The Runton Diaries

If nothing else, my part time job up the council has taught my toddler to swear. ‘It’s a fucking mess, Daddy!’ he will observe from amid the usual phoning-it-in dinner I prepare for him of fish fingers, beans and waffles, as I recap the events of the day with my current girlfriend. This demonstrates impressive maturity, as his grasp of English is otherwise patchy – for example, he thinks that the number after ten is ‘a lemon’ and that the correct sequence for launching a rocket is ‘Three, two, one – blarg dog’, which, given the recent media time devoted to the moon landings is simply lazy. He also thinks that he and I support ‘for fuck’s sake, West Ham’ who live in the radio. Swearing toddlers are a comedy staple and I offer no specific apology, but I shall rein things in a bit because if my old dear, who has never really forgiven the nineteen fifties for deserting her, hears him talking like that, she will go fucking mental.

The sweariest children I have ever met are Graham’s, the oldest of whom is twelve. I see less of them at Runton these days as they often stay with their mother in, I think, the traveller site in Thurrock. Now that summer is here, they have resumed their usual clattering bicycle patrols of the Runton estate, warning errant glampers away from the Runton Confederates’ encampment with shouts of ‘Hey wankers! Don’t you know there’s a fucking war on?’, like characters in an alternative Romany Dad’s Army universe. They usually have dead rabbits dangling from their handlebars while they do this which, if challenged, they explain by saying ‘They knew too fucking much’. I enjoy their incongruous cultural references, a result of a childhood spent listening to nothing but Radio 4 in Graham’s caravan. As you may recall, I taught them to read a few years ago, and in return got Archibald al Fantastique, who was originally one of Graham’s working dogs, albeit one ‘…more suited to working in a fucking administration capacity’ according to his oldest child, who was at the time eight. As I recall, he had pointed at a picture book of the Egyptian pyramids and said ‘That’s Tutenfuckingkhafuckingmun’ that same afternoon.

It isn’t that Archie is slow. He was actually the fastest of Graham’s dogs, clocked at a remarkable 36 mph – unsurprising being that he is a saluki, the fastest mammal in the world. They are bred for chasing prey across sand until it collapses, then standing around until a Bedouin tribesman – or Ben Kenobi, if they are doing this on the desert world of Tattooine – finishes the luckless quarry off in a manner acceptable to hal-al guidelines or, indeed, the Force. Formidable speed and stamina are lovely, but saluki will only bite in self-defence. Interestingly, this means that they fall foul of RSPCA hunting guidelines which state that cruelty lies in the chasing, rather than the killing, of an animal. In practical terms at Runton, this made Archie something of a liability, unlike Graham’s other hounds who are trained to end a hare or rabbit definitely and immediately by biting and crushing the neck vertebra and spinal cord. Archie would just nudge an exhausted rabbit with his nose, and it would take ages to kill it like that. Still, liability that he is, he doesn’t owe me anything, which is useful because dogs can’t use money.

This issue of hunting rabbits is more important than you might think with the Runton Confederates in residence. As discussed last time, they are cut off from the twenty first century, and the conditions under which they are to be disturbed are strict – one is in the event of a national emergency, which is fair enough as I would imagine people portraying an army in a civil war would be quite useful under those circumstances. There is also the question of food, which is where the dead rabbits come in. Their backstory is that that are hiding in Union country following defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg. Graham’s kids leave the rabbits near the encampment, the narrative here being that they are local Confederate sympathisers. To maintain authenticity, they shout ‘clip clop clip clop’ while cycling near the woods, which amuses me a great deal.

My son’s increasingly foul mouth is only one of the many reasons I need to resign from my council job. The public sector and I are ill suited to each other, although it has been nice to have people understand what I actually do. Saying that you and your old mates from Camden Market are buying a small Georgian country estate bit by bit than selling it back to the owners once you have carried out repairs and/or improvements is a lot to explain. No one at the council knows anything about Runton, or much about my former market life. I just say ‘buying and selling’ to cover that entire era. They say ‘What, like Only Fools And Horses?’ and I say ‘No, they were fictional characters’ and leave it at that. The other day, however, I finally lost my air of professional (and actual) detachment and shouted:

‘While you’ve been here on your Routemaster arse booking line dancing holidays and trying to find an app that’ll let you remotely rearrange your fucking cat themed fridge magnets, I have been out there in the real world, taking care of people who think this is America in the 1860s, hosing inaccurate philosophical quotes off glamping tents and accidentally stealing cake from a Duke. Put your tin of Heroes down and earn your fucking living, before I put you in a desert, get my dog to chase you till you collapse, then cut your fucking throat.’  

That didn’t happen, obviously. Imagine if it had, though. It would’ve been brilliant.

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Main: Hefty boy. This was as close as I was willing to go in case it stung me or whatever it is they do.

Top inset: Nid, having sworn himself to sleep.

Middle inset: Archibald el Fantastique, crashed out on the sofa. He likes to sleep with the Nid’s dog teddy and blanket while he is out swearing.

Lower inset: Nid being a white girl by being in a photograph looking at something. This particular something is Sheringham Park, and is really nice.

Working up the council is very much a ‘Marmite’ thing, in the sense that if you don’t hate it, there’s something fucking wrong with you. My dislike stems not from doing what I am employed to do, but rather not being able to do what I am employed to do, which would mean immediately sacking the two thirds of my staff who are presumably only kept alive for their organs and who could easily be replaced with something more useful, like a balloon with a face drawn on it. It was a shambles there long before I arrived, mind. Just prior to starting, I was invited to a team meeting as an observer. It was the first such meeting in eight months, and quickly became a platform for staff to express their preferences for the ethnic minority they would rather have living next door to them, if push came to shove. After outlining the religious and cultural differences between various ‘types of Asians’ for the purposes of clarification, I can reveal that Hindus ‘seem the nicest’. After about an hour, they got bored, stood up, and left. Minutes of the meeting were taken, but I later dispensed with them.

Then again, I’m not about to live in the woods for three weeks surviving on tree bark and squirrels I’ve shot with a catapult like the Runton Confederate re-enactors, so that’s something. I seem to remember going over this a couple of years ago but, in case you are unfamiliar, the Confederates (‘the South’) are popularly perceived as fighting to preserve slavery during the American Civil War, which they sort of did and sort of didn’t. They were opposed by the Union (‘the North’) who are perceived as nice for fighting to end slavery which, again, they sort of did and sort of didn’t. In fact, the assumption all round was that the slaves would simply return to Africa following emancipation and, amid the general astonishment that they did not, the victorious North treated them much same as the Confederacy had done before all the bother. I am increasingly of the opinion that the African Americans pretty much emancipated themselves, albeit with the enabling legislative power of Congressional reform and a lot of dead non-African Americans. It is a contentious arguement, and I am sure it doesn’t need me wading into it.

Even without all the slavery and incessent fucking banjo music, I could never have been a Confederate, as they are too scruffy. ‘Anton’ could never have been a Confederate because he is black which, as you can imagine, might cause awkwardness. Anyway. We helped the Runton Confederates heft their tents, guns and paraphernalia into the woods where they will remain for the duration. We had to, really, as the field next to their encampment was wet and if we’d taken Joe’s van it would’ve left tyre tracks, detracting from the authenticity of the experience. That’s how hardcore these people are.

Indeed, one of them said, in a lovely broad Norfolk accent somewhat at odds with his portrayal of a South Carolina infantryman that he would ‘heff ter gew hewme’ if that happened. They do, incidentally, practice their accents and speak like Huckleberry Hound within ten minutes of building a fire, boiling water over it, and brewing coffee from acorns and charcoal, which is also how Marmite is made. I think I’m right in saying that all their cutlery and pots are authentic, as is much of their equipment, including their conversation. While in character, they refer to nothing known or discovered after 1863, which sounds difficult but is actually very easy to do in Norfolk. It’s an impressive bit of role playing nonetheless.

Among other social and dietary experiments, two of the Confederates are gay and intend to explore how they might have gone about that sort of thing, if at all, in a deeply religious nineteenth century military formation. It’s certainly annoying in the twenty first century free market economy, because if we’d known beforehand Joe could’ve celebrated Pride by trebling thier fee and put a tiny rainbow flag up in the car park for a couple of days. Still, despite being the only for-profit organisation to miss a dungaree and leather cap wearing party boat of an opportunity to sell a heterosexual marketing interpretation of gay culture back to gay people, I remain a big fan of the re-enactors. Leaving the Runton Confederates to coat worming tablets in Marmite so that their dog will swallow them more easily – the purpose for which it was originally invented – we withdrew to the twenty first century and let the eighteen-sixties overtake them.

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Donkeys hanging out. We do own some donkeys, although these are not they. What we should really do is open a donkey sanctuary at Runton and get rid of those ungrateful fuckers in the petting zoo.

Top inset: Running stock between markets, early morning in the East Yard, Camden Lock, a long time ago. I would often ferry stuff on the bike between Camden, Greenwich, Spitalfields and the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1. Pictured is Northern C3PO, ie Martin, a Leeds fan who sold jewellary next to us, and is currently trading in York. The Duke of Wellington fell victim to planning permission a couple of years ago, signalling the end of London.

Middle inset: Camden High Street from above the mezzanine gallery in the Lock Market. Not sure when this was taken – well, twenty six minutes past two, obviously – but the building work opposite suggests late 2016.

Lower inset: Joe during one of his occasional chubby phases when he has been able to hide food from his numerous children. This is at the Compleat Angler in Norwich, by the look of things.

Meanwhile, I am still working up the council. I was supposed to have left four weeks ago, but my replacement didn’t show up and has subsequently vanished. My predecessor lasted three weeks before being allowed to work permanently from home. So here I am between these two giants of the public sector, getting through the working day by retiring to a vacant meeting room each afternoon and watching The Baby Club on my phone to remind me that there is niceness in the world. Still, working in an office is the quintessential late 20^th/early 21^st century employment experience, and I have always regarded with disdain people who say things like ‘I could never work in an office, me, a living death, that. Ironing a shirt is something I don’t do and wearing a tie would feel like a noose’. ‘Scruffy fuckers might want to sort themselves out then,’ said ‘Anton’ – a man who once sold zoot suits from a transit van outside the Lacy Lady in Ilford – when I relayed this to him yesterday during Runton tent washing duty. I think he has a point.

It isn’t the environment that troubles me, of course, so much as my staff. 30% refuse to work hard because of the 70% who barely work at all, and I have some sympathy with this. All of them could only exist in the public sector, where they are unsackable, as private capital would never touch them. Bone idleness does not, however, prevent them from indulging in the ‘Thank God It’s Friday’ mentality which, the last time I worked in an office, was both a restaurant chain and, with slightly altered wording, an advertising tagline for Crunchy bars. Fuck knows what they look forward to at the weekend because, unless it’s a medically induced coma, it can’t be any more relaxing than what they fancifully refer to as the working week. Still, there they are with their mugs with cats on and their ‘When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade’ fridge magnets, although if this actually happened they would be too busy complaining about being alive in the first place to worry about carbonating citrus fruit. On the wall above them is a faded sheet of photocopied paper with ‘Life Isn’t About Waiting For The Storm To Pass – It’s About Learning To Dance In The Rain’ on it. In a rare light-hearted moment, I recently pointed to this while talking to one of the piles of calories who sits underneath it and said ‘You know who said that? Jesus. And he was having a shocker’. After a slight pause she replied ‘I never go out in the rain,’ and wandered off to eat things in the kitchen.

Apart from anything else, they are just so weird. One of them – let’s call her Jan, as pretty much everyone else there is called fucking Jan – is recovering from hip replacement surgery. Last Wednesday, I asked if there was a card we could sign or whatever, to be told that they ‘don’t do cards because it gets confusing’. I may not have worked in an office for some time, but Jan has been working there since, by the look of her, the Industrial Revolution. Surely correct procedure is to get down to fucking Morrisons, find a card with a teddy on it, probably holding a balloon and wearing a bandage to denote a recent injury of some sort, write ‘Break a leg, Jan!’, or ‘Hands off the junior doctors!’ in it, and give it to the lazy old bitch with a box of fucking Quality Street. Surely this is the done thing. That said, in any ordered workplace, the done thing would be to take most of my team out into the car park and shoot them. They are too lazy to walk to the car park, though, so they would have to be shot at their desks, and even then they would be too stupid to die. I do have a shotgun licence, though, and as it’s appraisal week next week, I might bring it along.

Actually, there are stupider things in my office than my permanent staff, but they are kept in earthenware pots and watered twice a week. One of them honestly considers an unloseable well paid light administrative job to be ‘Hell’. Continuing the vaguely Biblical theme, I suppose I could submerge her in boiling pitch and force her to eat burning coals while skewering her with a pitchfork for eternity, in line with the vision of Hell painted by Dante in the early sixteenth century, and see how she gets on with that. Might bring that up in appraisal week, too.

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Photards:

Main: not Runton Hall, but lovely old Felbrigg Hall, about thirty miles away built by the same bloke I believe. A nice place which forms the model for what we want Runton to be, albeit on a smaller scale. Blickling’s a good one too. They have the kitchen done out like it’s the nineteen-tens or, if you’re in Norfolk, at the cutting edge of culinary style.

Top: Nid being King of the Bridge in some woods Felbrigg. If this was at Runton, Graham’s kids would charge people a toll to cross and, if they failed to pay, beat them up.

Middle: War memorial at St Mary the Virgin, Northrepps. Had an SAS man and everything. It seems to have given somewhat over-generously for such a tiny place.

Lower: A compost heap at Runton. This is what country folk use instead of a bin, and explains why the place is so untidy.

The moon looks very remote to me, and I speak as someone who lives in Norfolk. Also, although it sounds obvious, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the moon landings among a bunch of people who don’t believed they happened is not an easy thing to do. Still, it was a situation that Joe and I found ourselves in last Friday, having supplied sandwiches and nibbles to a Flat Earth Society lecture at Runton and, afterwards, watched the Apollo 11 footage with the lecturers themselves. Having now had a good look at it, I can safely say that I’m going to the moon until they sort it out a bit. Very dusty. However, that doesn’t mean that Neil Armstrong and ladies’ favourite ‘Buns’ Aldrin weren’t there, bouncing about, playing golf and driving their little space car hither and yon. I was born long after the event, but was nonetheless morbidly curious about what would’ve happened if ‘Buns’ had pranged the lunar module while parking it and they ended up stranded in space, dying the loneliest death imaginable, because I was a barrel of larfs as a child.

Nid’s main argument against the moon landings is that the moon itself looks ‘very heavy’, but he is not yet three years old. The main Flat Earth argument against the moon landings – apart from the earth being flat, which it isn’t – is that the technology for such a venture was not available at the time. The thing is, as impressive as landing on the moon is, it is a surprisingly unsophisticated procedure: you get a rocket, put a couple of fellas in it, light the blue touch paper and, as long as it’s pointing in the right direction, blast off will get you there and gravity will get you back. This prompted Joe to point out that this is why I work up the council a couple of days a week and not, for example, as Professor of Aeronautics at Cambridge University. I also wondered how weird it must be for the Flat Earthers, watching this stuff which you are convinced is a massive hoax with people like Joe and I, who are convinced that it isn’t, but they were friendly enough and mainly sat there eating Pringles, wearing Farahs, looking pleased with themselves, and saying ‘And people believe that!’ every time anything happened on the screen.

Our main business of the day, however, was planning Runton’s only wedding of the summer thus far. The last one involved narrowly avoiding a brawl after going to the considerable trouble of turning the Forest School dormitories into the pub from Lord of the Rings at the bride and groom’s request. I was therefore relieved to learn, from a wedding planner called Hugh, that this would a small affair with a vague Star Wars theme – which is why I was trying to book Princess Leo, a Stowmarket-based cross dressing Rebel Alliance cabaret singer, a couple of weeks ago. Incidentally, Joe and I once considering becoming the world’s only non-gay wedding planners and, speaking with Hugh, I was reminded of why this was. He was charging an extraordinary amount for everything, including his taxi that day to and from Wroxham for which he had billed the bride and groom £80, although Joe did in the van for £50 cash because he needed to pop into Hoveton to pick up some ear drops for some of his kids. Hugh had also billed them £40 for his lunch with Joe and I, even though this consisted of sandwiches left over from the Flat Earth lecture.* Joe and I also briefly considered setting up an agency to provide cover for people having affairs, an idea concieved one January afternoon en route to an animal feed supplier in Saxlingham. It would have been a highly questionable enterprise – ‘We’d be like the Robin Hoods of romance, except it would be fucking horrible and everyone would hate us, including ourselves’, as I remarked at the time. The idea had been ditched by the time we got to Swanton Morley.

The Flat Earthers would be staying in the Keeper’s Cottage, adjoining and leaning somewhat into the Old Servant’s Quarters, which function as Runton’s marital suite. I wondered if the wedding buzz might be harshed by having a bunch of people around who believe that human consciousness is an artificial construct bought about via mind control techniques and the media, and mentioned this to Hugh. I had worried about this a couple of years ago, too, when we had our first Runton wedding, but that all went rather well – indeed, credible reports suggest a Flat Earth Society member fingered a cousin of the bride in the woods near the Hermitage, indicating a reasonable amount of admittedly highly localised conviviality. I imagine that Hugh is billing the bride and groom for the cost of a spaceship to fly the Flat Earthers to the moon, if only to jump out and say ‘There – fucking happy now?’, but in any case there will be no funny business by the Hermitage this time. As I write this, Confederate re-enactors are tuning banjos and a-hooting and a-hollerin’ there as part of their annual visit, which involves living in 1863 for three weeks with no disturbance from the outside world. We’ve had to divert work vans bringing in stuff for the new stables for the duration and everything. Nid will be disappointed that we can’t play Hide and Seek there, but as this only involves me counting to ten and him immediately shouting ‘Found you!’ I am less devastated. We have another version where he shouts ‘Hiding, Daddy’, I reply ‘Where?’, and he replies ‘Here, Daddy!’ and jumps out of the telly cabinet. He’s a fine boy, but he’s no Anne Frank.

Anyway. It had been an enjoyable afternoon, all things considered. We finished our sandwiches, agreed a price for the wedding for Hugh to treble and pass on to the bride and groom, and took him for a tour of the petting zoo, during which a goat stood on him. As he climbed into Joe’s van for the lift home, I realised I now know how it is that 5% of the population hold 80% of the wealth. They’re wedding planners.

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*Forty quid for six sandwiches? Who did you get to make them? Paul McCartney?’ as ‘Anton’ later remarked.

Photards:

Main: North Finchley public library. Of every single building in the world, this is my current girlfriend’s favourite, even ahead of the bouncy castle next to the Eiffel Tower, as discussed last time.

Top inset: the lovely beach at Cromer.

Middle inset: the rubbish beach at Sheringham.

Lower inset: my dog eating a rib cage.

After the box hefting and relationship councelling of last time, ‘Anton’ went back to Leeds to rewire a kitchen for one of his untrusting elderly Asian clientele, and Joe and I went on a chip run to Beccles. Beccles is a pleasant East Anglian boating town where Chris Martin* and John Lemman** were born and, reaching the front of the compulsory fish-on-Friday queue at the Sea Spray Fish Shop, I put our order in. Joe is a regular patron, and the chip shop lady knew to include the ‘bin liner of chips’ he always buys for his thirty four children. I also remembered to ask for ‘Large chips and chicken strips, for Joe’s mrs’, who refuses to eat fish because it is weird.

‘Child or adult?’, asked the chip shop lady, a scarlet barrel of a woman in a hairnet.

‘She’s thirty-four’, I said. It seemed a strange question.

‘Child or adult size?’, clarified the chip shop lady, demonstrating the difference in chicken parts, a detail I had missed among the salting and the vinegaring and the wrapping stuff in up paper. We established it was the adult size and I left, saying something about having to pick Joe’s mrs up from nursery, which got a larf.

The point of recording this exchange was not to suggest Joe might have married a child by accident, but an episode that occurred some years ago in the early hours of a January morning in the Lighthouse Fish Bar at Tooting Bec. I had spent the preceeding evening at the Wheatsheaf with John the Boxes, the richest market trader in London and, swaying gently, realised that my childhood was over. Children aren’t allowed to drink alcohol because they just spill it everywhere, so it was nothing to do with being up the pub. It was when Mo the chip shop man offered me a choice of cod and chips accompaniments, and I realised that somewhere in the Unknowable a tiny wheel had turned, an obscure planet had re-aligned, and I now preferred peas to beans in this, and all, circumstances. I discussed the revelation in a distraught manner with Mo until he asked if I needed him to call me a cab home.

My current girlfriend states that her childhood ended with the realisation that her favourite building was now North Finchley public library, and no longer the bouncy castle next to the Eiffel Tower. Parenthood has also ushered in a joint appreciation of Rich Tea biscuits which, as a youthful postman in Slough washing down a packet of chocolate Hob Nobs with a pint of full fat milk every morning outside the corner shop at the end of Park Street, I would have considered unmanly. I suppose all these things are not so much rites of passage, which are big obvious things like getting into your first fight or paying to get into the cinema instead of sneaking up the fire exit, or parenthood, but subtle life markers. After all, ‘life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans’, as John Lennon*** famously said, although he had taken quite a lot of heroin by then and was in any case merely quoting a Reader’s Digest article from 1957. Anyway, I understand the gist of the ‘life v other plans’ sentiment, but resent the glibness, because life is other plans. ‘Other plans’ for John Lennon included forming the most beloved and influential entertainment phenomenon in the history of the world****, but all the while he was slowly preferring peas to beans because, whether he liked it or not, life was happening to him.

Other life markers include, of course, death. I cut Mr Matthews’ hair last Wednesday, and on Thursday he died. The events are unrelated – he was 94, although amazingly not my oldest client – and while it is a blow to my small mobile barbering business, it would be crass to dwell upon this as the most noteworthy thing about it. No, I am sure from the conversations we shared that he greeted it with acceptance, free from significant mental deterioration or the particularly determined tumours and lurking congenital defects that have already afflicted my own circle of friends and peers as we march towards middle age. These concerns were unlikely to trouble Mr Matthews, who felt that all his life’s bad luck was taken by his brother, who died as a child when the Germans bombed Coventry. He once said that he used to worry about having created no cultural legacy of literature or art to leave when he died, but in the end realised this was because he was simply ‘a very ordinary man’, and had failed to consider what a blessing this was.

I am hard pressed to imagine a more ordinary death than that of Mr Matthews – half past ten in the morning, watching the regional news – and, as a widely loved man, he needs no further commemoration from me. I therefore congratulate him on a race well run and causing me to consider, with Joe on the way home from the chippie in an ex-Post Office van, that sooner or later everyone prefers peas to beans, but as long as you have one or the other, things are looking up. Never tomato sauce with a roast though. That’s very common.

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*The Derby Country striker, not the lead singer of Coldplay.

**The seventeenth century Lord Mayor of London, not the Beatle.

***The Beatle, not the seventeenth century Lord Mayor of London.

****The Beatles, not the office of Lord Mayor of London.

Photards:

Main – East Anglian village fete. The orchestra were playing the theme to Match of the Day slightly too slowly at the time.

Top – Mari Bowen, Nid’s maternal great-great-great-great-grandmother, who took part in the Rebecca Riots of 1843. These were a series of civil disturbances sparked off by punitive tax reforms, and notable for the male rioters dressing as women for some reason. 

Middle – Thomas Phillips, Nid’s maternal great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, a master mariner on the transatlantic route from Cardigan Bay to Waltham, Massachusetts. I wonder what his views on his riotous grand daughter were.

Lower – Nid in a graveyard, after I had to remove him from a Christening service for running around the church shouting ‘Daddy!’ and ‘Bingits!’ [biscuits]. Strange to think that whatever he achieves he will one day be an obscure name on a family tree, too.