THE VERNHAM CHRONICLES NOW AVAILABLE AT THE KINDLE STORE!!!

Hello Chums, For all of you out there with Kindles, The Vernham Chronicles is now available for download from The Kindle Store.

If you don’t own a Kindle but would still like to download my little book of silliness, you can still download it to your computer.

If you don’t own a computer you won’t be reading this so I’ll shut up! BYEEEEEEEE!

THE CHARACTERS OF VERNHAM EXPLAINED (EVER SO SLIGHTLY!)

Chapter 5

OF IDIOSYNCRASIES, IDEAS AND IDIOTS

The Vernbury Vale would be poorer without its unique villages, and none of them more unique than Vernham. Outsiders, visitors and accidental tourists all earn the title of ‘Spruggle’, a term used only by Vernhamites. The origin of the name Spruggle dates back to 1066 when a small number of William the Conqueror’s bunch of Charlies took the wrong turning, missed Hastings and wandered on blindly north to stumble upon Vernham, a settlement of very basic and ancient Britons (who somehow managed to miss out on the 5th-century Anglo-Saxon invasion). These Norman soldiers, outnumbered by the Vernhamites, were overpowered and taken hostage. These Normans were an intelligent and friendly bunch and taught the Vernhamites a lot of useful things. This knowledge was taken on by Vernhamites and the teachings became known as ‘Norman Wisdom’. They helped these lesser intelligent villagers with farming methods that revolutionised their ways of thinking as regards cultivation and irrigation. One problem Vernhamites had was the lack of food in springtime; the food, like root vegetables, kept well during the winter months in storage, but as the temperatures rose in spring the food began to decay. This famine period was known as ‘The spring struggle’, but the Normans showed the Vernhamites how to dig underground cellars to keep the food cooler and prevent frost from biting it. This worked well because by the time they had finished the old stock of food, the newly grown food was just about ready to eat. The spring struggle was an unpleasant memory for the Vernhamites and so anything nasty or unwanted was referred to as ‘spring struggles’ as a term of dislike, this later became shortened to Spruggles. As all visitors to Vernham were treated with dislike, they became known as Spruggles too, and the term is still used to this day.

Many visitors to the village are affected in one way or another, both good and bad. Martin Paste, poet and winner of ‘The Oliver Sprigg poetry trophy 1955’ wrote:

I walk down Low Street

On lambswool moccasin feet

Led like a wasp to a jam pot

To arrive at my favourite spot

In a village named Vernham

I read my words and burn them.

He didn’t win the Oliver Sprigg trophy with that poem, that was rubbish! But the lambswool moccasin feet part is significant to Vernham, and it was the ‘Vernham Village Noise Before 6:00am Abatement Society’ that put forward a ban on all noise between 11:00pm and 6:00pm. The milkman, who still delivers milk by horse and cart today, has to put hoof silencers on his horse and the wheels of the cart have inflatable tyres which glide silently on Low Street’s cobblestones. The milkman has to wear regulation slippers and the milk is in cartons so to eliminate the traditional clanking of glass bottles. The final part of that short poem portrays Paste’s feeling of uselessness, the inability to write about a village that haunts and inspires him so much, and yet his words don’t touch the spirit of Vernham. His final act is to set alight the feeble page of words in disgust and watch them burn on the cobblestones. Unbeknownst to Martin Paste, a young Mr Jedson the Fire Chief was watching, and this event made a marked impression on the small boy who would grow up to be a pyromaniac.

The world of American country and western music has also found influence. On a visit to the United Kingdom, country and western artist Wild Wesley West dropped in on his pal Tricky Turnspike and stayed in Vernham for a week. It inspired his song ‘Sweetwater Fever’ which recounts a tale of a lusty night with a young girl on the edge of Sweetwater Marsh, their passion interrupted by the eerie noise of the Vernham Bog Stomper. They both fled in different directions, trading their passion for fear, the lyric tells us:

It was a hot steamy night by a marsh

I could feel a thumpin’ in my sternum

We both got high, stared the devil in his eye

And we lost our souls in Vernham

These words, though apparently nonsensical, have made a huge impression on American country and western fans, and the name of that faraway village called Vernham has acquired a mystique that has earned the same intrigue as English Rock and Roll fans of the 1950s had for places with American names.

It is said that John Constable came to Vernham seeking inspiration for his paintings, but didn’t stay for long though because of the lack of gloomy clouds.

To the Spruggle, some the people of Vernham may appear to be eccentric, but Vernhamites believe themselves to be the height of normality and the Spruggles the eccentrics. I suppose when you think about it, if one was to put a bucket on one’s head every day from very early on in life and found no unpleasant side effect from such an act, one would assume it to be a normal thing to do. But some people would see that as an act of eccentricity. It would be interesting to hear Ned Kelly’s view on that subject if he was still alive!

Vernham has had clever inventors who may be viewed as eccentric to some. Arthur Range for instance developed a street lighting system for Vernham Village. The Vernham Rate Payers Society opted out of having streetlights installed so that their rates weren’t increased. They also raised objection to car headlights shining around all over the place during the hours of darkness; now this is obviously flouting a standard safety requirement and law in motoring. So Arthur Range built a street-illuminating compromise – this was a light in a streetlamp-like stand mounted on the roof of the car; he named them ‘Mobilights’. These worked well but were not such a good idea as there are a lot of low bridges in the Vernbury Vale and it would be impossible to travel very far. So these were scrapped and Arthur went back to the drawing board and came up with ‘Lamplids’. Lamplids are little shields that fit over headlamps with little suction pads. These little accessories make the cars look as though they have very sleepy eyelids, but they are extremely effective and shed controlled illumination only where it’s needed. Any driver caught driving in Vernham without these Lamplids is likely to get ‘what for’ from PC Fred Sweetman and learn a bit about another sort of flashing!

On the subject of cars, another inventor and innovator named Rodney Beauthorpe put Vernham on the motoring innovation map for a short while when he produced the prototype ‘Dentmobile’. The Beauthorpe Dentmobile was developed as an answer to the prime, new car owner’s fear – getting a dent in your new car! Rodney’s reasoning was that people are often afraid of leaving their pristine motor cars unattended in case they get dented by a careless driver when they’re parking. Simple, if you make the car pre-dented then you have beaten the careless drivers to it, thus all fear is removed. These went into production and the cars were quite popular around Vernham and its neighbouring villages until ‘The Night Of The Panel Beaters’ occurred. One morning, every proud owner of a Beauthorpe Dentmobile woke to find their lovely new cars completely dent less. Much like crop circles that are made overnight, all of this reverse vandalism was executed without a single noise and the miscreants that performed this panel-beating were never caught. All of this did not deter Rodney Beauthorpe in the slightest; it only inspired him to find another method to alleviate dent paranoia… ‘The Beauthorpe Latexia’ was Rodney’s new approach – a car made from solid surgical rubber panels; put simply, you could bash into any old thing and your car would be totally dent free. The windscreens were made from glass clear rubberised PVC, so smashed windows would be a thing of the past. The Latexia’s downfall was that it wasn’t very good driving round sharp bends – the car would take on a banana shape due to the grip of the tyres on the road, and finally as the tyres lost their hold, the back end of the car would spring out and catapult the car off the road. Also, during safety tests, the flexible windscreen’s chemical make-up was faulty; there appeared to be too much stretch, and if a crash test dummy was used to simulate a driver not wearing a seatbelt, the window would wrap around the dummy’s head like a melon in cling film. Although facial injuries were minimized, the windscreen’s substrate didn’t seem to retain its memory and so risks of a driver suffocating were high.

Courting rituals are quite eccentric in Vernham too; if a man finds a woman appealing and wants to take her out on a date, he must first make his intentions clear to her. If the woman says ‘maybe’, which invariably she will, the man has to place a small pebble on the woman’s doorstep, every day for five days. These pebbles are called ‘The Five Stones of Maybe’, and if the desired woman picks up a pebble off her doorstep and takes it indoors, that is a stone of maybe. Each day that a stone is taken indoors, it becomes more likely that she will go out on a date with him. If the woman goes off the idea she will leave the next stone untouched; this is a rejection and the man is out of luck and must leave her alone. If a woman accepts the man’s request, she must let him know by throwing her deciding stone at his bedroom window at 11:15pm. The deciding stone can be any one of the five, and the lucky fellow that gets the first stone of maybe is in for a hot date. The amount of heartbroken men that have had their fifth stone untouched are few, but it does happen – poor old Mr Robson, the counterfeit Scotsman, had the one brick of ‘DEFINITELY NO!’ crash through his window when he proposed to Miss Somerton-Jove. One sad tale is of village odd boy Tommy Perkins who fell deeply in love with a pretty girl called Cynthia Bustle. Cynthia said maybe, and so Tommy was very excited. On the first night a stone came smashing through his window, he could hardly sleep that night – fantasy scenarios of eating fish and chips, and walking together in the country lanes rattled around inside his head. All this was before Tommy became unwittingly addicted to amphetamines. He very rarely sleeps at all these days; he works a nightshift at the Velstrum Bakery and his free time is spent painting snail shells and coughing. Anyway, the following day, Tommy happily skipped all the way to Cynthia’s house only to find his first stone of maybe still on her doorstep. It later transpired that it was one of the small village children that fired a stone at Tommy’s window from a catapult. The parents of these infant terrorists are obviously not very concerned that their children are out late at night, it’s a sign of the times, and even Vernham isn’t immune from this modern culture.

As regards Tommy’s amphetamine addiction, the Velstrum chemist ‘Booth’s’ which is owned by Charlton Booth, supplies him with these drugs. Charlton Booth is a chemist who knows just what one needs for their ailments; he also has a wicked sense of humour and will prescribe things for people purely for experiment. So when Tommy turned up at Booth’s complaining that he found his night shift at the bakery was tiring him out and he felt very sleepy, Mr Booth said that he had some special sweets called ‘Whizz Balls’ that can help, and suggested that Tommy give them a go. These sweet cinnamon-flavoured balls are impregnated with an accurate dose of amphetamine sulphate, but they do taste rather good! Tommy loves them and eats a mountain of them, but his mother worries that he sleeps so little. As mentioned before, Tommy is also unwittingly the fabled Vernham Bog Stomper, and his Whizz Balls enable him to skim across Sweetwater Marsh on his Bog Shoes effortlessly. These little balls are costing Tommy a fortune and he seems to be getting through more and more, and Mr Booth is doing very well thank you very much!

Mr Booth once prescribed a laxative for Mrs Bunkerton as a cure for her IBS, his thinking being that if she offloaded everything, her bowels wouldn’t have anything to be irritable about. Gladly, Mrs Bunkerton bumped into Bettie Griggs the newsagent lady on the bus home who suggested that Mrs B threw away the laxatives and tried some liquorice cream rock. This was a good idea, it saved Mrs Bunkerton from loo-time disaster, and Ye Olde Sweetie Shoppe was better off from the profit of 2oz of liquorice cream rock every day. Charlton Booth will hopefully meet his nemesis one day, until then people will continue to suffer from his lab rat sense of humour. One thing is for sure, the place most unlikely to have a ‘drugs bust’ is a chemist!

In a Spruggle’s eye view, the people of Vernham would appear to be content with their lot, and in general this is true. Of all the things that are aplenty in Vernham, ambition is in short supply. I mean real ambition, a desire to see what is outside, and some of Vernham’s natives have never ventured out as they feel that all they need is in the village. But every now and again a Vernhamite feels the desire to venture out – they are all certain that the far off places that they have seen on the television do exist and aren’t just inside the box. Indeed Tommy Perkins was sixteen years of age when he realised that Columbo was a real person and not just a figment of his television, the sad truth dawned on him when he went to a friends for tea in Velstrum and watched the glass-eyed detective on his friend’s TV.

But some have aspired to much more world widely things – of course Tricky Turnspike is a good example. In his teenage years, the young Richard Turnpike’s father made him his first guitar, fashioned from a plank of wood with a bicycle brake cable stretched between two screws impaled in the wood. Tricky’s musical journey began. This plank type of guitar thing was purely acoustic and wasn’t very loud, it was also very monotone. The single bicycle cable did make a very good sound though but it needed something else. Then one day, like silly teenagers do, Tommy decided to plug the microphone of his mono compact cassette recorder in and put the machine into record mode whilst plugging in the little earpiece. With this earpiece wedged into his ear hole he discovered that an amplified version of his voice could be heard with a slight distortion. So what if he connected a lead from his cassette recorder into the DIN socket of his stereo record player? He discovered that apart from an unpleasant squealing noise, he heard his voice very loudly. So with a bit of imagination, Richard stuck the microphone to his plank guitar with sticky tape and ‘HEY PRESTO!’ the electric plank was born. Some of Tricky’s early songs were written on this instrument, and one song in particular was ‘While You Were Snoring’ which was penned when he was strumming the plank in quiet mode with the earpiece plugged in. The title of this song came about because he composed it late at night when his mother and father were in bed and the original sentiment of the lyric was not as Rock and Roll as it seems in the current version. Tricky also found that if he ran one of his mother’s vacuum cleaner nozzles up and down the brake cable while he twanged, the musical pitch of the plank changed. Some of Tricky’s early recordings had a definite Hawaiian flavour to the sound, notably the song ‘While My Plank Gently Whinges’. All of this cacophony became very popular and has made Tricky the icon that he is today – there’s no accounting for taste is there?

Some Vernhamites leave the village unintentionally – 102 years old Mr Barnford, for instance, was kidnapped in the Comfytums tea room raid by pupils of Blagworth Junior School. He now stands sentry in the school corridor, though he doesn’t look a very good colour nowadays and smells a bit odd.

Mr Barnford, too young to fight in the First World War, too ill to manage the Second World War, became the village ARP man. Most of his time was taken up sorting out the mess left behind by the Luftwaffe bombings. At a Vernham summer picnic, young Mr Jedson sat on Mr Barnford’s knee, wideeyed, for two hours listening to his wondrous stories of burning wood and explosions. Despite his ill health, old Mr Barnford was a wartime hero and he is highly respected. There are newspaper cuttings in Busted’s historical museum with an account of how ‘Old Barney’ (as he liked people to call him, even though no one ever did!) saved the beer cellar of The Grummet and Nut from burning after embers from a nearby incendiary incident ignited some old potato sacks. With a photograph of Mr Barnford, ARP helmet cockily on the tilt, sticking two Churchillian fingers up at the sky and holding a pint of ale in the other hand, the headline reads ‘EAT, DRINK AND BE MERRY, YOU CAN’T SPOIL OUR FUN, OLD JERRY!’

Very few Vernhamites did fight in the two wars; there was always a reason not to be able to, be it due to ill health or other excuses. I’m glad that very few did fight, as any loss of its characters would rip the heart out of the village and the surrounding area would become less rural and nodding towards the suburban.

One building that was severely affected by wartime bombing was Grummet Hall, the home of Lord Wenville. Although Lord Wenville wasn’t killed that night, the bomb damage was so severe that he didn’t feel he could stand the emotional pain of seeing Grummet Hall, the proud home of the Wenville’s for over 200 years, being pulled down. Merry Meadow the home for the infirm, old and very disturbed was built on the site using a lot of the bricks left over from Grummet Hall. The original and beautiful landscape gardens designed by Incapability Saunders are still there and the Rhododendrons in May are a treat for the eye to behold.

Although there are parallels with the outside world with Vernham, this little village will always remain odd. The refusal to accept £1 coins as legitimate currency (and heaven knows decimalisation was a nightmare), common notions that completely disregard scientific fact, deviants that would be either chastised or locked up for their misdemeanours are accepted as normal and the implacable belief that Spruggles are the weirdos and ‘The Vernhamite is right!’ all make up the ingredients of a very strange world that few could survive in.

THE VERNHAM CHRONICLES AVAILABLE ON KINDLE SOON!

Hi chums, Just a short word (well, short by my standards anyway!) regarding my attempts to sell The Vernham Chronicles in the United States of America. I have long grown tired of seeing sellers on the amazon.com shop window offering TVC for prices up to $100 or more; this seems to have calmed down a little now with the highest prices just a little under $46. To be honest, and without meaning to sound immodest, I think that The Vernham Chronicles is a lovely little book and deserves to take pride of place on anyone’s coffee table. However, there are no brand new novels that are worth the ridiculous prices in the online market place. I feel that the current RRP is a little too high, but I don’t set the costs. A little while ago, I had correspondence with my publisher regarding the absurd pricing; it was suggested that I have the book set up for American print to eliminate the import and inflated carriage charges. I’ve always been a bit of an old fashioned chap and prefer to have a book, CD, DVD or whatever in my hand; very rarely do I download anything (unless it’s free!). Nevertheless, as I have found out recently, since the rising popularity of the Kindle, digital downloads are increasingly outselling paperback books in the USA. It’s hard enough trying to sell this charming and unusual book in the UK, without wasting more trees for the books to remain unsold in America. So, it is with a reluctant heart that I have decided to have The Vernham Chronicles converted to a digital download for all Kindle lovers. If you are lucky enough to receive a Kindle as a Christmas gift this year, I can recommend The Vernham Chronicles as your first download. I believe the price for such fare is going to be $2.99. If you have managed to read thus far without nodding off, thank you!

The Vernham Chronicles – It’s just about as original as you can get!

The Vernham Chronicles – It’s just about as original as you can get!

On 15^th October 2012, my novel The VernhamChronicles will be enjoying its 2^nd birthday!

In those 2 years, The Vernham Chronicles has received mixed reviews and comments, and gladly, none of them(so far) bad!

Some readers have likened or compared The Vernham Chronicles to Spike Milligan, and one reader thought there was an element of Gormenghastabout it. While these observations are complimentary, they aren’t really anywhere close to the mark.

I suppose that the brilliant Spike Milligan is used as a yardstick for wacky British comedy and quite rightly so, but I don’t think you will find anything like The Vernham Chronicles in his great body of work. In addition, the only connection that The Vernham Chronicles has with Gormenghast is a flood during a rainstorm.

Indeed, the closest description I have seen is ‘BBC’s TheLeague of Gentlemen before it gets nasty!’

In a radio interview at Marlow FM 97.5, DJ Paul Mansell asked me what inspired my writing of The Vernham Chronicles and its characters. The novel’s inspiration goes back to just a little over 40 years ago when I was a schoolboy.

I used to walk down a little high street everyday on my way to school, some of the buildings dated as far back as the 16^th Century and other cottages built into the gaps afterwards.

Some of the characters in The Vernham Chronicles were inspired from people that I saw regularly going about their daily business in that little high street, and some characters inspired from those I have had the uncertain pleasure to meet.

The Vernham Chronicles’ characters are of course a complete exaggeration or distortion of those people; they are purely literary caricatures.

One of my favourite characters, and indeed it would seem many of readers’ favourites, is Mr Robson the Counterfeit Scotsman and a character that I had to be careful not to over indulge myself. A little old man that wore plaid inspired this lovely old fellow, he was most likely Scottish but it amused me to think that he might just be a Scottish fanatic and very English. I remember my mother buying me a second hand Oor Wullie (Our William) annual when we went to a local muscular dystrophy charity fete. This comic book and its little lad called Wullie and his pals Fat Bob, Wee Eck and Soapy Soutar fascinated me with its use of strange language in the speech bubbles. The language of course was a way of adding a phonetic accent to otherwise English text.

I found inspiration in Wullie, so much so that I tried to be Wullie right down to wearing dungarees and boots with tacks in (tackety boots) and I would sit on an upturned metal bucket just to be like him.

All this role-play was typical adolescent behaviour and I’m certain we have all pretended to be someone else at sometime or another. This of course made me the original Counterfeit Scotsman, but the thought that somebody could carry on this façade until late in life because of their fanaticism tickles me in all the right places.

I incidentally adore Scotland and love the Scottish way of life!

Mrs Bunkerton, recently widowed 7 years ago as she insists on telling people every day is another favourite. Mrs Bunkerton has an obsession with the accuracy of time and she makes sure she visits the local tearoom ‘Comfytums’ at two minutes past ten o clock every morning; to be too early or miss the exact time would throw her day out completely.

The natives of Vernham village are all obsessed with something or another anyway, and their personalities are all products of their strange neurosis; this is why human beings are an enigma.

Without rewriting the novel here for you, I would like to leave you with a short section of a lovely review by Sue Magee of The Bookbag, which I feel sums up The Vernham Chronicles; you will of course have to read it to maker your own mind up!

“I looked at The Vernham Chronicles for the first time last night and I really had no intention of reading it, but the book had other ideas. Well, just one chapter, then quickly expanded and before I knew it I'd turned the final pages in the early hours of this morning. It's not the plot that keeps you going, because there really isn't one. It would be superfluous. The humour is gentle – from the reason for the villagers having Norman Wisdom to the raunchy page nine glamour model Corrie Nation. She used to be Corrie Nation-Street but her agent told her that it made her sound like a soap opera.
It's said that in times of war people turn to Jane Austen for her gentle humour and a reassurance that all will be well in the world. The Vernham Chronicles had a similar effect on me. The humour tickles you relentlessly and won't let go even when you scream for mercy. It's kindly humour though: you laugh with people rather than at them and you're left with a feeling that you could live in Vernham and know that you might not be accepted, but it would be because you were an outsider and not because you're in any way different. That's their kind of logic.”

                                    

Vernham Chronicles - tunes to annoy the neighbours with!

Vernham Chronicles

OF IDIOSYNCRASIES, IDEAS AND IDIOTS!

The Vernbury Vale would be poorer without its unique
villages, and none of them more unique than Vernham.
Outsiders, visitors and accidental tourists all earn the title of
‘Spruggle’, a term used only by Vernhamites. The origin of the
name Spruggle dates back to 1066 when a small number of
William the Conqueror’s bunch of Charlies took the wrong
turning, missed Hastings and wandered on blindly north to
stumble upon Vernham, a settlement of very basic and ancient
Britons (who somehow managed to miss out on the 5th-century
Anglo-Saxon invasion). These Norman soldiers, outnumbered
by the Vernhamites, were overpowered and taken hostage.
These Normans were an intelligent and friendly bunch and
taught the Vernhamites a lot of useful things. This knowledge
was taken on by Vernhamites and the teachings became known
as ‘Norman Wisdom’. They helped these lesser intelligent
villagers with farming methods that revolutionised their ways
of thinking as regards cultivation and irrigation. One problem
Vernhamites had was the lack of food in springtime; the food,
like root vegetables, kept well during the winter months in
storage, but as the temperatures rose in spring the food began
to decay. This famine period was known as ‘The spring
struggle’, but the Normans showed the Vernhamites how to dig
underground cellars to keep the food cooler and prevent frost
from biting it. This worked well because by the time they had
finished the old stock of food, the newly grown food was just
about ready to eat. The spring struggle was an unpleasant
memory for the Vernhamites and so anything nasty or
unwanted was referred to as ‘spring struggles’ as a term of
dislike, this later became shortened to Spruggles. As all visitors
to Vernham were treated with dislike, they became known as
Spruggles too, and the term is still used to this day.
Many visitors to the village are affected in one way or
another, both good and bad. Martin Paste, poet and winner of
‘The Oliver Sprigg poetry trophy 1955’ wrote:

I walk down Low Street
On lambswool moccasin feet
Led like a wasp to a jam pot
To arrive at my favourite spot
In a village named Vernham
I read my words and burn them.

He didn’t win the Oliver Sprigg trophy with that poem, that
was rubbish! But the lambswool moccasin feet part is
significant to Vernham, and it was the ‘Vernham Village Noise
Before 6:00am Abatement Society’ that put forward a ban on
all noise between 11:00pm and 6:00pm. The milkman, who
still delivers milk by horse and cart today, has to put hoof
silencers on his horse and the wheels of the cart have inflatable
tyres which glide silently on Low Street’s cobblestones. The
milkman has to wear regulation slippers and the milk is in
cartons so to eliminate the traditional clanking of glass bottles.
The final part of that short poem portrays Paste’s feeling of
uselessness, the inability to write about a village that haunts
and inspires him so much, and yet his words don’t touch the
spirit of Vernham. His final act is to set alight the feeble page
of words in disgust and watch them burn on the cobblestones.
Unbeknownst to Martin Paste, a young Mr Jedson the Fire
Chief was watching, and this event made a marked impression
on the small boy who would grow up to be a pyromaniac.
The world of American country and western music has also
found influence. On a visit to the United Kingdom, country and
western artist Wild Wesley West dropped in on his pal Tricky
Turnspike and stayed in Vernham for a week. It inspired his
song ‘Sweetwater Fever’ which recounts a tale of a lusty night
with a young girl on the edge of Sweetwater Marsh, their
passion interrupted by the eerie noise of the Vernham Bog
Stomper. They both fled in different directions, trading their
passion for fear, the lyric tells us:

It was a hot steamy night by a marsh
I could feel a thumpin’ in my sternum
We both got high, stared the devil in his eye
And we lost our souls in Vernham

These words, though apparently nonsensical, have made a
huge impression on American country and western fans, and
the name of that faraway village called Vernham has acquired a
mystique that has earned the same intrigue as English Rock and
Roll fans of the 1950s had for places with American names.
It is said that John Constable came to Vernham seeking
inspiration for his paintings, but didn’t stay for long though
because of the lack of gloomy clouds.
To the Spruggle, some the people of Vernham may appear
to be eccentric, but Vernhamites believe themselves to be the
height of normality and the Spruggles the eccentrics. I suppose
when you think about it, if one was to put a bucket on one’s
head every day from very early on in life and found no
unpleasant side effect from such an act, one would assume it to
be a normal thing to do. But some people would see that as an
act of eccentricity. It would be interesting to hear Ned Kelly’s
view on that subject if he was still alive!
Vernham has had clever inventors who may be viewed as
eccentric to some. Arthur Range for instance developed a street
lighting system for Vernham Village. The Vernham Rate
Payers Society opted out of having streetlights installed so that
their rates weren’t increased. They also raised objection to car
headlights shining around all over the place during the hours of
darkness; now this is obviously flouting a standard safety
requirement and law in motoring. So Arthur Range built a
street-illuminating compromise – this was a light in a
streetlamp-like stand mounted on the roof of the car; he named
them ‘Mobilights’. These worked well but were not such a
good idea as there are a lot of low bridges in the Vernbury Vale
and it would be impossible to travel very far. So these were
scrapped and Arthur went back to the drawing board and came
up with ‘Lamplids’. Lamplids are little shields that fit over
headlamps with little suction pads. These little accessories
make the cars look as though they have very sleepy eyelids, but
they are extremely effective and shed controlled illumination
only where it’s needed. Any driver caught driving in Vernham
without these Lamplids is likely to get ‘what for’ from PC Fred
Sweetman and learn a bit about another sort of flashing!
On the subject of cars, another inventor and innovator
named Rodney Beauthorpe put Vernham on the motoring
innovation map for a short while when he produced the
prototype ‘Dentmobile’. The Beauthorpe Dentmobile was
developed as an answer to the prime, new car owner’s fear –
getting a dent in your new car! Rodney’s reasoning was that
people are often afraid of leaving their pristine motor cars
unattended in case they get dented by a careless driver when
they’re parking. Simple, if you make the car pre-dented then
you have beaten the careless drivers to it, thus all fear is
removed. These went into production and the cars were quite
popular around Vernham and its neighbouring villages until
‘The Night Of The Panel Beaters’ occurred.
One morning, every proud owner of a Beauthorpe
Dentmobile woke to find their lovely new cars completely dent
less. Much like crop circles that are made overnight, all of this
reverse vandalism was executed without a single noise and the
miscreants that performed this panel-beating were never
caught. All of this did not deter Rodney Beauthorpe in the
slightest; it only inspired him to find another method to
alleviate dent paranoia… ‘The Beauthorpe Latexia’ was
Rodney’s new approach – a car made from solid surgical
rubber panels; put simply, you could bash into any old thing
and your car would be totally dent free. The windscreens were
made from glass clear rubberised PVC, so smashed windows
would be a thing of the past. The Latexia’s downfall was that it
wasn’t very good driving round sharp bends – the car would
take on a banana shape due to the grip of the tyres on the road,
and finally as the tyres lost their hold, the back end of the car
would spring out and catapult the car off the road. Also, during
safety tests, the flexible windscreen’s chemical make-up was
faulty; there appeared to be too much stretch, and if a crash test
dummy was used to simulate a driver not wearing a seatbelt,
the window would wrap around the dummy’s head like a
melon in cling film. Although facial injuries were minimized,
the windscreen’s substrate didn’t seem to retain its memory
and so risks of a driver suffocating were high.

Courting rituals are quite eccentric in Vernham too; if a man
finds a woman appealing and wants to take her out on a date,
he must first make his intentions clear to her. If the woman
says ‘maybe’, which invariably she will, the man has to place a
small pebble on the woman’s doorstep, every day for five days.
These pebbles are called ‘The Five Stones of Maybe’, and if
the desired woman picks up a pebble off her doorstep and takes
it indoors, that is a stone of maybe. Each day that a stone is
taken indoors, it becomes more likely that she will go out on a
date with him. If the woman goes off the idea she will leave the
next stone untouched; this is a rejection and the man is out of
luck and must leave her alone. If a woman accepts the man’s
request, she must let him know by throwing her deciding stone
at his bedroom window at 11:15pm. The deciding stone can be
any one of the five, and the lucky fellow that gets the first stone
of maybe is in for a hot date. The amount of heartbroken men
that have had their fifth stone untouched are few, but it does
happen – poor old Mr Robson, the counterfeit Scotsman, had
the one brick of ‘DEFINITELY NO!’ crash through his
window when he proposed to Miss Somerton-Jove.
One sad tale is of village odd boy Tommy Perkins who fell
deeply in love with a pretty girl called Cynthia Bustle. Cynthia
said maybe, and so Tommy was very excited. On the first night
a stone came smashing through his window, he could hardly
sleep that night – fantasy scenarios of eating fish and chips, and
walking together in the country lanes rattled around inside his
head. All this was before Tommy became unwittingly addicted
to amphetamines. He very rarely sleeps at all these days; he
works a nightshift at the Velstrum Bakery and his free time is
spent painting snail shells and coughing. Anyway, the
following day, Tommy happily skipped all the way to
Cynthia’s house only to find his first stone of maybe still on
her doorstep. It later transpired that it was one of the small
village children that fired a stone at Tommy’s window from a
catapult. The parents of these infant terrorists are obviously not
very concerned that their children are out late at night, it’s a
sign of the times, and even Vernham isn’t immune from this
modern culture.
As regards Tommy’s amphetamine addiction, the Velstrum
chemist ‘Booth’s’ which is owned by Charlton Booth, supplies
him with these drugs. Charlton Booth is a chemist who knows
just what one needs for their ailments; he also has a wicked
sense of humour and will prescribe things for people purely for
experiment. So when Tommy turned up at Booth’s
complaining that he found his night shift at the bakery was
tiring him out and he felt very sleepy, Mr Booth said that he
had some special sweets called ‘Whizz Balls’ that can help,
and suggested that Tommy give them a go. These sweet
cinnamon-flavoured balls are impregnated with an accurate
dose of amphetamine sulphate, but they do taste rather good!
Tommy loves them and eats a mountain of them, but his
mother worries that he sleeps so little.
As mentioned before, Tommy is also unwittingly the fabled
Vernham Bog Stomper, and his Whizz Balls enable him to
skim across Sweetwater Marsh on his Bog Shoes effortlessly.
These little balls are costing Tommy a fortune and he seems to
be getting through more and more, and Mr Booth is doing very
well thank you very much! Mr Booth once prescribed a
laxative for Mrs Bunkerton as a cure for her IBS, his thinking
being that if she offloaded everything, her bowels wouldn’t
have anything to be irritable about. Gladly, Mrs Bunkerton
bumped into Bettie Griggs the newsagent lady on the bus home
who suggested that Mrs B threw away the laxatives and tried
some liquorice cream rock. This was a good idea, it saved Mrs
Bunkerton from loo-time disaster, and Ye Olde Sweetie
Shoppe was better off from the profit of 2oz of liquorice cream
rock every day. Charlton Booth will hopefully meet his
nemesis one day, until then people will continue to suffer from
his lab rat sense of humour. One thing is for sure, the place
most unlikely to have a ‘drugs bust’ is a chemist!

In a Spruggle’s eye view, the people of Vernham would
appear to be content with their lot, and in general this is true.
Of all the things that are aplenty in Vernham, ambition is in
short supply. I mean real ambition, a desire to see what is
outside, and some of Vernham’s natives have never ventured
out as they feel that all they need is in the village. But every
now and again a Vernhamite feels the desire to venture out –
they are all certain that the far off places that they have seen on
the television do exist and aren’t just inside the box. Indeed
Tommy Perkins was sixteen years of age when he realised that
Columbo was a real person and not just a figment of his
television, the sad truth dawned on him when he went to a
friends for tea in Velstrum and watched the glass-eyed
detective on his friend’s TV.

But some have aspired to much more world widely things –
of course Tricky Turnspike is a good example. In his teenage
years, the young Richard Turnpike’s father made him his first
guitar, fashioned from a plank of wood with a bicycle brake
cable stretched between two screws impaled in the wood.
Tricky’s musical journey began. This plank type of guitar thing
was purely acoustic and wasn’t very loud, it was also very
monotone. The single bicycle cable did make a very good
sound though but it needed something else. Then one day, like
silly teenagers do, Tommy decided to plug the microphone of
his mono compact cassette recorder in and put the machine into
record mode whilst plugging in the little earpiece. With this
earpiece wedged into his ear hole he discovered that an
amplified version of his voice could be heard with a slight
distortion. So what if he connected a lead from his cassette
recorder into the DIN socket of his stereo record player? He
discovered that apart from an unpleasant squealing noise, he
heard his voice very loudly. So with a bit of imagination,
Richard stuck the microphone to his plank guitar with sticky
tape and ‘HEY PRESTO!’ the electric plank was born.
Some of Tricky’s early songs were written on this
instrument, and one song in particular was ‘While You Were
Snoring’ which was penned when he was strumming the plank
in quiet mode with the earpiece plugged in. The title of this
song came about because he composed it late at night when his
mother and father were in bed and the original sentiment of the
lyric was not as Rock and Roll as it seems in the current
version. Tricky also found that if he ran one of his mother’s
vacuum cleaner nozzles up and down the brake cable while he
twanged, the musical pitch of the plank changed. Some of
Tricky’s early recordings had a definite Hawaiian flavour to
the sound, notably the song ‘While My Plank Gently
Whinges’. All of this cacophony became very popular and has
made Tricky the icon that he is today – there’s no accounting
for taste is there?

Some Vernhamites leave the village unintentionally – 102
years old Mr Barnford, for instance, was kidnapped in the
Comfytums tea room raid by pupils of Blagworth Junior
School. He now stands sentry in the school corridor, though he
doesn’t look a very good colour nowadays and smells a bit odd.
Mr Barnford, too young to fight in the First World War, too ill
to manage the Second World War, became the village ARP
man. Most of his time was taken up sorting out the mess left
behind by the Luftwaffe bombings. At a Vernham summer
picnic, young Mr Jedson sat on Mr Barnford’s knee, wideeyed,
for two hours listening to his wondrous stories of burning
wood and explosions. Despite his ill health, old Mr Barnford
was a wartime hero and he is highly respected. There are
newspaper cuttings in Busted’s historical museum with an
account of how ‘Old Barney’ (as he liked people to call him,
even though no one ever did!) saved the beer cellar of The
Grummet and Nut from burning after embers from a nearby
incendiary incident ignited some old potato sacks. With a
photograph of Mr Barnford, ARP helmet cockily on the tilt,
sticking two Churchillian fingers up at the sky and holding a
pint of ale in the other hand, the headline reads ‘EAT, DRINK
AND BE MERRY, YOU CAN’T SPOIL OUR FUN, OLD
JERRY!’
Very few Vernhamites did fight in the two wars; there was
always a reason not to be able to, be it due to ill health or other
excuses. I’m glad that very few did fight, as any loss of its
characters would rip the heart out of the village and the
surrounding area would become less rural and nodding towards
the suburban.
One building that was severely affected by wartime
bombing was Grummet Hall, the home of Lord Wenville.
Although Lord Wenville wasn’t killed that night, the bomb
damage was so severe that he didn’t feel he could stand the
emotional pain of seeing Grummet Hall, the proud home of the
Wenville’s for over 200 years, being pulled down. Merry
Meadow the home for the infirm, old and very disturbed was
built on the site using a lot of the bricks left over from
Grummet Hall. The original and beautiful landscape gardens
designed by Incapability Saunders are still there and the
Rhododendrons in May are a treat for the eye to behold.
Although there are parallels with the outside world with

Vernham, this little village will always remain odd. The refusal
to accept £1 coins as legitimate currency (and heaven knows
decimalisation was a nightmare), common notions that
completely disregard scientific fact, deviants that would be
either chastised or locked up for their misdemeanours are
accepted as normal and the implacable belief that Spruggles are
the weirdos and ‘The Vernhamite is right!’ all make up the
ingredients of a very strange world that few could survive in.

More stupidity can be found here by clicking on this link

The Vernham Chronicles - a gentle respite from the usual read!

How does one start a blog with the sole intention of flogging a novel one has written?

How does one convince prospective buyers to buy a copy of one’s novel when the subject of that novel is nonsense?

The Vernham Chronicles is a nonsensical trip into an imaginary English village where its natives are less than normal.

Here is the rear cover blurb that sums up this little novel well:-

Vernham, a pretty but mindless little village, loiters pointlessly in the beautiful English countryside of Vernbury Vale, almost suspended in time. It's got bags of charm - cobbled streets, 16th-century houses, and so on, but there's something a bit odd about it...Vernhamites are somewhat eccentric - oddballs most of them, miscreants and deviants - but you'll grow to like them. Averse to technology, immersed in their own quaint rituals, they even refuse the GBP1 coin as acceptable currency. Alcohol is a big pastime, the vicar being its biggest participator - but with reverse vandalism rife, Vernham's got its good points! Pity it's no place for outsiders, but you're welcome to take a sneaky peek. Be warned though, don't linger unless you're an exhibitionist, counterfeit Scotsman, or enjoy painting garden snails! Take a light-hearted walk down memory lane with a difference - it won't hurt. Have fun!

The Vernham Chronicles is suited to the reader that is tired of the serious world of dynamic novels.

The Vernham Chronicles is a charming little novel that is perhaps dark around the edges.

If you enjoy a wickedly childish giggle at other’s misfortune, The Vernham Chronicles could be right up your street!