oldham Athletic had been seeing West Ham lose there 6-0 in a cup semi final. This was followed by scuffles a-plenty with jubilant Cockney-hating locals and a nine-hour overnight crawl home by train to rush hour Euston, to find the events of the night before commemorated in the Sun headline Oh My Gawd, No!. Times had changed. As the twenty first century dawned, Oldham, whose brief moment of footballing pre-eminence predated Britpop, were a spent force, and the club was on the verge of vanishing. The effect on Hynesy was extraordinary. He lost weight, despite spending every lunchtime eating bags of jelly babies in his car, exhibited signs of morbid depression, and hatched a worryingly sophisticated plan to assassinate businessman Chris Moore, responsible for the club’s plight, by running him off the A62 in a van. For a larf, I suggested that maybe rich Americans would buy the club and rename it Oldham Fever. He was so upset that I sponsored a seat at their ground for £150 to make amends. The prospect of losing Oldham Athletic had driven Hynesy to the edge of reason, but at least the weight loss was due to drinking and poor diet, and not a cartoon orangutan called King Louis stealing his dinner money because Mowgli wouldn’t give him the power of Man’s red flower, as I had feared.

Hynesy decided the only way out was to adopt a new sport, and pour his emotional energies into that instead. To this end, we spent a memorable day in the Eagle on City Road considering potential candidates. There were stipulations of course: his new sport needed to be something he could plausibly participate in, ruling out tossing the caber and synchronised swimming, wasn’t full of toffs, which saw rugby, rowing and dressage bite the dust, and obviously not golf. It also needed to be popular and accessible, but something to which he had no prior cultural attachment. The process of mending Hynsey’s broken footie heart saw us cover a table the with charts and graphs and Venn diagrams – but, after participation from bar staff and fellow patrons, we hit upon a final, definite answer: baseball. Overnight, Hynsey became a fan of, for some reason, the Los

Angeles Dodgers. Not only a fan, but an obsessed fan, knowing everything about the game, betraying how much Oldham-related pain he needed to bury in ground ball/fly ball ratios, earned run averages and World Series results from the 1950s. Magically, baseball stopped him drinking so heavily. This was fortunate, because one weekend he went on a bender from Friday to Sunday and, on the Monday morning, had no memory beyond leaving his girlfriend and winning a cream cracker eating competition in a Southend pub. I am certain he was drinking while working from home, too, as he once convinced himself that his opposite neighbour had hanged himself from the light fitting in his bathroom, having spotted what appeared to be a corpse through the window. After hammering on the front door as a precursor to breaking in, the reassuringly living neighbour answered and explained that the ‘corpse’ was a suit hanging over the door, ready for a job interview the next day. By his own admission, Hynsey began literally sobbing with relief. These are the actions of a man driven beyond endurance by financial irregularities at a small provincial football club. It could happen to any of us.

It was financial irregularities that ended my telecoms career, too. The industry giant we worked for was Worldcom, shortly to become notorious for perpetuating a corporate fraud so massive that five thousand people were obliged to lose their jobs to allow it to stay afloat. I was one of them, although I did have the opportunity for a parting shot at a huge ‘It’s going to be alright’ corporate get-together at the Barbican. The highlight of this was the chief executive explaining that, although all the job losses were inconvenient, seeing a ‘good colleague and friend’ – who had devised and perpetuated the scam in the

first place – being led out of a courtroom to jail, was ‘heart breaking’. Raising my hand, I pointed out that it wasn’t that heart breaking, when you think about it, because after all he had swindled four billion dollars from the Federal government and then lied to Congress, which is exactly the sort of thing that prison is for. It was, I went on, significantly more heart breaking for the blameless people whose livelihoods he had forfeited as a result, and the following sixty seconds or so remain the only time in my life I have been cheered and applauded by a large number of people at the same time. In the eye of the storm, amid the clapping and noise and arms leaning across rows of seats to shake my hand, Hynsey whispered quietly in my ear: ‘You’re fucked’, he said. He was right, too – like Nelson and Ben Kenobi, I was a marked man, cut down in my moment of triumph. Six weeks later I was behind a market stall in Camden. Ah well.

Eventually, things improved for Oldham Athletic. While never yet recapturing their early 90s peak, they clawed themselves away from oblivion thanks to the superhuman work of their supporters, and those of other clubs, who chipped in money and time for the cause. Hynesy never became a murderer, avoiding the job losses and reuniting with his girlfriend, marrying her and regularly taking their subsequent two children to see Schalke 04 in the Bundesliga, who he adopted as a second team ‘just in case’. Fascinated by his baseball odyssey, I have become a bit of a fan myself, ruining my sleep patterns by following the LA Dodgems to post season defeats against Boston’s Red Socks and the Washington Nationalists in recent years. I will be forever saddened that stomach cancer killed Hynesy when he was barely into his forties, diagnosed far too late to make any difference to anything. A last picture shows him on Tandle Hill, overlooking his beloved Oldham. ‘Next time I’ll be here, I’ll be in a bloody urn’, reads the caption. He was right about that, too, although I refuse to come to terms with it.

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Photards:

Main: Baloo with a snack. Hynsey’s would be like this, except that the paw-paws and prickly pears would be a catering sack of Smarties.

Inset top: The Eagle, City Road. ‘Up and down the City Road / In and out the Eagle / That’s the way the money goes’ – the Eagle was once at the centre of a vast slum district, and the famous nursery rhyme is a sanitised version of an earlier lyrical description of the lives of the London poor.

Text insets: Old work IM conversations – ‘the s’ is me, ‘the h’ is Hynsey.

Middle inset: A switch. It’s a big spooky humming room full of row upon row of cabinets like this.