And there he was. Not a pretty sight. Ex-Winchester MP Mark Oaten!
Cont. from 11/11
News is, Keogh,
We’ve had visitors. After Reading, next stop Farnham. But, between estate agents’ offices, your brother for a telecoms marketeer changed production editor for works of academia favouring publication in Farnham rather than Oxbridge beds down some nights at the Lower House of Windsor.
And so it was on the morning afore you began rising-40.
His Nibs was late-to-rise. All of 20 rush-hour miles distant from his desk; offering the impoverished equivalent of 25p-a-mile for his lift to work; and leaving his Poppa Mike to require every last penny of his eldest’s total contribution of £10 towards remedying the 20-year-old family Ford’s demand for a pit stop at Four Marks’ pseudo-French Total Bonjour on the 20-mile return journey to Cressroads.
And there he was!
Not a pretty sight. Unshaven. Pulled up on the alternative dispensing side of the one and the same Total unleaded petrol pump. And especially anxious not to want to be noticed tanking up an ‘R’-reg Vauxhall Vectra.
Who you may ask?
No less a personage of low-standing in Greater Cressroads than the one exposed for having his News of the Screws’ way with a rent boy modelling a Chelsea FC strip - and why your father was not of any mind to bend over backwards and want to re-make the dubious acquaintance of the former Lib-Dem MP for Winchester.
Once was too much. After the right dishonourable gentleman as well as the town hack were invited to a cocktail party at a florist’s. No less a flower shop than one daring to compete with Floral Paul Oliver Twist along Alresford-on-Arle’s busy West Street, and calling itself Cressroad’s Rampant Stamen.
So impressed was Mark Oaten of Bramdean-not-so-Common that his bossy wife volunteered to deliver to the developing market of chimneypots for fresh Kenyan roses in a bid to replenish a philandering MP family’s demanding, if not dwindling exchequer.
But again, Keeks, you old dad digresses. And when the best is yet to come.
Stepping inside the door of Bonjour to want to turn left and pay for £20-worth of unleaded, when Oaten rushed in behind, jostling all in his path to one side and unapologetically heading off into the aisles of the service centre shop.
“Hey, you … yes, you Mark … who the hell do you imagine you’re now of a mind to push and shove?”
“Did I … sorry … please excuse me.”
“Excuse you, Mr Oaten? Never. Never. Never.”
Love, Dad
p.s. We need to talk soon. A Russian lady living in the St Melons district of Cardiff - now there’s a Christmas coincidence - seeks a new beginning to her 60-year-old life that sounds as bad as it can get for someone so deserved of something so much better.
