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 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 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’.
One Saturday morning long ago, I found myself deeply impressed with Adam Ant’s watch, which he was mucking about with on Swap Shop. At least, I assume it was Swap Shop, because it was definitely a Saturday morning and, although barely out of infancy, I knew I wasn’t the sort of child to be watching Tiswas*. The thing about Adam Ant’s watch was that it played an actual tune if you pressed a couple of the buttons at the same time, and was the greatest thing I had ever seen. To make things even better, the tune in question – The Yellow Rose of Texas – was also played by our local ice cream van, with Andrew Sayer’s hilarious uncle at the helm. Could it be that Adam was reaching out to us, amid the Zoom lollies and rum and raisin choc ices favoured by Jackie Fulbridge to show how sophisticated she was at seven years of age? If so, it was in vain, as my primary school was staunchly aligned to Madness in the beat combo politics of the day. Nonetheless, his musical wrist watch was such a hot playground topic the following Monday morning that our infinitely patient music teacher, Mr Allison, promised to put The Yellow Rose of Texas into rotation for the coming week’s morning assembly. This never happened. Untroubled, the world turned, and it has taken over thirty years for the reason to reveal itself.
ey enjoy, and with no Forest School kids or glampers till next spring, they bring in useful revenue during otherwise lean months. So far, so fluffy. The rather large iceberg that has hurled itself into the choppy waters just ahead of us is that no one wants Confederate flags all over the place, because the Confederate flag is, to say the least of it, a bit of a talking point. It wouldn’t be as weird has having swastikas everywhere, but still. It’s tricky, because our re-enactors are portraying troops from 1861, when a Confederate flag was perfectly reasonable thing to wave about during a rebellion against the Yankee government. People in the nineteenth century weren’t like people today. When things went wrong, they didn’t just make a flag out of a rainbow, write ‘Hope’ across it, and stand next to it weeping. They were much more focussed.
Despite neither Joe nor I being black or American, and the loss those two fine communities doubtless feel as a result, it wouldn’t do to be flippant with other people’s sensibilities, or contribute further droplets of unhappiness to an already unhappy world. Most of the time at Runton, I am simply a lost Cockney in a big field. Being asked to construct a philosophical argument about the impact of nineteenth century cultural symbolism in contemporary society is beyond my cognitive threshold when all I want to do is find somewhere warm to have a cup of tea and six four bar Kit Kats, because I’ve been low carb for weeks and it gets to you after a while. That said, I am certain that our Confederates are entirely benevolent, and we’ll have a natter with them on Monday to be on the safe side. Also, there is a possibility that Runton could be a location for an upcoming film about the Battle of Shiloh** with which the re-enactors are involved in a consultative capacity, and I’m going to say I can ride horses to get a speaking part as a cavalryman. Ahead of the meeting on Monday, nervous readers may rest assured that I have made them promise to treat the N-word*** with respect and not perform any authentic music of the era. Banjos and sentimentality are simply too much for an Englishman to bear, and they really will have a war on their hands if I have to put up with any of it, let me tell you.
I was happy to report to the Trustees during this morning’s weekly board meeting that our Runton Bollywood wedding was a tremendous success. All concerned had a marvellous time and the whole thing went on till dawn. It also raised a healthy chunk of cash for the estate, even after numerous expenses and wages for me, Joe, and ‘Anton’, who drunk heavily for several hours while generally jollying things along. Becka was on the payroll for the day, amusing younger guests with face painting, which sadly did not extend to painting each child to look like one of the other children, as was my suggestion for causing chaos among parents and spicing up the end of the evening. Saturday Night Feverishness and their Seventies/Eighties covers went down a storm, especially their stirring rendition of Adam and the Ants’ 
Anyway. Weddings are nice, and the bride, groom and guests looked marvellous in their Bollywood gear, hired at massive cost by the wedding planner I employed to plan the wedding instead of me. Glampers, wandering over to see what the fuss was about, were cordially invited to join the celebrations, as were a bunch of yoga enthusiasts from Great Yarmouth who had arrived that afternoon. By the end of the night, pissed Flat Earthers were bopping happily among the guests, even when Saturday Night Feverishness played I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me by Nik Kershaw. The sun can’t go down on a flat earth, can it, and stauncher Flat Earthers consider this sort of thing to be propaganda put about by NASA. Yes I know, but they do, and I have to nod indulgently as they explain why, in the line of duty. A flat-earth compliant lyric in this instance would be ‘I won’t let the sun leave the part of the sky directly above where you are standing and transverse to the other end of the planet’, which is less catchy. A few Flat Earthers even got hold of other guests, which they probably didn’t bargain for when they arrived at Runton for a weekend of debunking the Theory of Relativity again, including a couple of gay blokes who doubtless saw the night out with acts of Greek love under the peaceful East Anglian firmament. We have another, smaller, wedding booked on the 8th July, but I shall not be around for it as I will be leaving Hackney that evening at 20:00 to ride to the Suffolk Coast, it being the annual 
The Runton Diaries 