I once lived in a small town in the West Country <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many of the local families <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Had been there for generations <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Or at least from last week <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was crappy\/ happy town<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Surrounded by sleeping fields <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I attended a church skool <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which although deeply academic <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Was populated by savages (including myself) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The grotto of the skool was Look After Others <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And this is how the Harvest Festival started <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Especially after Miss Perkins came to teach Latin and Guerrilla Warfare to the Third Year and the Retards who were kept in a shed <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This naive girl was as the daughter of a defrocked vicar<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And thought that to aid others<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Might help her father gain forgiveness <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So she arranged a Harvest Hope Festival and a pub crawl <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the weeks leading up to the harvest celebrations <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The boys and girls of St Jude’s were encouraged to bring in harvest gifts <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the elderly dead and less fortunate of the town<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This would either be produce from the fields or stuff nicked from the local supermarkets <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shops in our town were encouraged to donate useful items such as jack hammers and broken gnomes for broken gardens <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our fathers (if we had one) were asked to donate goods typical of their profession <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sally Stephens dad owned a motorbike shop and Timmy Tam’s a rifle range on the Bath Rose Road <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My dad owned a newsagents shop so I blindly donated used train mags which I had finished with and out of date mars bars turned white<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sue Smith’s father a fruit farmer with a lisp culled peoples pets free of charge and sold them in his father’s ironmongers shop <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were many kind people living on our little town <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Miss Perkins insisted that the harvest gifts be presented in light baskets decorated with a ribbon and a note of greeting <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We were such a loving community with the Beer Sisters being the most loving of us all<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that is where it all went wrong as after the Harvest Festival all pupils with bicycles were asked to deliver the harvest baskets to all those who deserved them <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Little old ladies with dead poodles and war heroes without legs all were welcome <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even my granny who had been dead since 1901 received a basket<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It should have worked but it did not as many boys and girls just blagged the whole thing <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some accepted money from the grateful old folk and asked for more <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some baskets were raided en-route with the contents stolen or sold to the said pensioners at the next Saturday market<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bikes and baskets were stolen and never seen again <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the baskets were sold to the senile old farts in care homes <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Harvest baskets without anything decent left in them would be found rotting in lonely fields for weeks afterwards <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was the duty (as part of the honour) to make sure that none of the old people were dead <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We were expected to knock only four times and if the door was not opened then inform the local pigs <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was another failure as many harvest baskets were just lobbed over hedges or into gardens as many pensioners were stone deaf<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Selling the harvest gifts to one’s parents was strictly prohibited <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bubble gum gobstoppers and hundreds and thousands were not considered to be appropriate gifts although freshly killed rabbits were considered game<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The use of pensioners outside bogs was also prohibited and could only be used in extreme circumstances like a dodgy curry<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If used all scrape marks should be removed and the toilet flushed with brown acid <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The door of all outside bogs should remain closed for the duration of the crap as not to scare any nervous budgies in the area <\/p>\n\n\n\n
These were a sample of the many harvest do’s and don’ts <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am sad to tell you that Miss Perkins ended up in house for crazy people as she thought that everybody came from tins of baked beans <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is said that ones schooldays are the best days of your life long before the prison sentences scabies and learning how to cook <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I tend to agree with this as I still have the crab apples which were so lovingly stolen from the skool garden in 1943
Silly Boy Remembers His Pet Hummingbird (2025) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also available in Green and Pink <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I once lived in a small town in the West Country Many of the local families Had been there for generations Or at least from last week It was crappy\/ happy town Surrounded by sleeping fields I attended a church skool Which although deeply academic Was populated by savages (including myself) The grotto of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30180"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30247,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30180\/revisions\/30247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}