Bollywood - Hollywood - Sleaford

Earlier this week my brother informed me of plans to make a film in Sleaford, the tiny market town in which we grew up.

Sleaford is famous for precisely three things: Jennifer Saunders, Abbi Titmus (local legend says she shagged three Chippendales in Legends when she was doing her A-Levels at the high school. I have no idea if this is true, but I’m going with it either way) and the Lincolnshire Rebellion. I know you all want to know more about this famous uprising, but you’re just going to have to chill your boots for the time being. This is neither the time nor the place. That said, I once attended a lecture by David Starkey on that very subject, and it was BRILLIANT. I love that historical creepy crust. He could lecture me on the history of bog brushes and I’d still listen with rapt attention.

My point here is that Sleaford is not the kind of town you make a film about. I’d call it a one horse town, but I can’t remember there being any horses in Sleaford ever. There was a monkey - the woman who lived near Castle Fields kept some form of ape in a cage in her garden; it bit someone once, bloody scandal it was - but no horse. It was a horse-free town.

Turns out that I’d missed a great bloody hoo-har over some obsessive Elvis fan who robbed the local council to the tune of £600,000 in order to fund her memorabilia collection. She was pocketing around a grand a week in loose change as she emptied the car park ticket machines and then buying anything to do with the quiffy Hamburgler, even if the prices were massively inflated. Once in possession of her latest prize, she stowed it away in her attic and never laid eyes on it again.

She was caught, of course, and at one point tried to top herself in a B&B in Skegness. It’s a sad tale. She survived, and, according to my mum, she’s out of prison now and free to roam the streets of Lincolnshire, searching feverishly for prized Presley tatt like a rhinestone Gollum.

My parents were in town yesterday. They were having one of their senior citizen days and catching a matinee performance of Jospeh and His Amazing Technicolour Hujamaflip. We met for lunch and I mentioned the Elvis thing. My mother’s eyes lit up. “I saw her in Lincoln! She was waiting to get the train home, and she LOOKED AT ME.”

Sarcasm is almost entirely lost on my mum, so I just smiled and said something along the lines of, “Blimey.” It seemed to please her; clearly all she wanted was some sort of acknowledgement that it was a life-altering moment, this being looked at by a sad and lonely woman whose passion for Elvis had got somewhat out of hand. She was carrying a HMV bag, would you believe? That’s right - a BAG. From HMV. And it had a COMPACT DISC in it. “I thought, ‘I hope she’s paid for that!’” said Mum, now fully in her anecdotal stride.

I swallowed my forkful of spaghetti carbonara and gave her a solemn look. “I wouldn’t joke; you’re the mother of an obsessive child… there but for the grace of God, and all that.”

She didn’t seem to understand my point, caught up as she was in thinking that one look from Elvis Lady was equivalent to being unceremoniously fingered by Harold Shipman. Back when he was bumping off old ladies, that is. Not now. He’s a corpse, and being felt up by his rotting remains would take planning and skill that I’m not convinced my mother would be able to pull off, even if she wanted to.

I chose not to tell her that a man had been decapitated and left in an alley just down the road from my house the night before. Something told me my mother wasn’t ready for the type of crime we’re used to here in London. And anyway, she was bubbling up with excitement at the idea of Connie from that Sound of Music talent search playing Lady Elvis and filming in Sleaford, no less.

The headless corpse and the Shipman-fingering analogy stayed safe in my brain. I suspect lunch was all the more pleasant for it.