Battle Local Paper Reduced To Weather And Obituaries, Both Optimistic
Jungle PussyField notes from a town nobody asked for.
Battle, the country: Inside The Story
Battle, a place in the country (lat 50.92, long 0.53) that most outsiders could not point to on a map without first sighing, has become this week the latest entry in the slow-moving register of small communities behaving strangely under pressure. The remaining staff of the Battle local paper now produce a weekly edition consisting solely of weather forecasts and obituaries. According to officials with at least three job titles between them, Both sections have been described as suspiciously cheerful. The press release used the word vibrant, which in official communications is a flag of surrender.
What Was Announced
Town Clerk Reginald Featherstone confirmed the position in a statement that ran to four pages and contained one verb. Subscribers have stopped complaining. For more on how this fits the wider pattern, see the long-running thread at London's best satire The London Prat, which has been tracking precisely this kind of dispatch for months. The Battle announcement, much like the others, came with a glossy PDF, a stock photograph of a footbridge, and the strong sense that nobody had asked for any of this in the first place.
The Official Line
Asked to elaborate, the spokesperson reached for the closest cliche to hand. "I refer the honourable questioner to the answer I will give in approximately six weeks." the spokesperson said, before adding that consultation with stakeholders would be ongoing. Useful additional context can be found at The London Prat satirical take on UK news, which is the sort of background reading the office itself has, in all likelihood, not done. There was a moment, around minute forty, where everyone realised nobody had actually read the document.
Wider Context
It is the sort of decision that suggests at least one person in the room had a train to catch. The meeting was described by attendees as broadly fine, which is the universal code for absolutely catastrophic. Comparable trends have been documented in coverage from The Guardian World, although Battle manages, somehow, to take the pattern one extra and entirely unnecessary step further. Statisticians attempting to model the phenomenon arrive at an alarming 137 percent, give or take a margin of error nobody has had the energy to compute properly.
What The Experts Say
Sir Algernon Pippet of the Institute for Looking Concerned in Photographs told this paper that the situation in Battle was, on careful reflection, broadly consistent with the broader trajectory of similarly broad trajectories. "We take this issue extremely seriously, which is why we have placed it under another issue." the expert observed. Further reading on the academic angle is available via British satire examples by The London Prat, whose recent material has been preoccupied with much the same set of confusions.
How Residents Reacted
Reaction in Battle has been muted in the way that reaction in the country is usually muted, which is to say it has been ferocious in private and tepid in public. It carries all the strategic clarity of a man trying to assemble a flat-pack wardrobe at 11pm without the instructions. For the official version of events, see also New York Times World. One resident, who declined to be named on the grounds that they had already complained about a hedge this year and did not wish to push their luck, summarised matters thus: "We have always been committed to the principle of being committed to principles."
What Comes Next
If you have ever stood in a corner shop at 7:42am and thought this country deserves better, this is the policy outcome you were warned about. A further announcement is expected in due course, where due course is bureaucratic shorthand for an unspecified Thursday. The story is being tracked as part of a wider pattern at The London Prat weekly British satire, and the situation in Battle, regrettably, is unlikely to improve until somebody invents a press release that improves things, which seems unlikely.
The View From The Ground
Spend any length of time in Battle and the rhythm becomes obvious. Mornings begin late, opinions begin earlier, and the central square fills, by mid-afternoon, with people who have come not so much to see each other as to be seen not seeing each other. Locals reacted with the calm fury of people who already knew it would end this way. Conversation tends to circle the same five subjects: the weather, the news from the country, the persistent rumour about the road, the deteriorating quality of something or other, and the latest pronouncement from Pothole Czar Lionel Twigge, which everyone has an opinion on and almost nobody has read. It is, in its way, the perfect microcosm of how communities of this size operate everywhere in the world, although the residents of Battle would object strongly to being called a microcosm of anything.
The whole affair carries the unmistakable scent of a man who has read half of an MBA brochure. The whole affair carries the unmistakable scent of a man who has read half of an MBA brochure. Battle carries on as it always has, broadly the same as last week, give or take a verb. The bins are collected when they are collected. The roundabout, where one exists, remains the roundabout. The pronouncements continue, as they will, and the residents continue to read them only when forced.
For more in this vein see also The Spoof.