DENIALS abound in Alresford-alias-Cressroads.

Ever a viper’s nest of rumour-atop-rumour doing the rounds of its bars, cafes, church halls, guesthouses, hotels, pubs, restaurants and social clubs.

Become the touristy self-styled Watercress Capital of the World, and its population doubling to 10,000 peppery folk enjoying a free Sunday out to celebrate the awakening of a fresh town crop every next month of May.

“No! No! No! We didn’t import cress from Florida growers for our annual festival and pass it off as home-grown.” But they did. “And-I-jest-not,” testifies the grinning Cressroads driver assigned to truck it from London Heathrow’s air freight depot to Broad Street’s waiting growers-for-stallholders.

“But it’s not true that we sourced the services of a skilled immigrant Indian letter-writer to assist us in the handwriting of hundreds of prescriptions for our 9,000 patients, after what can only be described as a ‘local problem’ caused our computerized system to crash and return doctoring in Greater Cressroads to the dark ages for as long as the past week,” word has it at Alresford Surgery. “No, thank you, we need no reminding,” wail the town’s three pharmacies.

“Yes! Yes! Yes! Called him Rodney Dog, did our Steve. His late Jack Russell, and now the two of them laid to rest in the same grave. Barking mad! But Rodney, who passed over the same week as my brother, left £10,000 in a Barclays account serviced in his name,” reveals a Cressroads’ ex-secure Broadmoor Hospital nurse, whose criminally insane patients included Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe.

While the bank remains unable to comment over the worldly worth of its deceased flea-ridden ratter of a customer, a wealthy ex-printer has few regrets over his late £250,000 lavished on a mixed bag of 1,500 as good as blind dates in his hunt for a woman to want to call his own.

Culled from young-through-early-middle-aged-lonely-hearts brought to market in the columns of the nation’s redtops as well as broadsheets giving away ‘free’ column inches to those of the fairer sex looking to noise abroad belief in their God-given graces and prospective marital attributes for mostly second time around a nuptial steeplechase.

Wed to 40-year-old Yolanda from Manila at the end of his decade-long trawl, the snappy-suited septuagenarian sat behind the wheel of his model-year Mercedes claims a biological age that lags a decade behind his chronological-years-old; and one and the same silver fox reputed to have raised the iced eyebrows of neighbours on his Greater Cressroads sub-division of des-detached the recent Christmas Day morning he attempted to mow the tramlines back into his manicured lawns.

Sprightly Henry Tapper, Jesty Mick, Voluptuous Nurse Vanessa, Rodney Dog, General Steve Dogsbody and Jean-the-Campaigner are among the hundreds of alive as well as dead voices resurrected for the cast and illustrated pages of the Continuing Story of Cressroads knowing no bounds as it tracks Alresford’s town crop to all points of the Hampshire compass.

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