Tractors!

Warming Up

8048/20989

We haven't even been living in Hitchin for 3 months yet, but I do like this place. It was recently declared to be the 20th happiest town in the UK which is actually the perfect level of happiness. If you're in the happiest place, Woodbridge, then the pressure to remain happy in such a joyful place is going to be very stressful and make you extremely unhappy. Also you have to ask yourself why you're this happy. The world is a terrible place, you should have some sense of balance. If you're the happiest place then you are probably living in some kind of dream world or cult. But 20th happiest place - no pressure to be artificially happy or push down any occasional sadness, no one thinking, "I hate happy places, I am going to go and live there and be a right miserable cunt." I hope we stay the 20th happiest place forever. Because 20th happiest place is actually the happiest possible place. Oh wait.

Anyway we had friends round for what should have been our Christmas dinner in hindsight. Although I admire the tradition I don't think the stuff we have for Christmas dinner is actually very nice. Turkey is a flawed meat and is a lot of hassle to cook without killing anyone through food poisoning and sprouts are very easy to mess up and Christmas pudding is some kind of vestigial food from the middle ages which I think is OK, but not the kind of thing you want to be eating when already stuffed. Today Catie (on her own I have to say) did an amazing spread of lamb and roast potatoes, with an array of salads and it did the job of being a feast that made me eat too much that I felt sick, but was also properly delicious and had some healthy aspects to it. I don't eat red meat much any more so the lamb was a bit of a shock to the system, but it was terrific . Maybe the tradition should be that you eat whatever your favourite food is or in keeping with the idea that Christmas was the one day where you ate like a king, we could just eat one of the lovely foods that we try to avoid the rest of the year due to not wanting to die at 25 of gout. Would anyone be disappointed if Christmas dinner was steak and chips? Maybe in a quantity that doesn't make you explode if you finish off with a wafer thin after dinner mint.

Anyway, all the good work of the last month of eating healthily was undone (and it's not even actually Christmas day yet) and I wanted to go to sleep. But instead we had to go out on to the cold streets of Hitchin because today was the day of the Hitchin Tractor Run.

It's possibly the biggest Tractor Run in the UK an ancient tradition dating all the way back to 2021, an incredible fund raising event where seemingly 10,000 tractors drive through the town to the delight of the tractor hungry citizens of Hitchin and Baldock. It's absolutely insane, not least because, as Catie pointed out, at any other time of year seeing a tractor on the road ahead of you is a source of severe irritation (it happened to me this morning when I popped back to the old house) and yet now everyone was cheering tractor after tractor after tractor.

We were waiting for maybe half an hour for the tractors to arrive - "We want tractors" chanted the kids. Well be careful what you wish for, because we then got about an hour's worth of almost nothing but tractors. It was a lot of tractors. But the repetition made it more amusing. And most of the farmers (quite a presumption there - could just be other people who have tractors) had gone to quite some trouble to dress up their tractors with lights and decorations. And most of them were blasting out their horns and waving. It was surreal, insane and brilliant.

Every now and again there'd be a break and you'd think it was over and then more tractors would arrive. Occasionally you'd fear that maybe the parade involved infinity tractors and would never end. Best of all though, occasionally a couple of regular cars would go through. These were drivers who had somehow managed to make use of a gap in the relentless flow of tractors and snuck into the line thinking they could get on their way, rather than being held up for an hour by unexpected tractors and now found themselves being ironically cheered and waved at by Hitchin families or have me shouting at them "You're not a tractor". They represented all of us on any other day, stuck behind a sarcastic amount of tractors as they tried to get on their way, but on this upside down day of the year, the car drivers were now the enemy, punished for daring to think they were more important than the ancient Tractor Run and in danger of being dragged from their vehicles by angry tractor lovers and kicked to death.

If I am honest it was too many tractors, though an occasional emergency vehicle or haulage truck or minibus (all officially part of the parade) would mix things up a bit or one of the tractors would be travelling much too fast adding a sense of jeopardy to the whole thing.

It made me think that to liven things up next year and make it more than an infinite parade of tractors they should turn the whole thing into a no-rules tractor race. Whatever it takes. Whichever tractor gets to Hitchin town centre first wins. It would be terrific to see tractors trying to knock each other off the road or crush each other under their huge tractor wheels, taking out spectators. I'd pay to witness that and risk being flattened by a tractor. I guess whoever turned up with the biggest steamroller would win.

But you have to love a town where 50,000 people come out to look at tractors in the cold and the tractors made everyone so delighted that we're in danger of being the 19th happiest town in the UK next year. And no one wants that. Just ask the people of Wandsworth.

8049/20990

We were watching Wonka this weekend, which is lots of fun and full of spectacle and Hugh Grant steals the show. At the end of the film (spoiler alert) it is discovered that the lost mother of Willy Wonka's friend works in the town library. And the library that features in the film is the Radcliffe Camera, the impressive round building that forms part of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The mother of my niece, the acclaimed author Emily Herring used to work in this building, so I think that makes my niece the inspiration for the character. She should put that on the back of her serious books about philosophy.

The Radcliffe Camera has mixed memories for me from my student days. It's fair to say that I was not the most fastidious of students. I worked very hard to get to University, but once there pursued my seeming pipe dream of becoming a comedian and so spent nearly all my time doing sketches, plays, drinking, eating chips and failing to talk to women. I didn't trouble the University's fine libraries very much (I think I went to one lecture the whole time I was there), which is something I partly regret now (though as it turns out concentrating on comedy would be more beneficial to me than the effect on Anglo-Papal relations of the murder of Thomas a Beckett).

Anyway I had always done well at exams before I got to University and was always well prepared, so as the Final exams approached it was quite a terrifying time for me. I had only been really inspired by the Victorian Intellect and Culture module that I had worked hard on (ironically none of my top subjects came up on the paper and it was one of the ones I did worst on - though I did use some of the info on English History III and got a first on that paper). But there were 10 papers and a thousand years of history to catch up on in about six weeks and I was never going to do it.

I turned up at the library most days, but was overwhelmed by the task at hand and that led to inertia and staring off into the distance and feeling increasingly desperate. I still dream about this time every now and again, asking my tutors if I can defer my exams for a year (even thoug in the dreams I am my age now and wondering if it's worth giving up my career just to do well at some exams that I never needed). It was a dark time and I felt pretty depressed, sometimes a little dangerously so. It seemed a much bigger deal that I did OK than it turned out to be.

I remember the only book I read from cover to cover was one about whether the Rudolph Hess in Spandeau (prison not pop group) was the real Rudolph Hess or a double. The book (incorrectly) thought not and was a stupid bit of fluff. More pertinently this was not even a period that any of my exams would cover.

I also became a little bit obsessed with a fellow student in the library, a young woman with a striking profile that I thought made her look like someone from a medieval painting. I spent quite a lot of time drawing pictures of her profile. I was not a good artist and did not do her beauty any justice. I was certainly too shy to ever go and talk to her.

I am not sure if one of my friends told her about this or if she just noticed the weird, increasingly unhappy man staring at her a lot, but we did end up meeting up outside the Radcliffe Camera for a chat or a date or something. I was drinking a fair amount at this time and though I think this was an afternoon meet up, I brought some cans of beer and we had a drink rather than working or reading about Rudolph Hess. She knew about the pictures or I told her that I'd been drawing her and she wanted to see the pictures, but I knew they were terrible and not flattering in any way and so it just became an awkward hour or so where she realised I was a weirdo. We didn't have a second date. But nor did she call the authorities and have me locked up, so it's all good.

It was a desolate and terrifying time for me. I managed to borrow notes and revise a the three subjects that I thought would come up on each paper and when I couldn't get a copy of England in the Late Middle Ages, I shoplifted it from Blackwells (the first time I shoplifted and the only time I took something that I couldn't afford but actually needed) and got to a zen like state where I knew everything was hopeless so there was no point in worrying about anything. When we turned up for the exams the other students remarked how cool and collected I was. But it was only because I'd accepted that I was definitely going to fail. Just like people could calmly walk to the scaffold to be hanged.

I still tried. My punts on what might come up had been largely successful, I was much cleverer than I realised and occasionally I was able to use knowledge from my A levels (my memory was very good back then and I could still remember quotes from books that I'd learned four years before) to bluff my way through. I was always good at exams, though there were some papers I was totally out of my depth with (there was one general history - about the theory of the subject itself rather than stuff that happened- paper which I still don't understand and which we hadn't been taught, which felt like the kind of thing you'd know about if you'd been to public school.

Subsequently I had an incredible range of marks over the ten papers. I think I somehow passed them all and got an unlikely first on one of them (which just makes me wish I'd worked properly all the time - I had no clue that I was capable of getting a first) and ended up with the flukiest possible 2:1 (I have a feeling I might have been bottom of the 2:1s but had done just enough to sneak in and make it look like I was a diligent if unexceptional student). If I'd know I could get a 2.1 I would have worked much harder and still get a 2.1. To think I had considered deferring for a year (and in darker moments deferring from life itself forever) this was a crazy result. And one that has had no impact on my life.

So the Radcliffe Camera is the symbol of that awful final term and the despair and emptiness I had to endure. But it's where I learned that Rudolph Hess might not have been the real Rudolph Hess so it's not all bad.

It was also the scene of one of my happiest University memories when the Seven Raymonds, the comedy sketch group I was part of, performed a medieval shepherds play. We had a cart and went round Oxford performing this funny, weird and religious text in medieval English in various locations. One of which was the lawn next to the library (near where I'd later drink cans with an unimpressed woman with a medieval face). It was ridiculous and sublime. The sun shone, the audience laughed and were moved, we made some money for charity and it was the kind of thing you could only do at University. As magical as Wonka and I probably ate about as much chocolate as well.

And for paid subs - there’s a bit more post-Finals info (including a story about how TV’s Emma Kennedy almost killed me) and videos of tractors for you to enjoy!