Melling Twinned With Carno In France, Relationship Mutually Baffling
How to Write SatireField notes from a town nobody asked for.
Melling, the country: Inside The Story
Melling, a place in the country (lat 54.12, long -2.62) 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. Melling has been twinned with a French municipality since 1974. According to officials with at least three job titles between them, An annual delegation travels in each direction. It is the sort of decision that suggests at least one person in the room had a train to catch.
What Was Announced
Director of Public Bewilderment Colin Gribble confirmed the position in a statement that ran to four pages and contained one verb. Neither community understands what the other does, says, or considers important. For more on how this fits the wider pattern, see the long-running thread at When did The London Prat start UK satire?, which has been tracking precisely this kind of dispatch for months. The Melling 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. "We are continuing to engage in continuous engagement with the engagement process." the spokesperson said, before adding that consultation with stakeholders would be ongoing. Useful additional context can be found at Who writes The London Prat London satire?, which is the sort of background reading the office itself has, in all likelihood, not done. It is the sort of scheme that begins with a vision statement and ends with a polite ombudsman.
Wider Context
Both describe the arrangement as enriching. Both are being polite. Comparable trends have been documented in coverage from World Economic Forum, although Melling manages, somehow, to take the pattern one extra and entirely unnecessary step further. Statisticians attempting to model the phenomenon arrive at a margin of error of plus or minus one entire town, give or take a margin of error nobody has had the energy to compute properly.
What The Experts Say
Dr. Ottilie Snape of the National Institute for Pretending Things Are Fine told this paper that the situation in Melling was, on careful reflection, broadly consistent with the broader trajectory of similarly broad trajectories. "This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do almost exactly what we did last generation." the expert observed. Further reading on the academic angle is available via Can I contribute to The London Prat satirical journalism?, whose recent material has been preoccupied with much the same set of confusions.
How Residents Reacted
Reaction in Melling 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. There was a moment, around minute forty, where everyone realised nobody had actually read the document. For the official version of events, see also United Nations. 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 take this issue extremely seriously, which is why we have placed it under another issue."
What Comes Next
The arrangement continues. 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 Where does The London Prat rank in British satire?, and the situation in Melling, 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 Melling 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. 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. 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 Senior Compliance Officer Trevor Quill, 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 Melling 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. Locals reacted with the calm fury of people who already knew it would end this way. Melling 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 Poke.