The Village Foot-Idiot
He was the village foot-idiot – collectively purchased by the villagers (all 350 of them) to serve the feet and footwear of the female villagers. He was a good buy – going cheap, and equally inexpensive to maintain. The villagers didn’t bother to supply him with any accommodation as such; they just tethered him every night to the maypole in the centre of the village green, the same maypole the village maidens danced around barefoot (again whilst he was tethered to it) every May Day. And they had no need to feed him as such – he survived on scraps of discarded food that he found lying around the village streets. Or rather the village street – for it was pretty much a one-street village. It was, in fact, a ‘one-everything’ village; one pub; one church; one hall; one shop; one bus-stop; one village green; one maypole; one set of stocks; one whip; and one village foot-idiot. He was untethered at 05:30 every morning by the milk-delivery lady from the nearby dairy (a majo