Tag: glamping

Return of the Glampers

Aug 16th, 2021

I am at Runton and, while summer has been as fickle in Norfolk as anywhere else, I can finally see nothing but sunshine and greenery and warm unhurriedness from my position in the shade of the Restored Barn. There are at last things to do here, because as summer finally settles down, the sound of yoga mats, soya milk, pronouns and ukuleles from the South Field can only mean one thing: the middle class is here, and it wants to go glamping. In case you are unfamiliar, ‘glamping’ is a term for sitting in a tent with a rainbow flag in front of it, looking pleased with yourself. I have never understood the attraction of tents – an animal might tread on it at any moment, how do you relax? and so forth – but, that aside, their return is good news. It’s particularly good news if, like ‘Anton’ and myself, you hire out the tents which the Olivers and Lauras and their Noahs and Tillys glamp in, thus generating a tiny income for yourself. Also, it’s just nice to see people here for the first time since the Pestilence. I therefore welcome the return of the middle class who, in many ways, are just like normal people. Yes, they are physically and morally weaker, have no cultural identity of their own, are very unhappy and rarely breed because they are clearly an evolutionary dead end but, in my experience, they hire a lot of camping equipment. For that alone, they have no case to answer as far as I am concerned.

I’ve never had a heart attack, which is something. However, while wandering around the Estate just prior to re-opening I thought I could be having one when I suddenly got some nasty cramping in both legs. Having never experienced this before, I assumed it was blood clots crawling up my arterial system to kill me, but decided that there was no point making a fuss, as there was no one around and no phone signal to call anyone with, so I put my Spotify Christmas carol playlist on in case I was about to meet God and hoped for the best. In turn, this meant that I was able to get away from my audio book, Lancaster and York by Alison Weir, an account of the Wars of the Roses narrated by the same woman who does the announcements on the Docklands Light Railway, compromising the otherwise faultless literary style. At one point, for example, I thought the catastrophic ineffectiveness of the child king Henry VI was caused by a signal failure at Limehouse, when it wasn’t at all – it was caused by dynastic squabbling between leading landowning families in fifteenth century England, which is a very different thing. I had my dog with me and, stumping painfully across land nominally loyal to York during the conflict but more interested in pursuing an ancient feud with the de la Pole family in Suffolk, I reflected that if anyone was going to eat my corpse, it was only fair he had first go. Also, ‘de la Pole’ sounds like amiable Nineties jazz-rap hip-hoppers De La Soul, who would struggle to win a feud against the Clangers. I wondered briefly if that might be my last thought on earth and, if so, how history would remember me.

Archie is a semi working dog, well capable of doing his job of pursuing small game such as rabbits and hares across open land until they collapse, then standing over them with the same expression as a glamper with a rainbow flag until his owner turns up. Otherwise, he is very enthusiastic about being a dog and spends most of his leisure time going happy delighted bananas around anyone he can find. This sounds lovely, but he is no lap dog and will nip any unfamiliar limbs that are unexpectedly shoved at him. Not hard or viciously, but enough for me to keep him under close control around new people and not, for example, to let him hurtle at thirty miles an hour towards a small family of unexpected glamping outliers. To my considerable dismay, he had locked onto a small girl of about six. She remained calm and relaxed, instead of shrieking, trying to shoo him off with her arms or running away, which is the standard middle class response to unfamiliar dogs or, now I come to think of it, working class people. Archie stopped. The little girl stopped. They regarded each other, him looking down and her looking up. She shoved her hand into his face and stroked all of it, including his teeth and eyeballs. He was unfussed. I jogged closer, relieved that he wasn’t about to cause the whole estate to be closed down by savaging an infant. Perhaps, if middle class people can learn to get along with dogs, they can one day learn to get along with the rest of us? Just a thought. Anyway, dizzy with relief, I exchanged ‘Hellos’ and ‘Well, he’s never done that before’s with the family, who were enchanted with him. I didn’t want to trouble anyone by mentioning that I might be having a heart attack in my legs, so I let it go, and the girl pointed at me and said loudly ‘Daddy, that man’s dog is starving’, signalling the end of the encounter. I later learned they had been looking at Becka’s Forest School, a special place where children who are fucking intolerable go to collect pine cones in a shoe box. She seemed unsuited to it if you ask me.

And thus, life returned to the Runton Estate, the small but undeniably likeable rural shagging retreat for minor Victorian aristocracy in deepest East Anglia. Our conspiracy theorists have gone (‘…or have they?’, as I like to say every time this is mentioned, to annoy Joe) but, although I may have un-Clingfilmed my last sandwich buffet for the Flat Earth Society, yoga, both deaf and outdoor, are fully booked. We may have a bride-less bridal suite in the Old Servants’ Quarters, horseless stables by German Field and allotments full of runner beans and courgettes that everyone hates but I have survived not having a heart attack and we are, if nothing else, still here. Chin up, everyone!

Public Service Announcement: I have no idea what the thing with my legs was, cramp of some kind I should think. I find I get it if I’ve not ridden my bike for a few days. ‘Severe, unexplained pain is never normally something to worry about’, as the old saying goes.

Picters:

Main: Cricket at Cromer. Always a lark.

Top inset: Wheat being harvested prior to being turned into things middle class people probably won’t be able to digest.

Middle inset: Wattle-and-daub interior of the walls in my son’s room.

Lower inset: Archie, a naturally sleek and idiotic, but not starving, dog.
The Changing Of The Seasons

Oct 17th, 2018

At Runton, a season has turned. The horizon, for so long an indistinct line between two fierce blocks of haze, now just looks big and sad. Frizbees no longer land in the petting zoo to be eaten by Angora goats, their glamping hurlers elsewhere for a gluten free winter of self-loathing. The restored barn is silent, alfresco deaf yoga (admittedly pretty quiet at the best of times) and Flat Earth Society lectures done with. The clattering of forest school children in Leicester City shirts is an echo in the gathering leaves; they are in the East Midlands for Tangfastic breakfasts till April. Sevastopol, the Runton peacock, who may or may not be the same peacock they remember from two years ago who, in turn, may or may not or may have been fatally savaged by my dog one irate September morning in 2016, is in his winter lodgings. The paths through the woods are quieter, silhouettes are sharper, sound carries heavier across damp autumn fields, and this morning ‘Anton’ complained that he could ‘feel winter in his tits’. Summer has gone, and the year is dozing off.

Dozing, but not yet asleep. For example, Joe recently celebrated ten years of marriage by getting into a fight at a wedding reception. Well, not a fight exactly, but some to-ing and fro-ing at the end of the evening when six of the two hundred guests produced a sound system and announced they were having a rave with it. Joe explained that we don’t have a licence for that and that no one, including the bridegroom, had mentioned anything that would’ve enabled us to sort something out. The chief would-be raver argued that the bridengroom had paid ‘thirty

grand for this’. Joe pointed out that he hadn’t paid him thirty grand, as he was working for free. It’s difficult to know how you can spend thirty grand in a series of fields held together by crumbling mid-Victorian buildings, especially considering that Joe, ‘Anton’ and I bought a bit of it three weeks ago – the stable block and yard where Becka’s Screaming Car is – for seven hundred quid*. For thirty grand the bridengroom could probably have bought all of East Anglia but spent it on, among other things, stilt walkers, jugglers on unicycles, jugglers not on unicycles, a fish and chip van, an ice cream vendor on a bike, and transforming the vacant forest school dormitory into a replica of the pub in Lord of the Rings. Joe was right, though. He was working for free, as the money went straight to the shape shifting Freemasons of the Board of Trustees. ‘Anton’ and I, in attendance as general helpers-out, were also working gratis, although we did liberate a lot of food and booze in a process I refer to as Pre-ganism. Whereas Freeganism involves procuring food that has been abandoned, my method involves procuring food before the owners notice it has gone: Pre-ganism.

On no less than three separate occasions people have made a concerted effort to actually kill Joe, so a bit of handbags with some Alisdairs was unlikely to find him out of his depth. Also, while physical violence is both exciting and effective, it has to be kept as an option of last resort because of civilisation, so ‘Anton’ and I decided against steaming in to the ravers and opted for a more conciliatory approach. I suggested that we ‘invent a way / through ideas and play’ in accordance with the theme tune to Bitz and Bob, still in my head after watching it fourteen hours earlier with Nid. At that moment, however, my judgement was clouded when I took a bite of wedding cake to discover that it was made of cheese instead of wedding cake. This made me angry and emotional, so I was up for whatever, really.

With Joe being firm but diplomatic with people who ‘Anton’ and I were keen to skittle about all over the place, Graham appeared. It is rare that his capacity as rustic Romany beastmaster overlaps with ‘Anton’ and I’s capacity as clueless Cockney hangers-on, but it was a big wedding and he was attracted by food he didn’t have to shoot. Sharing my dismay at the cheese wedding cake – ‘How’re you supposed to eat it? In a baked potato with fucking beans?’ – he suggested that we remove the engine from the chief protagonist’s Range Rover Sport overnight for a larf. You may recall that it was once common practice for Graham’s kids to forcibly sell re-treaded tyres to problematic glampers, so this is not as outlandish as it sounds. After working hard to de-wanker the place, this is no longer part of the judicial process, which is a shame because foul mouthed Romany pre-teens aggressively selling retreaded tyres to a terrified Josh is a sight to behold. Anyway. I asked Graham if he could replace the engine with one from a washing machine for a further giggle, and incredibly this is actually possible. In the event, of course, no one had the engine in their Range Rover Sport replaced with anything, despite my earnest desire to commiserate with the owner the next morning by pointing out that although a car with a washing machine engine might not be very powerful, you could still take it for a spin. The argument fizzled out, and everyone went to bed.

And with that, summer ended. I spent less time at Runton than I would like, what with temporarily moving considerably further away while the ceilings in my house are prevented from falling in, and have done little of note other than walk the dog and look after Nid, who can’t attend his usual nursery for the duration. Thoughts now turn to how those of us comprising the Runton Estate management team will survive the winter. I have my bicycle barbering, although cycling about rural East Anglia in freezing mist to cut pensioners’ hair at a fiver a pop is not all larfs and I am in any case thirty miles from my modest client base. Still, among the other things that happened in the latter half of summer were that Joe got certification to drive explosive materials in a van, and I got a shotgun licence. By again following the advice of Bitz and Bob and combining these with ideas and play, we should be able to come up with something.

*This is first part of the Grand Renovation Plan, whereby we buy chunks of the Estate, restore them, and sell them back to the Trustees at an agreed price instead of getting everything done with a Lottery grant.
Twitter
Facebook

Photards:

Main: Forest School dormitories, converted to look like the pub in Lord of the Rings for the wedding in question.

Top inset: A little plastic man I found gamely hanging on to part of a hedge one day.

Inset middle: Swans.

Inset lower: A horse standing next to his little car. He drove in to have new shoes put on by a blacksmith for a job interview the following week.
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.

Twitter

Facebook

*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.
Feeding The Four Hundred

Nov 16th, 2017

It is early on a November morning, and the Runton Estate lies sullen under silver mist. In the East Field, Archibald al-Fantastique is thrashing through the soaking grass in pursuit of mice. They turn too sharply and accelerate too quickly to be in danger of anything other than inconvenience but, elsewhere, other wildlife is less fortunate. I first heard gunfire as a schoolboy outside the Bedford Park Hotel in Streatham, where it made sense. Here, it drifts from German Field where Graham is shooting at something that, given the poor visibility, is either very large, or which he is very close. For a moment, it occurs to me that he might be shooting himself, and I mention this to ‘Anton’, who emerges from the wet air pushing a surveyor’s wheel with which he has been measuring the East Field, now sporting a smart perimeter fence installed by Joe. By now, Graham has fired twenty or thirty shots, and if this is indeed a suicide attempt he will be in a sorry state. ‘Anton’ points out that Graham is a professional marksman and ‘would be able to Cobain himself straight off’. He is right. Archie’s head appears above the grass. Seconds later he cannonballs after us with what I estimate to be seventeen feet of tongue flapping delightedly behind him, and we leave the field. In violation of the Countryside Code, which states that you should always leave gates open to let the air circulate, I shut this one behind us and we wander off to Joe and Becka’s yurt for tea and toast with their numerous children. It is not yet dawn. I don’t know why we are up so early. God I hate the countryside.

We needed to measure the East Field to see how many Bellwether glamping tents we can fit into it next spring. About thirty, as it goes, raising our overall capacity to eighty, potentially housing four hundred glampers at a time. That amount of middle class people could have as many as three thousand food intolerences and gender issues between them, as well as having to deal with the Hampstead Holocaust, ie Brexit, so they need a lot of managing. That said, since ‘Anton’ and I commandeered the Runton glamping operation, I have become fond of them, and miss their silly white nonsense tremendously. Feeding them is tricky though, and this is main reason I want to promote self-sufficient glamping. Truthfully, it’s the only option that can be made to work, practically speaking, as I have stated in the Smith Plan for Runton, due to go before the Trustees in March. As you may recall, getting glampers to hunt their own rabbits with Graham’s dogs was briefly considered but rejected as insane; however, their gender-neutral children could pick veg from German Field, under Becka’s supervision. There is nowhere near enough veg for everyone, obviously, but we can always nip in in the middle of the night and plant more from Morrissons. Splendid.

Another feeding alternative is letting them do summer roasts in the pizza ovens, even though summer roasts are a bit suspect. For a start, they are based upon cous cous, which I refuse to eat, along with pesto, kale, quinoa or anything else from Morrisson’s ‘Food for Wankers’ aisle. This may well be its own form of food intolerance, but I’m just not eating it and there it is. Until recently, avocado was on this list, but after trying it inadvertently I have grown rather partial, and after all there is guacamole to consider. My cousin Helen and I were reminiscing recently about a far-off family gathering where avocado was served as a starter for the adults, probably with chips and Carling Black Label. I think the rest of us had Chewits. This was followed by a forgotten main course and a real coconut smashed open with a hatchet in the back garden by Uncle Roy for pudding, and with which I was disappointed. How and why this was considered fun is entirely beyond me, but we both swear that it was all to celebrate that evening’s screening of the Incredible Hulk, starring Lou Ferrigno. Yes, it seems bizarre to me too, but we both independently recalled it, so it I can’t just be some story from the Blitz that we’ve mis-remembered as happening to ourselves. Whatever the occasion, it was clearly a fancy evening, and I shall ask Helen, who took to weightlifting and is now officially the strongest woman in Colchester*, for further info the next time I see her.

Anyway. The issue of feeding the glampers was discussed among a veritable tea-and-toast-athon prepared with various degrees of expertise by Joe and Becka’s numerous children in their cosy Iron Age house. At least three had Marmite, presumably as a punishment for poor behaviour. After a while Graham and his eldest daughter, who recently celebrated her seventh birthday, joined the cheery rural scene. When questioned, he announced that he had been ‘generally shooting things’ earlier, as his daughter cast aside an endearing pair of child’s binoculars made in the traditional playgroup manner by Sellotaping two old toilet rolls together, describing them as ‘fucking useless’. I alone refused tea and toast, and instead had Nescafe Gold Blend from my flask and a bowl of double cream with peanut butter in it, because I am on a low carb diet and toast might make me fat. Thus fortified, we awaited the onset of winter.

*this is a genuine fact. She’s holding up the sky above Essex.

Twitter

Facebook

Photards:

Main: Archibald al-Fantastique on a midsummer beach at dawn, north Norfolk coast.

Inset top: The bike I cycled through the Confederacy on. It’s a 2001 Specialised Hardrock A1 Comp, a widely-available mid-range mountain bike, and it did a fine job. Note Alabama sticker, purchased from a petrol station in Childersburg, after riding for two horrifying days through Talladega National Park. A tradition was born with this – all my subsequent bikes have incorporated a reference to one or other of the states I unwisely traversed.

Inset middle: Leadenhall Market, London EC1. I always enjoyed trading here on a Friday afternoon. It was a short, easy day – arrive around ten and be away by three – and made a nice change of pace from Camden or Greenwich.

Inset lower: tiny Stonehenge build by prehistoric midgets, Runton Hall estate.
Enter the Goat Bag Man

Jul 24th, 2017

It is unusual for visitors to get far into the Runton Estate without attracting the attention of Graham’s children, who patrol the grounds on their bikes with the territorial ferocity of a pack of wolverines. Last Friday, as I sat in a deckchair by the Restored Barn, his youngest daughter rocketed past me on her small pink bike, stabilisers creating a mini whirlwind of dry earth behind her. She was hurtling into the rising summer haze between the Fallow Field and the untroubled East Anglian sky, from which a figure was emerging. It was a man in a Panama hat, and I had been expecting him. The tiny wolverine circled him as he approached.

As my deckchair and I fell into her orbit, she jumped off her bike, ran up to me, and with the infinite earnestness of a six year old demanded ‘Who the fuck is that and why the fuck does he smell of paraffin?’

*

The recuperative process, such as the one I am working through in the wake of the Tennyson Road Incident, is annoying for the self-employed. This is especially true at Runton, when earnings are usually linked to physical labour which remains arduous and tiresome no matter how half-heartedly I go about it. For me and ‘Anton’, this is mainly putting up, taking down and hefting about tents as part of our glamping hire enterprise, as well as tinkering with general restoration work around the estate. Joe tends to orchestrate much of this, as he is the only one of us 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.

Major fires at Camden Market occur so often that the council should stop putting them out and use the place as street lighting instead. In 2008’s Great Fire of Camden, myself, Joe and the Goat Bag Man were fortunate that the prevailing wind blew the flames across the High Street away from our Lock Market stalls and towards the old Canal Market, destroying that instead. There was still tragedy enough: the old Canal Market entrance, from which the letter ‘C’ was removed so many times that it once appeared in the Rough Guide to London as the Anal Market, was lost forever, as was the 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 10^th 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.

Emerging from the Barn with a roll of insulating cable under his arm, ‘Anton’ all but jumped on the Goat Bag Man, desperate to see if he still smelled of the Northern Line, joined in quick succession by Joe and myself. Incidentally, the aroma of paraffin comes from the process by which goat leather bags are waterproofed, ie immersion in gallons of the stuff. 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 Chas and Dave tunes on a piano in the Old Servant’s Quarters, prompting a rather rowdy singalong, and I discovered that drinking heavily on top of several hundred milligrams of daily codeine gets you very tipsy indeed. I decided to stop codeine the next morning. It works as painkiller, but it’s nasty and I’d rather save it for lifting weights when I am fully healed.

For the time being, the Goat Bag Man will take care of the glamping tents with ‘Anton’, popping back to London to tend his Camden business at prudent intervals. I will lounge about formulating a strategy regarding which groups of people are too much trouble to have at Runton in the future, and sort out some kind of plan with Joe that he can place in front of the Trustees in due course. I have already commenced work. It looks like curtains for the Bikram yoga lady and demands for open fires burning in the middle of her Bikram yoga room 24hrs a day. Even if this was possible, it would be potentially disastrous: the Runton Estate is heavily wooded. Imagine the situation if a Bikram yoga fire got out of control in Autumn. Some bunch of white girls escaping through the trees could compromise an orderly evacuation by stopping to take pictures of their shoes among the fallen leaves – a risk I am simply not prepared to take. Arrivederci, stupid Bikram yoga lady.

Photards:

Main: Camden Market with its evening lights on.

Upper inset: A goat bag. Nice bit of stuff, I’ve had loads of them.

Middle inset: The Goat Bag Man (left) and myself at the Duke of Wellington, a couple of years ago.

Lower inset: The goat bag stall in the East Yard, Camden Lock Market. Customer being assured that the smell of paraffin fades after a couple of decades.