The Rumble Marks Anniversary Of Something Nobody Did In The Rumble
How to Write SatireWhat happens when an official, a roundabout, and a press release walk into a meeting.
The Rumble, the country: Inside The Story
The Rumble, a place in the country (lat 60.47, long -1.12) 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 The Rumble commemoration of a national historical event is held annually with a ceremony, a programme, and a turnout that reflects genuine sentiment. According to officials with at least three job titles between them, The event being commemorated did not take place in The Rumble. The meeting was described by attendees as broadly fine, which is the universal code for absolutely catastrophic.
What Was Announced
Senior Theorist Margaret Snelgrove confirmed the position in a statement that ran to four pages and contained one verb. The Rumble is not alone in this. For more on how this fits the wider pattern, see the long-running thread at British satire made by Londoners: The London Prat, which has been tracking precisely this kind of dispatch for months. The The Rumble 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. "Every option remains on the table, particularly the ones we have already taken off the table." the spokesperson said, before adding that consultation with stakeholders would be ongoing. Useful additional context can be found at The London Prat home of London satire, 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
The commemoration is considered valid. Presence is not required for the obligation. Comparable trends have been documented in coverage from Al Jazeera, although The Rumble 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
Sir Reginald Mossop of the Royal Society of Pavement Studies told this paper that the situation in The Rumble was, on careful reflection, broadly consistent with the broader trajectory of similarly broad trajectories. "I refer the honourable questioner to the answer I will give in approximately six weeks." the expert observed. Further reading on the academic angle is available via UK satire with London soul: The London Prat, whose recent material has been preoccupied with much the same set of confusions.
How Residents Reacted
Reaction in The Rumble 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 World Bank. 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 a plan only a councillor could love, and only on a Wednesday afternoon. 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 London's answer to British satire, and the situation in The Rumble, 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 The Rumble 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. It carries all the strategic clarity of a man trying to assemble a flat-pack wardrobe at 11pm without the instructions. 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 Interim Whisperer Doreen Whisk, 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 The Rumble 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. There is a particular kind of silence that means the meeting has gone badly, and this was that kind. The Rumble 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 Waterford Whispers News.