Odd this day

26 Jan 2007

This account likes to claim, sometimes, that it has happened upon the most consequential story yet. Often sarcastically, it has to be said. This time, though? Crikey. Era-defining, epoch-making, world-startling stuff.

Yes, it’s the 18th birthday of this headline in the Westmorland Gazette:

As a headline, it was unimpeachable: succinct, to put it mildly, and entirely without error. There had been a chair. There was now not a chair, merely a charred stump. More remarkable still, the news story underneath ran to a full 61 words:

AN OFFICE chair was destroyed after it was set on fire on the grassy area, off Maude Street, Kendal, this afternoon.

Fire crews from Kendal attended along with police.

A spokesman for the fire and rescue service said: “A delinquent set fire to an office chair in the middle of a grassy area and it was extinguished using one hose jet.”

To begin with, I think we can all agree how rare a treat it is to have someone described as a ‘delinquent’ in a news story by a member of the emergency services. ‘Hooligan’, ‘miscreant’, and ‘ne’er-do-well’ would also have done good service there, but ‘delinquent’ is at least as satisfactory as any of them.

Anyway, as you might imagine, this caused quite the to-do. Kendal is a small place, and its weekly newspaper a noble century-old institution with a readership of just 7,000 (thank you, Wikipedia). But the chair’s fame was to spread well beyond the environs of even the Lake District.

To begin with, there were commenters. Some of them made the obvious ‘jokes’ about this being a slow news day, but soon — appropriately, for a part of the world once beloved of Wordsworth and chums — those of a more poetic bent arrived. One Adam Candle, for example, keened:

Another tale of moral decline from our already debauched society. Ergonomic disasters of this magnitude were last seen during the fall of Rome.

And then, of course, there were those who began to converse with each other in the comments, sometimes in disputatious fashion…

Twitter (remember that?) was in its infancy, and I can find references on what remains of that site from no earlier than 2009, but that may be due to it lying in ruins. It seems, though, that the news reached The Internet, and spread.

On 8 February, things had got so exciting that the Gazette ran a follow-up, Destroyed chair story continues to draw attention, which ran to over 300 words. I think that makes the significance of this thing clear.

MYSTERY surrounding an office chair that was set alight in a Kendal park has been solved after dozens of readers inundated The Westmorland Gazette website wanting to find out more.

The story developed into a web of intrigue after the breaking news was uploaded to the Gazette’s website on a quiet Friday afternoon in Kendal.

…Reporters and the editor joined in the debate and strong interest led the Gazette to try to find out what happened to the talked-about chair after it was the most-read story on the web for well over a week.

After scouring the land, off Maude Street, the Gazette stumbled upon what looked like scorch marks on the grass and possibly some remains of the incinerated chair.

I think you’ll agree: this is heady stuff. BUT WHAT’S THIS?

After our find a spokesman for Cumbria Police said the chair had been cleared away but they had not found out who was responsible.

Reporter Andrew Daniels, hang your head in shame! In the opening paragraph, you said the case was solved! In the first half of the 20th century, the poet Humbert Wolfe could write:

…but now? How far, how low, has the once noble profession of journalism sunk! It brings a tear to the eye.

Still, at least the march of time had brought the benefit of technological development.

Editor/Publisher Mike Glover said the ability to comment on stories was one of the benefits of the website and urged people to post their thoughts on stories of interest and share their views.

“This story was the most-read for a number of days and became the talk of the newsroom,” he said.

“It just goes to show how much interest can be generated by local news and I would like to make people aware they can comment on any of our stories on the web by clicking the Add Comment icon.”

At the time this story ran,

Through the Add Comment’ icon attached to the story on www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk more than 40 people have posted their thoughts. Comments included a poem, a joke and tales of sleepless nights after reading the news.

I won’t reproduce the poem, because, to use the correct term from literary criticism, it’s fucking shit, but please feel free to follow the link to the first story if you want to put yourself through it. If you do read the comments, you will see that the total eventually reached 90. Wikipedia tells me that one of the Westmorland Gazette’s early editors was famed opium-eater Thomas De Quincey, and perhaps he would have been able to find the words, given his personal experience, to express the woozy sensation engendered by this high-octane stuff.

But there was more to come. (I KNOW!) On 16 February, a further headline was unleashed: Torched chair story profiled on the airwaves

NEWS about a torched chair, which generated interest across the globe, made its way on to the airwaves today (Friday).

The story posted on the Gazette’s website in January attracted comments from as far away as New York and Dubai. This morning Westmorland Gazette reporter Andrew Daniels, along with editor/publisher Mike Glover, were interviewed live on BBC Radio Cumbria.

The story, about an office chair that was set alight, in Kendal, attracted a record amount of comments on the Gazette’s website.

A few days after this, and not before time, the United Kingdom’s Newspaper of Record took an interest. On 24 February, Alan Hamilton of The Times opened with a mea culpa:

The Times apologises to readers for failing to report an earth-shattering event in Cumbria last month. Some ne’er-do-well set fire to a chair.

Top marks. A ‘ne’er-do-well’ sighted in the wild. Marvellous.

We were distracted by lesser events in Iraq and Afghanistan. But when the Westmorland Gazette, the Kendal-based local weekly, posted the story on its website the fate of a piece of office furniture reverberated around the world from New York to Australia.

Better late than never, we hereby reproduce the report that drew a record number of comments to the website of an assiduous journal that keeps a hawk-like eye on its patch.

I retract my praise, Mr Hamilton. You have shocked me, sir. SHOCKED me. Bringing sarcasm to a tale such as this! And it gets worse.

Freed from the gravitational pull of pity, the story took off on a spaceflight to distant galaxies of imagination.

Mind you, he’s got a point, given that the comments he chose to highlight included:

The chair knew the risks. Gang warfare in Kendal is rife, and when you choose a side you gotta be down with risks. This was a declaration by the Standard Lamp Posse of Kendal. No one messes with lamps.

…and

This type of atrocity has only been able to happen since the ‘Chair In The Community’ legislation was passed in the late 1980s. Before that time chairs would have been cared for indoors, not forced to walk the streets.

But if you want a moral to this story (which rather begs the question: what the hell are you doing here, then?), finally, The Times provides one:

“This is not the most crime-ridden or busiest of areas, and it’s difficult to get much material from calls to the police and fire brigade,” Mike Glover, the editor and publisher, said. “We took the attitude that local news sells local newspapers. People will have wondered what the fire brigade were doing.”

This was a ‘news in brief’ piece: a small story, in a small corner of the world, but (a) the point in that last sentence is crucial, and (b) it points up something larger. These little snippets may only be a minor public service, but it’s not too much of a stretch to point out that, in the olden days, the bigger articles around them gave people a sense of community, and an insight into local culture — and sometimes held local politicians and businesses to account. The decline of print has undermined local news, and with it local democracy. And [gestures at everything], that sentence stands up if you take out both instances of the word ‘local’, too.