Continuing Story of Cressroads

Hail the Great Debate in Manchester last night as led by ITV newscaster and St. Augustine’s Abbey old boy Alastair Stewart, OBE.

Someone recognized in Greater Cressroads as the Bramdean Commoner opposed to supermarkets in Alresford and, four times over the legal limit, ex-ITV Police-Camera-Action man, who orders a Chinese takeaway, runs into a telegraph pole and cops his second conviction for drink driving.

Presenter Stewart, 57-year-old Rolling Stones fan, whose TV career began with Southern Television in Southampton, was cast in the role of even-handed sober interventionist to police political history in the making as he led the nation’s first ever live TV debate between the leaders of Britain’s three main political parties.

‘Foggy, Campo and Clegg in Start of the Summer Whine’, Winchester Furniture Emporium’s Jonathan Gretrix was fast to crack by blog.

Throwing in his Facebook take of last night’s televised kick-off to the 2010 General Erection that played out for 90 minutes - and, with no whistle, red or yellow cards to his name, charged Presenter Stewart to keep control, interrupt to ensure order and raise his voice when the likes of Campo saw fit to turn a deaf ‘un or worse.

Our Campo prepared, if occasion demands it, to nuke Iran or China.

China!

Loud and clear for all to hear, imagine to mishear - “Didn’t he mean to say North Korea?” - unless anyone was able to make sense of Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague’s subsequent attempt at explanation to want to keep the Chinese ambassador in London off his case.

Iran, we understood. But China?

And leaving Blogsbody to wonder if Campo’s secret plan to avoid repaying our financial Chinese overlords for wanting to keep up the nation’s interest on shopping baskets brimful with made-in-China merchandise is leaked?

While Foggy remained too busy as well as conscious of practising his smile to pick up on Campo making so careless and inane a case for Britain retaining a nuclear deterrent.

And Clegg?

Repeatedly disassociating himself from each of the two ‘old’ parties, no-one quite trusting his way with the arithmetic of economics but looking to be voted best of a bad bunch, Clegg similarly missed a golden opportunity to score at Campo’s expense.

Head and shoulders above such diplomatic and political gaffes was Winchester’s Sharon Watson.

Another fan of Facebook who networks ITV, sees herself as a future resident of a home for old punks and was to be found watching the debate on a high-definition TV screen for it to appear to her that both Foggy and Campo major in dandruff issues.

“Only Clegg’s shoulders still look flake-free.”

Next, Sharon’s eye for political incorrectness cried out: “Not keen on all the grey suits and colour-coded ties. I’d like to see a leisurewear-clad debate. Or, even better, compulsory fancy dress of the combatants’ choice.”

Blogsbody seconds that.

Going demented - or Blogsbody fearing he may just flip - after Jo Swinhoe, director of fundraising for London’s Alzheimer’s Society, enters the mailbox of Cressroads’ Lower House of Windsor warning one in three people over-65 will die with dementia, and hoping he will not forget it.

‘I hope you like the personal address labels attached for you, with a beautiful picture of forget-me-nots,’ enthused Jo. ‘There’s a very good reason we’ve sent them to you - and for you to use them.

‘You see, we’re using the forget-me-not, with its delicate pale blue petals and yellow centres to raise awareness of dementia and the work of Alzheimer’s Society,” she continues .

But Blogsbody can’t agree the colour printing of her hundreds of thousands of 2010 Appeal leaflets do justice to the flower as he counts his total of 14 self-adhesive labels, and knows from passing  performance he is most unlikely to write, otherwise address, stamp, and mail out as many letters over as many years to come.

So think greetings cards. Or rather he hasn’t since becoming a state-pensioned, semi-computer-literate-silver-surfer exchanging the cost of postage for the benefits of AOL’s free email.

And, in any event, the charity’s sprat to catch a gift of ‘£25, £50 or as much as you can afford to go towards work to support, research and campaign on behalf of people with dementia’ omits any mention whatsoever of his first name or initials, and prints an indelibly failed attempt to spell his surname.

“For every eight research proposals we receive, we have to turn seven down. We simply don’t have the money to support them along with all the other work we must fund.  So today, as well as using the labels and postcards I’ve enclosed for you, will you send a donation?” hopes Alzheimer’s Jo Swinhoe.

Blogsbody promises to do no more than splash out on the price of a brace of postage stamps and find some future use for each of two postcards: ‘Leading the fight against dementia’.

This in the wake of his one phone call to Reading and two to London to find and explain to Alzheimer Society’s Debbie Overseer-of-Mailings:  “Gone all but demented tracking you down to Devon House HQ, and the bad news is my state pension makes it an act of certifiable madness for me to commit to any cause but my dysfunctional family and myself.

“That said, Debbie, I’m hoping the good news is that, by me alerting you to the possibility of significant numbers of failed attempts to create and give away sets of usable address labels , you will spark changes further to improve the success of mailing out your future appeals.”

“Thank you for your perseverance,” begins Debbie.

” … but given the terrifying odds of becoming another one in three hoping to stop the disease from advancing, it’s me who is most grateful for you trying your utmost to aid and support sufferers,”  Blogsbody rings off to answer an afternoon knock at his front door from the neighbourhood ’s part-time postman all but finishing his especially late walk of the day in step with what was once the time of a day’s second, not only delivery.

“Hiring part-timers - now Royal Mail policy, because it’s cheaper than employing full-time staff - means it is our availability that determines when you’ll receive your post,” explains a uniformed, grey-bearded redundant manager of a stately home doing the town’s final round of the day.

“No mail, but this,” Steve presents a card advising Alresford’s sorting office - and not, as once was, his Mr Postie - holds an item of Blogbody’s family mailbag.

In this instance, shy of an outstanding £1.08 postage-payable. And awaiting personal collection, or return to sender within a week.

For what remains of Blogsbody’s mind to want to reckon the impending closure of Alresford’s sorting office at the rear of its closed Post Office in favour of a centralized postal operation for Greater Cressroads will come to mean any future curiosity as to the Who, What and Why of such failed attempts at savings on postage will demand a 16-mile return journey to Winnall - or forget it.

Postscript:  ’As so eloquently put, I’m a mere minion in the cast of thousands but touched by your mention. What an amazing story you tell and obviously you have travelled far and wide through to growing old disgracefully in Hogshire’s Alresford-on-Arle. So Hogshire’s hack was not always Hampshire driven. Given you were married to a French-Canadian fashion writer, and appearing to become a new member of your cast. Do tell us more. Such intrigue! Best wishes,’ MB signs off for a third time.

Stop the blog. Or pause to take stock, determines the town hack.

After a follower of his blog is moved to comment how 12 months of reading the Continuing Story of Cressroads leaves him with images of a ‘lost and troubled man’ behind the telling of episodes that remain shy of any conclusion.

Alresford’s Mr Blogsbody!

An ex-redtop Fleet Street reporter with a barrister for an only son by his first set of nuptials; remarried for seven months to a French-Canadian fashion writer; and then wedding his third wife who, 18 years ago, left him to raise their three young children.

Until Blogsbody grows old disgracefully in Hogshire’s Alresford-on-Arle, and reports on a dysfunctional outcome in respect of two sons as well as catch-up news of their sister quitting the pub game to work out of Flint, North Wales, as a call girl.

Blogsbody’s 29-year-old daughter Keogh interrupts: “For smut’s sake! When it’s only hours since you were blogging how Winchester’s prospective parliamentary LibDem candidate Martin Tod was to be found parked up in a police vehicle shining its headlights on Cressroads’ infamous dogging rendezvous.

“As true, I’m sure, as me finding employment at a North Wales call centre for a major food chain - after managing the Arms at Tichborne - but, if Winchester police has time to show a prospective MP the sights in Greater Cressroads, does anyone really care?

“Unless, perhaps, the constituency’s Blue Brigade finds itself inundated with demands for equal time from all of the candidates on its patch?

 ”Oh, silly me!” Keogh knows better than to answer herself thinking aloud.

“So, hey! Here we go again. And for Poppa Blogsbody to be found fanning more tittle-tattle in Greater Cressroads, if not creating it, then looking to blog what happens next.”

As it happened, the very moment in time Mike Bell - an otherwise unknown but  self-confessed follower of the town hack’s blog for many months - appeared out of the anonymity of its hits to complain of assorted loose ends troubling his tidy reader’s mind.

‘What an interesting web you weave with the help of all of your offspring,’ he notes. ‘But, last year, you introduce one member of your family, whose mention is not concluded - and, now, we come to hear of your Welsh granddaughter Daisy-Mae.

‘Blogsbody, you seem a lost and troubled man?” questions the saga’s longstanding fan.

“Don’t know any Mike Bell - so show yourself,” challenges the town hack. But determined to begin to attend to loose ends in his developing cast of hundreds, and plot how best to keep alive, put on a back-burner or wipe clean any potential excess of characters.

‘So looking forward  to hearing more of events surrounding those tales that await a deserved measure of conclusion in your Continuing Story of Cressroads,’ persists Mr Ding-a-Ling’s latest post from cyberspace.

Forgive us. But the conversation on Cressroads’ wrong side of the Watercress Line hit a steamy note for a Sunday afternoon, after the lone figure of Winchester’s parliamentary Libdem candidate Martin Tod walked into a one-to-one with the town hack.

In the opposite direction, Blogsbody was headed home from Alresford’s Doom & Gloom clutching a Pesky Tesky bag with a packet of onion and sage stuffing as well as two cans of naturallysweet sweetcorn to help him serve a later than usual Sunday roast chicken dinner. 

In his sights, Candidate Martin!

Waving his ‘vote-for-me’ goodbyes to the immigrant staff of Mitford Road’s newly-opened Sunstar Store - 1.5 miles from the heart of town and affording the city-built estate a store to call its own again - in the wake of  two previous  attempts to re-open had failed and resulted in closure of the estate’s only retail outlet for as long as the past 18 months.

But now to look to number as another of new council lessee Sri Arthanari’s potentially successful retailing ventures, after qualifying for a rural development grant of £17,000 to gut and develop the operation to twice its previous size as well as to introduce alcohol to a mix of groceries, newspapers, flowers and such services as dry-cleaning as well as ironing.

“A grant, eh!  That I didn’t know,” mused Martin. “And, you know, I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

Blogsbody wasn’t asking.  But he did go on to query the candidate’s knowledge of a Cressroads’ dogging hotspot, visible when approaching Alresford from Winchester on the north-bound carriageway of the A31.

A severe blight on its rural landscape that has troubled the town council into requesting police make their presence known. And they have. Officers in their cruisers were despatched to the forested lay-by to knock on windows and distribute National Health Service ’safe sex’ literature to cars, their drivers and back-seat passengers.

“It came as quite a shock for them and me after-dark one evening,” begins Martin. “Travelling in a police car, when, it seemed, taking no more than a press of a single button, our uniformed driver illuminated so-called ‘Dogging Alley’ with his battery of lights.”

Not for reasons of the police seeking to distribute more NHS material, but rather more a past preventative effort Martin wholeheartedly endorses.

Then time for the candidate to bid farewell and return to task pursuing his Sunday afternoon team of canvassers as they paved his campaigning trail through mailboxes of the city-built estate with more in a series of letters and leaflets aimed at hitting Cressroads’ homes with his ongoing promise to ‘deliver real change, and put local people first.’

Outgoing Cressroads’ Postmistress Jackie Sanger looked to salvage a further £1,000 from selling the remaining year on the lease for her passport-photo kiosk as her Everything Must Go sale prepared the way to gut the leased building on Alresford’s West Street for its upcoming change of use to an undertaker’s front shop window, office and chapel of rest.

When there were no takers for her kiosk, agreement was reached for it to move to immediately outside the door to the town council offices at Alresford Recreation Centre, and from where her proven little earner continues to provide photographs approved to accompany applications for driving licences, fishing permits and passports next obtained from the newly-established Post Office counter at the Co-op supermarket in town.

And the lessee? After 30 years of Post Office service, Jackie has changed wickets to begin shouting the odds from behind a Winchester bookmaker’s counter.

“It’s a racing certainty,” complain the town’s posties. “We’re next to move. Our sorting office is at the back of what’s changing to an undertaker’s - everyone believes the Co-op Funeral Service - and we are to be shut down to become part of Winnall’s Royal Mail operation.

“From where - you mind my words, within the year - we’ll find ourselves delivering to Alresford from up in the old neck of Winchester’s woods.”

Meanwhile, the go-getting Co-op supermarket Cressroads prefers to adopt as its more chic-sounding Coop, looks to feather its refurbished West Street nest at the expense of pesky Tesky’s Extra-of-a-store on nearby fashionable Georgian Broad Street.

While the Coop is switched to deploying modernized cash registers, it continues to resists any commercial temptation to install the like of its competitor’s robotic American checkouts costing as much as £175,000 for three.

“But forever and opening all hours, they do play up,” complain convenience staff.

“While continuing to serve customers the good, old-fashioned way, we are stopped in our tracks again and again to solve one problem after another encountered by those of our customers wanting to avoid queuing and trying to check out their groceries at one or other of the automated machines.”

 

“Oh my days! Or should that be Daisy?  I’m in charge of my baby,” exclaims 29-year-old Keogh, former manager of The Arms at Tichborne, after she checks into a flat for trainee parents with her fiancé Richard at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital, South Wales, where their 3lb 10oz Daisy-Mae was born eight weeks premature this past Ides of March.

 Back in Tichborne (pop. 170), the Sexth-of-May date for the General Erection comes as no surprise to villagers, after it was announced as many as three weeks ago by way of Winchester’s Meon Valley returning officer seeking to book The Arms as the village polling station, and where its glamorously popular landlady Nicky Roper raises erection fever by carrying out her threat to stand for a seat on the sleepy parish council.

 “Greater democracy! That’s what’s needed,” campaigns Nicky.

 “Blog all you want about Tichborne’s Firkin Henry, and we will continue to contribute fivepence on every pint of our Copper to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution,” promises Palmer’s Dorset brewery.

 “Fivepence on Henry’s pints of Copper as well as everyone else’s. But please don’t ask us to endorse any real ale enthusiast supping as many as 72 pints of beer at the extraordinary rate of a firkin a week to earn our charity £200-a-year,” adds a not-overly-ungrateful official of the RNLI.

 Firkin Henry made Blogsbody’s Dogsbloggy is a retired stockman bagged for his rural know-how. And through the services of the Natural Death Organisation, operating six-feet-under in a rented Cold War nuclear bunker at Twyford, Greater Cressroads, he and the town hack are  sworn to ensure that, whoever is first to pop his boots, the other will oversee a woodland burial without calling on the services of a funeral director.

“Optimistically, my money was already on our ageing family cat departing ahead of my 19-year-old Ford Escort, myself - or, indeed, Firkin Henry,” pronounces Alresford’s town hack.

“Then returning from my six-day visit to the Valleys of South Wales to discover Trixie is gone walkabout. With no sight nor sound of her over the past three days, and fearing the old lady has opted for a final solution akin to that of an aged Eskimo heading out of  an igloo for a last lone meander in a snowstorm.”

“Trixie,” cheers former production manager of the infamous News of the Screws Lenny Larden, mine host of the Tichborne Arms before Nicky and her husband Patrick, and recovering from a virus that has laid him low and off his favourite tipple for as long as the past three months.

 “Cheers, Trixie … cheers, Lenny,” cheers Firkin Henry.

 

Blogsbody is safely home to Hogshire’s Alresford-on-Arle, capital of Greater Cressroads, after averaging 30-mph at the wheel of his RAF-blue Wings-for-Wheels.

His 19-year-old Ford Escort … would you believe, automatic!

Equipped with electric windows, but devoid of power steering and making three pit-stops at as many service centres for the town hack to top up on caffeine as well as a read of this past Easter Sunday’s tabloids.

In turn beginning to explain away 90-spent-minutes of his five-hour, 150-mile drive home from Pontypridd, South Wales to his dysfunctional Lower House of Windsor.

Where he read the two welcoming words Vile ‘writing’ keyed into the comment box of his latest blog for the much respected Hogshire Chronic – Pink-hatted Daisy-Mae bears silent witness to crack-heads’ baby put in arms of SS – after he booted up an aging Acer laptop sat back at his desk in the cramped family dining-room that doubles as his so-called Word Factory inside a re-roofed, three-bedroom, city-built terrace.

Blogsbody discovered the comment to be the work of icy, blue-eyed Sharon Watson by the look of her Facebook photo, self-described as ‘Winchester female, networks ITV, fan of Straight Dave, North Walls Corner House Coffee Bar …’ and for Blogsbody to coax into half-apologising:   

I don’t mean to be rude, I’m sure you take great pride in them (his blogs), but I just can’t bear those articles. I follow the Chron for local news and I can’t read this stuff.

But it is his blog’s cast of scores of Greater Cressroads locals as well as Tichborne Arms regulars that demands the town hack travels beyond his Hogshire beat to bring news of where are they now.

Then for him to begin to tell what has befallen such past local personalities as his only daughter Keogh – former manager of the village inn that the BBC dubs Blog Central, and proud mother of premature Daisy-Mae – whose scores of cards, emails and inter-floral messages sent from the watercress capital of the world busily congratulate Keogh and her fiancé Richard on the recent birth of their 3lb 10oz baby.

Folk become members of Daisy-Mae’s growing family of adopted Cressroads aunts, uncles and cousins  -  “and if only her late Great-Aunt Peg were here to welcome her into the world,” Blogger Bamps knew to set Keogh’s wheels off, off and away.

Remembering the never-to-be-forgotten former chorus girl in the days of music hall in Yorkshire, who fell in love with a carrot-haired York greengrocer but chose instead a novitiate with the Order of Dominican Sisters.  

Becoming a nun – Sister Margaret Aidan, OP – nicknamed ‘Aids’ and recognized, together with her fellow sisters, as a ‘bride of Christ’.

One to be found teaching music at the convent high school in Harare, Zimbabwe, where the Aids epidemic sweeping Africa most decided her to shed for ever the name chosen in place of her family name to complete her religious identity. 

“So, Bamps, if your Aunt Peg became a bride of Christ … “

“… and she did,” the town hack assured his daughter.

“In turn, Daisy-Mae’s great-aunt?”

“Correct, Keogh.”

“And so making Jesus your uncle?”

“Yup … your Great-Uncle, Keogh …Daisy Mae’s Great-Great-Uncle … and uncles scarce come any greater than Him!”  

Some mothers do have them.

A premature baby born to undergo withdrawal from recreational drugs and in dire need of intensive special care alongside other pre-‘termers’ slowly graduating from incubator to cot, before they are ready to be taken home from hospital.

Found nesting between the Prince Charles and Princess of Wales hospitals in the Valleys of the Principality – why it is nicknamed The Camilla – Llantrisant’s 10-year-old Royal Glamorgan (where a 60p day-long ticket for car parking is seriously less than charges nigh on a king’s ransom levied at the likes of Southampton General), experiences its sad share of babes beginning life high on the likes of cocaine and heroin.

Babes born out of their tiny minds, thinks Bamps.

After visiting his healthy 17-day-old granddaughter Daisy-Mae, born eight weeks prematurely on the 15^th of March to mark coincidentally but indelibly his scheduled restart to the Continuing Story of Cressroads on the day of the Ides.

Then for him to add his granddaughter Daisy-Mae McArthur to the cast of hundreds for a saga emanating from the Hampshire market town of Alresford-on-Arle, after she bears silent witness to the emotive scene of one babe being taken into the care of social  services from the arms of crackheads for parents inside the Welsh hospital’s SCaBU

Pronounced Sca’boo and hospital shorthand for Special Care Baby Unit.

Where pink-hatted Daisy-Mae begins to overtake her birth weight, regularly fill her nappies and suckle her mum’s milk during the hours that teach hands-on parenting skills in preparation for going home.

Home to Pontypridd from its nearby hospital sat in all but the clouds on especially grey days in mid-Glamorgan, and down the dizzy heights of mostly winding lanes to Keogh and Richard’s stone-built, end-of-terrace back up the steep hill from Bamps favourite Morning Star and such regulars as Jamaican George.

As far again to walk to Pontypridd’s railway station, and close to where Daisy-Mae’s express arrival was officially noted in pen and ink by the Welsh market town’s Miss K Norris, Registrar of hatches, matches – and it is in that changed order of service her parents look to request a second notable dip in the Quink for their family album.

One that will put an official signature to their six-year-old bond forged throughout an initial time of togetherness on Cheshire’s Wirral Peninsula, before their past four years of working and living in Cardiff through homesteading in the Rhondda.

Keeping pace with events in Wales over the past five days, Bloggy’s Lady Karen of the Lakes emails him from her home in Cressroads:-

Morning Daisy-Mae’s Gramps,

Thank you for the link. Never a dull moment in the life of Mr Blogsbody, lol. It might not have had such a happy ending. . . .  but that would have been another story.

I’ve recovered from my trip to Wembley. What a great day that was. To some it might have been only a paint-pot trophy but to us real Saints fans it was the just reward for a traumatic journey and to help us realise there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Anyway big kiss for Daisy-Mae and you of course.

Safe journey home,

Lady Karen x x

Dressed up warm, my woolly hat all but over my eyes and snug as a bug in my open- topped incubator, sets off Old Bamps wondering aloud if Cressroads’ Mr Page was born ahead of his due-date?

“A neighbour on the wrong side of the tracks for Alresford-on-Arle’s Watercress Line,” explains silver-haired Bampy. “Our town’s Willy Page! Who rose once upon a time to the rank of Lollipop Man attending Sun Hill Junior School’s mums and their under-11s crossing Jacklyn’s Lane. But who remains mostly averse to turning over a new leaf for him otherwise to weather life’s storm.

“Like no-one has ever seen him indoors or out, hot or cold, bedtime or breakfast without he’s wearing his woolly hat. But not a tradition he seems able to pass down his chapter of the town’s Page-line to his kids of all ages.”

“Thanks for the memory and another of your misplaced cot-side thoughts,” sighs my mum. “Will you find out about the fire-that-could-have-been, or is that better left to me?” she asks her dad, alias my bamps.

Mum, headed home from my afternoon feed, can report back to him: “Well, after we heard the alarms go off, and watched through a porthole from behind closed doors across the corridor from the Special Care Baby Unit as fire crews entered to make safe the area, nurses explain to me how it was all on account of an electrical fault.

“A fault occurred in the older of two washing machines housed in the utility closet outside of the Nursery area, and was the cause of fumes that called for the breaking of glass to trigger a fire alarm signalling the need for a seven-engine response to Llantrisant’s Royal Glamorgan.”

But dubbed The Camilla, overhears Bamps.

Why because it is centred between Merthyr Tydfil’s 434-bed Prince Charles Hospital, where underfed kids from the local council estate sneak into the children’s department for their square meal of some days; and Bridgend’s Princess of Wales Hospital, where ITV’s Undress the Nation famously redesigned the uniforms of catering staff..  

“And the Camilla is where Baby Charlie, an identical set of twins and Daisy-Mae were first in line for a toasting,” Bamps excites the interest of the bar at the hospital’s nearby Beefeater Inn.

For mum, over her muddy mix of Coke-and-orange, wanting to explain: “Our four babes were safely evacuated from the one unit within the hospital where, because of its non-stop need to provide vigilance, treatment and round-the-clock care of new-borns requiring the use of state of the medical art equipment, a fire drill is ever off-limits.”  

“Taking a real-life incident to serve also as the ten-year-old unit’s first ever fire drill,” Bamps blogs back from Wales to Cressroads, where he fully expects to extend his visit through until Easter Sunday morning.