Continuing Story of 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.’

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.

Hey grown-up world, get this for a Welsh sca’boo!

In case you didn’t guess, it’s made our tiny-tot word made for saying ‘Special Care Baby Unit’ here at Royal Glamorgan Hospital, Llantrisant, near Cardiff and where my open-topped incubator is parked in the unit’s nursery so as to continue to keep a careful watch over my temperature.

Much else besides, while rising three-weeks-old and busy regaining my 58-ounce birth weight – “Only six ounces shy of our sweet Daisy-Mae tipping the scales at an equivalent weight to two of your mum’s bags of sugar,” decides my visiting Bampy Blogsbody – and so rock on Saturday when he heads back to Cressroads.

Already it’s too late to prevent mum’s dad of an ex-tabloid hack beginning to broadcast on Facebook: ‘In Wales less than 48 hours and to witness two-week-old Daisy-Mae survive crackheads, wasps and her baptism with fire, while fast asleep in her incubator at the Royal Glamorgan’s Special Care Baby Unit … and then for her bampy to wonder if, on future visits, he shouldn’t think to leave his eventful rabbit’s foot at home in Cressroads, where … don’t ask!’

“Best, Daisy-Mae, after all you’ve slept through today – opening, but quickly closing one of your deep blue peepers at the sight of Old Bampy – he puts on hold his thoughts of rocking your incubator and marking your baby card with anything less than an upbeat mention of your Uncles Matt and Sam,” mum strokes my long fingers.

“Can be scary,” she warns.

“Like scary … scary,”  perk the identical twins. Gabriel and Charlotte who, like me, are making up for lost weight. But it’s a visiting wasp that remains uppermost in their minds, not thoughts of my two uncles.

After fears of the wasp mortally stinging either of the twins, a teacher’s baby boy called Charlie or my little old self, the four of us were sped but ever so safely through the doors of the post natal ward that leads back to the Intensive Care Unit and where we first hung out together in the ScaBU.

In my case, grown 15-old-days, graduating to the Nursery, but still kept waiting for a first glimpse of home.

Old Bampy reports that it  is becoming ever more like my adoped Uncle Firkin Henry’s dairy in Cressroads, and he goes on to tell everyone the family’s Fiat is used increasingly as a milk float to trip back and forth to the Royal Glamorgan’s neonatal unit.

As often as thrice daily, and with as many as three small pintas of Mamma’s Best aboard for each morning, afternoon and evening delivery from her Graig Expresso in Pontypridd.

Scarce topped with double-cream, however, when mum is contained with Bamps across the corridor from the Special Baby Care Unit as crews for seven fire engines are summoned to attend immediately outside our Nursery door.

With Bamps as well as mum’s help – but as true as I lie here – there’s a fire to tell about to my real as well as adoped family. And not to forget a mention of sick Baby C. Born high on heroin, made well, but taken from her mum and put into care.

Until next time,

Love,

Daisy-Mae

Morning Mr Blogsbody,

Have read the addition of me to the cast of the saga that is Cressroads, and so you take care on your trip to the Welsh Valleys. Daisy-Mae wants her Grandpops to visit her, not the other way around, when I’m sure she’s seeing enough of hospitals to last her for a good while.

Not that I’m criticizing your driving - especially when you are doing the charity drive in November - but it’s the other loonies on the road. Thank god Wembley’s built and Saints aren’t playing at Cardiff. If they were, you’d be headed west this coming Sunday morning with a 44,000-strong contingent of the Red and White Army. 

Off on my fortnightly trip to Rochester today, so better get ready.

Have a great time and take care,

Lady Karen of the Lakes x x

Clearing the way for her Mr Blogsbody to be driving himself half the distance of his Lady Karen’s return journey to the Medway site of the original Borstal corrective prison for youths  - eight years past its 100-year-old-built-by-date  -  while putting on hold a reply-message to the fount of his all but daily inspiration. His wanting first to tick off some of the boxes for his pre-Pontypridd list of to-do’s. Until less than a half-hour remains before a white-coated, axe-wielding Kiwi takes his place for this Lady Day’s distribution of the Tichborne Dole in the traditions but not the dress of four centuries ago; and as depicted in the famed Gillis van Tilborgh portrait of today’s scene outside Old Tichborne House, before the demolition of its east wing in the 1950’s.

Dole Day, Wendy,        

After my daughter domiciled in Welsh Wales delivers me Daisy-Mae. A mite prematurely. And, weighing into the Royal Glamorgan’s intensive baby care unit at 3lb 8oz, likely to remain in hospital through until her due date as well as that for the coming General Erection: 06 May 2010.  
 
Continuing Story of Cressroads - www.blogsbody.com - encourages folk to split the new, two-seat Winchester Constituency between Meon Valley’s prospective parliamentary Tory candidate George Hollingbery; and one-d Martin Tod, standing all of six-feet-tall in the LibDem’s orange corner to fight the remaining city vacancy. 

George, a longstanding mate of mine and member of a city council letting contracts for the servicing of its gas appliances to your group of companies, will learn you are indebted to me in the sum of £150.00 as a direct consequence of your failure to keep a scheduled annual maintenance appointment at Cressroads’ Lower House of Windsor scheduled for this past St Patrick’s Day.
 
More to follow, Wendy, as you are copied into correspondence with Kinetic Group’s CEO - but, in the meantime please to know your need to cancel any scheduled third attempt to service my boiler, but to await news of my return to Cressroads from the Valleys of Wales.

Lower House of Windsor - Hi Momma, Poppa and Daisy-May Graig, who have fewer than four days to prepare for the threatened post-natal appearance of Bamps.

Messaging to confirm that, all but the minute the clocks go forward an hour, Bamps is scheduled to attempt the 120-mile drive from the water meadows of Cressroads to the valleys of Rhondda Cynon Taf at the wheel of his 18-year-old Escort LX for an air-force-blue Ford racer.

If you like, time for Alresford’s septuagenarian town hack to whisper goodbye to his adopted Dorset Copper Arms-of-Tichborne for six days, and to head west for his Egyptian welcome from your Pontypridd Landlord Saad, former Met police officer, who quit the force to pump pints of bitter Welsh Brains from behind the bar of his Morning Star.

What most troubles nine-day-old Daisy Mae’s Bamps-the-Blog this evening is whether or not he can afford to put on hold as many as half-a-dozen ever more pressing tales of town and country scheduled for the upcoming pages of his Continuing Story of Cressroads?

Or for him to want to imagine exchanging life in Cressroads for that in South Wales when Daisy-Mae’s one uncle is returned home to do battle with a mental breakdown, while that uncle’s younger brother continues to seek gainful employment at the end of six months going on seven, and the family cat is known to have enjoyed better health.

In fact, bets are taken on who will outlast the other.

Will Trixie, an 18-year-old arthritic moggy, be first of three to depart this mortal coil?  Or will Wings for Bamps’ beloved but gas-guzzling, four-wheel Escort of the House of Henry Ford be sentenced to ascend to the breaker’s yard in the sky?

Most bets, however, are placed on a once upon a time Fleet Street by-line become a wrinkly bamps  outliving his borrowed time before, during and after hours twixt his Acer laptop, leaning on the bar of his favourite Tichborne Arms dubbed Blog Central by the BBC and plotting who is next for boarding another of his  flights of fancy.

Until Sunday’s 1600-hour ETA Pontypridd,

Grumpy Bamps

p.s. When suddenly we have a problem unlocking and relocking Wings’ petrol cap.

‘An unexpected approach, but welcome,’ invites Rosie Inman-Cook, manager of The Natural Death Centre headquartered six feet under the ground at what her postman comes to know as the charity’s In-the-Hill-House along Twyford’s Watley Lane, Greater Cressroads.

Or welcome Blogsbody and his Henry Dogsbloggy!

Sworn to carry out the final instructions of the one who becomes first to depart Mother Earth, and invited to attend Rosie’s refurbished nuclear bunker to find she is ’snug, locked away from insanity,’ kept busy promoting alternative, do-it-yourself funerals that do away with a need for either clergy or undertakers, and seeking to help her visitors choose their final resting place within a developing network of woodland burial sites.

‘March is going bonkers!’ warns Rosie.

Her email explains: ‘Conference to facilitate and exchange invasion from Spain, plus the usual mum taxi servicing. But April better. Sitting at your Tichy pavilion is one of my favourite places, and looking forward to coming your way once the season starts. Pick a date. ‘

One that sees her cricketing son come to Tichborne Park to play against a home eleven that, once upon a match but within 65-year-old Firkin Henry Dogsbloggy’s pace bowling days, made up entirely of Ma Primmer’s sons and grandsons.

Tichborne’s cricketing Primmer Donnas!

Even to include a 12^th Primmer man in the trophy-winning Hogshire village side. And with older members of the famed agricultural family offering their umpiring expertise for a willow-on-leather summer’s evening or weekend in the grounds of the landowning Tichborne family seat for almost the past 1,000 years.

“No getting my arm over these days,” accepts Henry.

Scoring, instead, a firkin not out of Palmer’s Bridport Copper bitter each week to establish an unofficial record in the log of the Tichborne Arms for a regular given to quaffing 10 pints daily, sometimes more; 72 or equivalent to a firkin each week; and bowling over the Royal National Lifeboat Association to discover their charitable coffers remain indebted to the burly ex-stockman to the tune of as much as £200-a-year.

“Wants Firkin Henry written on the side of one of their new lifeboats for doing my bit towards saving others from the drink,” smiles the Primmer son. ”RNLI is my most favourite charity of all. And for the brewery to be donating 5p on each pint of its firkins of Copper, but not wanting to make too much of a song and dance about me drinking them dry of one of them every week.”

For more information about the Natural Death Centre - currently looking for volunteers to work with Rosie out of its Twyford bunker - visit www.naturaldeath.org.uk.