Recently, a microlight aircraft chugged across the sky above our house. Usually, this is one of the well known and well liked local gentry flying home from Northrepps International Airport – a field with an elderly shed in it – after a few breakfast vodkas in the village. This particular microlight, however, was being piloted altogether more purposefully and, as it buzzed across the mid-morning blueness, I explained to Sid that this was his grandmother, who had died ten minutes earlier, flying to Heaven. He found this a satisfactory explanation of a difficult concept, jumping up and down shouting ‘Hello Grandma!’ and waving his arms at the tiny aircraft until, at length, it disappeared from view.
In the strange minutes since the call from a ward sister at the Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital informing me that she was ‘drawing her last breaths’, I had in turn called Richie, her son and, in effect, my brother in law. Again, unable to properly articulate the situation, I appraised it by explaining that ‘ninety minutes are up, mate – the referee is checking his watch and looking at the linesman’ which, while somewhat bewildering, was more sensitive than my initial response to the call from the ward sister, which was ‘Right. So how do we get her stuff?’. In any case, it got the message across in a format with which we were both comfortable, and I therefore regard it as successful communication.
Her final day at home was odd. I had popped round in the evening to find her battling her way up the stairs to the bathroom. I have never seen anyone look so old or, under the circumstances, so foul mouthed, exclaiming constantly that she was ‘fucking sick of this’. The previous day she had offered to make tea, 
whereupon I explained I could make it, drink it, wash the cup up and re-grout the tiling around the sink in the time it would take her to sprint to the kettle, whereupon she told me to fuck off. In retrospect, I feel that foul language became a great comfort towards the end of her life – probably more than I was, now I think of it. Her imminent decline was not unexpected; I had been doing my half of Joe and I’s IT job in her kitchen over Easter, and rushed into the living room at the sound of the choir from King’s College, Cambridge, which she had been watching on the telly, saying that I thought the angels had come for her. Although I cannot now remember, she probably told me to fuck off then, as well.
Eventually, she reached the bathroom. I retired to the kitchen. Everything went quiet. It remained so for quite a while. I found myself listening for tell-tale thumps indicating she had Elvis-ed it and expired on the lavvy. Some time passed. It occurred to me that this was not a dignified situation for either of us, but to my relief, she re-appeared as her daughter, my current girlfriend, arrived with Sid, and it was decided to call an ambulance. The front room was soon full of flourescent jackets and forthright bonhomie and, unable to bear the sight of house guests not eating, she asked us to get some melon out of the fridge for the ambulance crew. She passed away five days later in hospital, after a nice breakfast, while talking about her grandchildren. Sid later claimed it was because her ‘heart stopped when no one was looking’. In any case, it was not a bad end, as ends go.
Thus it was that the funeral was arranged. This was not without incident. For example, the day before we learned that the service was at one o’clock and not two o’clock as stated on the invitations. Making the best of a bad job, I rang the crematorium and arranged for anyone turning up late and missing the funeral as a result to be allowed in to the next one instead.* In the event, some sharp phone work by Kitty, an unmarried mother who is, in effect, my sister in law, managed to get everyone arranged nicely. The dress code for the occasion being fairly relaxed, she turned up rather brilliantly like someone attending a picnic in an early series of The Crown. ‘God, I’m not even wearing tights!’ she pointed out, prompting me to reply that ‘You’ll find that there comes a time / For taking your tights off’ in the manner of Making Your Mind Up, a 1981 Eurovision Song Contest winner for Bucks Fizz. I have no idea why I did this. Anyway. My contribution to proceedings was a reading of the lovely old 23rd Psalm, with its still waters and green pastures and rods and staffs and cups runneth-ing over. This had caused confusion when the Orders of Service were printed, as they thought we meant the Lord’s Prayer. It is a short psalm, and I 
considered Hey Jude-ing it by repeating the last few lines over and over as a kind of singalong to pad it out, but in the end I left it as it was, grateful that the printers hadn’t left me to style out Away In A Manger or something.
Sid charmed everyone at the after party by explaining that ‘Grandma isn’t here because she is dead now’. As we got stuck in to the buffet I enjoyed bellowing ‘IT WAS A LOVELY SERVICE, VERY QUIET’ at the top of my lungs to her neighbour Vera, who is all but deaf. I spent much of it near the oven, from which a distant cousin in law produced a seemingly endless steam of baked goods. ‘Why make one cake, when you can make three?’ she said to me. ‘So – are you here on your own, or what?’ I replied, grabbing a bottle of merlot and a couple of glasses.** My dog got all the cheese and chicken in her fridge freezer – it’s what he would have wanted – and, apart from the sadness and what not, everything was remarkably convivial. Joe and I cleared the remainder of her furniture some days later. My dog bit him as we manhandled a G plan sideboard into a Transit van. I like to think he is biting through his grief, and I distinctly remember Joe saying that a nasty puncture wound is a small price to pay for helping him with the healing process, and that all things considered he was glad it happened. There was the material flotsam of course – books of crossword puzzles from 1986, a receipt for a four course Chinese meal in Finchley that cost £6.45 in the mid Seventies, a half finished box of After Eights (which I finished). It struck me, as we emptied the place that all of us, in the end, have a life marked out by a pile of litter in a carrier bag. Ah well.
Someone had been born, and then they had lived, and then they had died, as per Cemetry Gates by the Smiths, who she always hated. In some ways, it’s like a huge waiter’s been lifted off our shoulders, although there was little for her in the way of actual distress. She saw as much of her family as she could, enjoyed the early summer sunshine while it lasted and tapped out at the last moment where the going could be reasonably described as good. This is all very nice of course but, nonetheless, I have lost a dear and trusted friend. Interestingly, she has since become the voice of my inner monologue, not unlike Ben Kenobi, but with the focus very much more on biscuits and being warm enough and, as everyone we love is only borrowed from God, I am quite happy about that.
Picters:
Main: The road to Northrepps. I walk the dog along here quite often.
Top inset: Bit further along. It’s all like this really.
Middle inset: Horse enclosure by the church in Northrepps village.
Lower inset: Unreturnable calls.
*This is not true.
**This is also not true, except for the baked goods.
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 
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 
was which and that none were Fireman Sam, turning to me during the acid freak out
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.
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’.
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.
The Runton Diaries 