I was brought up in the traditional manner, by chain smoking adults who dipped my dummy in Guinness to help me sleep. I’m not sure how much this informed my choice of Father’s Day activity this year – getting really drunk then going to a zoo – but in any case it didn’t happen. Instead, I attended an event at Nid’s nursery on the understanding that I would not be expected to sing, dance (and I include rhythmic clapping in this category) or join in anything whatsoever. My concerns were, however, unfounded. It was a pleasant afternoon with other fathers who I suspect were attending under similar terms, saying ‘Is there a bar in here?’ and ‘Mine’s a Kronenburg if you find it’, and enjoying dad-style chuckles while Nid chewed books and looked on thoughtfully. Incidentally, I have picked Nid up from nursery while drunk on two occasions, and found being in a room full of bright colours and tiny blundering humans hilarious, although I prudently disguised this as simply being very happy to see him. Also, as I dropped him off recently, one of the staff pointed out a quantity of blood in my hair from a head wound sustained by jumping into a bookshelf when England beat Columbia on penalties. With this kind of form, it seems likely that at least one of us will get taken into care quite soon. Anyway. As Sid gnawed his way through This Rabbit, That Rabbit and the Wheels On The Bus I contemplated the correct etiquette for children chewing communal books. It seems unhygienic, but then so does having a child in the first place, so I decided to let it go.
My usual group parenting takes place at ‘Who Let The Dads Out?’ mornings at the local church hall, or afternoons with the Coffee Mums, which I was relieved to discover is not a clumsy East Anglian term for women of mixed racial heritage. ‘Who Let T
he Dads Out?’ consists of bluffing my way through conversations about sugar beet with agricultural workers, whereas as a Coffee Mum I am considered quite exotic for having been to Selfridges. This is not to pander to the usual lazy idea of Norfolk being mono-cultural; it isn’t middle class enough for that. For example, there is a German at ‘Who Let The Dads Out?’, an engineer working on the not inconsiderable problem of heating the many remote farm buildings in this area. He seems a decent sort, even when Germany got sent home from the World Cup for being beastly, but I am keeping an eye on him, just to be on the safe side. Similarly, at nursery, the play leader of Rock Pool group, where Nid is a penguin of some kind, is Mancunian. As a result, he has starting to say ‘Hiya’, her standard greeting. While this is a useful addition to his lexicon, otherwise consisting of ‘Daddy’ (which he calls his mother), ‘dog dog’ (which he calls me), and ‘Ahhhh’ (which he calls the dog), he is saying it in an undeniably Mancunian accent. I discussed this with ‘Anton’, a man from Deptford whose daughter, having lived in Manchester and Leeds for eight years, now sounds like Gracie Fields. We’ve met her before actually, years ago in the last blog when we were market traders, and you may recall that her graduation ceremony took place in the same building against which she was conceived. I’ve had a quiet word with the chief nursery lady, who attended Cheltenham Ladies College for what appears to have been about four hundred years, and we have agreed that she will be sacked in the morning*.
I would leave Nid
with Joe and Becka when at Runton, but considering they already have nineteen children, I’d feel like I was taking the piss. That said, he is an increasingly familiar sight there, stumping around, feeding goats through the petting zoo fences and laughing at Graham’s dogs tearing about the place with our own ever-game hound. Open space and fresh air are bad for children though, so when my current girlfriend is not in evidence, he is usually to be found playing in the wallpaper ‘Anton’ and I have scraped from the inside of the Old Servants’ Quarters while we all listen to the World Cup on the radio. We were pleased with England’s overall performance and that we have players who seem likeable, earnest and committed both to each other and the greater cause. It was difficult to say that about the squad when it had people like Rooney, Terry, Lampard, Jenas and Sturridge in it. That said, although my fondness for the England side is renewed, I am aggrieved that I had to wait twenty eight years to see them in a World Cup semi final, whereas Nid managed to do it in eighteen months. It seems most unfair.
*This is not true. She is a marvellous nurse in a marvellous nursery and, in common with all the other children, staff and parents, Nid is very fond of her.
Photards – this weeks’ studies in film are:
Main – some sheep. I started to count them, but fell asleep.
Top inset – Joe teaching the petting zoo goats how to wash up.
Middle inset – apprehensive Nid stumping around the East Anglian countryside like an Ewok, with my current girlfriend, his mother.
Lower inset – a glade or hamlet or something. Water meadow? I dunno.
A ‘sea fret’ is a persistent fog carried inland by warm air blowing across cold water, whereupon it clings to the earth, turning June into February and ruining early season ice cream van trade for miles around. They are, as Norfolk folk say, ‘holly reasty’ – ie, ‘wholly rancid’ – and, much as it would amuse me to meet someone actually called Holly Reasty, I agree with them. While Runton escaped the worst of the unseasonal murkiness, the ‘rhythm of life’ – the name that people in these parts give what is clearly an carnival of death – was interrupted. The fret-addled combination of hard summer earth and slick wet grass is hazardous to sighthounds, such as the ones belonging to Graham, who can slip and damage tendons while operating at high speed. Sighthounds operating at high speed is, in turn, hazardous to the rabbits they are chasing, such as the ones on the Runton Estate, who enjoyed a bonus month of damp untroubled frolicking as a result. Shearing the petting zoo animals was also postponed as it was too cold to take their jumpers off and, when it eventually did take place, Joe fancied a pop at it. Slithering about the enclosure unfettered by skill or experience and under sustained assault by an Angora goat, he swiftly resorted to the language of the public bar, inappropriate for Becka’s watching forest school kids who thankfully drowned it out with cheering and laughter.
the arrival of summer, a tradition which also seems to have disappeared. Still, not before time, I suppose, all things considered. I can no longer remember whether the girls who have nice tits were good or bad or, most likely, both for feminism, but I hope they are still happy because if they can’t enjoy major sporting events or get into university, there’s no hope for the rest of us. That said, most of my World Cup consumption has been via BBC radio, as God intended, while decorating the Old Servant’s Quarters with the incredibly expensive wallpaper ordered by After Lunch and Falafel For Lunch 
To return to the meteorological theme, sea frets are the ‘mist rolling in from the sea’ from Paul McCartney’s ’70s bagpipe-athon Mull of Kintyre. There is a problem though: sea frets are peculiar to the east coast, but the Mull of Kintyre is on the west, opposite Northern Ireland. I’m afraid the 114 year old mop top has lied to us, and I am not the first to say so: the amputee Heather Mills made similar claims throughout their divorce proceedings. When called upon to provide character witnesses, McCartney chose Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and the Head of NASA, suggesting a certain amount of social connectedness. Additionally, he was represented by Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia, whose clients include the actual Queen of England, and Nicholas Mostyn, a prominent high court judge. Faced with this onslaught, Mills ambitiously chose to represent herself. In her introductory notes to the court, she claimed to have been recently nominated for a Nobel prize and that her mother had also lost a leg in a motorcycle accident but that, unlike hers, it had grown back.
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.
When it comes to a no-nonsense accompaniment to tea, halfway between a cake and a biscuit, it’s a scone you’re after. There are scones, and there are scones, but no-one makes scones like an Anglican, because an Anglican scone is a timeless scone, steadfast, trustworthy and British. In case you are unfamiliar, Anglicans are baby boomers for whom the Sixties were too noisy, and they live in a kind, optimistic world of raffle tickets, tea cosies and Rich Tea biscuits. Young Anglicans usually have the traditional old testament names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, George and Ringo. They drink squash and colour things in until they stop being seven and, overnight, become seventy three, using phrases such as ‘…pardon my French’ to excuse Anglican swearwords like ‘blast’ and ‘damn’, and ‘…it’s gone a bit dark over Bill’s mother’s’ to warn of oncoming rain. Anglicans have a particular way of buying scones, biscuits and tea from each other in places such as Itteringham parish hall, where I met my old dear yesterday. It involves saying things like ‘…and four makes twelve’, ‘…I’ve got the seventeen’, and ‘…eighty three, ninety three, ninety eight and two’s a pound’ when counting change, and is curiously civilised. All in all, Anglicanism is like a Masonic code, if the purpose of Freemasonry was to make sure that everyone had a nice sit down of an afternoon. They are a lovely bunch.
These are exciting times for my old dear. For a start, there is a royal wedding to get her teeth into. We are both delighted with the Markle girl, who seems a good sort and has a name that rhymes with Sparkle, like a real princess. I imagine we’ll watch the ceremony on her sofa with a union jack across our knees, as is customary on such occasions. She has also been asked to lead the choir at her local church, which represents something of a coup because when she first arrived in East Anglia, two years after me, her proposals for streamlining the Wednesday morning Prayer ‘n’ Praise marked her out as ‘something of a flying cannon’. It is a progressive church, ‘with all the equipment for Catholics’, and she is fond of it. She lives in one of the small and remote villages on the north Norfolk coast, closer to the King’s Lynn end than the small and remote village where I live, which is so small and remote that they were still burning Catholics on public holidays until 2004, equipment or not. She is, if anything, even more suspicious of the countryside than I am, attributing the death of her cat, who I hated, to the ‘change of air’. Renal failure at nineteen was no more than veterinary superstition – Norfolk is so guilty it might as well cackle about the place in a mask and cape. Slough, her former home, is so maligned that I once carried off a joke about it during a funeral eulogy in the town’s crematorium, but my old dear actively misses it. The death of the cat was traumatic – certainly more traumatic than that of her husband, which she announced to me over the phone with an astonished ‘You’ll never guess what – your father’s dropped dead’, although as it was his eulogy I carried off the Slough joke in, I can hardly claim to be a paragon of sensitivity, myself.
arrival, he parked next to the Screaming Car, from which Becka emerged looking blissful, having been pounding her fists on the steering wheel for, by the look of things, about fourteen minutes. In far off days, I would treat my old dear to shandy at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street, London E1, and Vinny the Landlord would ban swearing among the villainy therein for the duration of her visit. At Runton, Graham echoed this tradition by keeping his children in their caravan until she went home. This says something about my old dear’s overall bearing, a mix of charming old lady and forgotten Kray sister, rather than her as someone fazed by unruliness – indeed, she once demonstrated a disdain for authority by punching someone to the floor, even though he was a fireman, in a fireman’s uniform. Nonetheless, ‘Anton’ respectfully stopped listening to Piss Whores In Training when she came to inspect the Old Servant’s Quarters, where he has all but finished the rewiring. This marks the culmination of an impressive eight months of work, especially considering he was only a qualified electrician for the last three weeks of it, and means that in addition to Flat Earthers and so forth, we might one day be able to have people who believe in normal things staying there. Imagine that.
Well, not entirely in silence. As the splintering yawn of ‘Anton’ crow-barring floorboards mingles with the ambient burble from outside, I declare the quickest way from Euston Square to Cally Road to be up Euston Road, past King’s Cross, left onto York Way, through the lights, and over Regent’s Canal. In return, ‘Anton’ points out that to avoid the Holborn Viaduct on the way to Hatton Garden you need to pick up Ave Maria Lane from High Holborn, straight off Cheapside. Since jointly working on the Old Servant’s Quarters we have found ourselves doing this sort of thing often, in what I believe to be an abstract expression of homesickness, as even the names of streets in that unhappy city chime in our grubby Cockney chimney sweep ear flaps. Also, we know more London street names than most, because we are former Knowledge Boys***, an apprenticeship we hampered somewhat by leaving town three years into the projected six year timescale for full Knowledge absorbtion. Incidentally, when you see someone on a moped in London with a clipboard on the handlebars, that’s a Knowledge Boy putting some work in. Myself, I was a cycling Knowledge Boy, zipping hither and yon amid the traffic with directions flapping from my handlebars on cardboard luggage labels. It’s an enjoyable way to earn your spurs. I’d love to go back and finish it; sadly, rural East Anglia is a long way from Charing Cross – when you see the distance to London on road signs, the numbers are in light years – and I fear it may be some time yet.
Apart from that, the only obstacle to my becoming a licensed taxi driver is the fact that I cannot legally drive. This is due to a common ocular complaint, keratoconus, which renders my vision atrocious. It’s a condition, rather than a disability, so we don’t get our own Olympics like those look-at-me landmine people. Then again we’d wander in front of the hundred metres by mistake and cause a pile up, so perhaps it’s for the best. In any case, you can’t keep a good man down, so I fight adversity by driving illegally instead. Concerned road users may rest assured that I have never driven on the public highway, limiting myself instead to private roads such as those surrounding the Runton Estate, teeming with dead wildlife mown down by Joe, Becka and delivery vehicles of every description. It was briefly suggested that instead of letting glampers hunt their own food with Graham’s dogs 
The Runton Diaries 