Belt. Braces.

I'll admit, it was quite novel when he turned up in the village.

It wasn't the London thing. We get folk coming up from down that way all the time. It wasn't the writer thing either, as after all, he was just a wannabe back then. It wasn't the craziness; we're quite used to that, (this is Norfolk after all). It was the blackness that did it.

I mean, young black guy playing bowls with octogenarian Tory voters. There's a certain humour there. Young black guy keeping chickens and perving over vegetable delivery ladies. It's funny. I would read about it, for a while, and maybe you'd hear about it on the radio. Like in that slot before six o'clock on Radio Five with that grumpy old bastard Peter Allen. No, second thoughts, that's too popular. It would probably turn up on Radio 4, after Farming Today, at 5.45 AM.

But the point is that "black guy in white world doing strange things" is inherently funnier than "just another white guy playing bowls for a bit". Call it a commentary on modern society, if you wish.

But, over the years, people around here have come to accept him. He is now a part of the scenery. Accepted, if not loved.

Which is why I was surprised to see Jonny B at the village pub, wearing a pair of braces he claimed were from the Black and White Minstrel Show. When it was pointed out to him that this show was a bastion of the kind of racism he has fought all of his life to overcome, he just smiled, and muttered something about it being post-ironic.

Perhaps, we will never truely understand him.