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.
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 
op of other stuff and adding a door, but it takes ages – although they had enabled us to avoid the horror of holding a gigantic barbeque, the groom’s first suggestion. I detest every single thing about barbeques. At least with a picnic, the other outdoor dining option, it’s mainly booze and cake, and is over quite quickly. My grandfather courted my grandmother with a picnic in Victoria Park E3, and while doing so acquired a dog, Mickey, from a passing fella he knew in return for some paraffin. That’s the old days for you. When Mickey died many years later, his replacement, and every dog my grandparents subsequently owned, was also called Mickey, although to my knowledge none were acquired in return for flammable liquids on a first date. Victoria Park will be lovely at the moment because Glastonbury’s on and the current locals will be at that instead of talking about Jeremy Corbyn, artisan bacon and cats in Hackney, although such is the overall niceness of the place it’s pretty pleasant even when they are. ‘Anton’ was unable to assist with oven building on account of being away in Leeds rewiring a basement (‘Who rewires a basement unless they’re planning to prison someone up? It’s well Austrian, I swear bruv’***), but has done a fantastic job threading hundreds of small lanterns among the fencing and trees around the edge of the Fallow Field, and presumably connecting them to a car battery or something. Regardless, it looks fantastic.
School kids are kept apart on purpose, but rather that the Board of Trustees consider them two different sets of customers best kept separate. This makes the Board sound harsh and stern, when they are in fact neither – just a bit, I don’t know, disconnected. We have pointed out that unless things change and Runton starts earning its keep the place will crumble away, but they take this to mean we’re threatening to build a commercial airport in the estate grounds, or a Norfolk World theme park, the main attraction of which would doubtless consist of driving slowly in circles behind a tractor for seventeen miles. Anyway. Keeping the pre-adolescent tribes apart seems contrary to the atmosphere of Runton, one of the few places where fat kids from places like Blackburn – the Forest Schoolers – can meet their loud and opinionated counterparts from gentrified areas of London and the Home Counties, and in the spirit of new found kinship, undertake strenuous physical activity for free on behalf of Joe, ‘Anton’, Becka and I.
The Runton Diaries 