On The Fifth Day... God Distributed The Arbroath Herald!

I come from a small town called Arbroath. In my 18th year, I had the good fortune to leave the town and experience the slightly less (only slightly mind) backward and introverted city life of Aberdeen. From there, I feel I’ve moved on to experience quite a lot of the world and open my mind to lots of new experiences and challenges. I don’t want a medal for this; I just want to distance myself from my own personal Salem.

Nonetheless, my one weakness on the path to psychological and sociological rehabilitation is a fondness for keeping up to date with events in the town as illustrated by our local newspaper; The Arbroath Herald, Guide and Gazette. In my longest and most enthusiastic post yet, follow me as I take you on a hard-on inducing voyage of discovery…

In trivial pish news, buses are not running efficiently due to roadworks and sufficient numbers are pissed off to make this front page leader for the week! The council opted against altering the route and frequency of buses despite this causing widespread…oh for fuck sake! I can imagine the scene now. Some piss strewn old fart moaning because the buses just don’t run like they used to and demanding more from their free bus service!

It’s always the same where I’m from! As the only people who bother to vote, pensioners are solely responsible for whatever administration is in charge in the town! However, they only vote for people who pretend to give a shit about their dreary existence and so when the shit hits the fan nobody has any idea how to clean it up!

The poor drivers will be taking a world of said shit too! Apparently, his role in all of this is to physically lift his sprawling Dennis over the delayed traffic and drop it seamlessly at the bus stop. Again, what less would one expect from a free bus service?

Said driver will also be expected to take the entire brunt of peoples frustration that their problem free existence is being disturbed by something so phenomenally massive as roadworks. That poor guy will even be dealing with miserable twats who don’t normally use the bus but have taken it this week just for the drama. Some people actually quite liked Harold Shipman you know?

Before I suffer myocardial implosion, I must report on the weeks other news and it seems that the poor residents of Ladyloan are suffering from a double whammy of yob attacks and overflowing bins. Will their hardship and misery ever end?

Apparently, the yobbish attacks were confined to some flower pots which were lifted from the roadside and mercilessly dumped in the middle of the road. The nosey bastard who clearly liaised with the venerable publication to hammer out the finer points of the crisis noted that the police ‘arrived very quickly’ but the perpetrators had disappeared. I imagine somewhere in the dark recesses of publishing house, they are scraping the brains and mortar of a disillusioned young journalism apprentice from the walls and detaching the shotgun of liberty from the prayerful grasp of her rigormortic hands.

Especially if said individual has had to take the lead on the overflowing bins expose also. Apparently, the refuse disposal skills of some residents in the area are being called into question and the street is a veritable shithole of filthiness. I personally feel the bins add character and a certain cultural depth to the area but in the interests of journalistic naivety will keep that opinion to myself.

The article carries a tone of acceptability until we hit the unconscious root of the problem. Apparently, the residents with responsibility for said bins ‘do not speak much in the way of English’. Ever since our Eastern European friends came over to improve the town’s character, appeal and employment rate people have had their backs up. The ‘they come over here stealing our jobs’ brigade have been up in arms. Well, when I say up in arms I mean sitting pissed in their armchairs on unmerited disability allowance under a pretence that they’d work if they could. Indeed they do work; mainly on the side.

Our final sortie into the local life of that dreary shite pocket focuses on the grim news that at least two village libraries are to be sacrificed in the pursuit of reduced expenditure by the town council. Apparently, the council received only two written complaints about the issue from the librarians themselves. One librarian had written ‘fuk u’ whilst the other had clearly written a rather more together ‘fuk u and them’; a clear threat to both the council and those in neighbouring villages with an interest in empiricism.

Nonetheless, over fifty hand delivered potato print swastikas were delivered to the newspaper’s offices stamped on the back of spent packets of Lambert & Butler. Our friends at the Herald have taken this to represent a large-scale protest about the closure of the libraries and relegated ‘Bus station upgrade now underway’ to a mere three quarters of coverage on page two.

Sadly, this is a problem for outlying villages in most remote Scottish towns. Under-resourced libraries struggle to promote reading as a viable alternative to engaging in depraved acts with your one-legged cousins. This is coupled with the increasing popularity of the hideously painted mobile library; to get the image exactly imagine if Salvador Dali painted a giant version of your local Sunshine Bus. It is of course only popular as a target for local hooligans bored of toying with the immigrants, but in Arbroath that counts for something.

That’s all for this week folks. A quick check on the ‘family announcements’ – a new anti-complaint mechanism for those whose feelings get hurt when their dearly departed are mentioned in the births, marriages and deaths section – reveals that no former schoolmates have overdosed and died this week. I won’t pretend actually, like anyone who enthusiastically reads their local paper, that was the first thing I checked.

(There will be more from the Arbroath Herald in the coming weeks…)