Continuing Story of Cressroads

Hey grown-up world, get this for a Welsh sca’boo!

In case you didn’t guess, it’s made our tiny-tot word made for saying ‘Special Care Baby Unit’ here at Royal Glamorgan Hospital, Llantrisant, near Cardiff and where my open-topped incubator is parked in the unit’s nursery so as to continue to keep a careful watch over my temperature.

Much else besides, while rising three-weeks-old and busy regaining my 58-ounce birth weight – “Only six ounces shy of our sweet Daisy-Mae tipping the scales at an equivalent weight to two of your mum’s bags of sugar,” decides my visiting Bampy Blogsbody – and so rock on Saturday when he heads back to Cressroads.

Already it’s too late to prevent mum’s dad of an ex-tabloid hack beginning to broadcast on Facebook: ‘In Wales less than 48 hours and to witness two-week-old Daisy-Mae survive crackheads, wasps and her baptism with fire, while fast asleep in her incubator at the Royal Glamorgan’s Special Care Baby Unit … and then for her bampy to wonder if, on future visits, he shouldn’t think to leave his eventful rabbit’s foot at home in Cressroads, where … don’t ask!’

“Best, Daisy-Mae, after all you’ve slept through today – opening, but quickly closing one of your deep blue peepers at the sight of Old Bampy – he puts on hold his thoughts of rocking your incubator and marking your baby card with anything less than an upbeat mention of your Uncles Matt and Sam,” mum strokes my long fingers.

“Can be scary,” she warns.

“Like scary … scary,”  perk the identical twins. Gabriel and Charlotte who, like me, are making up for lost weight. But it’s a visiting wasp that remains uppermost in their minds, not thoughts of my two uncles.

After fears of the wasp mortally stinging either of the twins, a teacher’s baby boy called Charlie or my little old self, the four of us were sped but ever so safely through the doors of the post natal ward that leads back to the Intensive Care Unit and where we first hung out together in the ScaBU.

In my case, grown 15-old-days, graduating to the Nursery, but still kept waiting for a first glimpse of home.

Old Bampy reports that it  is becoming ever more like my adoped Uncle Firkin Henry’s dairy in Cressroads, and he goes on to tell everyone the family’s Fiat is used increasingly as a milk float to trip back and forth to the Royal Glamorgan’s neonatal unit.

As often as thrice daily, and with as many as three small pintas of Mamma’s Best aboard for each morning, afternoon and evening delivery from her Graig Expresso in Pontypridd.

Scarce topped with double-cream, however, when mum is contained with Bamps across the corridor from the Special Baby Care Unit as crews for seven fire engines are summoned to attend immediately outside our Nursery door.

With Bamps as well as mum’s help – but as true as I lie here – there’s a fire to tell about to my real as well as adoped family. And not to forget a mention of sick Baby C. Born high on heroin, made well, but taken from her mum and put into care.

Until next time,

Love,

Daisy-Mae

Morning Mr Blogsbody,

Have read the addition of me to the cast of the saga that is Cressroads, and so you take care on your trip to the Welsh Valleys. Daisy-Mae wants her Grandpops to visit her, not the other way around, when I’m sure she’s seeing enough of hospitals to last her for a good while.

Not that I’m criticizing your driving - especially when you are doing the charity drive in November - but it’s the other loonies on the road. Thank god Wembley’s built and Saints aren’t playing at Cardiff. If they were, you’d be headed west this coming Sunday morning with a 44,000-strong contingent of the Red and White Army. 

Off on my fortnightly trip to Rochester today, so better get ready.

Have a great time and take care,

Lady Karen of the Lakes x x

Clearing the way for her Mr Blogsbody to be driving himself half the distance of his Lady Karen’s return journey to the Medway site of the original Borstal corrective prison for youths  - eight years past its 100-year-old-built-by-date  -  while putting on hold a reply-message to the fount of his all but daily inspiration. His wanting first to tick off some of the boxes for his pre-Pontypridd list of to-do’s. Until less than a half-hour remains before a white-coated, axe-wielding Kiwi takes his place for this Lady Day’s distribution of the Tichborne Dole in the traditions but not the dress of four centuries ago; and as depicted in the famed Gillis van Tilborgh portrait of today’s scene outside Old Tichborne House, before the demolition of its east wing in the 1950’s.

Dole Day, Wendy,        

After my daughter domiciled in Welsh Wales delivers me Daisy-Mae. A mite prematurely. And, weighing into the Royal Glamorgan’s intensive baby care unit at 3lb 8oz, likely to remain in hospital through until her due date as well as that for the coming General Erection: 06 May 2010.  
 
Continuing Story of Cressroads - www.blogsbody.com - encourages folk to split the new, two-seat Winchester Constituency between Meon Valley’s prospective parliamentary Tory candidate George Hollingbery; and one-d Martin Tod, standing all of six-feet-tall in the LibDem’s orange corner to fight the remaining city vacancy. 

George, a longstanding mate of mine and member of a city council letting contracts for the servicing of its gas appliances to your group of companies, will learn you are indebted to me in the sum of £150.00 as a direct consequence of your failure to keep a scheduled annual maintenance appointment at Cressroads’ Lower House of Windsor scheduled for this past St Patrick’s Day.
 
More to follow, Wendy, as you are copied into correspondence with Kinetic Group’s CEO - but, in the meantime please to know your need to cancel any scheduled third attempt to service my boiler, but to await news of my return to Cressroads from the Valleys of Wales.

Lower House of Windsor - Hi Momma, Poppa and Daisy-May Graig, who have fewer than four days to prepare for the threatened post-natal appearance of Bamps.

Messaging to confirm that, all but the minute the clocks go forward an hour, Bamps is scheduled to attempt the 120-mile drive from the water meadows of Cressroads to the valleys of Rhondda Cynon Taf at the wheel of his 18-year-old Escort LX for an air-force-blue Ford racer.

If you like, time for Alresford’s septuagenarian town hack to whisper goodbye to his adopted Dorset Copper Arms-of-Tichborne for six days, and to head west for his Egyptian welcome from your Pontypridd Landlord Saad, former Met police officer, who quit the force to pump pints of bitter Welsh Brains from behind the bar of his Morning Star.

What most troubles nine-day-old Daisy Mae’s Bamps-the-Blog this evening is whether or not he can afford to put on hold as many as half-a-dozen ever more pressing tales of town and country scheduled for the upcoming pages of his Continuing Story of Cressroads?

Or for him to want to imagine exchanging life in Cressroads for that in South Wales when Daisy-Mae’s one uncle is returned home to do battle with a mental breakdown, while that uncle’s younger brother continues to seek gainful employment at the end of six months going on seven, and the family cat is known to have enjoyed better health.

In fact, bets are taken on who will outlast the other.

Will Trixie, an 18-year-old arthritic moggy, be first of three to depart this mortal coil?  Or will Wings for Bamps’ beloved but gas-guzzling, four-wheel Escort of the House of Henry Ford be sentenced to ascend to the breaker’s yard in the sky?

Most bets, however, are placed on a once upon a time Fleet Street by-line become a wrinkly bamps  outliving his borrowed time before, during and after hours twixt his Acer laptop, leaning on the bar of his favourite Tichborne Arms dubbed Blog Central by the BBC and plotting who is next for boarding another of his  flights of fancy.

Until Sunday’s 1600-hour ETA Pontypridd,

Grumpy Bamps

p.s. When suddenly we have a problem unlocking and relocking Wings’ petrol cap.

‘An unexpected approach, but welcome,’ invites Rosie Inman-Cook, manager of The Natural Death Centre headquartered six feet under the ground at what her postman comes to know as the charity’s In-the-Hill-House along Twyford’s Watley Lane, Greater Cressroads.

Or welcome Blogsbody and his Henry Dogsbloggy!

Sworn to carry out the final instructions of the one who becomes first to depart Mother Earth, and invited to attend Rosie’s refurbished nuclear bunker to find she is ’snug, locked away from insanity,’ kept busy promoting alternative, do-it-yourself funerals that do away with a need for either clergy or undertakers, and seeking to help her visitors choose their final resting place within a developing network of woodland burial sites.

‘March is going bonkers!’ warns Rosie.

Her email explains: ‘Conference to facilitate and exchange invasion from Spain, plus the usual mum taxi servicing. But April better. Sitting at your Tichy pavilion is one of my favourite places, and looking forward to coming your way once the season starts. Pick a date. ‘

One that sees her cricketing son come to Tichborne Park to play against a home eleven that, once upon a match but within 65-year-old Firkin Henry Dogsbloggy’s pace bowling days, made up entirely of Ma Primmer’s sons and grandsons.

Tichborne’s cricketing Primmer Donnas!

Even to include a 12^th Primmer man in the trophy-winning Hogshire village side. And with older members of the famed agricultural family offering their umpiring expertise for a willow-on-leather summer’s evening or weekend in the grounds of the landowning Tichborne family seat for almost the past 1,000 years.

“No getting my arm over these days,” accepts Henry.

Scoring, instead, a firkin not out of Palmer’s Bridport Copper bitter each week to establish an unofficial record in the log of the Tichborne Arms for a regular given to quaffing 10 pints daily, sometimes more; 72 or equivalent to a firkin each week; and bowling over the Royal National Lifeboat Association to discover their charitable coffers remain indebted to the burly ex-stockman to the tune of as much as £200-a-year.

“Wants Firkin Henry written on the side of one of their new lifeboats for doing my bit towards saving others from the drink,” smiles the Primmer son. ”RNLI is my most favourite charity of all. And for the brewery to be donating 5p on each pint of its firkins of Copper, but not wanting to make too much of a song and dance about me drinking them dry of one of them every week.”

For more information about the Natural Death Centre - currently looking for volunteers to work with Rosie out of its Twyford bunker - visit www.naturaldeath.org.uk.

“WHAT is MP Mark Oaten trying to tell The Chronic?” demands Cressroads’ Mr Luv-a-Duck. “Given he has the pair of us most to thank for his two-seat majority to represent Winchester’s Watercress Capital of the World, until he finds our city ‘less at ease with itself’ than when he was first elected to Westminster thirteen years ago. And as if that isn’t rich!”

“Meaning?” asks Blogsbody.

“That, in company with so many other troubled cities for constituencies, it becomes more and more a case of voters becoming less and less at ease with their parliamentary representative hitting the headlines for all of the wrong reasons; and, old boy, good reason for the two of us to remember how mistaken we were to talk ourselves into voting only the once during our combined total of 88 eligible years.”

“Or put another way, Frenchie, it’s 57-years-apiece since we were each given the vote and conscripted to serve our National Service at one and the same time as Ma’am was crowned Queen Bess-the-Second at Westminster Abbey … “

“ … and Hillary and Tenzing went on to conquer Mount Everest,” adds the never to be outdone alternative septuagenarian, before he goes on to warn how Oaten predicts: ‘In the race to succeed me, there is everything to play for and it could be down to two votes for a second time’.”

“Perhaps less so,” ponders the town hack, “if Oaten had long since vacated his seat in the certain knowledge his extra-parliamentary behaviour was at unacceptable odds with a significant majority of his supporters as well as the Greater Cressroads electorate?”

Before the two muppets each pause to whet their silver whiskers by dribbling seemingly all but indelible red wine as Alresford’s Blogsbody re-opens his copy of Friday’s Chronic to want to display its four talkative shots of Oaten sporting his ginger stubble and waving his hands in further explanation of reporter Warwick Payne’s half-page article headlining the former public relations man’s regret: ‘I wasn’t cut out to be our party leader.’

“No shit, Sherlock!” chorus the septuagenarian pair.  

An article accounting for all of the top-half of a broadsheet, while the county weekly’s free-to-join Two’s Company dating hotspot of Women’s Ads, Men’s Ads and Men-Seeking-Men, totalling 130 classifieds in black and white as well as those coloured pink, fully occupies all of the column inches of the bottom half of this Friday’s county weekly’s page-eight.

“ … ah yes, Frenchie, first met the little PR-man for an MP attending a cocktail bash to welcome a pair of all but Chelsea out-of-towners set to challenge Alresford’s floral Paul to his second commercial War of the Roses in Cressroads with their Rampant Stamen,” explains the town hack. “

 “And, if I may stop you there,” insists Frenchie, “when, these dozen or so years later we come to share the triple concern that, just as Oaten’s everyday skills are rooted in public relations, before as well as after publicising his way to Westminster, as many as three of the four candidates for his Winchester seat changed this time around the hustings to include part of Oaten’s old constituency in the new Meon Valley seat are fought over by PR-executives blowing each of their own trumpets.”

“So, Frenchie, if we do decide to vote for a second time in our combined but chequered century-and-a-half on Mother Earth, we are left with the choice of successful entrepreneurial businessman George Hollingbery for us to want to send to Westminster?” Blogsbody mulls aloud.

Oh dear Mike. A bad back? Nothing worse. It hurts but you can’t quite put your finger on where exactly

. . . as if I wouldn’t anyway … Off to St Mary’s tonight so I’ll wrap up warm to watch my Red Army in battle. Will be a close contest, I think. Hope you are ok apart from the back. You need a good massage!

Take care, my Mr Blogsbody,

Lady Karen x x

BROKEN marriage, mortgage, fulltime job as well as part-time, younger sister in psychiatric care, and a son in a young offenders’ institution supported by his mum’s regular visits, Lady Karen of one of Greater Cressroads’ two ports, looking a decade or more too young to be an especially loved granny as well as mother, has met the silver-haired town hack just the once.

Or so be it?

When during the early hours of many a morning in the ensuing 49 wintry days from the anniversary of the death of Sir Francis Drake through to the Feast of St Patrick, the two have gone on to exchange emails totalling thousands of words.

Seeing them drag the baggage of their family dramas into cyber space. Share their troubled times. And, respectively as well as respectfully, come to know each other all the more intimately.

No secret, therefore, when Lady Karen, who betrays no semblance of any shadow of doubt over understanding the ever troublesome offside rule, went in her own precious little time to St Mary’s. But only to experience more disappointment in her middle-aged life as she watched the game get away from her beloved Saints in the second half and leaving their avid supporter to grin and bear visiting Swindon go on to win 1-0.   

Congratulations Granddad,  

How lovely. What a beautiful little girl and a beautiful name. Wonder what lies ahead for Daisy-Mae, another little person for you to worry about.

I look at my two little grandchildren, think how innocent they are and what little worry they have at the moment. A shame they have to grow up.

By the sounds of your blog, your back is being well looked after. 

You take care and don’t overdo it. Sounds like you’re trying to burn the candle at both ends.

Love and hugs

Miss K x x

Or another in a developing line of emails inspiring Blogsbody to want to more than imagine a return to life before superannuation and a need to swallow his once, twice or three times daily milligram amounts of enteric-coated Aspirin, Bendroflumethiazide, Co-codamol, Simvastatin as well as Glucosamine Sulphate Chondriotin Sulphate and MSM,

Post’scrip: Oh yes, Lady Karen,your faithful Blogsbody has yet to pop his prescription for four 50mg Sildenafil – ‘half or full tablet as needed’, recommended to be taken 30 minutes before – into the pharmacy of Alresford Surgery, where four tabs retail at a price equivalent to eight pints of Palmer’s Dorset Copper Brewer’s Droop in the embrace of the Arms of Tichborne. Any thoughts? 

A brace of Ides of March blogs welcome folk back to their Continuing Story of Cressroads as pages of their Facebook twitter, flicker and joyously chorus the three-pound-ten-ounce arrival of tiny but perfectly formed Daisy-Mae into her magic land of laced leather eggs, dragons, wooden love spoons and ringing trebles of Telynau Telfi harps.

Forty leagues east of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of Royal Glamorgan Hospital, where eight-week-early-Daisy-Mae is incubated to look to gain several more pounds in weight before going home to Pontypridd, the grandfather clock stood in Tichborne’s mediaeval, thatched Arms chimes time to wet the sleepy head of the latest addition to the far away Llantrisant’s registry of Welsh births.

More besides! When Neath-born sports writer Tim Glover further challenges the spinal line-up for a back rub by Landlady Nicky Roper. “But … hey …  Daisy-Mae,” grows the cheer led by Nicky and husband Patrick returned overnight from their week of Indian sunshine in southern Goa.

With Nicky tasked to ease Blogsbody’s back pain. Next 60-year-old Tim’s: “And any more of you in need of a rub down, before I enjoy my glass of wine?” hopes not their psychic landlady with as magic a touch as any tending relief to geriatrics on either side of the banks of the Severn.

Until she is stopped to share in a message from the town hack’s ex-wife, mother of their daughter Keogh, former manager of Tichborne’s Arms: ‘Congratulations granddad,’ texts Granny Underwood. ‘Brill news … so thrilled to hear Kee and her babe Daisy-Mae are doing well … Rich sounds bit spaced, poor chap … tooing and froing … and hasn’t quite taken in that he’s now a dad,’ the town hack reads aloud.

Oh yes he has,” replies Bloggy.

And, catching the hint of a domestic pantomime in the making, daughter Keogh is reported by Rich to have seen his fiancée dive for cover under her fresh set of white hospital sheets.

Fabulous news.  How very exciting,” Meon Valley PPC George Hollingbery hears tell of Meonstoke’s shotgun protégé grown mother of Daisy-Mae gone to work in Cardiff in the wake of Chester and her teenage years in Cressroads.

“Ask me,” forecasts Bloggy, “Meon Valley will go to Tory George, son of Comet; Martin Tod will take Winchester for the LibDems; and, representing most of Greater Cressroads, www (Winchester to Waterloo to Westminster)two-for-the-price-of-one-dot-com will ride the train together into the next parliament chatting for the good of all of our Hogshire sakes.

“George? Who knows? But I’m betting Education Secretary, before you can say Daisy-Mae-Irving-McArthur.”

ADDRESSED to Blogsbody News Desk, Lower House of Windsor, Cressroads, SO24 9HU – after the Welsh Post Office reminds: ‘Printiwch y Cod Post’, without which no postie can be guaranteed to deliver safely the otherwise disguised details for the town hack’s city-built terrace on the wrong side of Alresford’s Watercress Line tracks, the envelope for a choice of Shannon Martin’s Girl Designer Mother’s Day messages inspired by ‘dear, sweet Billy and his mother Shirley’ in Seattle, Washington, USA, warned in capital letters that it was ‘not to be opened before the Ides of March’.

A warning spelled out loud and clear in the fair hand of Blogsbody’s only daughter Keogh, aged 29, who, did she but know it, was about to experience the surprise indignity of her waters breaking eight weeks early while lecturing a male member of her team in what-not-to-do at work in the high-rise offices of a bank overlooking the Welsh Assembly building in Cardiff Bay; and, this Mothering Sunday, remains admitted to the Ante Natal Unit of the city’s nearby, ultra-modern Royal Glamorgan Hospital, where the ex-manager of Tichborne’s mediaeval, thatched Arms can only lie in wait for her spasmodic, undetermined contractions to amount to a pinch of  her premature baby coming to inhale the fresh air, after it crosses the Severn Bridge from England to the Rhonda Valley of South Wales.

Back across the bridge it had proved a case of too cavalier a Poppa Mike, more besides in the mind of the mother of his daughter and two sons by his third set of nuptials within ten times as many of his birthdays though age-52, that was to see the former Fleet Street hack turned corporate public affairs man raise single-handed an Irving trio of offspring. Beginning as the youngest, Sam Mykel, nudged and attempted his chronological age of reason. Seven, if not quite a day, and to remain embedded to his home throughout these past 18 years. Ever more want to ape his father’s eccentric, if not disturbing ways. And with hands-on Sam all too rarely wanting to oblige the likes of his elder sister’s 15-day-old request to leave unopened the likes of a buff envelope perched atop a four-drawer filing cabinet but otherwise concealing from view his father’s surprise Mother’s Day card.

Hidden from sight and unread

Until, that was, a Michael Bassington handcrafted London timepiece, snapped up for £4 at a St David’s charity shop in town on the last occasion Blogsbody walked into Pontypridd from his daughter and partner Richard’s converted miner’s cottage down the steep Graig hill past the Morning Star – a high-ceiling  pub with guest rooms as well as ales, where the discovery of Egyptian-born Landlord Saad, ex-Met after Cairo police officer emigrated to pulling pints of bitter Welsh Brains, proved reason enough for Cressroads’ itinerant hack to adopt the boozer as his indubitable choice of half-way house away from home – clocked one minute past Saturday midnight into the opening moments of Mother’s Day and time for him to reach for the glass handle of a letter-opener displaying all of the jeweled parts of an alternative timepiece reminding Bloggy of his one in a dozen long-ago birthdays celebrated in Toronto, Canada.

Coloured sepia, a card of an American youngster trying the driver’s door of a vintage Chevrolet, wears a look for Keogh to arrow him in red ballpoint and suggest L-Nibs?  Next for her to amend Mark Twain writing in memory of his mother, and otherwise wisecrack: ‘MY FATHER HAD A GREAT DEAL OF TROUBLE WITH ME BUT I THINK HE ENJOYED IT.”

On the sepia and white inside back cover of the Yoohoo card, created by Sharon in partnership with Madison Park Greetings for a U.S. retail price of $2.50, a greeting implores ENJOY! HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY - DAD! inserts Keogh, before she writes: ‘Only fair you’re recognized on both ‘parent’ days. You’ve done more than twice the job.’ Then caricatures her smiley face and signs off: ‘Lots of love, Twinkle xxx’               

WELCOME back to the Continuing Story of Cressroads, Hogshire’s Watercress Capital of the World, looking forward to harvesting the first of its crop in time for this spring’s greening of Broad Street, and to rule out any repeat of a foul-weather necessity for Alresford growers to import secretly shedloads of what passes as their green, green cress of home from their alternative sun-blessed Florida beds for freebie festive visitors to triple the population of the historic Georgian market town.  

Oh, Rosie … oh, Rosie, our continuing tale is suddenly interrupted.

Paused to comprehend why our earlier message is returned to sender, and leaving us to respond: ‘We can’t help but imagine you sat in your dank bunker dressed in your widow’s weeds on this late Saturday evening before the dawn of another Mother’s Day that finds you scratching your scalp on our perplexed behalf as you remain as good as buried alive in the bunkered bowels of Greater Cressroads’ chalky Twyford Down.
 
‘Stopped in your tracks as you go about your business plans for less demanding folk than Firkin Henry and me but who, in the Maker’s good time, do assure you we wish most earnestly for our earthly days to fade to skeletal remains in a reserved woodland plot or two, and why we ask that you read again:
 
—–Original Message—– 
From: Mike Irving <IrvingDylan@aol.com> 
To: contact@naturaldeath.org.uk 
Sent: Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:23 
Subject: PASSING YOUR WAY 
 
Hello Rosie, 
  
www.blogsbody.com with two natural deaths in mind, a friend’s as well as his own, most wishes to feature your organization in his Continuing Story of Cressroads. 
 
When would it be most suitable for Blogsbody and his Dogsbloggy to visit you at Natural Death’s Twyford bunker? 
 
Please ‘phone 01962-735043 or 079-890-495-84. 
 
Kind regards, 
Mike Irving and Henry ‘Firkin’ Primmer 

Brother ‘Big’ John digs deep

While we await Rosie’s response to highlight further her appearance amid the developing cast of hundreds for the endless saga of the self-styled watercress capital of the world, an ex-Cressroads licensee sporting his old pub’s Meon Valley T-shirt under the voluminous red gown of the Order of Noble Poverty tells the frail St Cross fraternity centrally-heated under the 850-year-old wing of Britain’s oldest charitable institution of his chance encounter with Cressroads’ town hack at the bar of Jimminy Cricket’s Willow Tree Inn-on-the-Itchen.

“Who knows?” teases Winchester College old boy Brother ‘Long ‘John Droxford.  “But just maybe we can look to have a Brother Blogsbody become accepted as one among our impecunious selves.”

And for the former Fleet Street redtop reporter to seek to set the ball rolling at ‘Britain’s oldest and most perfect almshouse’ by messaging the Porter of the Hospital of St Cross further to enquire:-

‘ … This past wet Friday afternoon, it was my good fortune to happen across your Brother ‘Big’ John, who dug deep into his traditional red gown of your Hospital of St. Cross’ Beaufort Order of Noble Poverty to share with me an illustrated text describing your tranquil Wessex almshouse, a 15-minute riverside walk away from the Norman Cathedral of the old capital of England. 
 
‘My interest is more than aroused, and I look to accept an invitation to visit St. Cross Hospital, attend your service of morning prayer, admire the architecture of what author and journalist Simon Jenkins lauds as ‘England’s oldest and most perfect almshouse’, enjoy meeting more of the Brothers of St Cross, seeing their gardens at the start of spring, and accepting a wayfarer’s dole of beer and some bread, before walking back to Winchester along the footpath beside the trout-filled Itchen. 
 
Most sincerely yours, 
Mike Irving 
(alias www.blogsbody.com) 
 
p.s. Soon after the end of World War II, rising-12, I was a church student at Durham’s Roman Catholic Ushaw College. But destined to lose my vocation for the priesthood and switch from the imagined sublime to the known ridiculous of London’s ‘Street of Disillusion’ as a reporter, then feature-series writer, before selling my soul to the corporate world of public affairs. Through until my ‘child bride’ was to leave me with three children to raise on my lonesome, and until I am come to sport a difference of half-a-century between my youngest grown up to be tagged Sam-not-enough, and my shattered self.