I want to sleep with common people
Like you – Pulp
Ambridge is still pretty feudal. The rich jingle enticingly and the poor ripple delightfully, but in general they keep their distance. Except at festivals. If Noël Coward had thought about it, he would have strongly advised Mrs Worthington against letting her daughter go to the Isle of Wight.
Kate Aldridge came back from Glastonbury with a baby, Phoebe, born in a tipi. Alice Aldridge came back from the Isle of Wight with a blacksmith for a husband. And this week Freddie Pargetter, heir apparent to stately Lower Loxley, cut his GCSE maths exam (“My head’s going to explode! My brain hurts! I can’t do it, Mum!”) and also skedaddled to the Isle of Wight. He came back with a pierced eyebrow (“I had an epiphany!”). Once you get over the surprise of Freddie knowing a word like epiphany, you realise he means he had Bonnie. Bonnie, whom he met at the festival, also had a pierced eyebrow.
His mother, Elizabeth Pargetter, chatelaine of stately Lower Loxley, exploded in spades: “You are hideously disfigured!” This is rich considering she also shared a tent at a festival with her manager, Roy, the father of Phoebe, the tipi baby.
“Well, really!” as Queen Mary said during the abdication. “This might be Romania!”
Talking of Romania, Adam is finding it difficult to recruit pickers for his strawberry fields, and Freddie, fired with democracy and (as his mother has stopped his allowance) poverty, volunteers to get down and dirty with the common people. So that’s Brexit solved.
I have just realised that they paved paradise to put up a parking lot and not, as I had thought for 40 years, they paid paradise. I assumed, of course, that paradise had received an offer it couldn’t refuse. Possibly from Justin Elliott, who has just offered the Archers of Bridge Farm a million pounds for three and a half acres of paradise with planning permission.
Open Farm Day in Ambridge was its usual rip-roaring success (“Get off my farm and don’t come back!”).
• A month in Ambridge returns on 19 July.
