Tag: weddings

Rock Climbing With The School Bully, Part III: Life Skills

Nov 22nd, 2022

Public service announcement: For the benefit of foreigners, Minstrels are a British confectionery staple consisting of chocolate in chocolate shell. They are wonderful and if, once my scheduled MRI scan has happened, it turns out that I do indeed have peripheral arterial disease, they will be in no small part responsible. Je ne regrette rein, except not eating more of them.

While acknowledging that we are mid-way through a story of childhood confectionery theft to illustrate a series of connected posts on the theme of bullying to, in turn, highlight the need for the establishment of a new trade union for non-clinical NHS staff, I sometimes wonder if stealing cars is still a thing. It was a national sport when I was growing up, especially in Canning Town. In case you are unfamiliar, this is a part of London where, traditionally, West Ham fans are made. Not now, obviously, as it’s all organic bakeries and Guardian readers and pronouns and what not, but for decades it was wall-to-wall claret and blue and an almost comically criminal place. Well-liked local notables included Mono and his dog Trio, who only had four legs between them, and Frank the Wank, a harmless man with an unfortunate muscular affliction that made him appear to be constantly nursing a tremendous invisible phallus.

The most Canning Town crime ever happened to an acquaintance of mine at some point in the 1990s. He was surveying a roof prior to doing some work or other when he noticed an urchin trying to break into his van, parked below. When the urchin failed to heed shouted warnings and threats, my acquaintance ascended to pavement level and remonstrated with him further. Unmoved, the urchin replied ‘OK mate, what’s happening here is that I am going to steal your van, and you are going to watch me’. With this, he forced the driver’s side door, hot wired the steering column and made good his escape. My acquaintance said that what annoyed him most was that he didn’t even bother to hurtle away in a cloud of screeching tyre smoke, but drove off within the speed limit, stopping at some nearby traffic lights in accordance with the Highway Code, whereupon he could be heard adjusting the radio and hurling an unwanted CD from the offside passenger window.

(On the subject of car crime, the Ford Sierra became legendary at our school due to a manufacturing fault that made the windscreen easy to pop out and sell on, due to the rubber surrounds expanding with a blast from a hairdryer. You could also bypass the central locking systems of the day, which operated on compressed air, by cutting a tennis ball in half and banging it against one of the door locks. Also, pretty much everyone knew how to open padlocks with spanners, and how to distill cyanide gas from silk. Not that everyone went around doing that stuff all day, of course, but still. Life skills, mate.)

My Minstrels were stolen by Nat Baker with the same efficient nonchalance as a roofer’s van in Canning Town. I’m sure he just said ‘I’m having those’, and fucked off with them. I tried to wrestle them back in a rough-and-tumble kind of a way, but was restrained by one of his huge hands appearing on my black Lyle and Scott jumper, along with some nonsense threat like ‘Right. After school’ as if this was Grange Hill or something. I don’t recall feeling nervous during the intervening afternoon, perhaps presuming that our respective legal teams would sort it out. I do, however, recall being told I was going to be ‘marmalised’ – the only time I have heard this preserve-based adjective – and being advised to feign epilepsy as a result.

Incidentally, I offered to do this a couple of decades later at Joe’s wedding in order to have the ceremony waylaid, the shamefully inaccurate consensus being that this would be a good idea, if only so I could sober up enough to do my speech. In neither event did I do this, however, so did indeed find myself facing marmalisation over some Minstrels and, a couple of decades later, witnessed Joe’s wedding taking place as planned and on schedule. On one of these occasions, though, I had a sharpened compass point in my pocket as an aid to any stabbing-in-the-face opportunities that may arise. (I should point out that by ‘compass’ I mean the technical drawing instrument, not the navigational aid, because on neither occasion would knowing where magnetic North was have been any help whatsoever.)

Picters:

Main: Truth in advertising. Not sure where this was taken. Tottenham I think.

Top: Unused Ministry of Kitchenware apron labels. I miss the Ministry of Kitchenware, and intend to bring it back as an online store in 2023. Most of the old manufacturing plant still works, and it’s just sitting there and everything.

Lower: Old publicgriefjunkie t shirt label, found by my current girlfriend in a drawer in our haunted bookshop of a house.
The Changing Of The Seasons

Oct 17th, 2018

At Runton, a season has turned. The horizon, for so long an indistinct line between two fierce blocks of haze, now just looks big and sad. Frizbees no longer land in the petting zoo to be eaten by Angora goats, their glamping hurlers elsewhere for a gluten free winter of self-loathing. The restored barn is silent, alfresco deaf yoga (admittedly pretty quiet at the best of times) and Flat Earth Society lectures done with. The clattering of forest school children in Leicester City shirts is an echo in the gathering leaves; they are in the East Midlands for Tangfastic breakfasts till April. Sevastopol, the Runton peacock, who may or may not be the same peacock they remember from two years ago who, in turn, may or may not or may have been fatally savaged by my dog one irate September morning in 2016, is in his winter lodgings. The paths through the woods are quieter, silhouettes are sharper, sound carries heavier across damp autumn fields, and this morning ‘Anton’ complained that he could ‘feel winter in his tits’. Summer has gone, and the year is dozing off.

Dozing, but not yet asleep. For example, Joe recently celebrated ten years of marriage by getting into a fight at a wedding reception. Well, not a fight exactly, but some to-ing and fro-ing at the end of the evening when six of the two hundred guests produced a sound system and announced they were having a rave with it. Joe explained that we don’t have a licence for that and that no one, including the bridegroom, had mentioned anything that would’ve enabled us to sort something out. The chief would-be raver argued that the bridengroom had paid ‘thirty

grand for this’. Joe pointed out that he hadn’t paid him thirty grand, as he was working for free. It’s difficult to know how you can spend thirty grand in a series of fields held together by crumbling mid-Victorian buildings, especially considering that Joe, ‘Anton’ and I bought a bit of it three weeks ago – the stable block and yard where Becka’s Screaming Car is – for seven hundred quid*. For thirty grand the bridengroom could probably have bought all of East Anglia but spent it on, among other things, stilt walkers, jugglers on unicycles, jugglers not on unicycles, a fish and chip van, an ice cream vendor on a bike, and transforming the vacant forest school dormitory into a replica of the pub in Lord of the Rings. Joe was right, though. He was working for free, as the money went straight to the shape shifting Freemasons of the Board of Trustees. ‘Anton’ and I, in attendance as general helpers-out, were also working gratis, although we did liberate a lot of food and booze in a process I refer to as Pre-ganism. Whereas Freeganism involves procuring food that has been abandoned, my method involves procuring food before the owners notice it has gone: Pre-ganism.

On no less than three separate occasions people have made a concerted effort to actually kill Joe, so a bit of handbags with some Alisdairs was unlikely to find him out of his depth. Also, while physical violence is both exciting and effective, it has to be kept as an option of last resort because of civilisation, so ‘Anton’ and I decided against steaming in to the ravers and opted for a more conciliatory approach. I suggested that we ‘invent a way / through ideas and play’ in accordance with the theme tune to Bitz and Bob, still in my head after watching it fourteen hours earlier with Nid. At that moment, however, my judgement was clouded when I took a bite of wedding cake to discover that it was made of cheese instead of wedding cake. This made me angry and emotional, so I was up for whatever, really.

With Joe being firm but diplomatic with people who ‘Anton’ and I were keen to skittle about all over the place, Graham appeared. It is rare that his capacity as rustic Romany beastmaster overlaps with ‘Anton’ and I’s capacity as clueless Cockney hangers-on, but it was a big wedding and he was attracted by food he didn’t have to shoot. Sharing my dismay at the cheese wedding cake – ‘How’re you supposed to eat it? In a baked potato with fucking beans?’ – he suggested that we remove the engine from the chief protagonist’s Range Rover Sport overnight for a larf. You may recall that it was once common practice for Graham’s kids to forcibly sell re-treaded tyres to problematic glampers, so this is not as outlandish as it sounds. After working hard to de-wanker the place, this is no longer part of the judicial process, which is a shame because foul mouthed Romany pre-teens aggressively selling retreaded tyres to a terrified Josh is a sight to behold. Anyway. I asked Graham if he could replace the engine with one from a washing machine for a further giggle, and incredibly this is actually possible. In the event, of course, no one had the engine in their Range Rover Sport replaced with anything, despite my earnest desire to commiserate with the owner the next morning by pointing out that although a car with a washing machine engine might not be very powerful, you could still take it for a spin. The argument fizzled out, and everyone went to bed.

And with that, summer ended. I spent less time at Runton than I would like, what with temporarily moving considerably further away while the ceilings in my house are prevented from falling in, and have done little of note other than walk the dog and look after Nid, who can’t attend his usual nursery for the duration. Thoughts now turn to how those of us comprising the Runton Estate management team will survive the winter. I have my bicycle barbering, although cycling about rural East Anglia in freezing mist to cut pensioners’ hair at a fiver a pop is not all larfs and I am in any case thirty miles from my modest client base. Still, among the other things that happened in the latter half of summer were that Joe got certification to drive explosive materials in a van, and I got a shotgun licence. By again following the advice of Bitz and Bob and combining these with ideas and play, we should be able to come up with something.

*This is first part of the Grand Renovation Plan, whereby we buy chunks of the Estate, restore them, and sell them back to the Trustees at an agreed price instead of getting everything done with a Lottery grant.
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Photards:

Main: Forest School dormitories, converted to look like the pub in Lord of the Rings for the wedding in question.

Top inset: A little plastic man I found gamely hanging on to part of a hedge one day.

Inset middle: Swans.

Inset lower: A horse standing next to his little car. He drove in to have new shoes put on by a blacksmith for a job interview the following week.
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 Wedding Shammers

Jun 20th, 2017

Runton Hall has recently started hosting weddings. The decision to do so came as a relief to me, as in my capacity as ad hoc bookings manager I had arranged for one to be held in the Great Barn this coming Saturday, with camping for guests in the Fallow Field near the Forest School on the southern end of the estate, and full provision for dj’s and catering. I’m afraid I had to bulldoze the idea past the Board of Trustees with such phrases as ‘powering up the revenue engine’ and ‘expanding Runton’s portfolio of activities’, but in my defence I was the only person in the room who, unbeknown to the Board, had spent nine grand on Sandstone Star bell weather tents that morning expressly for the purpose of hosting weddings in the first place, and wanted them earning rental income sharpish.

These handsome acquisitions were paid for by selling off abandoned glamper tents, left behind when their owners go back to Guardian reader land without them. I don’t know why you’d spend six hundred quid on a tent and only use it once, but then I don’t know why you’d suddenly want to get full sleeve tattoos at forty five and sit around drinking craft lager and being offended by literally everything either, and that’s some of the other stuff they like to do at the weekend. If anyone would know about tents, I reasoned as I contemplated the Sandstone Star purchase, it would be a survivalist. My hunch proved correct when Beggar’s Canyon, our consultant doomsday prepper, was not only able to shift our abandoned stock via who-knows-what network of citizen militia and woodland folk, but also put us in touch with a very amenable camping wholesaler, from whom the new tents were purchased. ‘She’s not just an enormous face’ as an impressed ‘Anton’ was moved to exclaim, and he’s right, although I warned him to guard against such comments around someone who knows how far a steel ball will penetrate solid oak when fired from a hunting catapult.

It’s exciting for us though, and an important milestone in our attempt to drag Runton Hall into one of the centuries immediately proceeding the twenty-first. I have literally no idea how to host a wedding, which differs from my repeated assertions to the Trustees that I had done it ‘loads of times’ in a fictitious previous career, and that it was easy. Whether it actually is easy is no concern of mine; I merely assumed that hiring a wedding planner for less than you are charging to plan a wedding yourself would be easy, which was indeed the case. Anyway, everyone’s happy and the only hitch was the catering, for which Joe is building a couple of pizza ovens. This did not fit entirely seamlessly with the Bollywood theme of the event, but I smoothed this over by suggesting that guests might like a spicy pizza with bolives and bonions, with borange juice for younger attendees. Some of Joe’s numerous children are to be press-ganged into circulating with trays of such delights while Joe, ‘Anton’ and I keep the ovens aglow until such time as we can abandon our posts and drink heavily with the wedding party, thus affording ‘Anton’ a chance to ‘get hold of a spare slag’, and other sundries with which I will not trouble you. It’s sometimes difficult to imagine that Anton – the rag and bone man of love – once had the romantic wherewithal to actually get married himself, but there we are.

Elsewhere on the estate, various comings and goings take place as usual. The Paul Is Dead people have departed, and as I write this we are relatively nutcase free. There has of course been a general election since we last spoke, and if you didn’t already know the result, the online petitions calling for recounts, reforms to the voting system, the subsequent removal of every party except Labour from ballot slips and so forth should tell you which way things went, although Labour did put in a magnificent effort which did everything other than actually win. I’ve voted for all the main parties at one point or other, and although I religiously stay up and watch all the Election Night coverage because it is genuinely riveting, I never really mind who comes out on top. Mind you, I always say Conservative when asked for my allegiances regardless of which way I’m voting, because it offends the righteous – the righteous love being offended, and so by claiming to be a Tory I am spreading a little happiness in these troubled times. I suggest you do the same if you’re feeling mischievous and want to see how quickly the Hope Not Hate people turn out to hate literally everything. Progressive liberalism is, I should think, the highest evolution of democracy, and if it wasn’t always fronted by angry middle class wankers, I’m sure it would catch on.

Anyway. By the weekend we will have a group of twenty Flat Earthers ensconced in the Old Servants’ Quarters, a rather nice, roomy property rewired by ‘Anton’ and without an electrical fire for some weeks now. They are unlikely to be disturbed by the wedding reception, which is on the other side of the estate. Everyone loves a wedding, surely, and a Bollywood-themed wedding is only a bunch of Bens and Lauras light-heartedly appropriating someone else’s culture in the name of matrimony, after all. I’m sure the Flat Earthers would find it a giggle, and probably more so than the Paul Is Dead people, who consider that the whole of civilisation – weddings, Bollywood, general elections, glamping tents and all – has in turn been appropriated by shape shifting lizard hybrids from among the rings of Saturn. Appropriated for what exactly I am yet to discover, and have been at Runton long enough to know that I don’t like to ask, although we may safely assume it isn’t for ‘Anton’s skills as a romantic electrician.