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.
The constant mending of damaged fences should not be underestimated. The goat that urinated into its own mouth while Archie was 
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.
If Graham, a Romany gypsy, is anything to go by, the travelling community are very bad at travelling. I say this because, to my endless amusement, he is the only official permanent resident on the Estate. Not even Joe, who is on the Runton payroll, has an address or proof of identification, to the extent that he recently had to ask the 
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.
Post Script
For the record, I love the smell of paraffin. I’ve inherited this from my old dear, who often sniffed the paraffin heater in the ridiculous house in which I was born until she regularly made herself ‘quite dizzy’. If she’d turned it on now and again I might not have contracted tuberculosis in front of the Generation Game at eight months of age, but that’s east London in the Seventies for you. Still, before I met Graham, my only exposure to Romany gypsies was collecting Colgate lids for a poster of David Essex. In case you are unfamiliar, Essex was a notable British singer of the 1980s, and latterly President of British National Gypsy Council, whose autograph I later attained by chance at Upton Park when West Ham were home to Everton in 1984, and when I still had no idea who he was. The Colgate poster initiative had been intended to instill the concept of value in me. Instead, its only lasting impact has been that whenever I see a caravan, I taste spearmint. This is of course not true. However, when I hear Name of the Game by Abba I genuinely smell cardboard, as it was on the radio as I opened my presents one distant Christmas morning and clearly made an impression, as did tuberculosis, toothpaste – and however obliquely, David Essex, after all.
Photards:
Main – Mysterious crop circles near Runton Hall. What can it mean?
Top inset – I was stationary while taking this picter for six seconds tops – quite enough time for this convoy of wankers to form.
Middle inset – Joe delightedly interrupts a curry to break the news that we are to receive three new pygmy goats.
Lower inset – One of the rooms in the Old Servant’s Quarters rewired by ‘Anton’. Note goat bag, lower left.
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 
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 