Erection Fever: Candidate Martin quizzed over dogging in Cressroads
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.’
