Part One... Page One

If the village is in any way unusual, It is blissfully unaware of the fact and to all who live here, things are sleepily meandering along in a remarkably normal fashion.

It is a place, Here and now. But somehow undisturbed by too much outside influence.

For no known reason it is unnoticed by us all and those of us who meander through seem to fail to put it's passing into any memory. Thus it is ignored and untroubled by our existence.

The kids here still peer out from behind the sofa as Doctor Who wields his sonic screwdriver (made by Ever-ready) at the aliens who are adorned with lengths of vacuum cleaner hose and polished cylinder head gaskets and are armed to the plastic teeth with whisks, plungers and pointed torches!

Mr Bodget (of Bodget and Billem local builders) even turns amusing shades of purple and shouts at the scrumping children in his orchard at the top of Posh lane. He has a shed full of assorted footballs, cricket balls, tennis balls and even croquet balls that are lost to anyone foolish enough to let them stray from the adjoining recreation ground into his garden. This is somewhat unfair as the house is a far cry from the council flat he grew up in down Peatbog road and as a child he was often the first legging it across the rec as "Old man Grimes" waved his fists and turned amusing shades of purple etc.

The village does have some unexpected features such as the bizarre objects that seem to be simply lying about the place and the occasional badly damaged building that appears to have been bombed…. Recently! The observant visitor may notice that there is always someone, somewhere replacing a few roof tiles and everybody always wears a hat.

The village paper is a touch odd as well. There are pages and pages of small ads daily and here can be found virtually anything you can name. Most items are marked as minor, badly or extensively damaged. And the good condition items are rare enough to warrant their own half page section at the back of the paper. The outsider will also glean from this local rag the fact that sudden and unexpected death of the locals is more common than elsewhere and seems to be accepted as a way of life.

However, I digress and must move on to the stars of this tale.

Besotted is the daughter of the local vicar and lives as you would expect in the vicarage with "Mummy" and "Father" she is almost 15 and plump (to be polite) with wiry hair, glasses and always a bright flowery frock. Forever the butt of the local kids jokes and taunts she is also none too bright and a constant disappointment to her father. She has little in common with anybody in the village and so tends to keep a low profile. She reads a lot of Mills and Boon and sometimes bumps into things as she dreams of dashing tall dark men and gooey romance. In short, A desperately lonely… Loner. She tends to restrict her dream world to the vicarage grounds but Oswald the gardener is always lurking about between brew-ups in his dreadful shed and grins and winks at her in the most puzzling manner!

Children are incurably inquisitive and Besotted is no exception so last summer, while the gardener was away for his "holiday," She did sneak a look in the shed but found only smelly wellies, pots of paint and jars of who knows what, apples all wrapped up in bits of news paper and a pile of 8mm film cans with labels in some foreign language. She had picked up a copy of "Gardens Monthly" from a heap magazines.
She has never told a soul of the awful magazines she found underneath. But she left the shed in tears and has never looked inside again……..(as far as we know.)