Filed under: Historic Wight, Wight Ways | Tags: History, Inbreeding, IOW, Island, Isle of Wight, IW, Osbourne House, ovener, Queen Victoria, Romans, vectis
he Romans arrived on the Island, which they called Vectis, under Vespasian in AD 43 (incidentally he was the first Italian Vespa to arrive on this island but they now come in large numbers every August Bank Holiday at the scooter rally)
You cant really go wrong when the occupying force produce mosaics of men with chickens heads like the one found at Brading, now that’s culture for you! 
The Island remained under the Roman government for the next 400 years. During this period there was no doubt a marked decrease in the traditional practice of inbreeding amongst the islanders due to all the randy centurions on the loose and a long way from their wives and girlfriends.
When the Romans finally skedaddled there followed a long period where inbreeding showed a marked return. That is when the locals weren’t being murdered en masse, 
firstly by the Saxons who took Carisbrooke around AD 530 and continuing for several hundred years culminating with Danish pirates having a go as well from AD 787 until the Norman conquest in 1066.
The islanders had to keep their heads down for another couple of hundred years and then things really took a turn for the worse in 1377 when the French kicked off. It remained well dodgy throughout the next 500 years and the inbreeding steadily increased 
until Queen Victoria took a fancy to the island and bought Osbourne House in 1845. This made the island the height of fashion attracting Dukes and Earls as well as Tennyson, Dickens etc. Once again with the influx of culture we had a decrease in the inbreeding as Victoria was initially so concerned with the level of the problem that she sent in the army to remedy the situation. However following the demise of The old Queen the inbreeding again steadily
increased, the tide only stemmed with the advent of the overners who began moving to the island and once again brought cultural reform with them. So it is clear that falls in the patterns of inbreeding in the island population have throughout history been directly linked to the influx of people from the mainland, along with their cultural input, improving the island itself and beneficial to the islanders by widening their gene pool. Today we have fresh hope that the remaining inbreeding will be further eradicated thanks to the rapidly developing phenomenon of the Vectisexual.
Filed under: Wight Ways | Tags: beach, grockle, IOW, islander, Isle of Wight, IW, ovener, red squirrel, Ryde, surfer, surfing
round about this time of the year you will start to notice large amounts of small flat white objects washed up on
the islands beaches. The islanders will assure you that they are nothing more than cuttlefish bones and they will even go to the lengths of placing the odd dead cuttlefish on the beaches in order to persuade us, and avoid any further awkward questions. However my spies have discovered the truth behind this 
mystery which the islanders would much rather us overners and grockles knew nothing about, that they are in actual fact discarded squirrels surfboards.
Contrary to that which we have been led to believe there are in fact plenty of red squirrels living on the mainland and around about this time of the year they tend to get an irresistible urge to head
over en masse to the island in order to while away the summer months in such pleasant and tranquil surroundings. This being an exclusive red squirrel stronghold they can be free of their grey cousins throughout the summer as it so happens that the grey squirrels are lousy surfers and the reds are quite excellent in that department. Therefore on arrival having successfully negotiated 
the Solent, and feeling a bit cream crackered, the squrfers abandon their squrfboards on the beaches and wearily head off to establish their summer quarters and reacquaint themselves with their many old friends and 
acquaintances who choose to live on the island all the year round. The resident island squirrels aren’t quite so pleased with the arrangement however and group together whilst rather begrudgingly referring to the recently arrived multitude of mainland squrfers as the overners.
