Johnson Johnson and Jackson Johnson Are Right!

In my home town there are at least 25,000 people, many of whom all share the surname Cargill. There’s Bill Cargill who runs the ice-cream parlour; he only sells vanilla ice-cream and thinks that white people are just all-right! Johnson Cargill is our local policeman and he has a zero tolerance policy on crime. Only last week he beat an elderly woman to death with a salmon because she drank bacon juice from an old boot on a Sunday.

Okay, I’m kind of paraphrasing from the Blazing Saddles-esque train of thought coursing through my mind. But as we delve back inside the pages of Arbroath’s local paper, you’ll maybe notice that my town is quite close to being my own little Rock Ridge.

Even though the town of Arbroath is still anxiously behind in the pursuit of scientific and social enlightenment – just the four ‘witches’ executed this week by the by – let it not be said that the good people at the local paper are bereft of a sense of humour. Embedded into an article on a local couple’s 54 hour alternative journey following the grounding of all planes due to the ash cloud of sensationalism; an advertisement for luxury coach travel. Brilliant!

In more pressing news, an apparently effective solution has finally been found for the enduring seagull problem in the town. This is great news as reports from home suggest that the previous tactic of engaging in constant man-seagull circle of deaths was proving to be time consuming and utterly insane.

Apparently, the method of choice is to scare the birds away. This of course will not involve the kind of abusive, racist and unacceptable social behaviour employed by the locals to scare away unwanted (i.e. foreign) people. Instead, the town council have employed the services of a team of hawks to drive away the birds.

Ultimately, the aim is to stop the birds from breeding, thus reducing the population dramatically over the next five years. Previous attempts involved getting the seagulls when they were young and telling them how having children early would ruin their lives. The town elders also insisted that welfare officials arranged weekly sexual awareness appointments for all seagulls.

The plans initially fell by the wayside when it was determined that the seagulls spoke worse English than ‘the Polish’ and were fully abandoned when the gymslips complained about the shameless seagull shagging sessions that had begun to characterise a trip to the family planning clinic.

For those of you who wish to support local opine, the paper’s website carries a poll asking whether employing falcons and hawks can help reduce the gull population in the town. Options include the traditional ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘let’s just put our faith in God and have a good old pray’.

The adjoining comment box also offers the opportunity to really sink your teeth into this issue. At present, the dominating comments on the issue are ‘Jimbo Cargill…whaur’s ma fuckin’ maintnins munny’ and ‘Britney Cargill hiz nae tits!’

Finally, and I feel I should tread carefully here if you pardon the pun, Johnston Ralston (really…) writes that there have been further developments in the sewage leak story carried by the newspaper in recent weeks. My favourite thing about Ralston’s story is his potentially accidental revelation that all is not harmonious amongst the staff at Herald Towers…

Hoping to uncover some ‘straight from the horses mouth’ journalistic gold from the visiting inspectors of Scottish Water, Ralston bitterly states that ‘unfortunately, by the time our reporter got to the scene the Scottish Water workmen had already left’. Sadly, the paparazzi potential of our local hacks is massively hindered by the fact that almost all of them are either clinically dead or have long since forgotten that they are in fact journalists.

Like most people, I don’t want to detect bitter undercurrents of staff tension in my local leader. I want to read about damaged farming equipment crushing a cow or Maureen and Alec celebrating 60 years of wedded bliss (read… misery). You missed the scoop Ralston… Take it like a man…

You missed the scoop.