Southwards to Yorkshire, where a pile of journals required my attention. Mother Pen Portraits had gathered them over the three months since my last visit, and each edition now required my sarcastic analysis.

The Copmanthorpe Village Newsletter is, sadly, not widely available. Luckily, my Mum still lives in the nauseous commuter hamlet of Copmanthorpe, my home for 16 formative years, and so an arsenal of newsletters can be easily amassed.

Dan Gray reports from the ‘nauseous commuter hamlet of Copmanthorpe’...

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Before the kettle had boiled, I was excitedly reading Reverend Geoffrey Mumford’s hard-hitting editorial, ‘A Word from the Vicarage!’ It was the exclamation mark that conned my eyes in Mumford’s direction, plus the promise of a single word summing up the local church’s perspective or mood. What would the word be? ‘God’? ‘Love’? ‘Twatsticks’?

His column’s title was, though, a lie. He lied to me, ladies and gentlemen, me and all the other innocent parishioners: there were at least 250 words from the vicarage. Distraught, I powered on to page five and found that Copmanthorpe Women’s Institute remained intact, a beacon of trust in a time of flux. I do hope their ‘Hearing Dogs for the Deaf’ lecture went according to plan.

Page seven’s Copmanthorpe Carnival round-up bought the not entirely unconnected sentences ‘We are further burdened this year by the requirements of the York Event Safety Advisory Group’ and ‘Most of you will be aware of the accident at last year’s carnival when a teenager was thrown from the Cliffhanger.’

It was all getting far too heavy, so I ploughed on to the peerless ‘Used Postage Stamps for Charity and Stamp News’ and then more recent newsletters. In March, Lex Burdall, building contractor, advertised his credentials as a ‘Specialist in disabled adaptations’, which sounded vaguely threatening (“You pay cash in hand, love, and I’ll do you a knee-capping for £75”).

Then in April, Reverend Penny Worth (no, really) managed to get from an account of the revolutions in Egypt and Libya to some bearded fella ‘giving himself on a cross’, all within the space of 150 words. Reverends are amazing like this: give them any subject and in seconds they can tell you how it relates to the bible. “Well in many ways, Hamilton Academical’s relegation plight is symbolic of the Sermon on the Mount, and the Discourse on Judgmentalism specifically.”

Giz a job
This edition of the Newsletter needed bringing back down to earth, and what better way to achieve that than with a piece about the local playing fields (I really should write links for The One Show. Seriously. I need a job. Anything will do. Anything). The unintentionally hilarious Recreation Centre News is best read in a cutesy Alan Bennett voice:

‘The Recreation Centre has gone on a spending spree and bought a mower and a strimmer…One of our volunteers has clearly been over-enthusiastic while using the Ransome triple mower. When Kevin Heels serviced it last month, he found that the bar which carries the left hand cutter unit had been dramatically bent. Someone had clearly hit a tree, or something similar, and Kevin has had to take it away to straighten.’

The replacement of the strimmer, meanwhile, was necessitated when in late 2010:

‘…it seized up. Trevor Buckle suspects that someone may have used it with ordinary petrol, rather than 2-stroke mixture. The cylinder was so badly scored that it was beyond repair. Guy Dillon-Kelly has very kindly used his influence at Elcock’s to get us a very good deal on a Stihl strimmer’.

The author of Recreation Centre News is a genius at effortlessly ramming up his word count with forensic and irrelevant minutiae. I learnt from the best.

Lassie the cat
To escape the misery of Copmanthorpian existence, I often pretend my visits are television formats. There’s one that is basically the opposite of My Name is Earl, where I wish to go around righting all the wrongs done to me during my teens. For instance, I’d walk into Fred the Baker’s and extract a written statement from Fred agreeing that I did not steal a packet of Space Raiders in 1993.

In another, and this is not exclusive to Copmanthorpe so do try it at home, I enjoy pretending my Mum’s cat is a humdrum domestic version of popular television character Lassie the dog. This entails looking at the cat, listening and then exclaiming such things as, “What’s that, Lassie? My toast is burning? Run into the kitchen before the fire alarm goes off?”

This is the kind of creativity that may one day earn me my dream gig: a column in the Village Newsletter.

Info: Daniel is appearing at Leith Festival on June 16th alongside your humble editor. For info on his book Stramash: Tackling Scotland’s Towns and Teams, see: stramashthebook.com