Tag: cycling

The Visiting Barber

Jun 3rd, 2018

We live in a world of magic, where flimsy old Leicester City can win the Premiership and a black Freemason can become President of the USA. In this heady atmosphere, with the sky the limit and no dream too wild, there is no reason why I shouldn’t be a mobile hairdresser. To this end, I have been reborn as the Bicycle Barber, a reference to my mode of transport, and have already amassed a plucky client list of six people, one of whom is very elderly and expects to be dead by Christmas. It’s a modest start but, despite people misreading my business cards as ‘The Bisexual Barber’ more times than you might think, I have my hustle decidedly on. Elsewhere, I am considering a weekend barbering pitch at Greenwich Market, thereby laying the foundation for an unexpected return to London and a collective raising of eyebrows which, come to think of it, I can trim as part of a wider grooming service. Closer to my adoptive East Anglian home, I am sizing up the more traditional rural markets, and am tempted to combine hair cutting and key cutting under the tag line ‘How different can it be?’ for a larf. These are giddy times.

This quest for clientele has also seen me approach various local funeral directors, offering to tidy the hair of the deceased. I’d only want the natural causes people and not the accidenty ones, obviously, and wouldn’t find it disconcerting because although I believe in ghosts, I don’t believe in zombies. I think it would be a peaceful, dignified service to provide and not, as ‘Anton’ insisted while we waterproofed the derelict pigeon loft in the West Field last week, an opportunity to ‘Savile them up*’, and sundry other observations with which I will not trouble you. Admittedly, there would be a temptation to give anyone with My Way as their funeral song a bad haircut for presumably being awful when they were alive, but otherwise I was quite taken with the idea. Being the Bicycle Barber involves, reasonably enough, a lot of cycling, during which you have to think about something to pass the time. Clattering towards Bergh Apton last week, I even formulated the fictitious daily banter between me and an equally fictitious funeral director, probably called Martin, as I expect that’s the kind of name a funeral director would have. ‘Did he like his haircut?’ he would ask as I packed away my clippers and combs, and I’d say ‘Well, there were no complaints!’ and we’d have a little chuckle like we always do and I’d put my coat on and prepare to leave. ‘See you tomorrow, then!’ he’d then say as I left, ‘one way…’ then nod towards the mortuary’ ‘… or the other!’ We’d have another chuckle, and I’d go home, perhaps after saying ‘Not if I see you first!’ or something similar. It would be such a gentle, urbane place to work if it didn’t only exist in my mind. Meanwhile, in the relentless world of reality, my ever-loyal old dear has done her best to drum up support by introducing me to her Women’s Institute friends with ‘This is my son, Paul. He’s a barber, but he isn’t very good yet’.

The West Field pigeon loft, incidentally, was due for demolition when we thought the Estate was to be awash with Lottery money. Now it is to be awash with our own money, which we don’t have, it is instead more prudent to shore everything up and see what can be salvaged. Lime washing the stonework is important, because once Joe slaps a temporary roof on, the structure will essentially be sealed for assessment later in the year. The West Field Itself would be a nice place for events, and that is the general plan for it, but I think Runton is simply too remote for anything to really pay out. The easy answer would be to open it up for more glamping, but then we have the problem of what to do with perhaps four hundred glampers all day, as discussed in various earlier posts. Then again, we have local funksters Saturday Night Feverishness booked for a wedding at Runton in August (for which the Old Servant’s Quarters will serve as venue for the happy couple’s first night of bliss) and Joe would’ve booked the Style Councillors too, if they weren’t a Style Council tribute act. Entering the spirit of things, I contacted Austrian Beatlemaniacs the Mona Lisa Twins, to see if they are planning to visit East Anglia any time soon and if they might like to pop in. They are white girls with guitars who do cover versions, enough to set alarm bells ringing in the ears of music lovers, but a sure-fire winner with middle class glampers, who love that sort of thing. Well, that and Beyonce, but we can’t afford her. I saw the Mona Lisa Twins at the only Beatles convention I’ve ever been to, despite my obsession with the Fabulous Mop Tops. It was an enjoyable experience, and among the vendors and dealers and tribute acts I was struck by how many people were wandering around in full impersonation of one or other Beatle, by how much attention they each got, and by how much anyone dressed as Yoko was completely ignored.

Despite the attentions of Graham’s two youngest children, who circled us on their bikes as we worked, their unbroken voices offering encouragement such as ‘You’re fucked now!’ and ‘Fuck off back to Cockney Land’ in reference to our non-Lottery grant financial status, it was good to be putting a shift in at a busy Runton. The East Field, currently the only place where glampers can glamp, is booked solid and the residents are well behaved, good humoured and middle class, despite Britain’s imminent leaving of the European Union, about which they obviously remain panic stricken. Ah well. Perhaps the best thing about being at Runton these days is returning home to Nid, now seventeen months old, who literally dances with delight when he sees me. As you can probably imagine, it is a long time since anyone has done that.

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*Note for foreigners: Jimmy Savile was a famous British light entertainer and charity fundraiser, whose other activities included sex with corpses, the mentally ill, and children.

Photards:

Main: Look at this enormous bastard. He later ate all those sheep.

Inset top: There fourteen thousand seven hundred and nine annoying things about living in the countryside, and two of them are that you have to wear Wellingtons (I refuse to say ‘wellies’, as it would feel like I’ve surrendered) fifty weeks of the year, and that the milkman never bothers to take the empties, despite being in a Land Rover.

Inset middle: Tree house hangout of Joe and Becka’s twenty eight children.

Inset lower: Small path between a load of saplings, which are a special type of bendy tree.
Advance The Flag Of Runton

Nov 10th, 2017

Instagram foodies are ten a penny and routinely hated. This is understandable, because you can’t claim to really love food until you’ve wept over a Wagon Wheel on a low carb binge day. Low carb binge days are the sublimest pleasure. If they’d come along first, no one would’ve bothered inventing sex, drugs and rock and roll, and we’d all be happier as a result. Anyway. Carb bingeing dominated the meeting with the Confederate re-enactors which you may recall was something of a hot topic the last time we spoke. It went well, or at least I assume it did, as after two minutes I was tripping balls on complimentary Hob Nobs and would’ve agreed to pretty much anything. There was little to be concerned about, however. Our Confederates were a couple of amiable heating engineers from Stockport, somewhat different from what Joe and I managed to convince ourselves we were expecting – essentially, Tammy Wynette and Deputy Dawg – and it was difficult not to like them.

As also discussed previously, sturdy British readers will be mystified by the controversy surrounding the Confederate flag. It’s a contentious issue in the States though, and considering we have Americans among the various conspiracy groups that come to Runton, and also that we need to be squeaky clean for our Lottery grant, it’s best to be on the safe side. It’s not like in Britain, when every time something happens that Guardian readers don’t like (ie, literally every time something happens at all), Brighton declares it wants to leave the UK and become a republic. (By the way, I’m not sure where the threat is with this. It should just get on with it, and give us back our fag hags and anti depressants). No, when the Confederate south left the Union north, it caused no end of bother. That’s all history now of course, but we have twelve Confederate re-enactors re-enacting it in the East Wood, eating authentic rations as nutritional research for the University of Portsmouth. They are portraying an army close to collapse, so this means catching and eating squirrels, frying ground acorns in rancid bacon fat and making coffee from corn meal and sugar cane seeds. Grim. I have promised the squirrel scoffing mad men a table full of pizza with extra rootin’ and tootin’ when they leave, as long as there’s been no banjo music or lynching, and wish them fortitude against their oncoming peckishness.

I spiced up the Norfolk Shred* with an American Civil War playlist prior to meeting the Confederates so I’d have a bit of small talk. The mix of sentimentality and relentless jauntiness would be ideal for soldiers, because it makes you want to kill people. Not that I am without sentiment, I should like to point out. For example, I make a point of sniffing my dog’s legs of an evening because they smell of popcorn, and I love 30 Rock so much that I refuse to watch the last two episodes because I can’t bear to have seen it all. Sentiment can be a fine thing, but there is a place for it – and that place is not among endless banjo pickin’ references to rallying round this and shouting about that and Maryland, cotton and hearts the other. I’m sorry but it isn’t. It was a short playlist, and after going through it a few times I’d hear ‘protect our heritage’ from the Bonny Blue Flag as ‘protect our hair and tits’, and ‘advance the flag of Dixie’ as ‘advance the flag of Ipswich’. This last point would be fighting talk indeed among the gentle folk of Norfolk. In case you are unfamiliar, Ipswich is in Suffolk, a part of East Anglia where the feeble minded, ugly and malformed are sent to live happily among their own kind. It serves the same function as south London, which God separated from the rest of the world with the River Thames – originally, a valley full of disinfectant – and rightly so.

Horrible nineteenth century yee-hah banjo nonsense was not my only source of light conversation, mind you. I once cycled from Georgia to the outskirts of New Orleans and back up again, straight through the former Confederate heartland, for reasons I can no longer recall. It was fucking terrifying. I was treated with kindness by each human I met, and hatred by everything else. The rattlesnakes I narrowly avoided stepping on were disconcerting enough, but the real danger came from lethal pit bull/coyote hybrids living in packs around the many abandoned farms in the region. They have a particularly enthusiastic hatred of Cockneys, and would chase me along the dirt roads, all teeth and rabies, which was especially disconcerting at night in the middle of nowhere, five thousand miles from the nearest pie and mash shop. After the fourth or fifth such incident, I took to chucking beef jerky behind me to distract the little bastards, and this worked so well that I assumed that’s what it was for until I saw people in Monroeville eating it voluntarily. It all sounds ridiculous, recalling it now in the comfort of the Keeper’s Cottage at Runton Hall with a flask of Nescafe Gold Blend and forty custard creams, but they were desperate times. God I hate the countryside.

(The Norfolk shredding and low carbing have come about because I want to be at my fighting weight for the 2018 cycling season. I gained thirty six pounds after the Tennyson Road Incident, in which I demonstrated solidarity with the victims of the London terrorist attacks by having a van driven into me at forty miles an hour. Actually, it was a taxi, but it still beats changing your Facebook avatar and then forgetting why, in the standard modern expression of remorse.)

*an exercise regime invented by me. It is similar to the more usual types of Shred, except that hi energy dance music is replaced with a nice Audiobook. In my case this is currently The Aquariums of Pyongyang, an account of political re-education in a labour camp run by the Workers’ Party of North Korea. It is among the most depressing things I have ever heard.

Twitter: this has a Twitter account, you know, and I make up a quarter of the follower count. It’s a riot in there!

Facebook: it has a Facebook page too, with twenty five followers – twice as many as Jesus.

Photards:

Main: my dog, Archibald al-Fantastique, who smells of popcorn.

Insert top: Joe at the Compleat Angler in Norwich. The bookshelf behind him is wallpaper.

Insert middle: ‘Anton’ in cartoon format – perhaps the only one in which he is considered acceptable – drawn by Cartoon Ben at Greenwich Market, in a different life.

Insert lower: Abandoned building somewhere in rural Alabama, fourteen years ago. I rode past hundreds of these, and would often go in for a bit of a poke about. I had one cd – Original Pirate Material by the Streets – which I listened to incessantly while cycling. At times, I started to think that I had been riding a bike forever, and that my life at home and all the people and places in it were the product of some weird daydream. Also, I was so homesick that I would go to sleep at night imagining the smell of the Northern Line – sentimentality again, you see. Still, it was an adventure alright and, despite the terror and loneliness, I retain a fondness for the people, if not the wildlife, of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and all the southern States. I saw Belle and Sebastian in a baseball stadium, watched NASCAR racing, was mistaken for a cop in downtown Montgomery and got free food in restaurants by reciting the menu in my normal speaking voice, which everyone thought was Australian. The whole thing was bananas, and I should’ve written about that instead.
Tennyson Road Incident, Part II

Jul 20th, 2017

When regaining consciousness in a hospital bed, it is customary to sit up, blink a few times, and say ‘Where am I?’, but this is a redundant question. You’re in a room full of nurses and medical equipment. It’s not like you’ve wandered in to Carpet Right, is it. With this in mind, my first question to a ward sister after waking in similar circumstances recently was a pragmatic ‘Is this a good hospital?’, quickly adding that I didn’t wish to seem ungrateful or anything. She replied that she hoped so, as I’d had a good accident, which was a decent response. By way of an encore, she treated me to a rundown of my injuries, featuring a more liberal use of the words ‘cracked’ ‘lacerated’ ‘detached’ and ‘dislocated’ than I would otherwise choose in a report about my physical well being, and phrases such as ‘potential nerve and organ damage’ which didn’t seem like much of a giggle either.

It’s also customary under such circumstances to pay tribute to NHS workers. I’m sure they were performing acts of selfless heroism somewhere thereabouts, but keeping up to date with my National Market Traders’ Federation insurance for all these years meant I was in a private room in a private ward, and 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 the theme tune to Where Eagles Dare gave me the fear for about three hours. The film itself is enjoyable if cartoonish, and Richard Burton is at his finest in it, but blasting the theme tune through your Skullcandy Smokin’ Buds in a silent hospital in an opiate haze is not something I would recommend, because it is the sound of every paranoid thought you have ever had marching up the corridor to get you. Two minutes in and I even became suspicious of a pot plant my old dear had bought me – a Princess Diana clematis, deemed appropriate because ‘she was also in a car crash’ – and thought the Gestapo might be hiding in it.

As it turned out, they weren’t. However, I was all but screaming by the time the opening credits had finished, at which point a consultant popped in for a quick hello-how-are-you. On his part, this was conducted in the lovely chuckle-y Norfolk accent usually confined to the more rural parts of the county – ‘Yer shoulder tendenz – thass all gorn, look hee hee, none of that bodypoppin’ fer yew haha, new charnce boi, kill yew that wud hee hee might as well put a gun to yer ‘ead and pull the triggar ha ha’ etc – which made me think that perhaps his main job was hiring out wherries on the Broads. At various points he produced x-rays with a hearty commentary about how close to permanent injury I had come, delivered in a back slapping ‘and then I said’ manner – ‘See that thar? Thass yer spinal cord see, ha ha. Millimetre to the left an’ you’d have no feelin’ in yer legs fer the rest o’ yer life look boi hee hee!’, and so forth. It was not an appropriate tone to use with someone convinced that his mother has been hiding Nazis in a pot plant, but his joyous countenance revived my spirits no end, and I was glad of it. In his estimation, I had missed ‘four different fatal injuries ha ha!’ but by some miracle had sustained no significant long term damage. In fact, the only issues were a cracked ribs, extensive lacerations, some spectacular bruising, damage to the coracoacromial ligament and supraspinatus, and torn adductor muscles in my left thigh. All this meant that for two weeks I could hardly walk, my arms flopping about uselessly like those on the mighty Dinosaurus Rex, but with bed rest and codeine everything would get better. I had lost track of time what with all the drugs and sleeping, but knew it was the Fourth of July when he delivered this happy news because Instagram was full of drunk American white girls in stars and stripes bikinis waving guns about, in the kind of independence celebration that presumably made Scotland think better of the idea.

That, then, was my road traffic horror smash. It was a narrow escape, but an escape nonetheless. Writing this eighteen days later, I am more chipper by the hour, and able to dress and undress myself unaided, to the relief of all concerned. I am reluctant to refer to the whole episode as an accident, because to do so implies that it was unavoidable, when it wasn’t – Andrew the taxi driver was looking at his phone while accelerating onto a roundabout at forty miles an hour, and didn’t see me until I surprised us both by hurtling towards him in mid air. It was entirely avoidable. If he 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 was officially discharged by the ward sister five days after admittance, nodding my way through the standard ‘take these twice a day and this with meals and don’t get run over by any more taxis’ advice, before being wheeled towards the car park, where ‘Anton’ was waiting to take me home.

‘There’s also this’ she said, holding up the whiteboard on the end of my bed as I was about to leave. This usually displays information such as name, date of birth, and blood group, but instead had ‘Very Small Penis’ written across it. ‘Anton’ had done this a couple of days previously while I was asleep, he proudly informed me over homecoming fish and chips later that evening.

‘I’m here for a transplant’ I said.

‘I wish you well with it’, said the ward sister, ‘I’m the one who cut you out of your clothes when you came in’.

Photards:

Main – Never mind your expressos and cappachinoids – Gold Blend is the best coffee. Ask for it by name next time you’re in Costa, raising your voice and demanding to see the manager if necessary. Goes nicely with co-dydramol, I have discovered. Note Battle of Hastings 950th anniversary commemorative mug in the background. I am absolutely the kind of person that pre-orders that sort of thing so they have it ready on the day.

Inset upper – Promotional material for Where Eagles Dare. The text alone would have had me bewildered and weeping during my hospital stay.

Inset lower – Pints of snakebite with gin and tonic chasers, through a straw. More fun than co-dydramol, let me tell you.
Tennyson Road Incident, Part I

Jul 18th, 2017

When you find yourself strapped to a trolley in the back of an ambulance, it’s important to remember that things are looking up. Yes, you’re in a bit of a pickle, but at least whatever put you in the ambulance in the first place has stopped happening, and this represents a considerable improvement in fortunes. In my case, what put me in an ambulance was unexpectedly plummeting through the windscreen of a taxi as the driver was ‘texting’ (we can assume this means checking Tinder) while cycling round an otherwise unremarkable East Anglian roundabout a couple of Sunday evenings ago. I then bounced back out, and bounced along the road for a while before coming to a halt in a surprised heap, having bounced through a red light, something I would never do on the bike but appeared to have done as an airborne pedestrian. Satisfied that I had come to a standstill, I rolled onto my back, and everything stopped. The world is never as still as at moments like these, because it is looking at you, looking into you, waiting to see what will happen next. I was quite curious myself.

What happened next was that the cabbie, who had a name badge informing me that his name was Andrew, asked if I was alright, and in return I asked if he was ‘fucking blind’, both reasonable questions under the circumstances. My right leg was the only limb in working order, and using this to lever myself to the side of the road, I made further enquiries as to ‘What kind of fucking ISIS bullshit was that?’ and ‘Where’s your fucking van, you fucking terrorist?’, because I had discovered that adrenaline and indignation make you quite gobby. His passengers were also remonstrating with him, and as they called sundry emergency services my guardian Rastafarian appeared. A long time ago in a London borough far far away en route to Greenwich Market, I slid off my bike on Peckham High Road, and was helped up, dusted off and jollied along by two passing Rastas. Rural Norfolk, however, is an unlikely place to chant down Babylon, and my baffled state was further enhanced when, at this latest moment of peril, a bona fide follower of Haile Selassi appeared from a passing car, asking me which football team I supported by way of determining possible head injuries.

‘West Ham’ I said.

‘Dey shit man. Try again’ he replied.

‘It’s that fucking stadium’, I protested through clenched teeth, because various parts of me were starting to sting a bit, ‘should’ve let Spurs have it. No use to us. Then you let Tomkins and O’Brien leave and unsettle the defence too close to the start of the season, then there’s that wanker Payet to deal with. Shove all that in a stadium with no atmosphere, change the club crest and what do you think’s going to happen?’

‘Is that why they’ve been shit for a hundred years, then? Could they see it coming or something?’ he said, and our conversation went back and forth in this manner for several minutes. He was an Arsenal fan, and by way of a riposte I mentioned that when you have a West Ham fan and an Arsenal fan in the same place, it’s usually the Arsenal fan that’s lying on the floor, severely injured. By now, Andrew the cabbie was being arrested and I was being placed in a neck and spine brace by an ambulance driver who looked like Jeremy Corbyn, adding to the overall surreal nature of the evening. This caused me to think that perhaps a middle-class ambulance had picked me up by mistake, and I prepared myself for quite a long discussion about, probably, Brexit. These fears increased when, on the way to the Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital, the first question asked by the ambulance lady was if I had any food allergies. My experience with glampers at Runton tells me that there are a lot of things middle class people can’t eat – nuts, gluten, meat, dairy, fish, stuff from Israel etc – as they are an evolutionary dead end, which is also why they don’t breed. Upon reflection, I think this was the moment I realised I was going to be in hospital for some time, so I just said that while I have no allergies as such, I don’t like tapas as it is annoying because there is never enough of anything. Attempting to wrestle the conversation back to that evening’s headline news, I asked if I was badly hurt. The ambulance lady said that if I was a cat, I’d certainly have lost one of my nine lives. I pointed out that if I was a cat I wouldn’t have been riding a bike in the first place, and she admitted I had a point.

‘I live in the countryside,’ I said, ‘if I’m injured, they’ll shoot me’.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘the good news is that the crunching sound you can hear is not your bones. It’s all the glass in your shirt and hair. That said, if I was to hazard a guess, I’d say you’ve broken several ribs and your left shoulder, hip and possibly knee.’

‘And if you were to hazard a lie?’ I replied.

‘I’d say you were right as rain,’ she smiled.

‘Well that’s good news, then’ I said, and fainted.

Postscript

This was a long post, so I have split it in half. Well, I say that, but I haven’t written the other half yet, so there is no way of knowing exactly how long it will eventually be. When I started this blog, I wanted to post every Monday and Thursday, in keeping with the traditional broadcast days of Blue Peter, and while it is plain to all that this has gone by the wayside somewhat, I’ll try and put the other half up on Thursday evening, and stick to the format henceforth.

Pictards:

Top – The Iron Lady, not the bike I was riding when I was mown down. I use this for charging about the countryside. These days it has khaki panniers, and is covered in mud, straw, and animal droppings.

Inset middle – a VW Passat, similar to the one that hit me, although this one still has a windscreen of course.

Inset lower – Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital, unrecognisable without the crowds of people smoking in the entrance.