Vernham Chronicles
London
My name is John Saunders, I am a songwriter and musician (for want of a better terminology) and I am the author of 'The Vernham Chronicles' my first novel. This page is a place where I shall be uploading songs and instrumentals that are designed to accompany an audio version of my book should the opportunity arise.
There are 3 instrumentals here not connected with The Vernham Chronicles and come from my murky past as part of an ongoing body of work called 'Filmless Soundtracks' that hails from the early 1980s.
The Vernham Chronicles’, John Saunders’ first book, is a charming light comedy with a schoolboy sense of humour that is perhaps a little dark around the edges at times, it features twelve chapters, ten of which detail a day or event in the life throughout a year of a little fantasy village called Vernham. Two chapters are dedicated to complete and utter nonsense, one recounting characters and events of Vernham past (Of Idiosyncrasies, Ideas and Idiots), the other details the farcical happenings in the Vernham native’s lives (Vernham Gossip Update).
‘The Vernham Chronicles’ confuses fact with fiction, merging historical events with complete fabrication. It is written as a narrative in the present tense, with the odd recycled joke, in a children’s story style which is often sarcastic, and the occasional digression and flashback to previous events that explain the reasons behind the current situation.
The little village of Vernham, buried deep in the Vernbury Vale, is a hive of activity with its natives going about their everyday business in sometimes less than conventional ways. Almost frozen in time, where its populace struggle to come to terms with the modern day, Vernham village refuses to recognise the £1 coin, only £1 notes are accepted in its shops. For visitors to Vernham, or ‘Spruggles’ as the Vernhamites call them, the £1 notes are printed in the city of Busted at the back of a Bureau de Change, where the exchange rate is £1.20p to £1 note, and when the need to change notes back to coins arises you’ll only get 80p in return for your £1 note. The characters are all a bit odd, there is the local Bobby PC Fred Sweetman who has a strange habit which is revealed in chapter two, a Fire Chief that is irresponsible with matches, Mrs Bunkerton who’s been recently widowed seven years ago as she tells everybody every day, she also suffers from a strange obsessive compulsive disorder and irritable bowel syndrome, but we won’t mention too much about the latter. A very alcoholic Reverend Parsworthy, always collecting for the Church door fund, and spending the proceeds in the local pub ’The Grummet and Nut’, the door never gets bought. And the star ‘Mr Robson the counterfeit Scotsman’, seemingly ubiquitous and irritating, convinced of his Scottish ancestry and past lives after he had a dream about Rabbie Burns, which he wrongly refers to as his ‘post monition‘, a warning after the event. Mr Robson of course has always been a Vernhamite, as were all of his ancestors, he’s quite mad. The final chapter sees Mr Robson realising his Celtic dream at a Christmas party, in a sad but very sweet way.
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vernham-Chronicles-John-Saunders/dp/1907499598/ref" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vernham-Chronicles-John-Saunders/dp/1907499598/ref</a>=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317379163&sr=1-1
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Vernham Chronicles (John Saunders)’s tracks
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