The Idler

Tilston

04 August 2005

A back water cross roads of a village whose sole purpose seems to be to perpetuate every backward village stereotype that there is. Distanced from the main road to the North and the Welsh border to the South by several miles and the present day by at least a century.

This two pub, one shop agricultural throwback has little going for it other than as an example of the weird dichotomy that exists in isolated rural economies when over paid city twats buy old farm houses and refit them at exorbitant cost and then attempt to co-exist with the local people…

The locals. Yes, they do point at the sky when a plane flys over and/or run and hide every time the bus goes past. Frightening.

Then there’s the middle aged faux hippie alternative types who dress up two faced duplicity as freedom of expression and whose only experience of Marx is that it prefixes the place that they buy their shirts from as they trundle off to work; usually as teachers or in some education related quasi-quango select something-or-other.

And then there’s the hunt. Proof that residing in the upper echelon of the limited gene pool is no barrier to balancing on a horse while pissed out of your head. When asked what the purpose of Fox cubbing was, I was told by a particularly waspish hooray Henrietta (imagine the Queen’s voice emanating from Ralph Steadman drawn cartoon head) “that it removes the weak cubs from the pack”.
“Isn’t the point that the hunt is supposed to be controlling Fox numbers?” I replied. “Haven’t you people ever heard of Charles Darwin?”.
It’s been four years, she’s still trying to figure it out.

Tales of lurid debauchery, blaggers, smackheads, jockeys on the take, crooked farmers, bigots, the insane, the inbred abound and the entire place is underpinned by alcoholism on a phenomenal scale, as it runs along like some weird Archers parady.

Of interest only to Hollywood producers looking for a set for the remake of ‘The Land That Time Forgot’, or anthropologists with a well defined sense of the absurd.

Darren Straker