Tag: Joe

Preparing the Ground

Jun 22nd, 2017

There’s something weird about nine year olds eating, and really enjoying, salad, and we get a lot of it among the glamper children at Runton Hall. They know all about kale and cous cous and everything, and could only get more uptight and serious if they paused mid-lettuce to hand you a leaflet about prostate cancer. This is not to say that I don’t understand the importance of good eating habits among children, of course. In the countryside this is especially important, as the fat are at a disadvantage, presenting a larger target for insects and unable to climb over stuff without getting puffed out and splitting their trousers and what not. I’m afraid the one-child-per-classroom carefree chubster of decades past is no longer a beloved staple of the British educational experience. No, the modern obese child is likely to be angry, sullen, full of antidepressants and with little desire for being unable to climb ropes in the gym for the merriment of all, or finishing fourteen seconds after everyone else in the sports day hundred metres, weeping. The world has turned, and we are poorer for it.

Joe and I discussed the declining jolliness of fat children, and the building of pizza ovens for this weekend’s wedding party, as we prepared the Fallow Field for the two hundred guests who will be camping in it. The Fallow Field is a lambing enclosure for much of the year – the process by which animals are born is appalling beyond description and I shall not trouble you with it. Suffice to say, it’s easy to understand why city dwellers, cleverer and more physically attractive than rural folk, built walls around themselves as soon as the option became available, and distanced themselves from this and the other routine horrors of country life. Our brain storming was not assisted by my having to persuade Saturday Night Feverishness, an East Anglian seventies tribute band, to play at the reception for the bride by yelling into a Galaxy 8* while herding an uncooperative Sevastopol into his Summer Palace as Archie and one of Graham’s dogs, a black whippet called Lucy, chased each other around the field at forty miles an hour. The booking of Saturday Night Feverishness stretches the Bollywood theme of the weekend yet further, but I am assured by the groom it will be greatly appreciated as long as they black up**.

Along with sleeping and washing, eating is one of the main things it is much harder to do outdoors than in. Getting the pizza ovens built was proving to be a pain – it’s not difficult, basically just piling stuff on top 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.

Fortunately, the solution to the oven issue was provided by Becka, who wandered into view as I all but shoulder charged Sevastopol from the Fallow Field, looking refreshed after twenty minutes in the Screaming Car. I am writing this on Wednesday 21^st June, the summer solstice. In case you are unfamiliar, the summer solstice is a special little holiday for insufferable people, which involves staying up late and listening to Elbow, and could well have been invented by the parents of people who are usually in Victoria Park. As it turns out, it can also be an excuse to get Becka’s Forest School kids to build the pizza ovens under her guidance, in order to celebrate the midsummer union of nature’s bounty and all that and, as an encore, stock the freezers in the outbuilding next to the clearing where the school groups eat with wholesome organic things to cheer up the finished pizzas when they arrive. I am pleased to report that curious glamping children joined in to great effect, first in ones and twos and then in convoy, bringing onions and such from the German Field allotments in little wheelbarrows, while Archie and Lucy rocketed hither and yon to the delight of all.

It was, in truth, a lovely scene to behold. It’s not that the glamping children and Forest 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.

*I insist upon cutting edge phoneware, even though there is next to no wifi around most of the estate. It is one of my few remaining links with the developed world.

**NB this is untrue.

***I assume this is a reference to the Josef Fritzl case.

Post Script

Not entirely for free, as it turns out. There was no way we were going to fire up the ovens and cook stuff, so we called Pizza Hut in Norwich and arranged for £150’s worth of stuff to be sent to the phone box on the B1110 marking the furthest point they were prepared to deliver, and where ‘Anton’ was waiting to drive it to the hungry workers. I had gone home by the time they finished eating, but I should imagine that the onslaught of artificial colours and flavouring chilled the Forest School Kids out no end, while the glamping children yelling deliriously for several hours. Adapt or die, middle class people! Anyway, what is the countryside if not a vast green salad, and I’m sure they were glad of the change.

Photards: top – Be warned – if someone from the country says they’ll ‘Meet you at the White Horse’, they don’t necessarily mean a pub.

Top inset – transporting eating paraphernalia from one field to another.

Lower inset – Joe burning incriminating evidence of some kind.
The Forest School Kids

May 17th, 2017

We as a species are perhaps a generation away from finally breaking nature’s ability to resist us. Victory is that close. The final push surely starts by instilling a disdain for the outdoors in our children, and it therefore grieves me to see kids as young as five at the Forest School run by Becca. Rope bridges, tyres (mysteriously sold to us by Graham’s oldest daughter, who is twelve) hanging from trees, leaves being identified and drawn in little books, sheep being stroked – all this and more goes on among the conifer groves of Runton. Awful. I can only assume that those children are immediately taken into care when they get home – and rightly so.

For all that, the Forest School is, after the glampers, Runton Hall’s biggest source of income, and as Becca slowly chews single slices of toast while silently crying in the kitchen (which is how women who have had children prefer to eat) I am always intrigued as to what she will think of next. For example, until recently rain meant herding the Forest School kids into a large restored barn acting as everything from an actual barn to a debating chamber for the mental and getting them to draw ducks with crayons, or whatever children do when it’s raining out. This has since changed, because on the other side of the estate near German Field there is a Victorian greenhouse in need of restoration, and in keeping with the overall nineteenth century vibe, Becca gets the children to do it by issuing them with a Brillo pad each and a section of ironwork that last saw elbow grease in 1861. The aim is to return the greenhouse to a bona fide growing environment, then produce medicinal plants for the benefit of a particular pharmaceutical company who consider that forcing plant species alien to the northern hemisphere to grow in rural East Anglia is natural and organic. This is not likely to happen for a year or two – there’s a lot of Brillo pad work needed first – and Joe and Becca will be looking after the greenhouse when it eventually starts producing stuff. Not me, though. I am also a species alien to rural East Anglia, so fuck that.

You may recall that we touched upon the disappearance of Sevastopol the peacock last time. It is the Forest School children who would be most upset if he had indeed been savaged by my dog, because although he was extremely aggressive and something of a piss-taker who on four occasions attacked my dog for no reason whatsoever, he was much loved by them once they got their head around what he actually was. I say this because on more than one occasion, I had the following conversation:

‘Look! There’s Sevastopol! He’s a peacock!’

‘A penguin?’

‘No, a peacock’

‘Like in the Arctic?’

‘No, a peacock. He normally lives in India’

‘I saw a film about penguins at my school’

‘Yes, but Sevastopol is a peacock, do you see?’

‘What’s a peacock?’

…and so forth. Actually, the Forest School kids, bussed out from the grimmer parts of major cities to see the countryside, are endearing, and it is difficult not to take a shine to them. Also, they are far less noisy than their glamping counterparts, don’t have the food intolerances of middle class children, and bring packed lunches consisting of chocolate mini rolls and bags of Haribo Tangfastics. When you’ve had outraged glamper offspring demanding olives and halloumi it’s nice to see kids who just want to eat sweets all day. No child should prefer hummus to baked beans. We live in troubled times.

Anyway. I assumed my dog was a lurcher when Graham gave him to me. In case you are unfamiliar, a lurcher is a cross between a sight hound and a herding dog, with the most common being a greyhound/collie mix, although many variations abound. Lurchers are poachers’ dogs, and while Graham is a pest controller rather than a poacher, he has four others of this kind. I had originally wanted to name him Help Help Call The Police, to add interest when calling him back off the lead, but after consideration I changed this to Mr Fantastic. However, he had already been dubbed Archie by Graham’s kids, so his name became Mr Archibald Fantastic, only to encounter further complication when it transpired that he was a saluki, or Persian hunting dog, and therefore a Muslim rather than the Roman Catholic I had originally assumed. I changed his name again to Archibald al Fantastique to honour his Persian roots, and by way of thanking me, he repeatedly stole butter and hid it in the laundry basket. He also destroyed several pairs of sunglasses and drank a quantity of contact lens solution, although I suppose this is to be expected with a sight hound. This behaviour does not make a peacock killer though. Salukis are exceptionally sweet natured dogs, (unless you are running very fast away from them, like a desert hare or antelope, in which case they will chase you until your respiratory system collapses) and a peacock simply doesn’t move quick enough to trigger this sort of response. That said, if it’s adorable for some hippy’s cat to dismember every duckling Runton Hall has ever seen, it’s adorable for a frightened dog to defend itself against a violent peacock, regardless of his iridescent plumage and shiny blue face. While the case remains open, it is most likely that Sevastopol met his end due to the attentions of a fox. In case you are unfamiliar, a fox is the product of a dog breeding with a cat, and they are troublesome in the countryside.

Graham managed to rustle up a replacement Sevastopol before anyone noticed. How he did this I do not know, in the same way that I do not know how his children, two girls aged twelve and ten and a boy of four, seem to have established a successful tyre re-treading service on the outskirts of a Georgian country estate. Maybe they resprayed a goose. With regards to the tyres, I can only assume they’re buying them from relatives prior to selling them on to Joe, Becca, ‘Anton’ and sundry other people around Runton, and this is the sort of gap-in-the-market spotting enterprise of which I warmly approve. In any case, it’s not worth questioning them about it. One of the trustees did this recently, and discovered that they immediately shout ‘If you’re calling me a thief just come out and say it like a man’ and mob around you punching your legs if you do that sort of thing, at which point it is prudent to end your enquiries, accept that complimentary set of Bridgestones you’ve been given by Graham to smooth things over, and leave it at that.
The Peacock House

May 16th, 2017

Yesterday morning, ‘Anton’ and I were putting up a Robens Prospector Tent for some bunch of glamping fucktards or other when a figure approached us through the mist that sometimes makes the Runton estate look uncomfortably like a scene from The Others. It was Graham, who handles the more complex animal culls around the estate with ferrets and dogs and so forth. Graham is every inch a son of the soil, able to tell the time by the position of the sun, whittle things from sticks, get tractors to run on cooking oil, and do that thing where you pull a small sheep out of another, larger sheep. Conversely, ‘Anton’ is a shag happy Deptford wide boy, once the terror of the Lewisham menopausal and now, like myself, little more than a grumbling Cockney in a field. Those familiar with ‘Anton’ and I’s years of trading at Greenwich Market will recall the feud between him and Keith, a fine art and photography vendor, whereby ‘Anton’ would regularly offer to nip round and give Keith’s wife Barbara ‘the full half pint’, among other horrors with which I will not trouble you. My favourite part of the feud was when ‘Anton’ attempted to convince the market management that Keith was incontinent by pouring water over the cushion Keith liked to sit on, advising them to ‘have a quiet word with him about it’, and that Keith was a proud man in deep denial and it might be a good idea to call him into the office to discuss it privately, insisting it’s nothing to be ashamed of at his age and fatness. Sadly for ‘Anton’, his ambition of replacing the words ‘A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight’, which dominated the Nelson Road end of the market, with ‘Keith is a fucking fat fucking wanker’ will now never be realised, as that part of the premises has since been demolished and lost forever. Sometimes we can just dream a little too far. Anyway, as an adolescent, ‘Anton’ used to flog zoot suits outside the Lacy Lady* and, like myself, has time for someone who knows how to dress themselves properly. Incidentally, I don’t want any backchat about not judging a book by its cover at this point, because judging a book by the cover is efficient and speeds up the judging process a great deal.

‘Are you some sort of pikey or something?’ said ‘Anton’ to Graham, now beside us and resplendent in a heavily patched hunting jacket, giving the impression that he had been standing in rain for about thirty seven years.

‘Yes’, replied Graham, a Romany gypsy, ‘I live in a caravan over there [gesturing behind him]. You’ve been there loads of times. You’ve been buying tyres off my kids since you got here, and yer man here had a dog’. This pertains to the fact that I taught Graham’s children to read, and that he gave me a dog as part payment. Also, it says much about the nature of life at Runton Hall that the only permanent residents are a family of gypsy transients, but there we are. I hate the countryside.

Unabashed, ‘Anton’ disappeared back into the Robins Prospector to ensure it was ready for glampers wanting to talk about EU Referendum recounts in, while Graham and I talked about the Summer Palace Joe has built for Sevastopol the Peacock. Sevastopol is an impressive specimen of his breed, fond of wandering around the grounds with his tail out in the summer months, and is regarded as a beloved celebrity by Runton visitors. Not by Joe, however: peacocks are loud, and Sevastopol has a habit of celebrating this next to Joe’s wigwam in the early hours of the morning. The Summer Palace Joe has built is a wondrous thing, full of stuff that peacocks like, and most importantly well away from him and his numerous children. As we talked, we waved to the Flat Earthers, who were jogging past at that moment. Most people don’t think of hard core conspiracy theorists having an exercise regime, but then most people don’t think there’s a gigantic ice wall stopping the oceans from sloshing over the edge of the planet and into outer space either. Incidentally, the Flat Earthers are off next week, to be replaced by PID believers. In case you are unfamiliar, ‘PID’ stands for ‘Paul [McCartney] Is Dead’, and the theory is roughly as follows: McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a look and sound alike by the Tavistock Institute, a front organisation working on behalf of shape shifting lizards from the rings of Saturn for the purposes of spreading drug use among the young, thereby making the human population easier to control. Obvious really.

I yield to none in my love of the Fab Four – indeed, if I was any more obsessed with them I would consider myself ripe for psychiatric treatment. I collect old concert tickets and fan mail and everything. Bearing that in mind, imagine what it’s like for me hearing the Paul Is Dead theory relayed at first hand, as casually as if it was directions to Morrissons. I’ve heard it before, of course, but still. When faced with information of this kind at Runton, which is often, I just say ‘Well, I hope you get to the bottom of it’, and ask if they’ll be wanting sandwiches or anything, because not upsetting conspiracy theorists is probably the most important part of my current working life. The PID people spend most of the day playing Beatles albums backwards and saying ‘There. Solid proof. Absolutely crystal clear’ at obscure bits of garbled noise they claim proves their theory, but keep themselves to themselves otherwise. Still, I would rather have the place full of conspiracy theorists than glampers, as glampers act like they own the world, whereas conspiracy theorists act like it’s been owned since Ancient Egyptian times by hybrid lizard/human bloodlines, who probably leave less litter.

As ever, prudence is key. It isn’t for me to question beliefs which, at Runton at least, are pursued in a tolerant, good humoured and respectful manner. For all I know, there may be a conspiracy theory stating that Sevastopol the peacock is not Sevastopol the peacock at all, and that the original Sevastopol was attacked and dismembered by an angry dog given to an ex market trader by a Romany gypsy, and that the current Sevastopol is a replacement bought in to avoid upsetting guests and jeopardising revenue, but I’m sure you’ll agree it would be unfair to expect me to comment upon it.

*a famous Ilford nightclub, once the cutting edge of the British soul scene. In case you are unfamiliar, the British soul scene involved dancing all night to songs about love and then beating a stranger unconscious on the way home.

Disclaimer

In the unlikely event that any Flat Earthers read this, I understand that it is lazy to call the Flat Earth Society a conspiracy theory. It isn’t. I think I’m right in saying that it merely seeks to question accepted scientific fact, and the ‘conspiracy’ aspect in fact pertains to Space Exploration Theory, which broadly speaking believes that space travel is a hoax put about by NASA to enable military domination of the inner cosmos. There.
All Four Corners Of The World

May 15th, 2017

I discovered the other day that if the Flat Earth Society had an end of year dinner and dance, they wouldn’t be able to play All Around The World by Lisa Stansfield at it – the phrase ‘around the world’ implies that the earth is spherical, you see. To get it past the dj, the lyric regarding Stansfield’s misplaced infant would have to be ‘I’ve been to all four corners of the world/and I can’t find my baby’, or possibly ‘I’ve been to both sides of the world/and I can’t find my baby’. This is the sort of thing we have to know at Runton Hall. It’s a shame, because All Around The World is a classic Great British Summer Event tune, and means that it will be a while before we can raise the profile of Runton with a Great British Summer Event, although for a place that would be literally invisible if it felt it could get away with it, this is not perhaps such a bad thing.

I can truthfully say without fear of contradiction that I hate the outdoors. However, I do love a Great British Summer Event. You can keep your paraolympians and your People’s FA Cup – this is the Brits at their finest, scoffing Mr Whippy ice cream in the drizzle amid exhaust fumes in a field littered with fag ends, with mid-Nineties non-Britpop belting out of a poor quality public address system in the background. Marvellous. Attraction-wise, there’s something for everyone. I always enjoy the obligatory English Civil War tent containing a history teacher struggling with a flintlock pistol, hard enough to fire in the actual English Civil War, where combatants where not constantly interrupted by bored children putting their hands up to ask why they were gay. Burger vans flying the Confederate cross among the flags of the home nations, drunk twelve year olds, fat majorettes, shire horses wearing deeley boppers – it’s tremendous stuff, and the carnivals of East Anglia, long recognised as gathering places of the rich and beautiful, are the epicentre of it all.

The customary carnival procession, always advertised as ‘Second Only To Rio’, is little more than an excuse for everyone to drink themselves blind and hurl improprieties, with which I will not trouble you, at Carnival Queens being driven slowly past on flat bed lorries. Myself, I prefer the Boxing Day hangings favoured by East Anglian coastal resorts. These aren’t, at present, actual hangings, but a custom dating back twelve centuries in which men charge into the freezing North Sea in honour of Ran, a Norse god, watched by large crowds who cheer them on with lusty cries of ‘You’re going to drown you fucking twat’. Bucket-rattlers, moving among the crowds, collect money for fireworks displays, held on New Years Day instead of Guy Fawkes Night in these parts, as Norfolk supported the Gunpowder Plot and saw no cause to celebrate its failure. I like to say that on Boxing Day they execute a young offender on the promenade in front of a jeering crowd, and throw him, still conscious, into the sea where he is torn apart by gleeful townsfolk, hence Boxing Day Hangings. I have no idea why I say this, but it provides an insight into how I might have dealt with Guy Fawkes sympathisers, had I held judicial office amid such treason.

Carnival dog shows are a thing to behold, consisting of family pets with differing levels of willingness and co-operation being lead around a small enclosure, followed by raw meat donated by a local butcher being awarded to whichever owner lives closest. The format is unchanging year after year, and no one minds, even the East Midlanders who invade Norfolk each summer and, on one occasion in Sheringham, Amelia and Jacob from Clapham, representing the Remain vote and thinking they were in Hell. At this event, the announcement of an Ipswich-based Highland Terrier ignited the ancient blood feud between the East Anglian counties, and amid a torrent of initially good natured booing, the MC was heard to say ‘I must say, I don’t fancy your chances’ to the dog’s owner, who was six, amid the kind of uproar more commonly associated with a witch burning. Happily, a Lancaster bomber flew overhead at this point, delighting all and sundry. If you should find yourself marshalling an outdoor event in the English provinces, keep one of these on hand for if things get rowdy. Everyone loves it, and if you can combine it with the Dambusters theme – well, there won’t be a safe German for miles, to say the least of it. With everyone intent on bombing Berlin, the Mundesley Carnival Dog Show was won by Labradoodle (a mix of a Labradog and a Poodle) belonging to Chloe (a mix of a Clare and an oboist), all the way from Eastcliffe Avenue, a small road within sight of the ‘arena’.

Runton Hall’s donkey fleet will be at Scarborough this season and therefore not available to carry children along sundry Norfolk beaches at low tide. This will rob me of my annual opportunity to warn parents that a startled donkey can run at seventy miles an hour and other lies, none of which are ever questioned. I told someone once that if a donkey sees a bus queue, it will automatically join it. Not so much as a raised eyebrow. I also tell their delighted offspring to look out for sharks, submarines and pirates, often washed ashore at this time of year. One of these summers we’ll have to get Joe to dress up as Blackbeard and jump out from behind the pier supports for a larf, making demands for dubloons or pieces of eight, or parrot food or wooden leg varnish or eye patch darkener. Or in a shark costume, so that midway through his spiel the theme from Jaws could sound as his ringtone, and he could say ‘Better get this, it’s the missus’, then have a conversation whereby he could inform his imaginary shark wife that ‘They’re out of surfers, love’ but that ‘they’ve got children from…’ [Addressing children] ‘Where are you from? Grimsby?’ ‘…Grimsby. Could put them in a casserole I suppose’ and all that which, if accompanied by enough pissing about, will be a larf, especially if we say it’s for Help for Heroes.

With no donkey stewarding in the offing, Joe and I will also be denied something called the Tattoo Game. Originally, I wanted this to be a henna tattoo stall at Camden that patrons could unexpectedly discover did real tattoos several weeks after visiting it, but the current incarnation involves pointing out a tattoo on every parent and saying ‘Oh, I do like that, yeah, no, that’s lovely’, no matter how awful it is or fat they are. We’ve had some belters, and not just butterflies, dolphins, tribal bands and exhortations to ‘Follow your heart’, written across people more likely to follow a chip van, either. Highlights include dual Paul Wellers, contrasting Jam-era Weller with Style Council Weller, one on each calf of a savagely sunburned man from Coltishall, and a back-wide depiction of British soldiers going ashore at D Day on a bloke from Overstrand, which Joe claimed was similar to something his mum was thinking of getting.

Despite such jollity, I must reluctantly conclude that although an event like this would be remarkable indeed were it to take place at Runton Hall, it would at best ruin glamping revenue, and at worst see the glampers open a Mr Whippy restaurant in Shoreditch when they got home. Then again, if they wanted to enhance the authenticity by having exhaust fumes piped in shortly after having all the windows and doors nailed shut, I’m sure I could dig up a Bitty McLean cassingle to complete the ambience. Also, imagine the effect of a Red Arrows flypast on the Runton doomsday preppers and conspiracy theorists, jumpy about military hardware at the best of times. It would be like putting Mentos in a bottle of coke.
Farewell, Piccadilly

May 12th, 2017

The countryside is fucking barbaric. I don’t know if you’ve been there at all but, if you haven’t, it’s a bloodbath from end to end. One enormous slaughterhouse, all of it.

Everything in the countryside can be shot, hunted and generally preyed upon, and is too busy shooting, hunting and generally preying upon everything else to notice. Furthermore, whereas a Londoner such as myself will consider knowing what time the Bakerloo Line shuts down, or where to get a late drink in Southwark* as evidence of participation in an advanced society, someone in the countryside will consider knowing the best way to dispatch a rabbit in much the same light. The method, incidentally, is as follows: place the fore and index fingers of your right hand in a ‘v’ shape around the rear of the neck, then put the palm of your left under the luckless bunny’s chin and push firmly up and back. The lumbar vertebrae snap, the spinal cord is severed, and death is instantaneous. It is, as they say in the countryside, ‘the kindest thing to do’, although I imagine it would be even kinder not to kill it in the first place, or maybe treat it to a slice of carrot cake in the V and A tearooms instead. This information was imparted to me by Joe, a fellow urchin from the hairiest days of capering amid the shanty town of Camden Market, while executing hamsters with a claw hammer on a recent Tuesday afternoon. Joe hails from White City, but has been living in a wigwam in the grounds of Runton Hall for eight years, and has gone entirely native. The lesson is this: if you’re going to go to the countryside, get in, do what you need to do, and get out. Don’t start mucking about having pub lunches and all that. That’s how they rope you in – Joe only intended to stop for scampi and chips in Southwold, and now he lives like an Iron Age person. The danger, my friends, is real.

Mercifully, some similarities remain between us. For a start, we are both unemployable in any meaningful sense. Joe’s career highlight involved checking telecoms companies for Millennium Bug Compliance in 1999. This wa not difficult, and merely entailed walking around, nodding thoughtfully, and placing a sticker featuring a microchip fashioned into the shape of a smiling insect with ‘Bring On Y2K!’ written underneath it on equipment deemed able to withstand the coming apocalypse. It was a scam, obviously, but then so was the Millennium Bug itself. Joe understood that no one wanted to be the person who in January 2000 would have to explain why they hadn’t thought it worthwhile having their business Millennium-proofed, with computers running wild in the streets, and therein lay the genius at the heart of the whole caper: more companies than you might think adopted a ‘Well, we’d better let him get on with it’ approach, and quietly paid his invoices when presented with them some weeks later. Incidentally, the way to get past the poor quality security guards at telecoms companies is to be extremely aggressive when demanding access, and entirely charming once it has been granted – essentially a one man ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine. Sadly, both good and bad cops alike agreed that he had committed fraudulent embezzlement following his arrest in a BT building in Reading, and he was sent to HMP Oxford for fourteen months, but although he missed the Millennium celebrations, enough invoices remained unclaimed-back out of sheer corporate embarrassment to make his incarceration worthwhile.

All Joe’s numerous children are a larf. This is especially true of one of the oldest ones, whose enthusiastic conception I overheard while trying to sleep on a sofa in Joe’s comically disintegrating mouse-infested ruin of a squat on Girdlestone Walk N6, over the 2008 Easter weekend. There were walls, of course, but they were thin and served only to amplify the horror. Even when there was an opportunity to escape the noise of the miracle of life being created, it was a difficult place to sleep in because what we suspected was a money laundering operation was in constant full swing next door. Counterfeiters always seem to have an inherent sense of theatricality, and those behind whatever was going next door were no exception, with drop offs and pick-ups in the dead of night, lots of full beam headlights, wheel spinning and people in suits wearing sunglasses at three in the morning. It was harmless compared to the neighbour on the other side, who claimed to have changed his DNA via meditation. He was nuts. Really, really, nuts, following us to Archway tube if we weren’t careful, jabbering in a crazed but earnest fashion and then into Camden, where we were trading, and where he admittedly blended in quite nicely. Remarkably, he ended up dj-ing at Gilgamesh, and I believe still does so.

Joe provides for his wife Becca and their numerous children by slaughtering his way through the local East Anglian wildlife as part of a site management position at Runton, a role which also involves maintaining fences, growing stuff, and making sure that all gates are left open to let the air circulate. Claw-hammering hamsters also comes under the highly interpretive list of ‘kindest things to do’, because it provides an instant, if undignified, death, as does beheading chickens in preference to the accepted strangulation method. If I was a chicken about to be strangled, I would want it done by someone skilled at the task, rather than have Joe – in his own words – ‘wringing random bits of neck like a face flannel’, and would also choose decapitation, given the choice. The whole carnival of death is at odds with Runton Hall, which these days is a low-key retreat for Buddhists, hippies, Reiki healers, obscure religious sects, hermits, conspiracy theorists, yoga junkies, idiots, flower children and drop outs of every heft and hue. Remarkably, Joe has been voted onto the Hall’s board of trustees, and has managed to have me appointed, too. It remains to be seen how we’ll make a grab for absolute power, but doing so is an interesting idea, because a) Runton Hall is a lovely place in need of expensive restoration, and b) there is no such thing as a poor hippy, so you’d like to think there’s some potential for connecting the two things rather pleasingly, after which a third could be added whereby the hippies are subsequently done away with, either by beheading or claw hammer, depending upon the vibe at the time.

These, then, are our days. In case you remember us from bygone times, there is no more market trading. The tiny empires that sprang from the East Yard, Camden Lock Market, vaulting the Grand Union Canal and spreading east and south along the Northern and Central lines in the early years of the twenty first century have all but disappeared, their race among the socioeconomic fabric of London finally run, and like Joe and I, many former traders have scattered deep into the geographical accident known as the Rest of the World. Unlike Joe, I do at least live in a permanent structure in the form of an actual house near-ish Runton Hall, although it is factually correct to state that more people live on Girdlestone Way than in my minuscule village. We are often joined by ‘Anton’, an old Deptford cohort now living in a part of Leeds he describes as ‘well Basra’, having given up selling awful jewellery to, and then shagging, poorly tattooed forty year old Lewisham grandmothers at Greenwich Market in favour of an even more precarious living as an ‘amateur electrician’. Thanks to his trademarked fingers-crossed-and-hope-for-the-best work on the elderly wiring of the Runton outbuildings, the old servants’ quarters can now house the many groups of people who like to use the place to escape from, or into, reality, depending upon your point of view. It currently has some Flat Earthers in it, and I have learned that if you introduce their dormitory with a cheery ‘Flat earth – bumpy mattress!’, you get some very stony stares indeed.

*the White Hart at Great Suffolk Street if you’re in before 9ish, but it’s popular with old bill so mind yourself.

Postscript

No, I don’t know why Joe keeps the hamsters in the first place, either. There are loads of them, though.