WHAT started as an April Fool’s Day joke could be turning into reality for villagers on Exmoor.
Residents in Wootton Courtenay were alerted via their village website to the launch of a new club on April 1.
Website founders Bill Hodgson and his wife Marion Jay announced they were starting a Wootton Courtenay Grumpy Club ‘now that the world seems resolutely determined to go to hell in a handcart’.
They said the club would be ‘a place where like-minded individuals of a certain disposition can meet to exchange excessively cantankerous views without fear of reprisal’.
The couple said: “If you have had a bad week, this is the club for you.”
Members would receive a badge saying ‘Grrr!’ and the first rule of the Grumpy Club was ‘do not grumble about Grumpy Club’.
Weekly meetings would be held with members telling the group ‘what gets their goat’, and then voting in a secret ballot on how genuinely annoying the gripe is, on a scale of one to 10.
The couple said: “The person with the highest score at the end of the meeting receives a silver trophy cup engraved with ‘Grumpy Git of the Week’, which they keep until the next meeting.
“The group will then enjoy a nice cup of tea and cream cakes to cheer everybody up.
“At the end of the year, the member with the most points overall will win a prize, a guided tour of Minehead Sewage Works, to give them something new to complain about.”
They asked residents: “What makes you tut? What sticks in your craw? What are your pet peeves?”
The couple also asked each other, the same questions, with Mr Hodgson listing Michael Macintyre’s BBC television game show The Wheel, which he described as ‘cretinous nonsense’, misuse of the word ‘literally, as in ‘that chilli gumbo literally blew my head off’, and cheese, which basically, ‘is mould’.
Ms Jay listed ‘people who say they want to buy our house and then, several months later, say they do not’, multiple exclamation marks, and Alan Titchmarsh, which, she noted, ‘I am sure I do not need to say why’.
Since then, residents have been calling into the village shop to ask if they can have a ‘Grumpy Club’ badge, and villager Paddy Parnell has offered to chair the club.
Mr Parnell published his own gripes list, the top one being ‘people so full of self-importance they want to stand as chairmen of clubs’.
Ms Jay said: “From the reaction we have had from villagers, the invention of ‘Grumpy Club’ is not so much an April Fool, but a gap in the market.
“Many of you appear to have carefully curated lists of gripes which you want to get off your chest.
“If somebody wishes to launch ‘Grumpy Club’, I wish them well.”
Ms Jay also posted on the website graphics of a possible ‘Grumpy Club’ badge for villagers ‘to make your own, in traditional Blue Peter style’ by printing the design and using superglue and an old cornflakes box.