Continuing Story of Cressroads

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.