Tag: wildlife

Rabbits, Dogs and Glampers

Jun 29th, 2017

My solution to the Runton Hall rabbit infestation is simple: build a city. This is also my solution to everything in the countryside, from nettle stings to lack of public transport. In a city, rabbits would be licensed by a governing authority, like cabs. If they misbehaved they would be issued with a caution and moved along, with unrulier ones detained overnight and presented to local magistrates in the morning. The countryside is not like this, and unfortunately the countryside is where Runton Hall is. It exists in a state of anarchy and bloodlust. If country laws were to be adopted in the city, Graham would flush shoplifters out of their houses with ferrets and chase them with dogs until the point of exhaustion, whereupon Joe would extinguish any remaining life by breaking their necks and skinning them. Living in the countryside is an affront to God and civilisation, and we must never allow it to be regarded as desirable, acceptable, or British.

I pointed this out to Graham today at dawn as he prepared his ferrets and dogs for a bit of rabbit culling. ‘Anton’ was supposed to be helping him, but is wary of Graham after an incident prior to the last cull when Graham asked him to hold up a roof beam in an outbuilding we are renovating and, with ‘Anton’ fully committed and visibly shaking under the strain, placed two ferrets in his shirt. Some say that it is still possible to hear the words ‘I’ll kill you, you bastard fucking pikey cunt’, and sundry other sentiments with which I will not trouble you, dancing in the wind on the west side of the estate on still, moonlit nights. We Cockneys are kind, gentle, trusting people, and all too often this is our treatment at the hands of country folk. Anyway. ‘Anton’ was instead employed installing nets across gaps in the fences where rabbits might escape, the sound of his hammering filling the morning air. ‘Sounds like he’s crucifying one of yer glampers’ said Graham, and I was moved to agree.

You probably can legally crucify a glamper in the countryside. It’s chaos out here. In their defence, the quality of Runton glamper has risen now that ‘Anton’ and I are stricter about who glamps and who doesn’t. For a start, they pay more, in accordance with the old market trading rule that if you want to sell something, put the price up, which here translates to better behaviour when paying a premium. Also, we have the nice tents I bought for the Bollywood wedding to rent them, providing us with a useful side line income. Joe is on the payroll at Runton, Becka gets the Forest School money, so the Trustees usually allow ‘Anton’ and I to do whatever we like as long as it brings in revenue and is ‘the right thing to do’. Often, the ‘right thing to do’ would be to hold pillows across the faces of the Board members and, when they stop thrashing about, dismember them and feed them to Graham’s dogs as an act of Freeganism – but this is, I suspect, a legal minefield. Nonetheless, by charging the glampers more, encouraging tent hire and fining them when they go to sleep and leave their camp fires to burn uncontrollably, thereby requiring Joe to put them out at all hours of the night, they are far more welcome than they used to be.

They are messy though. This is what happens when you put the white middle class in a field – look at the state of Glastonbury when they’re done with it. Joe and I no longer wake them up in the morning by wandering through their enclosure shouting that someone’s found a way Jeremy Corbyn can still be Prime Minister, or that there’s going to be another EU Referendum, or that Great British Bake Off is not going to commercial television after all, and so forth. These days, we let them sleep in and ask them nicely to clean up after themselves, and almost all of them do so quite happily. I give the details of those who refuse, or who are basically dicks, to Graham’s kids, who then aggressively sell re-treaded tyres to them until they see the error of their ways. Graham’s kids, the oldest of whom is twelve, are fantastic. As you may recall, I acquired my dog, Archie, as part payment for teaching them how to read (‘A is for fucking apple, B is for fucking ball and my fucking bollocks. What’s this fucking book now? ‘I Don’t Like Fucking Snakes’? Who the fuck does? Rare old pile of shite this is’ and so forth) and they are inventive, hilarious and friendly, if relentlessly foul-mouthed and aggressively territorial around uncooperative glampers. ‘That’s what makes your holiday – the people you meet’ I usually say in a cheery manner as some Barney or Sophia drives back to Crystal Palace with tyres all over their back seat, and I’m sure they agree in principle.

With regards to the rabbit coursing, there isn’t much to say, other than it wasn’t a good day for Thumper and Bugs. Never likely to come out on top, were they. Incidentally, Archie does not participate in this sort of thing. He is a Saluki, and we Saluki owners treasure our dogs: I put great effort into every aspect of his well-being, from grooming (daily) to feeding (raw meat, bones and offal) to training (varied and extensive, and involving a sports psychologist*) but am obviously curious to see how well he could do the biz, if push came to shove. To this end, I shall be trying to get lure coursing past the Trustees at next Monday’s Board meeting. This is where a carrier bag is attached to a fishing line which is in turn attached to a motor, and dogs chase it hither and yon across a predesignated course like a bunch of nutcases. Larks ahoy!

*this is untrue.

Photards: Top – Saluki investigating a tree that fainted in the recent hot weather.

Middle inset: Cows in a field. This was taken in the early morning, when only the one on the left had been fully inflated.

Lower inset: Some white people nipping off to save the NHS. Picture taken from the BBC, who I believe are warmly supportive of my decision to use it here.
The Forest School Kids

May 17th, 2017

We as a species are perhaps a generation away from finally breaking nature’s ability to resist us. Victory is that close. The final push surely starts by instilling a disdain for the outdoors in our children, and it therefore grieves me to see kids as young as five at the Forest School run by Becca. Rope bridges, tyres (mysteriously sold to us by Graham’s oldest daughter, who is twelve) hanging from trees, leaves being identified and drawn in little books, sheep being stroked – all this and more goes on among the conifer groves of Runton. Awful. I can only assume that those children are immediately taken into care when they get home – and rightly so.

For all that, the Forest School is, after the glampers, Runton Hall’s biggest source of income, and as Becca slowly chews single slices of toast while silently crying in the kitchen (which is how women who have had children prefer to eat) I am always intrigued as to what she will think of next. For example, until recently rain meant herding the Forest School kids into a large restored barn acting as everything from an actual barn to a debating chamber for the mental and getting them to draw ducks with crayons, or whatever children do when it’s raining out. This has since changed, because on the other side of the estate near German Field there is a Victorian greenhouse in need of restoration, and in keeping with the overall nineteenth century vibe, Becca gets the children to do it by issuing them with a Brillo pad each and a section of ironwork that last saw elbow grease in 1861. The aim is to return the greenhouse to a bona fide growing environment, then produce medicinal plants for the benefit of a particular pharmaceutical company who consider that forcing plant species alien to the northern hemisphere to grow in rural East Anglia is natural and organic. This is not likely to happen for a year or two – there’s a lot of Brillo pad work needed first – and Joe and Becca will be looking after the greenhouse when it eventually starts producing stuff. Not me, though. I am also a species alien to rural East Anglia, so fuck that.

You may recall that we touched upon the disappearance of Sevastopol the peacock last time. It is the Forest School children who would be most upset if he had indeed been savaged by my dog, because although he was extremely aggressive and something of a piss-taker who on four occasions attacked my dog for no reason whatsoever, he was much loved by them once they got their head around what he actually was. I say this because on more than one occasion, I had the following conversation:

‘Look! There’s Sevastopol! He’s a peacock!’

‘A penguin?’

‘No, a peacock’

‘Like in the Arctic?’

‘No, a peacock. He normally lives in India’

‘I saw a film about penguins at my school’

‘Yes, but Sevastopol is a peacock, do you see?’

‘What’s a peacock?’

…and so forth. Actually, the Forest School kids, bussed out from the grimmer parts of major cities to see the countryside, are endearing, and it is difficult not to take a shine to them. Also, they are far less noisy than their glamping counterparts, don’t have the food intolerances of middle class children, and bring packed lunches consisting of chocolate mini rolls and bags of Haribo Tangfastics. When you’ve had outraged glamper offspring demanding olives and halloumi it’s nice to see kids who just want to eat sweets all day. No child should prefer hummus to baked beans. We live in troubled times.

Anyway. I assumed my dog was a lurcher when Graham gave him to me. In case you are unfamiliar, a lurcher is a cross between a sight hound and a herding dog, with the most common being a greyhound/collie mix, although many variations abound. Lurchers are poachers’ dogs, and while Graham is a pest controller rather than a poacher, he has four others of this kind. I had originally wanted to name him Help Help Call The Police, to add interest when calling him back off the lead, but after consideration I changed this to Mr Fantastic. However, he had already been dubbed Archie by Graham’s kids, so his name became Mr Archibald Fantastic, only to encounter further complication when it transpired that he was a saluki, or Persian hunting dog, and therefore a Muslim rather than the Roman Catholic I had originally assumed. I changed his name again to Archibald al Fantastique to honour his Persian roots, and by way of thanking me, he repeatedly stole butter and hid it in the laundry basket. He also destroyed several pairs of sunglasses and drank a quantity of contact lens solution, although I suppose this is to be expected with a sight hound. This behaviour does not make a peacock killer though. Salukis are exceptionally sweet natured dogs, (unless you are running very fast away from them, like a desert hare or antelope, in which case they will chase you until your respiratory system collapses) and a peacock simply doesn’t move quick enough to trigger this sort of response. That said, if it’s adorable for some hippy’s cat to dismember every duckling Runton Hall has ever seen, it’s adorable for a frightened dog to defend itself against a violent peacock, regardless of his iridescent plumage and shiny blue face. While the case remains open, it is most likely that Sevastopol met his end due to the attentions of a fox. In case you are unfamiliar, a fox is the product of a dog breeding with a cat, and they are troublesome in the countryside.

Graham managed to rustle up a replacement Sevastopol before anyone noticed. How he did this I do not know, in the same way that I do not know how his children, two girls aged twelve and ten and a boy of four, seem to have established a successful tyre re-treading service on the outskirts of a Georgian country estate. Maybe they resprayed a goose. With regards to the tyres, I can only assume they’re buying them from relatives prior to selling them on to Joe, Becca, ‘Anton’ and sundry other people around Runton, and this is the sort of gap-in-the-market spotting enterprise of which I warmly approve. In any case, it’s not worth questioning them about it. One of the trustees did this recently, and discovered that they immediately shout ‘If you’re calling me a thief just come out and say it like a man’ and mob around you punching your legs if you do that sort of thing, at which point it is prudent to end your enquiries, accept that complimentary set of Bridgestones you’ve been given by Graham to smooth things over, and leave it at that.
The Peacock House

May 16th, 2017

Yesterday morning, ‘Anton’ and I were putting up a Robens Prospector Tent for some bunch of glamping fucktards or other when a figure approached us through the mist that sometimes makes the Runton estate look uncomfortably like a scene from The Others. It was Graham, who handles the more complex animal culls around the estate with ferrets and dogs and so forth. Graham is every inch a son of the soil, able to tell the time by the position of the sun, whittle things from sticks, get tractors to run on cooking oil, and do that thing where you pull a small sheep out of another, larger sheep. Conversely, ‘Anton’ is a shag happy Deptford wide boy, once the terror of the Lewisham menopausal and now, like myself, little more than a grumbling Cockney in a field. Those familiar with ‘Anton’ and I’s years of trading at Greenwich Market will recall the feud between him and Keith, a fine art and photography vendor, whereby ‘Anton’ would regularly offer to nip round and give Keith’s wife Barbara ‘the full half pint’, among other horrors with which I will not trouble you. My favourite part of the feud was when ‘Anton’ attempted to convince the market management that Keith was incontinent by pouring water over the cushion Keith liked to sit on, advising them to ‘have a quiet word with him about it’, and that Keith was a proud man in deep denial and it might be a good idea to call him into the office to discuss it privately, insisting it’s nothing to be ashamed of at his age and fatness. Sadly for ‘Anton’, his ambition of replacing the words ‘A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight’, which dominated the Nelson Road end of the market, with ‘Keith is a fucking fat fucking wanker’ will now never be realised, as that part of the premises has since been demolished and lost forever. Sometimes we can just dream a little too far. Anyway, as an adolescent, ‘Anton’ used to flog zoot suits outside the Lacy Lady* and, like myself, has time for someone who knows how to dress themselves properly. Incidentally, I don’t want any backchat about not judging a book by its cover at this point, because judging a book by the cover is efficient and speeds up the judging process a great deal.

‘Are you some sort of pikey or something?’ said ‘Anton’ to Graham, now beside us and resplendent in a heavily patched hunting jacket, giving the impression that he had been standing in rain for about thirty seven years.

‘Yes’, replied Graham, a Romany gypsy, ‘I live in a caravan over there [gesturing behind him]. You’ve been there loads of times. You’ve been buying tyres off my kids since you got here, and yer man here had a dog’. This pertains to the fact that I taught Graham’s children to read, and that he gave me a dog as part payment. Also, it says much about the nature of life at Runton Hall that the only permanent residents are a family of gypsy transients, but there we are. I hate the countryside.

Unabashed, ‘Anton’ disappeared back into the Robins Prospector to ensure it was ready for glampers wanting to talk about EU Referendum recounts in, while Graham and I talked about the Summer Palace Joe has built for Sevastopol the Peacock. Sevastopol is an impressive specimen of his breed, fond of wandering around the grounds with his tail out in the summer months, and is regarded as a beloved celebrity by Runton visitors. Not by Joe, however: peacocks are loud, and Sevastopol has a habit of celebrating this next to Joe’s wigwam in the early hours of the morning. The Summer Palace Joe has built is a wondrous thing, full of stuff that peacocks like, and most importantly well away from him and his numerous children. As we talked, we waved to the Flat Earthers, who were jogging past at that moment. Most people don’t think of hard core conspiracy theorists having an exercise regime, but then most people don’t think there’s a gigantic ice wall stopping the oceans from sloshing over the edge of the planet and into outer space either. Incidentally, the Flat Earthers are off next week, to be replaced by PID believers. In case you are unfamiliar, ‘PID’ stands for ‘Paul [McCartney] Is Dead’, and the theory is roughly as follows: McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a look and sound alike by the Tavistock Institute, a front organisation working on behalf of shape shifting lizards from the rings of Saturn for the purposes of spreading drug use among the young, thereby making the human population easier to control. Obvious really.

I yield to none in my love of the Fab Four – indeed, if I was any more obsessed with them I would consider myself ripe for psychiatric treatment. I collect old concert tickets and fan mail and everything. Bearing that in mind, imagine what it’s like for me hearing the Paul Is Dead theory relayed at first hand, as casually as if it was directions to Morrissons. I’ve heard it before, of course, but still. When faced with information of this kind at Runton, which is often, I just say ‘Well, I hope you get to the bottom of it’, and ask if they’ll be wanting sandwiches or anything, because not upsetting conspiracy theorists is probably the most important part of my current working life. The PID people spend most of the day playing Beatles albums backwards and saying ‘There. Solid proof. Absolutely crystal clear’ at obscure bits of garbled noise they claim proves their theory, but keep themselves to themselves otherwise. Still, I would rather have the place full of conspiracy theorists than glampers, as glampers act like they own the world, whereas conspiracy theorists act like it’s been owned since Ancient Egyptian times by hybrid lizard/human bloodlines, who probably leave less litter.

As ever, prudence is key. It isn’t for me to question beliefs which, at Runton at least, are pursued in a tolerant, good humoured and respectful manner. For all I know, there may be a conspiracy theory stating that Sevastopol the peacock is not Sevastopol the peacock at all, and that the original Sevastopol was attacked and dismembered by an angry dog given to an ex market trader by a Romany gypsy, and that the current Sevastopol is a replacement bought in to avoid upsetting guests and jeopardising revenue, but I’m sure you’ll agree it would be unfair to expect me to comment upon it.

*a famous Ilford nightclub, once the cutting edge of the British soul scene. In case you are unfamiliar, the British soul scene involved dancing all night to songs about love and then beating a stranger unconscious on the way home.

Disclaimer

In the unlikely event that any Flat Earthers read this, I understand that it is lazy to call the Flat Earth Society a conspiracy theory. It isn’t. I think I’m right in saying that it merely seeks to question accepted scientific fact, and the ‘conspiracy’ aspect in fact pertains to Space Exploration Theory, which broadly speaking believes that space travel is a hoax put about by NASA to enable military domination of the inner cosmos. There.
Farewell, Piccadilly

May 12th, 2017

The countryside is fucking barbaric. I don’t know if you’ve been there at all but, if you haven’t, it’s a bloodbath from end to end. One enormous slaughterhouse, all of it.

Everything in the countryside can be shot, hunted and generally preyed upon, and is too busy shooting, hunting and generally preying upon everything else to notice. Furthermore, whereas a Londoner such as myself will consider knowing what time the Bakerloo Line shuts down, or where to get a late drink in Southwark* as evidence of participation in an advanced society, someone in the countryside will consider knowing the best way to dispatch a rabbit in much the same light. The method, incidentally, is as follows: place the fore and index fingers of your right hand in a ‘v’ shape around the rear of the neck, then put the palm of your left under the luckless bunny’s chin and push firmly up and back. The lumbar vertebrae snap, the spinal cord is severed, and death is instantaneous. It is, as they say in the countryside, ‘the kindest thing to do’, although I imagine it would be even kinder not to kill it in the first place, or maybe treat it to a slice of carrot cake in the V and A tearooms instead. This information was imparted to me by Joe, a fellow urchin from the hairiest days of capering amid the shanty town of Camden Market, while executing hamsters with a claw hammer on a recent Tuesday afternoon. Joe hails from White City, but has been living in a wigwam in the grounds of Runton Hall for eight years, and has gone entirely native. The lesson is this: if you’re going to go to the countryside, get in, do what you need to do, and get out. Don’t start mucking about having pub lunches and all that. That’s how they rope you in – Joe only intended to stop for scampi and chips in Southwold, and now he lives like an Iron Age person. The danger, my friends, is real.

Mercifully, some similarities remain between us. For a start, we are both unemployable in any meaningful sense. Joe’s career highlight involved checking telecoms companies for Millennium Bug Compliance in 1999. This wa not difficult, and merely entailed walking around, nodding thoughtfully, and placing a sticker featuring a microchip fashioned into the shape of a smiling insect with ‘Bring On Y2K!’ written underneath it on equipment deemed able to withstand the coming apocalypse. It was a scam, obviously, but then so was the Millennium Bug itself. Joe understood that no one wanted to be the person who in January 2000 would have to explain why they hadn’t thought it worthwhile having their business Millennium-proofed, with computers running wild in the streets, and therein lay the genius at the heart of the whole caper: more companies than you might think adopted a ‘Well, we’d better let him get on with it’ approach, and quietly paid his invoices when presented with them some weeks later. Incidentally, the way to get past the poor quality security guards at telecoms companies is to be extremely aggressive when demanding access, and entirely charming once it has been granted – essentially a one man ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine. Sadly, both good and bad cops alike agreed that he had committed fraudulent embezzlement following his arrest in a BT building in Reading, and he was sent to HMP Oxford for fourteen months, but although he missed the Millennium celebrations, enough invoices remained unclaimed-back out of sheer corporate embarrassment to make his incarceration worthwhile.

All Joe’s numerous children are a larf. This is especially true of one of the oldest ones, whose enthusiastic conception I overheard while trying to sleep on a sofa in Joe’s comically disintegrating mouse-infested ruin of a squat on Girdlestone Walk N6, over the 2008 Easter weekend. There were walls, of course, but they were thin and served only to amplify the horror. Even when there was an opportunity to escape the noise of the miracle of life being created, it was a difficult place to sleep in because what we suspected was a money laundering operation was in constant full swing next door. Counterfeiters always seem to have an inherent sense of theatricality, and those behind whatever was going next door were no exception, with drop offs and pick-ups in the dead of night, lots of full beam headlights, wheel spinning and people in suits wearing sunglasses at three in the morning. It was harmless compared to the neighbour on the other side, who claimed to have changed his DNA via meditation. He was nuts. Really, really, nuts, following us to Archway tube if we weren’t careful, jabbering in a crazed but earnest fashion and then into Camden, where we were trading, and where he admittedly blended in quite nicely. Remarkably, he ended up dj-ing at Gilgamesh, and I believe still does so.

Joe provides for his wife Becca and their numerous children by slaughtering his way through the local East Anglian wildlife as part of a site management position at Runton, a role which also involves maintaining fences, growing stuff, and making sure that all gates are left open to let the air circulate. Claw-hammering hamsters also comes under the highly interpretive list of ‘kindest things to do’, because it provides an instant, if undignified, death, as does beheading chickens in preference to the accepted strangulation method. If I was a chicken about to be strangled, I would want it done by someone skilled at the task, rather than have Joe – in his own words – ‘wringing random bits of neck like a face flannel’, and would also choose decapitation, given the choice. The whole carnival of death is at odds with Runton Hall, which these days is a low-key retreat for Buddhists, hippies, Reiki healers, obscure religious sects, hermits, conspiracy theorists, yoga junkies, idiots, flower children and drop outs of every heft and hue. Remarkably, Joe has been voted onto the Hall’s board of trustees, and has managed to have me appointed, too. It remains to be seen how we’ll make a grab for absolute power, but doing so is an interesting idea, because a) Runton Hall is a lovely place in need of expensive restoration, and b) there is no such thing as a poor hippy, so you’d like to think there’s some potential for connecting the two things rather pleasingly, after which a third could be added whereby the hippies are subsequently done away with, either by beheading or claw hammer, depending upon the vibe at the time.

These, then, are our days. In case you remember us from bygone times, there is no more market trading. The tiny empires that sprang from the East Yard, Camden Lock Market, vaulting the Grand Union Canal and spreading east and south along the Northern and Central lines in the early years of the twenty first century have all but disappeared, their race among the socioeconomic fabric of London finally run, and like Joe and I, many former traders have scattered deep into the geographical accident known as the Rest of the World. Unlike Joe, I do at least live in a permanent structure in the form of an actual house near-ish Runton Hall, although it is factually correct to state that more people live on Girdlestone Way than in my minuscule village. We are often joined by ‘Anton’, an old Deptford cohort now living in a part of Leeds he describes as ‘well Basra’, having given up selling awful jewellery to, and then shagging, poorly tattooed forty year old Lewisham grandmothers at Greenwich Market in favour of an even more precarious living as an ‘amateur electrician’. Thanks to his trademarked fingers-crossed-and-hope-for-the-best work on the elderly wiring of the Runton outbuildings, the old servants’ quarters can now house the many groups of people who like to use the place to escape from, or into, reality, depending upon your point of view. It currently has some Flat Earthers in it, and I have learned that if you introduce their dormitory with a cheery ‘Flat earth – bumpy mattress!’, you get some very stony stares indeed.

*the White Hart at Great Suffolk Street if you’re in before 9ish, but it’s popular with old bill so mind yourself.

Postscript

No, I don’t know why Joe keeps the hamsters in the first place, either. There are loads of them, though.

Tag: wildlife

Rabbits, Dogs and Glampers

The Forest School Kids

The Peacock House

Farewell, Piccadilly