Wiveliscombe in Somerset: Well where do you start? Often described in the glossy tourist brochures (I jest – there are no glossy tourist brochures!) as ‘The Gateway to Exmoor, nestling in an amphitheatre of glorious surrounding hills’. Instead what we find is that all that collective sh*te from those glorious surrounding hills (and by heck there’s a lot of sh*te around here) has rolled down and collected in one glorious cesspit of inter/in-breeding thuggery that is called Wiveliscombe – or Wivey.
The Wild West
Most yokels can’t manage more than two syllables, or print their names for that matter (different familial versions of X is the normal signature). There should be gates on the entry to this so-called ‘town’ with quotations from Dante’s Inferno for you truly abandon all hope if you dare venture here. It is like the Wild West, except with only cowboys & no Indians as 99% of the local population is so roaring racist they wouldn’t countenance anybody of another race – I believe some inadvertently got in somehow once and were boiled up in a pot and eaten in the Square.
Hillbilly Saloons
The ‘pubs’ are really gun-slinging saloons where various breeds of Hillbillies or Clampets (remember them) get pissed out of their skulls (no brains there to impede the flow of alcohol obviously) by 7 o’clock on a Friday evening. They then jump in their untaxed, uninsured, battered old pick-up (that’s only held together by multiple layers of farm detritus) and drive at nothing below 70 mph through the lanes to their hovels.
There is no form of animal life (apart from farm stock) in a 7 mile radius of the ‘town’. That’s because the only other main pastime (apart from getting bladdered or playing cricket/rugger on the ‘Rec’ – should be wreck) is shooting anything and everything that’s alive: duck, geese, pheasies, foxes, deer, rabbits, ****, birds, goats – you name it, they’ll shoot it. Anything they manage to miss with the gun they plough over on the lanes where they drive around at ludicrous breakneck speeds. They bounce their untaxed, uninsured, held-together-by-sh*te pick-ups (or ancient cars) off the hedges, churning up fields to get even more mud on the road and deliberately running over any unfortunate creature that happens to cross their path. Screeching to a halt, they then throw the mangled carcass in the back ‘for the pot’.
Very limited gene pool
The highest accolade ‘Wivey’ strives for is the highly competitive crown of inb3eding capital of the South West, if not of All England. The core of locals (most of whom live in one of the enclave pockets of ex-council house estates) are all inter-related with cousins, nephews et al living next door or down the street. The normal community rules of trying to avoid familial relationships have passed Wivey by. The newcomers do not dare mix, let alone breed with the them. This has left the genetic pool limited to about 2 genes as they managed to breed out the last remaining brain cell of intellect in c1904.
As a result most of the locals, apart from having the mental capacity of a 10 year old in any other part of the country, often have 6 toes, or 2 belly-buttons, or webbed-feet, or even worse: fur. You can often observe the ‘Wivey Limp’ where you see locals hobbling down the road in the same way they drive: bouncing off walls and houses (results, presumably, either of the webbed-feet or the alcohol, or conceivably both).
Just keep driving
If you ever have the misfortune to be driving from Taunton to Exmoor and see a sign for somewhere called ‘Wiveliscombe’ – I implore you: Please, PLEASE lock your doors and drive through the hole as fast as possible. Yes, I am a local. Just going to give my fur a nice brush before hobbling down the road to The Bear for a piss-up as it’s got to be 10 in the morning by now.
