Stop stalking me!

Can someone please tell me what the deal with Shepton Mallet is? This quite insignificant little town in the heart of Somerset, just a teeny weeny bit from Glastonbury, keeps popping up everywhere!

It's like that number series on “Lost”, except I can't say that bad things have happened to my close ones since we found Shepton Mallet on the map!

It started when we went to Glastonbury in the beginning of June. We went around the place a bit, and of course found our way to Shepton Mallet. It was a bit hard not to, to be honest. The Bath & West Show was there, or at least on the outskirts of the town. Fair enough, some towns are famous for big events. Glastonbury Festival is one example of this (no, we went there several weeks before the festival, as we were interested in the New Agey/Pagan/Hippie aspect rather than the muddy music festival). They had wolves that you could sort of meet and greet somewhere around there, and it turned out to be at the Bath & West Show. As we wanted to see wolves, but hadn't come for the event, we thought £18 was way too much for an entrance fee, so we went back to the car again.

As we were in Glastonbury and around there, we ended up going through or around Shepton Mallet a number of times. Fair's fair, we were in the area.

A few weeks later, that kidnapped Dalek we had heard about in the news had been found. On Glastonbury Tor. “Hah, we've been there!” was my initial thought, even though we never could be arsed to climb up the Tor when we were there. Then it turned out, it was normally a part of an exhibition at Wookey Hole (a name we had found rather amusing when we saw it on signs, as we thought of it as “Wookie Hole”, which sort of gave it a whole new meaning), but it had also been a part of the Bath & West Show in Shepton Mallet. “We were at that car parking field!”
Yeah, so so far it's not very interesting, is it? It gets slightly more interesting now.

We watched a show about gardening. It featured the guy who won the #1 prize at Chelsea (?) for his amazing vegetable presentation, and also a back garden monster veg grower. Monster veg being vegetables that grow really big in one way or another. They were working on a beetroot with a very long root part, I remember. They were going to display their monstrous produce at a monster veg fair/exhibition this autumn. Where they said it's held? Shepton Mallet.

Yes, I could sort of sympathise with this as well. It's Somerset after all, countryside and all that, there's bound to be some sort of veg show-off there. River Cottage might be in Devon, but that's like next door anyway.

I read a piece of news on the BBC website, about the rapist who was serving his time in prison, who had managed to win the lottery. I didn't even know Shepton Mallet had a prison. The whole article is here, by the way: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4296976.stm

The latest in this story is from today. I was speaking to a customer, small-talking while we were waiting for the computer to start up again, and I said we're in Nottingham. She started talking about a bag-company called Mulberry, who she believed came from here. I haven't got a clue (c'mon, handbags!), so I googled for it. If you want the handbag headquarters, it's Shepton Mallet you want.

Allow me to stick my thumb out in a Johnny Bravo kind of way and say “I'm beginnin' to see a pattern here”! Some more research shows the town has 8000 inhabitants, which is less than my home town in Sweden, and apparently, it's “a delightful mixture of old and new” as well. The pictures are nice.

Those Mendip hills lead my thoughts to Minyip in Victoria, Australia, where they shot “The Flying Doctors” (a show I absolutely swear by – if they'd only release the complete series on DVD! I've ordered the box with the first six episodes, but damnit, I want MORE! I don't want to get the 3-disc set from Holland that have “the best episodes”, as I'd like to be the judge of that myself... although, I agree that the one where David's attacked by bees in the plane happens to be a very memorable episode).

Still, Mendip isn't Minyip, and Minyip has never stalked me (even though I wouldn't have objected to it back in the day). So, little Somerset town of Shepton Mallet – what the hell do you want with me?!