On Vick and the Wigan Connection.

One of my many alter egos would like to make a simple comment:

Vick Hope is a helluva hottie

This particular little reprobate is the one I like to keep safely locked in the attic on those rare occasions when I’m in the company of discerning people. He’s an embarrassment. He’s sexist and shallow, has a taste for lowbrow, colloquial expressions, and objectifies women in the same way that foxes objectify pheasants.

I, the parent JJ, am ashamed of him, and yet I can’t help feeling a certain grudging fondness for the little scamp. He is, after all, the one who invented the character: Black Bessie the Wigan Vampire. Anyone who knows Wigan the way I mostly don’t will understand why that epithet is graced with a hint of comic genius, so he isn't always easy to ignore.

At this point I have to be frank and admit that I only ever met two people from Wigan (not that everyone I ever met told me where they came from, you understand, but those two did.) They were the two girls Barry Haynes and I took up with while we were on holiday in Blackpool when we were fifteen. The taller of the two was the one who made the comment about a pig with its throat cut. I remarked on it in a very early blog post, but different people were reading it then. I doubt that anyone reading the blog now will remember it. At least, I hope they won’t. It might offer some reassurance, however, to know that neither of the girls from Wigan looked remotely like Vick Hope. These are they:

 

 

And this is Vick Hope (Vick is short for Victoria, by the way. And might I just mention that I never, ever listen to BBC Radio 1. She just happens to be appearing every evening this week on a TV programme I watch. She has a brain as well as a face, a body, long legs, and… that sort of thing.)