Continuing Story of Cressroads

 

“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.