Saturday 5 June 2010

If this is news, then I'm a banana

I have always felt it important that we support our local newspapers, because if we don't, they'll die out but frankly, after reading a particular non-story in my local newspaper I'm starting to wonder if that is entirely a bad thing.

"Banana Drama For Irma" announces the headline, playing fast and loose with the meaning of the word drama. Goodness me, thinks the reader. What drama can this be? Let us read on, our admiration for the poor sod sent to interview Irma growing by every paragraph.

Irma said she was given the oddly shaped fruit after eating dinner one night at her residential home.

"I said, 'Oh, I've got a straight banana! I thought it was a joke," she explained.


I'm saying nothing about a 90 year old woman thinking it possible that someone, somewhere has "straightened" her banana as a joke. Yesterday I wandered around the house for 20 minutes looking for my specs, and only found them when I caught (blurry) sight of myself in a mirror and saw they were perched on my head. Ahem.

Meanwhile, the gripping drama of the straight banana continues. Are there any more details the dogged reporter can winkle out of Irma? How, for example, had Irma come across the straight banana? "Instead of the usual pudding I asked for fruit," she explains. Ah yes, how often we have done this ourselves. Well, I haven't, I don't live in an old people's home, but let's not get bogged down in piffling detail.

But what's this? The banana, it transpires, has changed. Our eager reporter is desperate for more details and Irma is only too happy to provide them. "It was a beautiful yellow to start with, but after a while it started to go brown." Alas, we are not told which shade of brown, a tragic oversight in my opinion.

Naturally, the reporter wishes to end this enthralling tale on a positive note. What will be the fate of the straight banana? Will it, perhaps, be preserved in a fruit museum, possibly in a tank of formaldehyde? Or studded with diamonds and sold to a very wealthy, straight banana collector?

Irma is keen to bring us down to earth. "If I can't do anything else, I will eat it," she announces, showing the kind of Churchillian spirit that made this country what it is today, that is, a place where people will eat brown, straight bananas.

How the mother of crap is this a story?

2 comments:

  1. I used to convulse at some of the so-called articles in the local paper in Catatonia. I thought local paper here could only be an improvement - after all, this is London (well, a suburb thereof). It's worse. I feel like shaking people. Whatever they're printing, it is NOT journalism. Bah.

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  2. Totally get that local news has to be local, and there's nothing like a heart-warming, "aw shucks" type of story, but really. This one is TOO MUCH!

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