It used to be easy coming from Kettering Part One

It used to be easy coming from Kettering, it really was.  There was never any pressure on any of us to achieve anything.  Keep your head down and shuffle through life without causing a ripple.  Just like everyone else who has ever come from this town.

Sure, very occasionally an individual from our fair borough managed to achieve a crumb of fame in the outside world - I'm looking at you, Knibb!  But, by and large us Kettering folk weren't expected to invent something, or discover something, or do anything but live reassuringly anonymous lives.  Back in the days of the printed Patgod, we devoted endless pages to just how comfortably bland everyone from the NN15/16 area was.  Happy days.

Stop being so bloody talented!

But then, some strange occurrences, well, occurred.

One day there wasn't Faryl Smith.  The next day there was.  She rocketed to singing fame even
though she was one of us!  Even the Poppies' best attempt to crush her spirit by mauling her attempt at signing ahead of our FA Cup Third Round tie with Eastwood didn't set her back.  She shrugged off our paltry efforts at sabotaging her burgeoning career, and, despite the handicap of being from our neck of the woods she became unremittingly successful.  She was genuinely famous.  She sold records. She was on the telly.  Unlike the rest of us tone-deaf local dolts, she could carry a tune.  And she came from Kettering.

But that was OK.  Faryl alone could be seen as a blip.  Knibb and Smith.  Two blips in over a thousand years of recorded local history.  We could take that.  There was still no pressure on the rest of us to be better.  Phew.  What a relief.

Oi, Hull!  No!!!

And then Charley Hull appeared.  We suddenly had a world famous sportsperson born out of our low-functioning local DNA.  Obviously it's only golf she plays, but for the love of God, she's world famous at it, and hails from the Holy City!  How have we allowed this to happen again? 

Don't the like of Smith and Hull realise the enormous pressure they put the rest of us under?  None of us have to be world-class, because people from Kettering aren't meant to be world-class.  We are all middling at the very best, and dammit, we were content with being middling.  And now these two have proved that the rest of us from Kettering are basically sh*t.

But let's not panic.  It's just the two girls doing their thing.  Us chaps don't have to worry about being any bloody good, do we?  I mean, it's not as though there'll be, say, a famous comic, snooker player and dart players hailing from Poppies-land anytime soon........