Oh how we’ve missed it. A couple of months ago, when it seemed all hope was lost, Lush Places penned its very own community poem, each person contributing one or two lines and egged on by that Wondermentalist, the performance poet Matt Harvey, as part of an Artsreach show.

If, like me, you’re a lover of brevity, this poem is no haiku or limerick. But it’s well worth a read to the end. We’ve passed this love letter to our local to Palmers Brewery who say they have never seen anything quite like it.

So here goes…

An ode to the White Lion

In the bar the lion sleeps tonight

They say the White Lion roams on Lewesdon Hill

‘Is anybody there?’ said the traveller

The open pub will have to do good grub

I went there once and had a pie

One landlord with more than eyes for the ladies and another one who was as miserable as Hades

We need people to cheer where there is beer

Like Shipton Gorge’s New Inn, the Lion will be a-brewin

Ruling the world from Compost Corner

Warm and welcoming, friendly to dogs

T’was the White Lion in Lush Places where I did want to dine

Miss the hairy sofa

I have never seen a white lion

Fuggy, muggy air seeps through, contaminating passers-by

The Lion is closed, the Lion is dead, long live the Lion

Oh to be in the White Lion now that winter’s here

Endless possibilities

A warm glass of Chardonnay from a fridge too far

After a few wines I too roar like a lion

Don’t lean on the wall Fred

Come back John and Sue

An inviting place of comfort and warmth

I’d like ice with mine…

The White Lion has joined the other myths of Dorset, such as the black dog of Common Water Lane

Squishy, squashy dog-hair sofa. The pub with no beer or any other cheer

That Palmers is rank again, like making love in a punt – near water

The garden is full of frogs

Last orders…pleeease

Tricky Dicky and Domestic Pam

Please give us basic pub food e.g. local sausages and mash

The lion is white with fright at the beer here

We miss our pub which we should use for happy evenings, food and booze

Road safety, don’t tear round the White line/Lion

New Year conga round the village

All we’re left with is a lonely pub and no beer

‘What do you mean there is no Guinness?’

We miss the cheer. The clink of glasses – the bubble of voices

The White Lion lives with my husband under the kitchen table

Open again soon.

The White Lion, dream of the hunters? Where oh where is all the beer?

A giggling group gathered in Compost Corner. A pub of dwindling renown

Palmers, re-open our long dark pale pussy cat

The White Lion lost its roar and customers galore, smiling, laughter, no frowning or scowls.

The buzz and banter of a pub in the community

Come back, come back, the hunt is here

The weather vane on the roof spins round and round

Lots of jolly people, great expectations

We had a pleasant jar served up by landlord ex-QPR

The White Lion is closed

Will rise like a Phoenix

CAMRA spokesman Michel Hooper-Immins said: “Members nominate their favourite pubs – then a panel of judges goes round individually to inspect each of them.

“This year our judges reported that The King’s Arms at Thornford and The Tiger Inn at Bridport were too close to separate, so we decided – exceptionally this year – to name both a Rural and a Town Pub of the Year.”

Members will, however, have to decide which pub to put forward for the title of Wessex Regional Pub of the Year against 10 other pubs from East Dorset, Hampshire, parts of Somerset and Wiltshire, the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands.

I wonder how they will do it? Name from a hat? Toss of a coin? They’re the classic tie-breaking methods but there could be so many others. Pause for a moment and let your imagination do its thing… Oh boy, could you have some fun.

The CAMRA West Dorset Town Pub of the Year 2012

The CAMRA West Dorset Town Pub of the Year 2012 is the Tiger Inn in Barrack Street, Bridport.

“This bright and cheerful Victorian ale house offers a frequently changing beer list,” says the 2012 CAMRA Good Beer Guide. “The Tiger is a well hidden secret, worth seeking out.”

Over the last week, seven real ales have been served from four hand pumps, including St. Austell Tribute from Cornwall, Jimmy Riddle from the Dorset Piddle brewery, Stargazer from Yeovil and Wickwar Brand Oak Bitter from Gloucestershire.

Londoners Graham and Jacqueline Taylor have been in the licensed trade for 22 years, coming to the Bridport free house five years ago, from a King & Barnes tenancy in Horsham.

“We’re a community pub and our customers are very fond of rugby,” said Graham Taylor. “I am gobsmacked to win this Town Pub award and we are both very pleased.”

The West Dorset 2012 Pub of the Year certificates were presented by CAMRA’s Rich Gabe at the Dorchester Beer Festival.

The CAMRA West Dorset Rural Pub of the Year 2012

The CAMRA West Dorset Rural Pub of the Year 2012 is the King’s Arms at Thornford, three miles south of Sherborne. A traditional free house in the centre of the village and built in 1905, it is owned by the Digby estate.

The 2012 CAMRA Good Beer Guide says: “The bar area is simple in decor, but offers a warm welcome to drinkers and diners alike.”

Over the last week This week, the three handpumps are dispensing Otter Bitter from Devon, Skinners Spriggan Ale from Cornwall and Fuller’s London Pride.

Licensees Andrew and Ann Evans took over the King’s Arms in 2008 and bought the lease from the former Hidden Brewery two years later. Born at Keswick in the Lake District, Andrew is a teetotaller – unusual in a licensee. Ann is from Wiltshire.

She said: “We are just building a new restaurant and we are naturally delighted and encouraged at winning this CAMRA accolade.”

WEST DORSET RURAL PUB OF THE YEAR 2012

The King’s Arms, Pound Road, Thornford. DT9 6QD. Tel. 01935 872294.

Licensees: Andrew and Ann Evans.

WEST DORSET TOWN PUB OF THE YEAR 2012

Tiger Inn, 14/16 Barrack Street, Bridport. DT6 3LY. Tel. 01308 427543.

Licensees: Graham and Jacqueline Taylor.

Throughout last week, I had people who I didn’t know from the local area following me on Twitter and adding me on Facebook. Many of them commented expressing their praise for the video. To date, the video on YouTube has had about 75 comments (and the same number of replies by me), 206 likes and 2 dislikes – a comment reading “Two dislikes for this video? The pair of you: YOU ARE DEAD INSIDE” made me chuckle.

Interest has died down at the moment. A few people have quietly complained about how much I was mouthing off about it, so I haven’t been sharing it around so much. But the other night, ITV West Country Tonight came to West Bay and filmed me for a piece they are running. And this Saturday, the film is being shown at the Bridport Arts Centre as part of a Spirit of Bridport event.

My target number of views for the video is 12,977 (which is Wikipedia‘s listed population for Bridport). It should soon surpass that. I already have plans to make a second, improved version of the video. Difficult second album?

When it comes to exclusives I am going to be bringing you a real hum-dinger, a blow-your-socks-off, bells a-ringing and horns a-tooting exclusive of the type that most of us only get to see once in a lifetime. Yes, this is going to be a belter.

Today, this very one, all the legal formalities are being completed for a change of management and ownership of one of Bridport’s premier nosheries – sorry , I should have written – establishments for the participation and enjoyment of your dining experience. Either way, the sort of place that dishes up your grub.

Once the formalities are finished and done with and the dust has settled down this very place will be offering the good folk of Bridport the chance to enjoy, for one day only, a delicacy that most of them will not have seen or tasted in decades. It is one that the vast majority of them would give their eye teeth to enjoy again, I know I would, if I still had any.

Beyond that I bound by the journalistic code of honour, the usual well-stuffed brown envelope, to say no more for the time being. However, I will do. I must admit I seldom get excited about food but this is something even I am determined not to miss, come the day.

I promise you – if you are middle-aged, or older, you are going to love this one. Just you wait and see!

We’ve coped, because in Lush Places that’s how we rock. But it can’t go on forever.

With one in five properties here a holiday home, it does make you wonder what the future holds. Especially when several people were asked in the parish plan survey ‘what don’t you like about Lush Places?’ they replied: ‘noisy agricultural vehicles’.

So it cheered me to the bone when I was told another answer: ‘incomers who tell us what to do’.

There’s hope for Lush Places yet.

That would truly be a town of utter desolation, a total pit of a place that would be completely unsuited to human habitation.

That would be Poundbury.

Could there ever be a place so desolate, so soulless and so completely lacking in a single attractive feature? Finding one would be a task on a Herculean scale and one which would make big, strong men blanch at the prospect of undertaking.

To enter Poundbury is to enter the Pit of Despair.

Drive around it and you will not see a single soul, no pedestrians walk the streets, no children play around its chilling exterior and no person dares to knock on a neighbour’s front door in the hope of a cup of sugar. Are they all ashamed to be seen in a such a place? Probably. Are they all mortified at the rush of blood to the head that impelled them to move there in the first place? Undoubtedly. Can the all be seeking the sanctity of their own homes as a release from their dreadful surroundings? Of course they are.

If towns were the lyrics of popular songs Poundbury would be “He made a vow while in State’s Prison, ‘bout it would be my life or his’n” or even “Yummy, yummy, yummy I’ve got love in my tummy” – yes it truly is that bad.

Ghastly, hideous, revolting and appalling, a whole thesaurus could not summon up enough adjectives to describe this total waste of perfectly good bricks and mortar, this nightmare of development that should have been smothered at birth, this appendage to a county town which must now bear its shame for evermore.

In a nutshell I do not like Poundbury.

On that cheery note I should like to wish you all a Happy Christmas and everything that you wish for yourselves in the New Year. As ever, mine’s a pint, thank you very much.

We are a place that has lost its permanent post office, shop and pub but we are adapting. And doing pretty well at it too. We may be in Jack and the Beanstalk Land and surrounded by mist for nine months of the year and a world away from the sophisticated (and maddening) Bridport crowd, but far from being miserable, we get on and just sow those beans and make our own luck.

Tonight, in the village hall, the crowds gathered for the first Lush Places community bar of earthly delights. Branscombe ale at £1.50 a pint – grab it while you can, once it’s gone, it’s gone – shorts and wine for the same price and doubles at £2 a go.

There were people (or was it the gods?) playing skittles upstairs, the book club members attempting floppers at table skittles in the main hall, the singing teacher showing everyone how to play a very smuttily-named card game while the table tennis kings were bobbing up and down like this as Bob Marley yelled No Woman, No Cry until some children pulled the plug out of the iPod and portable speakers on the stage and then said rather too loudly it was nothing to do with them.

A couple of farmers complained about the price of milk and then the iPod suddenly sprung back into life with Booker T and the MGs’ Time is Tight. And still the doubles were flying from the optics.

A brindle coloured lurcher was rather better behaved than the very strident lady knocking back red wine like it was Ribena. The allotments group dug deep into their pockets and the short arse bowlers got on their knees before paying for a round. The air was ripe with the smell of pickled onions, cubes of Cheddar cheese and those pretzels that defy all logic with no-ever ever eating them.

Christ, we’ve got at least a month or more of this to go before the pub re-opens. With prices like these, I hope the new publicans don’t accuse us of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

So, as well as treacle tart and Palmers (still apostrophe-less) IPA I am rather keen on the painting of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In fact, given half the chance and a wife who appreciates the finer things in life half as much as I do, I would plaster the walls of my home with his works.

Anyway, I was taking what we serious students of art describe as a gander at some of his stuff the other day when it struck me that one of his best-known works -Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap – looks really familiar.

Then it struck me – just like bout of flatulence during the evensong sermon –  Broadwindsor. There’s no getting away from it: way back in 1565 old Pete (as those of us who feel that we know him say) has got the village off to a tee.

Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Broadwindsor could become Bruegeland, suggests The Red Bladder.

He has really got the bleakness, the desolation and the misery of the place in winter exactly right.

Now, there are millions of art lovers around they world who, like me, love that picture and would almost give their eye teeth to be able to walk through the scene.

So come on Broadwindsor – cash in.

An artificial skating rink in the Square, glue a few rooks up in trees and invest in a couple of tons of artificial snow and you’ll have the tourists flocking in like bees to a glass of milk.

Bruegeland in Dorset could become one of the county’s premier tourist attractions. Just turn the whole place into a huge 16th Century Dutch Theme Park and you’ll have them queuing all the way from Orchard Mead to Fullers. Turnstiles at every entrance to the place with tickets at a fiver and a lavishly illustrated guide book at a tenner and, before long, the whole village will be able to retire.

Of course the residents would have to dress up a bit and get used to a spot of prancing and frolicking but that will soon all come naturally.

All it needs is a bit of imagination and application and the village could be in clover.

Next week The Red Bladder asks: ‘did Salway Ash inspire Jackson Pollock?’

Editor’s Note: The Red Bladder is a former national newspaper journalist (tabloid and broadsheet, since you ask). His own blog – recently awarded a One Lovely Blog Award by Maddie Grigg – is at http://theredbladder.blogspot.com/ 

On Twitter you should follow him (because it’s impossible to guess what he’ll come up with next) at http://www.twitter.com/theredbladder 

Thomas Hardy mentions this tree (although he calls it Bockhampton Sweet) in one of his novels.

Claire Tomalin, on page 19 of my copy of her biography of Thomas Hardy, says: ‘He was in charge of the garden, growing fruit and vegetables – carrots, onions, parsnips, broad beans and potatoes; in the autumn there would be Gascoyne Scarlets, Golden Pippins and Bockhampton Sweets on their apple trees and cider to be made.’

She got this information from  a book called Hardyana by J Stevens Cox 1964. She also quotes from a letter written by Mary Hardy listing vegetables growing which is to be found in the Museum H.1975.316.22.

The Bockhampton Scarlet was listed in the RHS Journal No.25 as exhibited in 1900 but there are no further records and I can’t find it listed in the Brogdale collections. There is one listed in 1904 as Bockhampton Beauty but no recent records.

My plan is to start a small cider orchard. It would be wonderful to find this tree and even more wonderful if it happened to be growing locally in Dorset.

The National Apple Register describes it as: Size, large; Shape, intermediate to flat, truncate-conic; Skin, yellow-green flushed deep red; flesh soft, yellowish; Flavour, subacid [good dessert]; Season, very late [February onwards].

If anyone knows anything at all about it please would you contact me.

Ruth Whitty works in Green Skills & Garden Industries at Kingston Maurward College near Dorchester and is the co-ordinator for ‘Apple Day’.

Tel: 01305 215183

Email: ruth.whitty@kmc.ac.uk

Editor’s Note: Ruth said to me: “I thought how lovely it would be to find out it was still growing round here. Apple trees live for more than 100 years, so it’s possible.

“It might just be spotted somewhere, with the leaves now falling, and with this particular apple staying on trees so late. It might be visible.”

It’s not a variety that was spotted during all the research that was done into Dorset’s cider history by Liz Copas and Nick Poole, but who knows? Liz and Nick re-discovered 20 ‘lost’ Dorset varieties of cider apple; there might still somewhere be one more.

As for the question of whether there was ever ‘a Dorset cider’ see the video above with Nick Poole, founder of the West Milton Cider Club, supremo of Powerstock Cider Festival, and maker of West Dorset Real Cider.

A companion video with Liz Copas can be seen by clicking on this link: ‘Was there ever a Dorset cider, part 2?’

No less so in the fashionable wine bars, exotic eateries and working men’s cafes of Islington, Kensington and Chelsea. The talk is of little else. “Who will wear the proud and much-venerated chain of office next year?,” they all wonder aloud, scarcely able to keep their anticipation and enthusiasm within their trousers.

That must be the case.

After all, the London-based national press and broadcasters assume that the selection of one or the other of a pair of self-opinionated, publicity-mad, cringingly embarrassing oafs, whose only hope of gaining paid employment, outside of Bertram Mills Circus, is elective office as Mayor of London, is of interest to the rest of the nation.

So London must be just as interested in our affairs.

The thing is though, we have got a Mayor at the minute. Yes, I promise you we have. Obviously, though, he is a man who wouldn’t want to court the unwanted attention of keeping a low profile.

Invisible and unreported completely are the words that spring to mind.

I suppose he’s been busy all year finding his way around town, give him his due and always remember he has been here for a shorter period of time than Peacocks’ shop.

So who will replace him? That is the question that keeps most of us awake at nights. Old wasisname, the present incumbent of the exalted office, is of the Conservative 2nd XI party, and the big boys in the first team were pretty miffed when one of their number didn’t get the job last time around.

“It’s our turn and that’s so not fair” they screamed with all the maturity that we have come to expect of politicians when they don’t get their own way.

This time they might get a crack of the whip. Should word of the Tory plight reach Lib Dem HQ they might well order the lads to be nice to each other and take turns fairly.

Failing that, perhaps bashing a couple of heads together might prove hugely satisfying and fairly effective.

That’s a job I would take on.

Can you imagine the satisfaction to be gained from hearing the clunk of two empty heads colliding with force?

As time goes on we shall see. For just a few more weeks I shall have to contain my excitement and pretend that life is carrying on as normal.

Difficult, I know, when so much is at stake, but I shall try.

Editor’s Note: The Red Bladder has just been awarded a One Lovely Blog Award by Maddie Grigg for his blog at http://theredbladder.blogspot.com/ As Maddie Says, the award will look “particularly fetching” hanging on the wall of his online lair.

But he will have no problem in supplying the five random facts now expected of him, as readers of his singularly entertaining Twitter feed will know. Follow at http://www.twitter.com/theredbladder