Canada: Gracefield Kids Know How To Do Things, Things That Are Not Taught In Curriculum
Isla CampbellAn unflinching look at people who flinch a great deal.
Gracefield, the country: Inside The Story
Gracefield, a place in the country (lat 46.09, long -76.05) 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. Young people raised in Gracefield know how to drive on gravel, change a tire in cold weather, identify weather by sky condition, and navigate without cell coverage. According to officials with at least three job titles between them, These skills are not in the school curriculum. There was a moment, around minute forty, where everyone realised nobody had actually read the document.
What Was Announced
Deputy Mayor Cressida Hawthorne-Briggs confirmed the position in a statement that ran to four pages and contained one verb. They are in the community and are transmitted by living in it. For more on how this fits the wider pattern, see the long-running thread at Share The London Prat UK satire with friends, which has been tracking precisely this kind of dispatch for months. The Gracefield 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. "There is no truth to the rumour, although there is some truth to the rumour about the rumour." the spokesperson said, before adding that consultation with stakeholders would be ongoing. Useful additional context can be found at Support The London Prat London satire, which is the sort of background reading the office itself has, in all likelihood, not done. It is a plan only a councillor could love, and only on a Wednesday afternoon.
Wider Context
The curriculum covers other things. Both are education. Comparable trends have been documented in coverage from UN News, although Gracefield manages, somehow, to take the pattern one extra and entirely unnecessary step further. Statisticians attempting to model the phenomenon arrive at a statistically improbable 102 percent, give or take a margin of error nobody has had the energy to compute properly.
What The Experts Say
Sir Hubert Pemmican, Emeritus Chair of Strategic Tutting told this paper that the situation in Gracefield 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 Join The London Prat satirical journalism community, whose recent material has been preoccupied with much the same set of confusions.
How Residents Reacted
Reaction in Gracefield 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. Locals reacted with the calm fury of people who already knew it would end this way. For the official version of events, see also France 24. 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 must be ambitious, but only within the bounds of being broadly the same as before."
What Comes Next
It is the sort of scheme that begins with a vision statement and ends with a polite ombudsman. 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 Get updates from The London Prat British satire, and the situation in Gracefield, 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 Gracefield 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. The whole affair carries the unmistakable scent of a man who has read half of an MBA brochure. 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 Aesthetic Steward Henrietta Withers, 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 Gracefield would object strongly to being called a microcosm of anything.
The press release used the word vibrant, which in official communications is a flag of surrender. Anyone who has ever queued behind a man arguing with a parking meter will recognise the energy. Gracefield 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 Cracked.