Continuing Story of Cressroads

Take your pick. Rape. Shy another pub to call your local. Or putting your life in danger by admission to hospital in Greater Cressroads.

Today’s Land of the Tichbornes is ruled over from their fading, all but 1,000-year-old family seat in their namesake of a hamlet known for its popular real-ale Arms close by Alresford-on-Arle.

Where the town crop is watercress.

And Blogsbody disturbs the chalky waters patrolled by brown trout to reveal life is but a microcosm of all that assails other communities making scary headlines throughout Britain.

But few in an abundance of comfortable Cressroadians want to see a jot of it.

What then, wonders the town hack, would be the outcry if, stripped of private medical care, one of them were to have to cross the Candovers - where the Queen’s chopper puts down on Lord Supermarket Sainsbury’s front lawn; a smidgen of Heinekan family fortune splashes out on providing seasonal food, drinks and accommodation for visiting guns and rods at the haunted Woolpack; and Michael Jackson finds his port in a storm on a nearby Greek shipping magnate’s estate – to present with the likes of pneumonia at the A&E Department of Chief Executive Mary Edwards’ Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital?

Left with no alternative, pity the likes of Sherborne St John’s Jean Emblem

Weeks later, 96 lines into a three-page letter of complaint, Independent Complaints Advocacy Services (ICAS) advocate Victoria Holt signs off on Mrs Emblem’s behalf, after saving the best for last.

Her client, no sooner home to her old folk’s bungalow than headed into second helpings of the illness, is a retired matron.

One left in no doubt whatsoever that the level of nursing care on the hospital’s Emergency Ward 2 is unacceptable.

Patients, claims the ex-matron, are not receiving basic care.

And the late Cressroads chimney sweep’s daughter, who left town to make a career of nursing, is determined no-one else will experience what she went through at Chief Executive Edwards’ 450-bed hospital.

Advocate Holt’s letter earns the ex-matron as many as 17 sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … sorry … apologies for nigh on Third World nursing care in the sunset zone of Britain.

Menwhile, out and about its watercress capital of the world, whole communities are adjudged as good as inflation-proof by landlords of some pubs pouring wines and plating grub for gross annual profits nearing a million pounds.

Be assured, however,  there will be takers for the Tichborne Dole.

Distributed from the steps of Tichborne House - again this March 25 Lady Day - after prayers are said for the repose of the soul of Lady Mabella de Lamerston.

A 12th century heiress from the Isle of Wight, noted for her piety and charity, who married Roger de Tichborne: ‘And, on her deathbed, requested of her husband that the value of a small portion of the Tichborne estates be given annually to the poor of the parish in the form of a dole. Sir Roger met this charitable plea with a reluctant undertaking to distribute annually the value of such land she could walk round,’ explains Tichborne’s 264-page Millennium 2000 project.

Its village authors add: ‘Despite being by then very ill, Lady Mabella managed to crawl round 23 acres of land (which are still known today as The Crawls), before retiring to her deathbed and warning her husband that should his family ever fail to honour his promise, then seven sons would be born to the house, followed by a generation of seven daughters, after which the name would die out and the house fall into ruin.’