I am indebted to BuzzFeed’s Patrick Smith for his listicle of the most earth-shattering local newspaper stories of 2014 (although some may have been from the year before).
I was intrigued enough to check out some of the more bizarre contents bills involving animals. Could they be true? The most unlikely one was genuine (up to a point) - the Coventry Telegraph’s “‘Racist’ swans attack students”.
It was interesting for three reasons. First, the use of the apostrophes. Was the bill-writer covering his back lest the swans sued for libel?
Second, the story itself, which the Coventry paper headlined Angry swans terrorise students at Warwick University. It included a quote from an unidentified 24-year-old student from India who said: “I think they don’t like too many Indians in England. Maybe the swans here are a little bit racist.”
The story was picked up by the nationals, including the Daily Telegraph (headline: White wing supremacist: swan attacks foreign students), which included the sentence: “Undergraduates revealed that the swan only appeared to target students from ethnic minorities.”
Third, it reminded me of the apocryphal red-top tales some years ago about “East Europeans” capturing swans from the Thames and cooking them. Were the Midlands birds tipped off and getting their own back?
Now for goats. I was not as surprised by “New mayor to keep goats out of town”, from the North Devon Journal, as some because I have suffered from their attentions on visits long ago to Lynton’s Valley of the Rocks.
The animals can be a menace as the paper’s report, headlined with an inevitable pun, Mayor takes goat issue by the horns, made clear. So the said mayor of Lynton and Lynmouth, Tony Meakin, has my sympathies rather than the vet, who said in a follow-up story that the mayor should be culled rather than the goats.
I think it’s fair to describe the Northern Echo’s contents bill, “Dog ate pair of giant knickers”, as what one of my old news editors used to call a “Hey Doris story”.
It involved the sad tale of Ernie, a stray six-month-old Labrador, who “coughed up a large pair of Bridget Jones-style underpants.”
Vets in Darlington operated on the starving, underweight beast and found more bits of the underpants as well as pieces of elastic and string in his intestines. Doubtless, after publishing that heart-rending story, a home was found for the puppy.
I note that, several months later, the Daily Mail discovered a dog in Rotherham who “almost killed himself by eating too many pairs of his owner’s silk thongs.”
His owner was said to have been horrified when her pet, Brian, was found by a vet to have her underwear in his stomach. This one had a happy ending.
One animal that apparently didn’t survive was a bird who featured in a bill for the Carlisle News & Star: “Budgie’s death now being treated as suspicious.” In fact, it was very suspicious indeed because I am reliably informed by the newspaper that it was a fake.
Although I couldn’t track down the exact story referred to by the Brighton Argus’s “Women headbutted by cow” I have no doubt it was true. Cattle attacking people are commonly reported - see random examples here and here and here.
Aggressive seagulls, as in Whitby Gazette’s “Demand for action on gull attacks” and Exeter Express & Echo’s “Seagulls stole my sandwich - then my pasty”, are also contents bill and headline favourites. My experience on Brighton pier at the weekend, where I saw a doughnut lifted from a woman’s fingers by a gull, proved the point.
But my researches picked up a Ham & High headline that would have made a wonderful contents bill (and perhaps it did): “Muswell Hill family shocked as tortoise who defied Hitler comes back from the dead”. The tortoise’s name? Adolf of course.