Tag: norfolk

Non-Conspiracy Theory

Nov 24th, 2017

November is slow at Runton Hall. Slow, yes, but not entirely at a standstill. For example, we still have conspiracy groups about the place, although in winter they prefer to stay in the Old Servants’ Quarters where they can gather around flip charts and sort everything out in the comfort of a warm nineteenth century building. The yoga never really goes away either. We have all three sorts at Runton – Bikram, drunk and deaf. I murdered our previous Bikram yoga lady for her own good, and the new one doesn’t expect Joe to maintain open fires all day in the Forest School dormitory where she holds her classes, and thereby clings to life. Drunk yoga is something of a misnomer, now I come to think of it, as only the instructor is drunk. Last week she took her class wearing sunglasses to hide plastic surgery bruises and spent an hour talking about her holiday in Cyprus, and I’m not sure how much longer her tenure will last. Of the three, deaf yoga is the most popular. I’d assumed that in rural areas deaf people would be shot as poor breeding stock, but the instructor claims to be able to ‘fill a coach from Norwich’ twice a week. I for one applaud the East Anglian deaf for their flexibility and commitment, and long may it continue.

The conspiracy groups are a legacy of Runton as a religious/hippy retreat in the seventies, decades before Joe and Becka and ‘Anton’ and I blundered onto the landscape with our Oyster Cards and hatred of rural life. Of all the groups, the Flat Earthers are most often in residence. They are a straight-laced bunch, but I don’t suppose there’s many giggles to be had when you’re up against NASA for what shape the world is. That said, I’ve sat through hours of Flat Earth lectures at Runton because I’m a slag for a good yarn, and a decent conspiracy theory is certainly that. To save you doing the same, shape-shifting lizards from Saturn infiltrated human bloodlines thousands of years ago and created sundry Illuminati organisations with which to exploit the planet earth and everyone on it. That, in a nutshell, is the root of all conspiracy theories. Moon landings, JFK, 911, AIDS, the Mandela Affect, Area 51, chemtrails, new world orders, Paul McCartney being dead since 1966 – it’s all down to the shape-shifting lizards. You can’t just hide all the lettuce and hope they go away either, as they feed off a low frequency energy field put out by humans in distress, the little buggers. Although there are millions of people who believe this, it’s not for everyone. As ‘Anton’, currently re-wiring the Old Servants’ Quarters, put it recently – ‘it’s not for us to have opinions on all this total fucking bollocks’ and it’s not for me to, broadly speaking, agree with him.

Be that as it may, ‘Anton’s enthusiasm for re-wiring buildings has improved significantly since he became a qualified electrician last week. Like myself, he has not been paid for his work at Runton, which in his case amounts to eight months of optimistic rewiring work undertaken entirely at his own expense. This explains the tacit understanding that ‘Anton’ and I can make a few quid from the glampers as long as we don’t compromise what Runton is – a low key, off-radar place ‘that people can fuck off to for a chill out’, as he assured the Trustees on the one occasion he met them. He is gambling that, with the coming of our Lottery grant and the subsequent establishment of a limited company consisting of him, me, Joe and Becka, he will effectively be hired by himself at consultant rates to check his own wiring, which there is nothing wrong with, thereby enabling him to take a long and extremely well paid holiday throughout the back half of 2018. I think this sort of thing might be how Freemasonry got started, and I certainly see the appeal.

While Runton does have links with Freemasonry, which I’m not sure the conspiracy groups are aware of, religious visitors are less common and mainly confined to the hermitage in the remotest part of the Estate. Officially, Runton’s religious affiliation is secular humanism. In case you are unfamiliar, secular humanism replaces an irrational faith in God with an irrational faith in humans, leading me to wonder how many humans the average secular humanist has actually met. Recently, this line of thought enabled me to formulate my own non-conspiracy theory about the space lizards, centred upon my belief that humans don’t really need help to exploit and suppress each other. Humans are perfect vessels for malice, and while kindness and civility exists on a local and interpersonal level, these qualities are scarce in a wider context amid societies which ultimately exist to be pitted against each other. Therefore, the space lizards act as a form of interstellar ‘othering’: they can be blamed for everything, because the fundamental realisation that humans tacitly demand a permanent state of atrocity in which to flourish is simply too much for us to admit. I am therefore inclined to think that the interstellar shape shifters are a product of a flawed human psyche that refuses to accept that we are all a bunch of wankers. There, I’ve said it.

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Photards:

Main – A little semi-outdoor kitchen that the Forest Schoolers use. There are no Forest Schoolers at the moment, so we use it to get pissed in.

Inset top – House martin chicks in the petting zoo earlier this year. They had a lovely time, fledging successfully in August, just in time for the new school year.

Inset middle – Grapes grown in the Victorian greenhouse at Runton. Note Joe’s stubby fingers, ideal for manual labour and showing a lack of education.

Inset lower – Christmas tree at Leadenhall Market. They do a lovely carol service, too. Be careful though, because Leadenhall is in the City of London, and the City of London crest is flanked by dragons, which are Illuminati symbols and what not. I think I might need to stop going to conspiracy theory lectures for a bit.
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.

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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.
Advance The Flag Of Runton

Nov 10th, 2017

Instagram foodies are ten a penny and routinely hated. This is understandable, because you can’t claim to really love food until you’ve wept over a Wagon Wheel on a low carb binge day. Low carb binge days are the sublimest pleasure. If they’d come along first, no one would’ve bothered inventing sex, drugs and rock and roll, and we’d all be happier as a result. Anyway. Carb bingeing dominated the meeting with the Confederate re-enactors which you may recall was something of a hot topic the last time we spoke. It went well, or at least I assume it did, as after two minutes I was tripping balls on complimentary Hob Nobs and would’ve agreed to pretty much anything. There was little to be concerned about, however. Our Confederates were a couple of amiable heating engineers from Stockport, somewhat different from what Joe and I managed to convince ourselves we were expecting – essentially, Tammy Wynette and Deputy Dawg – and it was difficult not to like them.

As also discussed previously, sturdy British readers will be mystified by the controversy surrounding the Confederate flag. It’s a contentious issue in the States though, and considering we have Americans among the various conspiracy groups that come to Runton, and also that we need to be squeaky clean for our Lottery grant, it’s best to be on the safe side. It’s not like in Britain, when every time something happens that Guardian readers don’t like (ie, literally every time something happens at all), Brighton declares it wants to leave the UK and become a republic. (By the way, I’m not sure where the threat is with this. It should just get on with it, and give us back our fag hags and anti depressants). No, when the Confederate south left the Union north, it caused no end of bother. That’s all history now of course, but we have twelve Confederate re-enactors re-enacting it in the East Wood, eating authentic rations as nutritional research for the University of Portsmouth. They are portraying an army close to collapse, so this means catching and eating squirrels, frying ground acorns in rancid bacon fat and making coffee from corn meal and sugar cane seeds. Grim. I have promised the squirrel scoffing mad men a table full of pizza with extra rootin’ and tootin’ when they leave, as long as there’s been no banjo music or lynching, and wish them fortitude against their oncoming peckishness.

I spiced up the Norfolk Shred* with an American Civil War playlist prior to meeting the Confederates so I’d have a bit of small talk. The mix of sentimentality and relentless jauntiness would be ideal for soldiers, because it makes you want to kill people. Not that I am without sentiment, I should like to point out. For example, I make a point of sniffing my dog’s legs of an evening because they smell of popcorn, and I love 30 Rock so much that I refuse to watch the last two episodes because I can’t bear to have seen it all. Sentiment can be a fine thing, but there is a place for it – and that place is not among endless banjo pickin’ references to rallying round this and shouting about that and Maryland, cotton and hearts the other. I’m sorry but it isn’t. It was a short playlist, and after going through it a few times I’d hear ‘protect our heritage’ from the Bonny Blue Flag as ‘protect our hair and tits’, and ‘advance the flag of Dixie’ as ‘advance the flag of Ipswich’. This last point would be fighting talk indeed among the gentle folk of Norfolk. In case you are unfamiliar, Ipswich is in Suffolk, a part of East Anglia where the feeble minded, ugly and malformed are sent to live happily among their own kind. It serves the same function as south London, which God separated from the rest of the world with the River Thames – originally, a valley full of disinfectant – and rightly so.

Horrible nineteenth century yee-hah banjo nonsense was not my only source of light conversation, mind you. I once cycled from Georgia to the outskirts of New Orleans and back up again, straight through the former Confederate heartland, for reasons I can no longer recall. It was fucking terrifying. I was treated with kindness by each human I met, and hatred by everything else. The rattlesnakes I narrowly avoided stepping on were disconcerting enough, but the real danger came from lethal pit bull/coyote hybrids living in packs around the many abandoned farms in the region. They have a particularly enthusiastic hatred of Cockneys, and would chase me along the dirt roads, all teeth and rabies, which was especially disconcerting at night in the middle of nowhere, five thousand miles from the nearest pie and mash shop. After the fourth or fifth such incident, I took to chucking beef jerky behind me to distract the little bastards, and this worked so well that I assumed that’s what it was for until I saw people in Monroeville eating it voluntarily. It all sounds ridiculous, recalling it now in the comfort of the Keeper’s Cottage at Runton Hall with a flask of Nescafe Gold Blend and forty custard creams, but they were desperate times. God I hate the countryside.

(The Norfolk shredding and low carbing have come about because I want to be at my fighting weight for the 2018 cycling season. I gained thirty six pounds after the Tennyson Road Incident, in which I demonstrated solidarity with the victims of the London terrorist attacks by having a van driven into me at forty miles an hour. Actually, it was a taxi, but it still beats changing your Facebook avatar and then forgetting why, in the standard modern expression of remorse.)

*an exercise regime invented by me. It is similar to the more usual types of Shred, except that hi energy dance music is replaced with a nice Audiobook. In my case this is currently The Aquariums of Pyongyang, an account of political re-education in a labour camp run by the Workers’ Party of North Korea. It is among the most depressing things I have ever heard.

Twitter: this has a Twitter account, you know, and I make up a quarter of the follower count. It’s a riot in there!

Facebook: it has a Facebook page too, with twenty five followers – twice as many as Jesus.

Photards:

Main: my dog, Archibald al-Fantastique, who smells of popcorn.

Insert top: Joe at the Compleat Angler in Norwich. The bookshelf behind him is wallpaper.

Insert middle: ‘Anton’ in cartoon format – perhaps the only one in which he is considered acceptable – drawn by Cartoon Ben at Greenwich Market, in a different life.

Insert lower: Abandoned building somewhere in rural Alabama, fourteen years ago. I rode past hundreds of these, and would often go in for a bit of a poke about. I had one cd – Original Pirate Material by the Streets – which I listened to incessantly while cycling. At times, I started to think that I had been riding a bike forever, and that my life at home and all the people and places in it were the product of some weird daydream. Also, I was so homesick that I would go to sleep at night imagining the smell of the Northern Line – sentimentality again, you see. Still, it was an adventure alright and, despite the terror and loneliness, I retain a fondness for the people, if not the wildlife, of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and all the southern States. I saw Belle and Sebastian in a baseball stadium, watched NASCAR racing, was mistaken for a cop in downtown Montgomery and got free food in restaurants by reciting the menu in my normal speaking voice, which everyone thought was Australian. The whole thing was bananas, and I should’ve written about that instead.
Tennyson Road Incident, Part II

Jul 20th, 2017

When regaining consciousness in a hospital bed, it is customary to sit up, blink a few times, and say ‘Where am I?’, but this is a redundant question. You’re in a room full of nurses and medical equipment. It’s not like you’ve wandered in to Carpet Right, is it. With this in mind, my first question to a ward sister after waking in similar circumstances recently was a pragmatic ‘Is this a good hospital?’, quickly adding that I didn’t wish to seem ungrateful or anything. She replied that she hoped so, as I’d had a good accident, which was a decent response. By way of an encore, she treated me to a rundown of my injuries, featuring a more liberal use of the words ‘cracked’ ‘lacerated’ ‘detached’ and ‘dislocated’ than I would otherwise choose in a report about my physical well being, and phrases such as ‘potential nerve and organ damage’ which didn’t seem like much of a giggle either.

It’s also customary under such circumstances to pay tribute to NHS workers. I’m sure they were performing acts of selfless heroism somewhere thereabouts, but keeping up to date with my National Market Traders’ Federation insurance for all these years meant I was in a private room in a private ward, and didn’t see any of it. People would wander in and check things and look at stuff now and again, and visitors would come and go. I spent my time having morphine mainlined into me and watching classic war films, which backfired somewhat when the theme tune to Where Eagles Dare gave me the fear for about three hours. The film itself is enjoyable if cartoonish, and Richard Burton is at his finest in it, but blasting the theme tune through your Skullcandy Smokin’ Buds in a silent hospital in an opiate haze is not something I would recommend, because it is the sound of every paranoid thought you have ever had marching up the corridor to get you. Two minutes in and I even became suspicious of a pot plant my old dear had bought me – a Princess Diana clematis, deemed appropriate because ‘she was also in a car crash’ – and thought the Gestapo might be hiding in it.

As it turned out, they weren’t. However, I was all but screaming by the time the opening credits had finished, at which point a consultant popped in for a quick hello-how-are-you. On his part, this was conducted in the lovely chuckle-y Norfolk accent usually confined to the more rural parts of the county – ‘Yer shoulder tendenz – thass all gorn, look hee hee, none of that bodypoppin’ fer yew haha, new charnce boi, kill yew that wud hee hee might as well put a gun to yer ‘ead and pull the triggar ha ha’ etc – which made me think that perhaps his main job was hiring out wherries on the Broads. At various points he produced x-rays with a hearty commentary about how close to permanent injury I had come, delivered in a back slapping ‘and then I said’ manner – ‘See that thar? Thass yer spinal cord see, ha ha. Millimetre to the left an’ you’d have no feelin’ in yer legs fer the rest o’ yer life look boi hee hee!’, and so forth. It was not an appropriate tone to use with someone convinced that his mother has been hiding Nazis in a pot plant, but his joyous countenance revived my spirits no end, and I was glad of it. In his estimation, I had missed ‘four different fatal injuries ha ha!’ but by some miracle had sustained no significant long term damage. In fact, the only issues were a cracked ribs, extensive lacerations, some spectacular bruising, damage to the coracoacromial ligament and supraspinatus, and torn adductor muscles in my left thigh. All this meant that for two weeks I could hardly walk, my arms flopping about uselessly like those on the mighty Dinosaurus Rex, but with bed rest and codeine everything would get better. I had lost track of time what with all the drugs and sleeping, but knew it was the Fourth of July when he delivered this happy news because Instagram was full of drunk American white girls in stars and stripes bikinis waving guns about, in the kind of independence celebration that presumably made Scotland think better of the idea.

That, then, was my road traffic horror smash. It was a narrow escape, but an escape nonetheless. Writing this eighteen days later, I am more chipper by the hour, and able to dress and undress myself unaided, to the relief of all concerned. I am reluctant to refer to the whole episode as an accident, because to do so implies that it was unavoidable, when it wasn’t – Andrew the taxi driver was looking at his phone while accelerating onto a roundabout at forty miles an hour, and didn’t see me until I surprised us both by hurtling towards him in mid air. It was entirely avoidable. If he was indeed looking at his Tinder matches, as I suspect was the case, I hope he was swiping whichever way signifies interest, because if a relationship comes of it, he and his partner will have an amusing anecdote about how they met the night a Cockney came through the windscreen to tell their grandchildren. Who knows – they might make a thing of it and run me over every year on their anniversary. Then again, if the criminal negligence charges being brought against him by the old bill stick, he’ll miss the first few of them, what with being in prison and everything, but still.

I was officially discharged by the ward sister five days after admittance, nodding my way through the standard ‘take these twice a day and this with meals and don’t get run over by any more taxis’ advice, before being wheeled towards the car park, where ‘Anton’ was waiting to take me home.

‘There’s also this’ she said, holding up the whiteboard on the end of my bed as I was about to leave. This usually displays information such as name, date of birth, and blood group, but instead had ‘Very Small Penis’ written across it. ‘Anton’ had done this a couple of days previously while I was asleep, he proudly informed me over homecoming fish and chips later that evening.

‘I’m here for a transplant’ I said.

‘I wish you well with it’, said the ward sister, ‘I’m the one who cut you out of your clothes when you came in’.

Photards:

Main – Never mind your expressos and cappachinoids – Gold Blend is the best coffee. Ask for it by name next time you’re in Costa, raising your voice and demanding to see the manager if necessary. Goes nicely with co-dydramol, I have discovered. Note Battle of Hastings 950th anniversary commemorative mug in the background. I am absolutely the kind of person that pre-orders that sort of thing so they have it ready on the day.

Inset upper – Promotional material for Where Eagles Dare. The text alone would have had me bewildered and weeping during my hospital stay.

Inset lower – Pints of snakebite with gin and tonic chasers, through a straw. More fun than co-dydramol, let me tell you.
Tennyson Road Incident, Part I

Jul 18th, 2017

When you find yourself strapped to a trolley in the back of an ambulance, it’s important to remember that things are looking up. Yes, you’re in a bit of a pickle, but at least whatever put you in the ambulance in the first place has stopped happening, and this represents a considerable improvement in fortunes. In my case, what put me in an ambulance was unexpectedly plummeting through the windscreen of a taxi as the driver was ‘texting’ (we can assume this means checking Tinder) while cycling round an otherwise unremarkable East Anglian roundabout a couple of Sunday evenings ago. I then bounced back out, and bounced along the road for a while before coming to a halt in a surprised heap, having bounced through a red light, something I would never do on the bike but appeared to have done as an airborne pedestrian. Satisfied that I had come to a standstill, I rolled onto my back, and everything stopped. The world is never as still as at moments like these, because it is looking at you, looking into you, waiting to see what will happen next. I was quite curious myself.

What happened next was that the cabbie, who had a name badge informing me that his name was Andrew, asked if I was alright, and in return I asked if he was ‘fucking blind’, both reasonable questions under the circumstances. My right leg was the only limb in working order, and using this to lever myself to the side of the road, I made further enquiries as to ‘What kind of fucking ISIS bullshit was that?’ and ‘Where’s your fucking van, you fucking terrorist?’, because I had discovered that adrenaline and indignation make you quite gobby. His passengers were also remonstrating with him, and as they called sundry emergency services my guardian Rastafarian appeared. A long time ago in a London borough far far away en route to Greenwich Market, I slid off my bike on Peckham High Road, and was helped up, dusted off and jollied along by two passing Rastas. Rural Norfolk, however, is an unlikely place to chant down Babylon, and my baffled state was further enhanced when, at this latest moment of peril, a bona fide follower of Haile Selassi appeared from a passing car, asking me which football team I supported by way of determining possible head injuries.

‘West Ham’ I said.

‘Dey shit man. Try again’ he replied.

‘It’s that fucking stadium’, I protested through clenched teeth, because various parts of me were starting to sting a bit, ‘should’ve let Spurs have it. No use to us. Then you let Tomkins and O’Brien leave and unsettle the defence too close to the start of the season, then there’s that wanker Payet to deal with. Shove all that in a stadium with no atmosphere, change the club crest and what do you think’s going to happen?’

‘Is that why they’ve been shit for a hundred years, then? Could they see it coming or something?’ he said, and our conversation went back and forth in this manner for several minutes. He was an Arsenal fan, and by way of a riposte I mentioned that when you have a West Ham fan and an Arsenal fan in the same place, it’s usually the Arsenal fan that’s lying on the floor, severely injured. By now, Andrew the cabbie was being arrested and I was being placed in a neck and spine brace by an ambulance driver who looked like Jeremy Corbyn, adding to the overall surreal nature of the evening. This caused me to think that perhaps a middle-class ambulance had picked me up by mistake, and I prepared myself for quite a long discussion about, probably, Brexit. These fears increased when, on the way to the Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital, the first question asked by the ambulance lady was if I had any food allergies. My experience with glampers at Runton tells me that there are a lot of things middle class people can’t eat – nuts, gluten, meat, dairy, fish, stuff from Israel etc – as they are an evolutionary dead end, which is also why they don’t breed. Upon reflection, I think this was the moment I realised I was going to be in hospital for some time, so I just said that while I have no allergies as such, I don’t like tapas as it is annoying because there is never enough of anything. Attempting to wrestle the conversation back to that evening’s headline news, I asked if I was badly hurt. The ambulance lady said that if I was a cat, I’d certainly have lost one of my nine lives. I pointed out that if I was a cat I wouldn’t have been riding a bike in the first place, and she admitted I had a point.

‘I live in the countryside,’ I said, ‘if I’m injured, they’ll shoot me’.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘the good news is that the crunching sound you can hear is not your bones. It’s all the glass in your shirt and hair. That said, if I was to hazard a guess, I’d say you’ve broken several ribs and your left shoulder, hip and possibly knee.’

‘And if you were to hazard a lie?’ I replied.

‘I’d say you were right as rain,’ she smiled.

‘Well that’s good news, then’ I said, and fainted.

Postscript

This was a long post, so I have split it in half. Well, I say that, but I haven’t written the other half yet, so there is no way of knowing exactly how long it will eventually be. When I started this blog, I wanted to post every Monday and Thursday, in keeping with the traditional broadcast days of Blue Peter, and while it is plain to all that this has gone by the wayside somewhat, I’ll try and put the other half up on Thursday evening, and stick to the format henceforth.

Pictards:

Top – The Iron Lady, not the bike I was riding when I was mown down. I use this for charging about the countryside. These days it has khaki panniers, and is covered in mud, straw, and animal droppings.

Inset middle – a VW Passat, similar to the one that hit me, although this one still has a windscreen of course.

Inset lower – Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital, unrecognisable without the crowds of people smoking in the entrance.