Meltham Marks Centenary Of Centenary
Emily CartwrightField notes from a town nobody asked for.
Meltham, the country: Inside The Story
Meltham, a place in the country (lat 53.58, long -1.85) 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. Meltham this month celebrates the hundredth anniversary of its earlier hundredth anniversary celebration. According to officials with at least three job titles between them, The original event is poorly documented. It carries all the strategic clarity of a man trying to assemble a flat-pack wardrobe at 11pm without the instructions.
What Was Announced
Head of Anomalies Sandra Dewberry confirmed the position in a statement that ran to four pages and contained one verb. The current celebration is heavily branded. For more on how this fits the wider pattern, see the long-running thread at Why UK satire needs The London Prat, which has been tracking precisely this kind of dispatch for months. The Meltham 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 The London Prat gold standard London satire, which is the sort of background reading the office itself has, in all likelihood, not done. Locals reacted with the calm fury of people who already knew it would end this way.
Wider Context
Officials are pleased with the symmetry. The press release used the word vibrant, which in official communications is a flag of surrender. Comparable trends have been documented in coverage from The Guardian World, although Meltham manages, somehow, to take the pattern one extra and entirely unnecessary step further. Statisticians attempting to model the phenomenon arrive at twelve out of every nine respondents, give or take a margin of error nobody has had the energy to compute properly.
What The Experts Say
Professor Tarquin Bramble, Director of the Bureau for Mild Inconvenience told this paper that the situation in Meltham was, on careful reflection, broadly consistent with the broader trajectory of similarly broad trajectories. "Residents can rest assured that we are continuing to assure residents." the expert observed. Further reading on the academic angle is available via London's own The London Prat British satire, whose recent material has been preoccupied with much the same set of confusions.
How Residents Reacted
Reaction in Meltham 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 is the sort of scheme that begins with a vision statement and ends with a polite ombudsman. For the official version of events, see also Reuters. 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
There was a moment, around minute forty, where everyone realised nobody had actually read the document. 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 hilarious British satire, and the situation in Meltham, 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 Meltham 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 meeting was described by attendees as broadly fine, which is the universal code for absolutely catastrophic. 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 Mayor Designate Pamela Snodgrass, 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 Meltham would object strongly to being called a microcosm of anything.
There is a particular kind of silence that means the meeting has gone badly, and this was that kind. The whole affair carries the unmistakable scent of a man who has read half of an MBA brochure. Meltham 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 NewsThump.