It’s Christmas, so that’s lovely. I’ve had Paul McBeatle’s Mull of Kintyre on heavy rotation while walking the dog, as it is my favourite Christmas song despite being about glens and heather in Scotland. Actually, I wonder how many Scottish couples called Glen and Heather there are? Loads, probably. And don’t believe the hype: even though Scotland likes to present itself as a big cold field where bitter people live, this isn’t true. It is a beautiful place full of brilliant people, and I think they should play to that aspect far more. Yes, if they’d got independence they would’ve wasted all their tax revenue changing the name from ‘Scotland’ to ‘Not England’, as not being England is the most important thing in the world to a major international player like Scotland, but still. Even if you’re Scottish, it’s Christmas. It’s even Christmas at my hospital, where everything’s covered in tinsel and the corridors are knee deep in Cadbury’s Heroes, which makes moving patients around tricky. I’ve been substituting prosecco for lidocaine to cheer them up during surgery, though, so all’s right with the world.
It’s probably worth pointing out that I am not a nurse. As I may have explained before, I’m not even a trainee nurse. Myself and my fellow dogsbodies are, essentially, trainee trainee nurses. We are obliged to do a lot of nurse stuff, because there aren’t any actual nurses, and there aren’t any actual nurses because being an actual nurse is horrible. To their credit, they try to put you off a career in nursing by being overweight, depressed and obsessed with cats, which sends a pretty clear signal. I often imagine that when they leave college, nurses are given a special advent calendar with a window for every day until they retire, and behind each window, as the years grind past, is a little chart to record their increasing disappointment with life. As you can probably imagine, this puts those of us working towards actually being nurses in a bit of a quandary because, as far as our training and exams go, success would be a disaster.
I explained the horror I feel about this at a recent ‘Hey! How’s it going?’ meeting my fellow cannon fodder and I had with a sympathetic consultant. On this occasion, we were talking with Dr Bowler, who I think we met last time. I am fond of Dr Bowler, as he addresses everyone as ‘chaps’ and ‘Dear boy’ and habitually wears a sheepskin flying jacket. As I once remarked to him, my dissertation was on the British Commonwealth in World War Two, so to work with someone who appears to be a Spitfire pilot is very exciting. Then again, it can be a strain on hospital infrastructure as he sometimes comes to work in a Lancaster bomber, which takes up forty-seven parking spaces, and so on.
Anyway. Looking back, when asked our opinions upon our training and eventual destination, I may have been channelling Tom Hardy’s portrayal of Reggie Kray in the pub fight scene from Legend. This is because I found myself saying ‘I’ll tell you all about being a nurse. Fuck being a nurse, and fuck nursing. Fuck oncology and gynaecology and the other ologies. Fuck main theatres, fuck wearing scrubs and fuck fucking about all day with fucking syringes. In fact, I would rather lose a fucking finger than be a fucking nurse.’
Channelling Reggie Kray or not, it was felt by my fellow dogsbodies that this explained our position adequately. It was unclear what someone who appeared to have spent a long morning dog-fighting with the Hun would do about this but, as it turned out, there was good news on the horizon. Or bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, if you will. (NB Germans aren’t allowed to have Christmas because they don’t deserve it).
Picters:
Main: Joe in the glamourous Compleat Angler by Norwich station recently.
Top inset: I recently attempted to get Sid to eat more vegetables by hiding garden peas in his birthday cake. He spotted them, unfortunately, but thought it was quite a larf.
Lower inset: A Christmas tribute to the late Queen, who Sid thinks flew a ‘Spitflier’ during this summer’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
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.
Runton Hall is not the only stately home in Norfolk. There are others, and at this time of year many of them put ‘enchanted’ in front of their name, string lights all over the place and let reindeer loose in the grounds for the delight of local children. At Runton as December deepens, Joe and Becka dress their numerous offspring as Christmas puddings, whereupon the smaller ones are rolled around like marbles by their older siblings, no matter much they cry and/or throw up. Elsewhere, ‘Anton’ can often be heard shouting at a peacock to fuck off. This is Sebastopol the Peacock, Runton’s mascot, hated by all and fortunate to dodge the festive roasting tin. There are other reasons I feel that ‘Runton’ and ‘enchanted’ do not sit easily in the same sentence. Certainly, it looks nice if you like endless skies, meadows silver’d with frost, birch trees in the midday mist and all the other things that make the countryside so insufferable. At heart though, Runton is a workplace, and better for it. In any case, if a reindeer wandered around Runton, Graham would shoot it – that’s why Santa comes here last.
eing someone twice in a short time, and a Christmas association was born. Played next that morning would have been Mull of Kintyre by Paul McBeatle, which replaced Name Of The Game at number one, and to which I credit my genuine love of bagpipe music. It was a significant ten minutes in a tiny life, and both tunes, yuletide playlist stalwarts, are as Christmassy to me as mistletoe and mittens.
My playlist has permeated the Old Servants’ Quarters, where ‘Anton’ and I are tidying up a couple of bits prior to departing for Christmas. Other than us, Runton is almost deserted. The film crew are long gone. The yoga groups are not back until January. Even the conspiracy theorists have gone home to tiresomely point out over and over again that Christmas is the Christian appropriation of a Pagan festival, overlooking the fact that before that it was the Pagan appropriation of a perfectly ordinary day of the week. Joe, Becka and their numerous children are housesitting elsewhere for the duration. Graham is still here, feeding some animals and killing others, but his children are with their mother, who he refers to as Stabby Onassis, in a caravan on Harlow Common. ‘Anton’ leaves for Deptford tomorrow, and while there are things I could be doing about the place over the festive season, I am simply too frightened to be here on my own, being a civilised person in the middle of nowhere. The whole point of civilisation is to eradicate the middle of nowhere, something that passes most country people by. Leaving aside intelligence and overall physical attractiveness, attitudes towards solitude are the major difference between urban dwellers, typically engaged in honest toil, producing the Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations that benefit us all, and their country counterparts, scratching about in fields and polishing cattle. I would find being at Runton alone terrifying because there is no one around for miles. A country person would find it comforting, for exactly the same reason. In turn, this reminds us that there is a serious side to Britain leaving the EU, all-too-easily lost amid the amusing spectacle of Guardian readers dying of rage and shrillness: after Brexit, we’ll have to subsidise our country folk ourselves, without seven hundred and fifty million other Europeans doing it for us. This, surely, is madness.
The Runton Diaries 