TRANSPORT OF DELIGHT

HAVE you seen many kangaroos wandering about the highways and byways of Dorset? I must admit that I've never spotted one.
Which all makes me wonder why Gary Pilbeam has got a set of, what he describes as, ‘roo’ bars on the front of his car? I call it a car but to tell you the truth it looks more like a mini pantechnicon what with its huge, slab like, sides, high doors and monstrous bonnet. It looks ready to take on a rhinoceros to me, yet alone one of Skippy's cousins.
Mind you his wife, Justie, probably needs the four wheel drive when she negotiates the hill between here and the supermarket in Bridport, its near-on 1 in 100 in places and can get particularly nasty after a drop of rain, presumably that's where having a sump a good Olympic high jump off of the ground comes in handy too, you never know when you're going to have to plough through a flash flood in these parts.
Not that I'm one to knock Gary and Justie, they've been well into village life
in the 18 months since they moved here. Within a week Gary had bought himself a tweed hat and a walking stick and Justie soon filled bowls with countryside pot-pourri and placed them in strategic spots in the lounge of their detached 'Squire's Manor' model four bedroomed, detached house on the Lark's Mead Estate.
It's the kangaroo bars that defeat me. Gary told me, over a pint of IPA in The Lark Ascending one evening, that they were an optional extra and set him back 400 notes, which means pounds, I suppose. Why?
I mean why have them, not why do they cost that, after all who am I to complain if the local garage manages to make a few shillings out of something that is no earthly use at all? One other thing that puzzles me is a how a vehicle, which was basically designed for expeditions into the Amazon rain forests, for crossing tracts of desert or for getting soldiers into position in the middle of mucky old battlefields, can always be so clean.
I've never seen it other than gleaming as though it had just driven out of the showroom. You should the state of old Ted Arbinger's Land Rover, the last time it saw a wash Muffin the Mule was a national hero and rugby players counted in threes. Mind you I suppose a farmer gives his transport a bit more rugged use than does an account executive in an advertising agency. Tools of the trade and all that, I should imagine. When all's said and done you never see old Ted using a lap top computer in the saloon bar, nor the public, come to that but Gary has been known to.
I wonder about these things. There are others in the village get quite upset about them. It's been the same ever since they first built Lark's Mead. The trouble is it brought in a lot of people who aren't exactly used to living in rural surroundings. Still once they got used to the fact that there wasn't a health club and sauna behind the parish hall, a bistro next to the post office and that the nearest Bert got to serving bottles of Mexican beer was watching Viva Zapata on television they seemed to start to settle in as best they could.
Soon most of the locals started to accept them and include them in village events. Without them one of our pubs would probably have had to close and I doubt that Dolly Hitchen's shop would still be open without the extra trade they've given her. So on balance the newcomers really are a blessing.
But there's always a few, aren't there? You hear a lot of silly talk about 'incoming cockney yuppies telling us how we ought to do things' and the like from a hand full of the locals but that's usually late at night and after a drop or two of cider has been taken. So far none of the estate dwellers have been thrown in the village pond or a combine harvester and one or two look like getting regular places in the cricket team so things can't be all bad.
We used to be real country village, now we supply commuters to Yeovil, Taunton and Dorchester. I suppose that's progress of a sort. I can't help wondering though how these new countrymen would feel if a few of our farm workers were to take to going up to one of those towns, dressing in designer suits, listening to MP3 players all the time and drinking in trendy wine bars, with amusement I suspect.
So why is it that they all want to come in here, and villages like this, and look like they imaging the locals ought to? They do stick out a bit you know. In fact about as much as a kangaroo would getting himself knocked down by a Japanese jeep in deepest Dorset.