With the sun dawdling across the huge East Anglian sky, the Restored Barn is a busy place in high summer. The mornings find Becka’s Forest School kids measuring stuff and noting things amid the waft of creosote and mown grass, referred to by the names they are encouraged to adopt for the duration of their stay on the Runton Estate. Glamper children, who occasionally wander in, having mistaken the dock leaves there for kale, call themselves things like Sparkle Swan or Blue Fairy Horse. The Forest School kids tend towards Terror Attack and Kim Il Jung. My favourite, however, was a lad from Sheffield who insisted upon being called Alan because it was his granddad’s name and he thought it was cool. The glampers and Forest School kids are not the only groups at Runton, of course. There are the conspiracy theorists to consider.
I organise more buffet lunches for conspiracy theorists than most people. In fact, if you want to hear about how the Queen is a lizard, or how the ice caps are the borders of a flat earth, or how false memories are generated by wandering in and out of alternative timelines because silly old physics is falling apart, Runton’s your destination and I’m in charge of your quiche. This level of catering merely entails hefting a trestle table into Restored Barn and putting trays of stuff on it. I don’t make the sandwiches but I do introduce them by saying ‘These sandwiches are cheese and pickle – or are they?’ and all that, to get a conspiracy feel going. The Forest School kids, marshalled by Becka, spend the afternoons restoring the Victorian greenhouse or playing Manhunt in the substantial woodland to the south of the estate, on the other side of the fucking petting zoo. The conspiracy theorists pretty much take care of themselves, and if they ever got tired of talking about conspiracy theories, we could organise them into five a side football teams and place bets on them instead. This is all well and good, but it does raise the question of what the adult glampers, the most prominent Runton group, actually do all day.
Runton is an isolated place, and there is only so much time middle class people can spend trying to conceive gay children. Accordingly, most glampers do nothing, except popping into the village six miles away to stock up on wine, avocados and books by Richard Dawkins, who became a multi-millionaire at the turn of the century when he found a way to turn Guardian readers into cash. Since ‘Anton’ and I took over the Runton glamping operation, they are no longer a bunch of beta males and unhappy modern white girls who expect everyone to listen to their shouty nonsense like we’re all in a Star Wars film or something. Even if they were, though, we would still need a middle class. Having a middle class is proof that your society has evolved, and it would be the worst kind of medieval nightmare without one. At heart, middle class people are the just like everyone else, and in many cases, much prettier. I prevented Graham’s children selling retreaded tyres to an Emily/Laura the other day, and once she’d cleared up the Glastonbury-esque litter around her tent she told me all about her shop in, probably, Sussex. I should imagine it had something to do with baking. Anyway, she was spending afternoons at Runton drawing a side line of greetings cards for sale in whatever her shop was about. Yes, they featured Rey from the Force Awakens rather too heavily and there were a lot of cats, but they were otherwise perfectly nice. It’s important to look beyond appearances; I accept that middle class people are physically weak, easily led, ruin everything and go on about things all the time, but they are paying an awful lot of tax – and I, for one, am glad that somebody is.
While watching Archie and a ratter of Graham’s called Lucy put each other through their paces in the Fallow Field last Monday, ‘Anton’ and I discussed how the glampers might be given useful things to do for the advancement of the estate in general. As we did so, I remembered something at Spitalfields years ag
o, whereby some bloke – the ex-drummer from Transvision Vamp, as it turned out – charged people to go berserk with a sledgehammer at a load of old desk top computers he’d bought from bankrupt businesses nearby. People loved it, for much the same reason that Becka loves the Screaming Car. It occurred to me that the glampers could do the same sort of thing in the dilapidated out-buildings around the Runton estate, as these are too small to be turned into accommodation and too expensive to restore. With Archie and Lucy tearing around after each other at impressive speed – Lucy is nippier in the turn, but Archie makes up ground on the straight – we calculated that if you fired up a couple of Bens or Joshes by telling them that clean eating is anorexia for wankers, or that bacon makes tattoos fall off, handed them a sledgehammer and aimed them at a derelict nineteenth century store house, it would be a pile of sand in eight minutes. If this energy of this kind could be stored, perhaps by way of a battery attached to pedals in a craft microbrewery where a conversation about the European Union is taking place, it could provide endless sustainable fuel. The world may die from many things, but if we can harness impotent middle class anger we will have taken the first step in making the ice caps safe, and if you believe in a flat earth, this will enable them to continue preventing the oceans from sloshing off into outer space. Phew.
Photards
Main: the Drive at Runton, leading from the Big House (ie the Hall itself) to, eventually, the rest of the world.
Inset top: large outbuilding of some kind converted for use as accomodation for the Forest School kids.
Inset middle: partially collapsed barn which now houses the Screaming Car.
Inset lower: glampers. Not Runton glampers, but you get the idea.
*Archie is a saluki, bred to run long distances in a straight line across sand. When operating in a European environment, it is wise to exercise the abdominal oblique and latissimi dorsi muscle groups of a saluki, as they can become strained in close pursuit of smaller game, such as the forty million rabbits that live on the Runton Estate. Belting around like a hairy whirlwind after Lucy strengthens his chassis nicely, and is hilarious.
Even though I keep him in tip top physical condition as if he were a working dog, it is unlikely that Archie will ever go rabbiting. This is because in a traditional setting saluki chase Thompson’s gazelle until the luckless ruminant collapses with exhaustion, then wait for a Persian on a horse to pop along and break its neck. I’m not sure what he would make of an ailing rabbit. That said, I’d never rule anything out – this is the countryside, it’s a bloodbath, and sooner or later we’re bound to have to kill something.
It is summer in Britain, and everything smells of unhappiness and Lynx. Well, nearly everything: by a broken fence next to a violent East Anglian petting zoo, the Goat Bag Man smells faintly of paraffin. Three weeks in the country air have all but purged the aroma of a leather waterproofing industry based around a Highgate bath that makes him so easily identifiable to the visually impaired, and his time as my body double in the wake of the Tennyson Road Incident is almost at an end. In fact, unbeknown to him, it already has ended. Had he not suggested, following my discharge from hospital with working legs but non-working arms, that I earn a living among the cast of River Dance, I would not be feigning continuing muscular trauma, he would not have to mend fences with Graham on my behalf, and there would be one more ice cream sale on Primrose Hill on weekday afternoons – but I can’t help that.
bitten by a deer last time we spoke got its head stuck in fencing nine times that week, requiring several fence posts to be hacked through in order to retrieve the silly bastard. Usually, when tedious physical labour is required around the Estate, Becka organises Forest School ‘fun groups’ to do it – appropriate in this case, as petting zoo goats regularly ruin their games of Manhunt. This is essentially hide and seek, with nine year olds scouring the wooded area on the south of the Estate for one of their number who lies on the ground, covers themselves with leaves, and pretends to be dead. While macabre, there is little chance of an actual fatality. Goats indicate the vicinity of the ‘grave’ by battering at nearby fencing, giving the game away somewhat, and in any case Forest School kids are as fat as they are endearing, and therefore unlikely to summon the physical energy required to bury themselves properly. They are also inept woodworkers (as Becka discovered while trying to get them to make bird boxes amid spirited enquiries about what a bird needs a box for and how will it carry it about) and can take over an hour to saw through a five inch fence post. This simply isn’t good enough. Once the entrapped livestock is once again free to caper about all over the place like a fucking idiot, repairs are undertaken by Graham, hammering at one end of a fence post with the uninsured Goat Bag Man and ‘Anton’ holding it steady and swearing at him, from the other.
Trustees to falsify a tenancy agreement thereby proving where he lives which, surprisingly, they did. I fondly recall trading at the Thames Festival in 2010 with velvet-toned posho Supertone, and realising that we had no public liability insurance certificate as the organisers did their rounds. It was an impressive thing, all calligraphy and swirls, and failure to produce one meant being thrown off site and barred from trading there in future. Usually, groups of traders deal with this by passing one certificate surreptitiously between them for repeated inspection, but we were trading away from anyone we knew and were unable to join in with this elementary bluff. Calligraphy and swirls look nice, and made the certificate a gift for the skilled counterfeiter, so Supertone drew one, flashed it tetchily at the organisers while pretending to be busy with something else, and we went on to have a blinding weekend of it. The last time I saw him, we passed a quiet trading afternoon at Leadenhall Market trying to translate correspondence by nineteenth century French romantic poet and novelist Victor Hugo (who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame), mysteriously acquired by Jigsaw John. As I recall, most of it was tetchy letters to his sister complaining about how difficult it was to get shirts laundered around the Paris Commune. I sometimes miss the incongruous sophistication that trading among such people often produced, because the countryside is awful. Still, the bite wound inflicted upon Archie by rampaging petting zoo animals the other week has healed nicely and without complication, leaving nothing more than two small puncture wounds. I might jazzle him by popping a sequin in each, and take him along to Norwich Pride.
officially employed by the Runton Estate, giving him a greater measure of credibility with the Board of Trustees. As we have seen, larger, boring projects such as cleaning of the Victorian greenhouse are undertaken by Forest School ‘fun groups’ of inner city children, arranged by Becka. ‘Anton’, a reasonably qualified electrician, is of value among the 1930’s wiring, as there are many miles of it around the estate, sparking gently away. Amid all this activity, I can’t, as ‘Anton’ rightly points out, ‘just sit around all day thinking about stuff, like that Stephen Hawkings’, and this is where the Panama hatted Goat Bag Man, now no longer regarded as the subject of a search and destroy mission by Graham’s children, comes into the equation by way of a major fire at Camden Market.
legend ‘A.J. Gives Toothy Blow Jobs’, written across the railway bridge overlooking the beer garden of the Hawley Arms. The next morning, Vinny, landlord of the Duke of Wellington, the Whitechapel interchange for market traders from north, south and east London, gave us to a Hero’s Breakfast – a fried egg sandwich – on a table thoughtfully situated next to the emergency exit, in case the pub caught fire. Joe was at Runton and I had moved to Greenwich Market when the next inferno struck, but the Goat Bag Man was lucky for a second time as it affected only the Stables Market, and he again received a Hero’s Breakfast from Vinny the next morning. The luck of both the Goat Bag Man and the Lock Market ran out on July 10th this year, when fire finally got the opportunity to make an absolute mess of the place, and while his business was largely unscathed, trade will inevitably suffer. This time there was no Hero’s Breakfast, because Vinny, who looked after us for so long, died in 2013. I’m sure this was due to his horrified response to the Goat Bag Man’s decision to give up the booze, making him technically guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
This takes place in the bath, kitchen sink and several barrels in the Goat Bag Man’s tiny flat, three floors up in the Highgate sky, but I all but sobbed as I detected about his person a hint of the escalators at Kentish Town, and the smell of warm air vented from the 214 bus as it meanders from Liverpool Street to Chalk Farm. To complete the scene, Becka appeared, fresh from the Screaming Car, where she been since one of her younger daughters irretrievably slid her phone, purse and keys into a hollow tree while shouting ‘Post box!’, and general revelry ensued. Later that evening, a member of the Christadelphian Isolationist League (currently glamping in the Fallow Field) appeared and played 
didn’t see any of it. People would wander in and check things and look at stuff now and again, and visitors would come and go. I spent my time having morphine mainlined into me and watching classic war films, which backfired somewhat when 
was indeed looking at his Tinder matches, as I suspect was the case, I hope he was swiping whichever way signifies interest, because if a relationship comes of it, he and his partner will have an amusing anecdote about how they met the night a Cockney came through the windscreen to tell their grandchildren. Who knows – they might make a thing of it and run me over every year on their anniversary. Then again, if the criminal negligence charges being brought against him by the old bill stick, he’ll miss the first few of them, what with being in prison and everything, but still.
I pointed this out to Graham today at dawn as he prepared his ferrets and dogs for a bit of rabbit culling. ‘Anton’ was supposed to be helping him, but is wary of Graham after an incident prior to the last cull when Graham asked him to hold up a roof beam in an outbuilding we are renovating and, with ‘Anton’ fully committed and visibly shaking under the strain, placed two ferrets in his shirt. Some say that it is still possible to hear the words ‘I’ll kill you, you bastard fucking pikey cunt’, and sundry other sentiments with which I will not trouble you, dancing in the wind on the west side of the estate on still, moonlit nights. We Cockneys are kind, gentle, trusting people, and all too often this is our treatment at the hands of country folk. Anyway. ‘Anton’ was instead employed installing nets across gaps in the fences where rabbits might escape, the sound of his hammering filling the morning air. ‘Sounds like he’s crucifying one of yer glampers’ said Graham, and I was moved to agree.
They are messy though. This is what happens when you put the white middle class in a field – look at the state of Glastonbury when they’re done with it. Joe and I no longer wake them up in the morning by wandering through their enclosure shouting that someone’s found a way Jeremy Corbyn can still be Prime Minister, or that there’s going to be another EU Referendum, or that Great British Bake Off is not going to commercial television after all, and so forth. These days, we let them sleep in and ask them nicely to clean up after themselves, and almost all of them do so quite happily. I give the details of those who refuse, or who are basically dicks, to Graham’s kids, who then aggressively sell re-treaded tyres to them until they see the error of their ways. Graham’s kids, the oldest of whom is twelve, are fantastic. As you may recall, I acquired my dog, Archie, as part payment for teaching them how to read (‘A is for fucking apple, B is for fucking ball and my fucking bollocks. What’s this fucking book now? 
The Runton Diaries 