Lennie Price

As soon as I was able, I became a regular visitor to the Snug (aka the Public Bar) of the pub in my natal village.
The Bush Hotel was an old coaching inn with lots of pokey rooms, so that different groups in the village could meet in different rooms to talk gardening, sport, politics, women or freemasonry.
The Snug was where the common folk met, the ones who just wanted a pint and maybe a game of dominoes. Among the regulars was one that I loved. His name was Lennie Price and he was blind from birth. He was a small man, wizened almost, but always animated. We played dominoes with him using tiles with raised dots, and he was a wizard at the game. He only drank half-pints of Bass, but he seemed to get through a fair few of an evening. The locals joshed him that when he went to the urinal he had to pee down his stick to avoid wetting his trousers. Sounds cruel put like that, but the affection that everyone felt for Lennie was palpable, and he knew it.
My favourite story about Lennie was that, after a bibulous lunchtime in the Bush, he wobbled his way home down the High Street and bumped into one of Farmer Billington’s cows. According to witnesses, Len raised his hat and apologised. Later he explained that he “thought it was a woman in a fur coat.”
When he was already pushing sixty, he surprised everyone by marrying a village woman who was only ever known as “Timmy Deakin’s sister.” Timmy Deakin’s sister was as ugly as sin, God bless her, but Len was happier than he had ever been. Shades of J M Synge's Well of the Saints.
Fortunately it didn’t stop him taking his corner in the Snug of the Bush, but he tended to leave well before closing time after that...
Love is blind, as they say.

Envoi: When Lennie Price died, the funeral was one of the biggest that Hadley had ever witnessed. As for the Bush Hotel, the bastard developers pulled it down, with many other fine old buildings, to make way for Telford New Town.