“KEEPS my arm in with my old cows for three hours of a Saturday, I does” - but the otherwise retired stockman on Cressroads’ Grange Farm is all but fully occupied having his pint pot recharged 72 times-a-week to milk a Bridport brewery and divert hundreds of pounds of its profits to the Royal National Lifeboat Institute.
Every pint pot of Palmer’s Bridport Copper poured from the firkins of ale racked behind the bar of Nicky and Patrick Roper’s thatched medieval inn at Tichborne earns 5p towards the Royal National Lifeboat Institute completing its new £1m Shoreham-on-Sea lifeboat station and boathouse.
“There’s no more charitable regular in Cressroads than our Firkin Henry.
“Patrick did the figures while we soaked up a week’s sunshine in Goa, and I thought to text the pub for Blogsbody to alert the brewery as well as the RNLI,” explains Nicky.
“Okay! So save for our Henry wanting to rescue lives at sea, we may have needed to choose Gosport over Goa and enjoy a week away with our camper van,” smiles the inn's landlady.
When pub figures reveal their 66-year-old regular downs up to a dozen pints some days, averaging 72-a-week and equivalent to the capacity of one of the firkins of Copper ale delivered from Dorset to the historic pub set in the rural bliss of a Hampshire village famed for its Tichborne family, landowners for nearly a thousand years.
“Add it up. Because we have,” reckon Nicky and Patrick. “Palmer’s gives 5p on the sale of a pint of its Copper to the RNLI. Our Firkin Henry sups 72 pints of their popular real ale every week - or 3,744 pints annually - and accounting for his £187.26 share in the brewery’s year-on-year donation to the work of a lifesaving charity ever-and-an-SOS denied government funding.”
Casting its spell: With the introduction of Nicky-the-Arms and her hubby Patrick, Blogsbody’s Continuing Story of Cressroads brings to book two dozen more of its assorted souls within a gathering cast of hundreds sharing their rustic ways and words in their past week's worth of blogs shared with their much loved County Chronic - www.blogsbody.com
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