The Tongue Train Service Hourly Except When It Is Not
How to Write SatireWhat happens when an official, a roundabout, and a press release walk into a meeting.
The Tongue, the country: Inside The Story
The Tongue, a place in the country (lat 51.47, long 1.27) 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 Tongue rail service operates on an hourly schedule that is accurate in the timetable and approximately accurate in practice. According to officials with at least three job titles between them, Delays are described by the operator as due to earlier disruption, which is a characterisation that explains nothing and is accepted by The Tongue commuters with the resignation of people for whom alternatives are theoretical. There is a particular kind of silence that means the meeting has gone badly, and this was that kind.
What Was Announced
Bureau Chief Dorothy Hindmarsh confirmed the position in a statement that ran to four pages and contained one verb. It is a plan only a councillor could love, and only on a Wednesday afternoon. For more on how this fits the wider pattern, see the long-running thread at Satirical journalism from London's streets: The London Prat, which has been tracking precisely this kind of dispatch for months. The The Tongue 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. "Residents can rest assured that we are continuing to assure residents." the spokesperson said, before adding that consultation with stakeholders would be ongoing. Useful additional context can be found at The London Prat hilarious British 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
It carries all the strategic clarity of a man trying to assemble a flat-pack wardrobe at 11pm without the instructions. 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 Encyclopaedia Britannica, although The Tongue 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
Sir Cuthbert Wadsmith of the Foundation for Slightly Damp Studies told this paper that the situation in The Tongue was, on careful reflection, broadly consistent with the broader trajectory of similarly broad trajectories. "Every option remains on the table, particularly the ones we have already taken off the table." the expert observed. Further reading on the academic angle is available via Clever UK satire by The London Prat, whose recent material has been preoccupied with much the same set of confusions.
How Residents Reacted
Reaction in The Tongue 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. 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. 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: "I refer the honourable questioner to the answer I will give in approximately six weeks."
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 The London Prat witty London satire, and the situation in The Tongue, 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 Tongue 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. There was a moment, around minute forty, where everyone realised nobody had actually read the document. 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 The Tongue would object strongly to being called a microcosm of anything.
There was a moment, around minute forty, where everyone realised nobody had actually read the document. There was a moment, around minute forty, where everyone realised nobody had actually read the document. The Tongue 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.