Public service announcement: I gave up smoking a long time ago.
I mentioned to Sid’s teacher at a recent parents’ evening how pleased I was that there seemed to be an awful lot of fighting at the school, and how this had attracted us to their syllabus in the first place. Despite my current girlfriend telling me to ‘For fuck’s sake shut up’, I pointed out that we’ll be glad of this if he turns out to have a violent career in later life, and that it was illegal to swear in a classroom such as the one we were currently sitting in, on tiny adorable children’s chairs. The conversation drifted a bit after that, eventually turning to a large picture of the late Queen Elizabeth that Sid and his friend Harry Christ had painted. Incidentally, Harry Christ’s name isn’t Harry Christ, but Sid has always maintained that it is, because it sounds similar. Anyway, I doubt Sid’s teacher is going to be particularly fussed about a bit of playground scrapping, as she has a drinker’s face and has probably been about a bit. I’ll ask about her drinking when I see her at the Christmas carol concert, just out of curiousity.
Remarkably, my own school managed to arrange a fight with the Windsor Chapter Hell’s Angels a couple of years prior to the Minstrel stealing episode that we are, at some length, discussing. No, I also don’t believe that this actually happened, either, and I speak as one who believed a classmate’s father was Bungle from Rainbow, as previously discussed. Anyway. My school claimed victory when they did not turn up at the appointed time and place, which I think was Plaistow tube, in the days before it was full of Guardian readers gluing themselves to public transport, obviously. The fact that they probably didn’t want to fight children was of no mind: as a school, we had faced down the Hell’s Angels and, even though the incident can’t possibly be true, we felt it gave us bragging rights.
To return to our story: one of the worst things that could happen prior to having a fight at our school was for a teacher to intercept the combatants on the way to the wall behind which disputes were traditionally settled. If this happened, you were fucked. For a start, there was the legal minefield of liability for lost television revenue. There was also the no-holds-barred surprise lynching you would receive at some unknowable future juncture because you didn’t ‘stand’, and were therefore some sort of wanker. If the contest went ahead you were in the clear, legally speaking, even if you got marmalised, because at least you ‘stood’. Of course, I intended to avoid marmalisation by stabbing Nat with a sharpened compass point because I was of the opinion then, as now, that you either get bullied once, or bullied forever. It was tricky though. We had been, well, not close mates exactly, like Sid and Harry Christ, but on good terms. In fact, Nat taught me to smoke a few years later, and that’s what friends are for.
Thus it was that on an otherwise nondescript school day afternoon behind an anonymous wall at the end of the ninth decade of the twentieth century, Nat Baker and myself readied ourselves for combat. The thing about bringing localised but overwhelming force to a broad-front conflict – the schwerpunkt or ‘blitzkrieg’ doctrine associated with German success in World War Two, for example, or my improvised weapon consisting of a modified technical drawing instrument with which I intended to stab a Tottenham fan who had stolen my Minstrels – is that you only have a short amount of time to use it. A surprise is not a surprise if your opponent knows it’s coming, after all. As far as modified classroom equipment goes, it’s not a surprise at all if your opponent can already see it because it has worn through the pocket of your Farahs, as had happened in my case. This was extremely bad news.
‘You gonna stab me with that?’ said Nat, gesturing towards the compass point.
To this day, I can’t remember exactly what I said to de-escalate the situation. He maintains it was ‘No, I had to measure my bollocks for biology homework’, and this sounds plausible, clutching at straws as I was. In any case, he claimed it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard and, whenever our paths have crossed since, has never failed to mention it. In return, I usually offer to stab him now, if it will shut him up, but have thus far not done so. In any case, peace was restored and, thanks in no small part to all the Superkings which children smoked at the time, tranquility descended once more upon the school. Say what you like about smoking, but it kept a generation of children calm, focussed and slim during the Cold War and AIDS. That said, a liberty had been taken, and I was still a disgruntled plaintiff. I decided that the best thing to do was wait for a quarter of a century before my next move.
Picters:
Main: Sounds nice. This was in Bermondsey or New Cross somewhere, part of a feud between Tottenham and Millwall.
Top: Windsor Chapter Hell’s Angels. Why would people like this want to hang out with children?
Lower: Liver biopsy stuff. This is for four consecutive biopsies; I never set up for more than one at a time because it looks cluttered and untidy unless the patient actually has four livers or has been force fed foie gras style for a larf beforehand.
In Norfolk, home of Britain’s flabbiest arms, January has finally ended. For those of us involved with the Runton Hall project, it was an unhappy contrast to the carefree Januaries of our market trading past. Back then, January was January: a month on the sofa listening to the footie and eating biscuits in the commercial afterglow of a Christmas trading run. There were left over advent calendars from Liberty of London too, as large numbers of these would find their way to from Regent Street to Camden Lock courtesy of the Theft Fairy and, as December went on, formed the cornerstone of every traders’ diet. I never found out exactly who was bringing them in, but Plastic Dave, who once mugged a postman for his shoes, would be substituting them for fruit by the middle of the month, and eating five a day. What a treat for the public we must have been. Sadly, January 2018 was less certain and less delicious. There was no snoozing and no planning of summer festival trading over snakebite and fried egg sandwiches at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1. The world has turned and, for those of us struggling to turn with it, Runton is as dead as a doornail. No one is even there except Graham, who leaves his caravan twice daily to shoot things, and the trustees who live in the Hall itself, the Big House into which only Joe is ever invited. At the end of the second decade of the twenty first century, January is a very different kettle of coconuts, and I am not entirely keen on it.
It’s not all gloom, though. We have, after all, had a few weeks off. ‘Anton’ who, as you may recall now resides in a part of Leeds he describes as ‘well Basra’, spent part of the break being chased along his own street when Millwall played at Elland Road which, in case you are unfamiliar, is the home of Leeds United. In the interest of context, Millwall fans such as ‘Anton’ are composed of poor genetic stock, historically bound by law to stay the fuck in south London and, put simply, are terrible, terrible people. To illustrate the point, I once made the mistake of cycling through Bermondsey, a place overlooked by God and infested with generations of Millwall, in a West Ham shirt and was subjected to ribaldry, with which I will not trouble you, at almost every set of lights from Deptford Creek to Borough High Street. It wouldn’t happen now obviously, because the place is as full of depressed media consultants and Ocado vans as every other part of London, but still. The thing is, in Millwall areas, social cleansing has been especially disastrous, because when the colonists moved into Bermondsey and Deptford with their gluten intolerances and pulled pork, Millwall fans were driven from their natural environment and started turning up as far away as Acton. Yes, Acton is west London and who knows what goes on out there, but can we really claim that spreading Millwall across the capital represents progress? I, for one, do not think we can.
with stairs, walls, doors, flushable sanitation and sundry other things that you just don’t get in a yurt. I presumed they’d put a tent up in the back garden and use the house for livestock, but during my recent visit they were quite the urbanites, and Joe especially was a far cry from the person who, on three separate occasions, has had people trying to kill him. As we drank wine and discussed the benefits of permanent rooved structures it struck me that for the first time in a decade I was able to talk with the pair of them without the shrillness and running around that make children so fucking annoying – the only competing sound was George Michael’s Symphonica wafting from a discrete wall mounted speaker. The whole thing was rather civilised and, I realised, the first time since 2008 that I have heard Becka finish a sentence without having to shout at, feed, rescue or otherwise manage her numerous children halfway through. They move back to Runton next week. I am sure their many children will re-adjust easily, but predict epic tantrums from Joe and Becka.
As for my time off, I spent some of it studying old floorplans of Sheffield city hall because one of my Christmas presents was a ticket for the Beatles’ 1963 show there, and I wanted to see what sort of view the person would’ve had. Quite a nice one, as it goes. I also saw West Ham at Stoke and, unlike ‘Anton’, managed to do so without getting on public transport with anyone I had been cajoling with references to ‘gobby northern wankers’ and ‘Bell End Road’. Things could’ve been different though, as I found myself on a train carriage with forty Stoke fans after the game, but they were a right old larf, especially considering we beat them 3-0. It was mainly mums and dads going back to the small towns between Stoke and Derby, and we passed the time discussing the fattest team to win a major honour – Nottingham Forest under Brian Clough, as far as I’m concerned. There was some mention of Liverpool when Neil Ruddock was at Anfield, but I refused to be swayed and in evidence suggested that the only reason Clough played John Robertson on the wing at Forest was because it was nearer to the chip van in the car park, and by the time we all parted company, I felt my argument had carried the day.
The Runton Diaries 