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.
*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.
When it comes to a no-nonsense accompaniment to tea, halfway between a cake and a biscuit, it’s a scone you’re after. There are scones, and there are scones, but no-one makes scones like an Anglican, because an Anglican scone is a timeless scone, steadfast, trustworthy and British. In case you are unfamiliar, Anglicans are baby boomers for whom the Sixties were too noisy, and they live in a kind, optimistic world of raffle tickets, tea cosies and Rich Tea biscuits. Young Anglicans usually have the traditional old testament names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, George and Ringo. They drink squash and colour things in until they stop being seven and, overnight, become seventy three, using phrases such as ‘…pardon my French’ to excuse Anglican swearwords like ‘blast’ and ‘damn’, and ‘…it’s gone a bit dark over Bill’s mother’s’ to warn of oncoming rain. Anglicans have a particular way of buying scones, biscuits and tea from each other in places such as Itteringham parish hall, where I met my old dear yesterday. It involves saying things like ‘…and four makes twelve’, ‘…I’ve got the seventeen’, and ‘…eighty three, ninety three, ninety eight and two’s a pound’ when counting change, and is curiously civilised. All in all, Anglicanism is like a Masonic code, if the purpose of Freemasonry was to make sure that everyone had a nice sit down of an afternoon. They are a lovely bunch.
These are exciting times for my old dear. For a start, there is a royal wedding to get her teeth into. We are both delighted with the Markle girl, who seems a good sort and has a name that rhymes with Sparkle, like a real princess. I imagine we’ll watch the ceremony on her sofa with a union jack across our knees, as is customary on such occasions. She has also been asked to lead the choir at her local church, which represents something of a coup because when she first arrived in East Anglia, two years after me, her proposals for streamlining the Wednesday morning Prayer ‘n’ Praise marked her out as ‘something of a flying cannon’. It is a progressive church, ‘with all the equipment for Catholics’, and she is fond of it. She lives in one of the small and remote villages on the north Norfolk coast, closer to the King’s Lynn end than the small and remote village where I live, which is so small and remote that they were still burning Catholics on public holidays until 2004, equipment or not. She is, if anything, even more suspicious of the countryside than I am, attributing the death of her cat, who I hated, to the ‘change of air’. Renal failure at nineteen was no more than veterinary superstition – Norfolk is so guilty it might as well cackle about the place in a mask and cape. Slough, her former home, is so maligned that I once carried off a joke about it during a funeral eulogy in the town’s crematorium, but my old dear actively misses it. The death of the cat was traumatic – certainly more traumatic than that of her husband, which she announced to me over the phone with an astonished ‘You’ll never guess what – your father’s dropped dead’, although as it was his eulogy I carried off the Slough joke in, I can hardly claim to be a paragon of sensitivity, myself.
arrival, he parked next to the Screaming Car, from which Becka emerged looking blissful, having been pounding her fists on the steering wheel for, by the look of things, about fourteen minutes. In far off days, I would treat my old dear to shandy at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1, and Vinny the Landlord would ban swearing among the villainy therein for the duration of her visit. At Runton, Graham echoed this tradition by keeping his children in their caravan until she went home. This says something about my old dear’s overall bearing, a mix of charming old lady and forgotten Kray sister, rather than her as someone fazed by unruliness – indeed, she once demonstrated a disdain for authority by punching someone to the floor, even though he was a fireman, in a fireman’s uniform. Nonetheless, ‘Anton’ respectfully stopped listening to Piss Whores In Training when she came to inspect the Old Servant’s Quarters, where he has all but finished the rewiring. This marks the culmination of an impressive eight months of work, especially considering he was only a qualified electrician for the last three weeks of it, and means that in addition to Flat Earthers and so forth, we might one day be able to have people who believe in normal things staying there. Imagine that.
Well, not entirely in silence. As the splintering yawn of ‘Anton’ crow-barring floorboards mingles with the ambient burble from outside, I declare the quickest way from Euston Square to Cally Road to be up Euston Road, past King’s Cross, left onto York Way, through the lights, and over Regent’s Canal. In return, ‘Anton’ points out that to avoid the Holborn Viaduct on the way to Hatton Garden you need to pick up Ave Maria Lane from High Holborn, straight off Cheapside. Since jointly working on the Old Servant’s Quarters we have found ourselves doing this sort of thing often, in what I believe to be an abstract expression of homesickness, as even the names of streets in that unhappy city chime in our grubby Cockney chimney sweep ear flaps. Also, we know more London street names than most, because we are former Knowledge Boys***, an apprenticeship we hampered somewhat by leaving town three years into the projected six year timescale for full Knowledge absorbtion. Incidentally, when you see someone on a moped in London with a clipboard on the handlebars, that’s a Knowledge Boy putting some work in. Myself, I was a cycling Knowledge Boy, zipping hither and yon amid the traffic with directions flapping from my handlebars on cardboard luggage labels. It’s an enjoyable way to earn your spurs. I’d love to go back and finish it; sadly, rural East Anglia is a long way from Charing Cross – when you see the distance to London on road signs, the numbers are in light years – and I fear it may be some time yet.
Apart from that, the only obstacle to my becoming a licensed taxi driver is the fact that I cannot legally drive. This is due to a common ocular complaint, keratoconus, which renders my vision atrocious. It’s a condition, rather than a disability, so we don’t get our own Olympics like those look-at-me landmine people. Then again we’d wander in front of the hundred metres by mistake and cause a pile up, so perhaps it’s for the best. In any case, you can’t keep a good man down, so I fight adversity by driving illegally instead. Concerned road users may rest assured that I have never driven on the public highway, limiting myself instead to private roads such as those surrounding the Runton Estate, teeming with dead wildlife mown down by Joe, Becka and delivery vehicles of every description. It was briefly suggested that instead of letting glampers hunt their own food with Graham’s dogs 
There are two forms of measurement in Britain: imperial and metric, depending upon what you’re trying to measure. For example, imperial measurements, such as ounces and inches, are used for fun things like drugs and cocks. Metric milligrams are for calculating legally incriminating blood-alcohol levels and such like. Horses, being undeniably hilarious, fall squarely into the imperial system, and are measured from ground to shoulder in imperial units known as hands. For example, a Shetland pony, such as the little bastard that lives in the petting zoo at Runton, is ten hands high. Like everything in the petting zoo, he does nothing other than destroy fencing and lark about, and is richly deserving of measurement in stroppy old centimetres like a hub cab or lamp post. We have discussed petting zoos before, and I once again urge you never, ever, to have one. It’s worse than having children. You can put children up for adoption if you decide it’s not really for you, but once you have a petting zoo, you’re stuck with it.
to a horse, silently weeping, as it moved along at 1 mph. I can therefore confidently claim to have seen a horse, but genuine horsemanship is difficult to bluff, especially when confronted with all the stirrups and saddles and swishing and sheer horsiness of what an actual horse is. They are massive, they keep fidgeting, and our ancestors must have been pretty desperate to get somewhere slightly further away a little bit more quickly than usual to domesticate them in the first place. I asked if they could blue screen the shot and cgi Conkers in later, but it was already evident that I cannot do a decent American accent in any case, with my line – ‘Sir, you are to maintain your fire and hold fast your ground. General Meade will send reinforcements presently’ – sounding as if Worzel Gummidge was saying it, thus detracting from the gravitas of the scene. I looked at ‘Anton’, watching proceedings from an upstairs window of the Old Servant’s Quarters, but to no avail. He is black, and not allowed to ride horses. The debacle bought a snort of amusement from Joe, which I thought was a bit fucking rich considering the much-vaunted ‘affinity with animals’ that secured him the only paid employment on the Runton Hall Estate stems from nothing more than being born next to White City greyhound stadium.
Despite this, and unlike the original glampers at Runton for whom threats of this nature were commonplace, everyone likes the key grips, gaffers, boom mike holders and so forth and, accordingly, Joe and/or Graham mediate such exchanges. The crew are indeed having a party for those of us constituting the staff at Runton, and usually Joe’s children, being as numerous as Graham’s are profane, would act as tiny, endearing waiting staff on such occasions. This time, however, Graham’s team of infant extortionists will also help, sharing in the generous whip round the crew have promised to have for us. Good mediation, if you ask me. It would be poor form to name the film, so discretion must prevail. That said, I will exclusively reveal that it features the grand-daughter of a very famous Hollywood star indeed, and some bloke who has a great aunt in common with Olive from On The Buses. Box office potential was adroitly summed up by Graham’s son, who pointed out that ‘You could sell their autographs on eBay if anyone knew who they fucking were’.
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.
con 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.
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 Runton Diaries 