Angry People in Local Newspapers

by Alistair Coleman

  Alistair Coleman

  * * *

  ANGRY PEOPLE IN LOCAL NEWSPAPERS

  Contents

  Brits lose their rag in local rags

  FOOD Dive-bombing gulls ruffle the feathers of cafe owner

  Sports coach irate with KFC because staff ‘didn’t cook him chicken’

  Toddler banned from vegan child’s birthday party for wearing cow onesie

  Yuk! There are maggots in my Fray Bentos pie

  Couple’s shock after ‘vegetarian’ product incorrectly labelled

  Family eat Quality Street Christmas dinner after pub ‘ruined’ festive day

  Father’s disgust at rubber dummy in bag of Iceland rice

  Fury after Morrisons wouldn’t sell couple meat pies before 9am

  TRANSPORT Fury at plans to spend £54,000 on bus signs

  Learner driver mum slams ‘crazy motorists’ for driving her nuts

  Train enthusiasts call for ‘wave of carnage’ ticket office closures to be reversed

  Bus stop labelled ‘ridiculous’ after council workers paint lines across driveway

  Cyclist lies down in ‘absolutely ginormous’ pothole in Plympton

  Angry people meet to discuss parking problems around Devonport Dockyard

  Couple lose £1,200 Las Vegas break after booking flights from WRONG Birmingham

  Man furious over ‘poorly kept’ traffic island

  CRIME Sunday trade moves are Satan’s work says cleric

  Not again! Jeremy Corbyn TEDDY vanishes

  Devon mum installs CCTV because yobs throw ONIONS at her house

  Hull pensioners’ fury as they are ‘plagued’ by scammers

  Naked gardener ‘puts neighbour off sausages’

  Anger as thieves posing as workmen steal paving slabs

  Huge arrow shot at house in Worcester

  ‘Senseless vandalism’ as trees snapped within hours of being planted

  Traffic cone man slams court appearance as ‘ridiculous’

  Cornwall woman’s anger after car vandalised outside her own drive

  ANTI-SOCIAL NEWS Butcher warned by police to tone down risqué signs

  Residents plagued with worst dog poo problem in town

  Ball bombardment leaves Belfast woman ‘a nervous wreck’

  House fire started by a squirrel disrupts funeral procession

  ‘Angry church seagull keeps attacking me and all I want to do is play Pokémon Go’

  Concerned parent says ‘disgusting’ dog mess is being left around village

  Woman living on building site after eighty neighbours move out

  Family scare as fox gets in through cat flap

  ‘Bird scarer is driving us (and our dogs) round the bend!’

  Postie cries foul over language of pranksters

  Catford fox horror for man on toilet

  MONEY ‘I’m so angry that charity shop didn’t let me buy blouse’

  ‘That’s disgusting’ – grandmother’s horror at dirty stains on mattress

  ‘Here’s my parking fine – in 1p pieces’

  Father’s shock as he sees £500k overdraft after having bank account frozen

  Repentant passenger fined ‘outrageous’ £600 for £4 train fare dodge

  Hull man’s anger as he is fined for visiting Asda twice in one day

  Grange Hill star’s business struggling after online banking ‘fiasco’

  COUNCIL ISSUES Council accused of wasting energy as office lights are ‘left on all night’

  Pensioner rages at ‘ghastly’ four-foot ditch left outside his home

  ‘My beloved dog Snowy will be torn apart by foxes if council chop my fence in half’

  Anger as dog walkers steal second sign in two days from Devon beach

  Woman fears giant tree is going to crush her house

  Residents want to bring an end to thorny battle with Wiltshire Council

  ‘I told the council about dangerous paving two years ago – and it’s still not fixed’

  Field looks ‘like the Somme’ after developer changes land

  Newly fitted lights could harm children’s eyesight

  Smelly bin taken away after a year

  The Top Ten of Angry People in Local Newspapers

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Britain is a country on the edge.

  A country lost in its own impotent rage.

  And it’s not because of the big issues in the news like the state of the NHS, an impending Third World War, Brexit and … err … Brexit.

  It’s also about those trivial things that get up your nose – the bins not being emptied on the right day, stepping in dog poo for the third time this week, getting an unfair parking ticket, or finding some squamous nightmare creature from the pits of Hell lurking at the bottom of your tin of Heinz Cream of Tomato soup.

  Most of us know how to react when a politician lies. You get to vote them out at the next election, and in the meantime you can moan about them in the comments section of Mail Online.

  But when your bus timetable is suddenly changed, bringing minor inconvenience to your daily commute; or if – say – you received a £900 bill from your cable television supplier for adult films you swear blind you didn’t watch, where do you go?

  Obviously, the correct and logical answer to these questions is the bus company and Virgin Media, but angry people tend not to be logical, and the people who wronged them are invariably the last people from whom they seek satisfaction.

  Angryism has changed along with the times.

  While furious local councillors crouching over potholes like they’re going to the toilet are still the staple of local newspapers where editors have to somehow fit thirty-two pages of stories and photographs around the adverts and make money in the process, there is now the very real chance that a particularly ridiculous photo story will go truly viral, making editors and accountants very happy indeed.

  For one thing, angryism perfectly illustrates the British habit of ‘I don’t like to complain, but …’, and combines it with the off chance that there could be a few quid at the end of this while the person who doesn’t like to complain makes a concerted bid to join the British Olympic complaining team.

  A nice hamper from the supermarket, perhaps. Or the bus company offering a chauffeur service from your front door, for life. This never happens.

  I’ve been doing this long enough to know that when they say, ‘I only ever wanted an apology,’ their eyes in the accompanying photograph say, ‘And a gift voucher would be nice as well.’

  Add in lunatic letters, daft headlines and some of the dullest news stories ever committed to print, it makes you wonder why local newspapers are struggling to survive.

  They’re part of us. We cannot afford to lose them.

  But if we do lose them, I’ll be the first to be photographed pointing angrily at the space where my local rag used to be. Because that’s how it works.

  FOOD

  * * *

  I spent my formative years when I should have been at university working for an obscure branch of the UK government tasked with the job of counting Britain’s cows.

  After I had come up with a one-hundred-per-cent inaccurate figure of the number of cows in the United Kingdom (rated by whether they were alive, or dead and in an industrial-sized freezer somewhere), I would telex this data to an office in Brussels, where, for all I knew, they put it straight into the bin.

  Yeah, telex.

  The reason I am telling you this is because these three years of my life were not entirely wasted; they were an education.

  And the thing that I was educated about is this: What goes into your food.


  Distilled down to a single sentence, this knowledge boils down thus: You do not want to know what goes into your food.

  That being the case, I have made it my lifelong mission to try not to find out what goes into my food, because life is short, and you shouldn’t make it any shorter by – for example – worrying that you might be munching through an animal’s anus with your Friday-night dirty kebab.

  Because there’s every chance you might be eating anus, and unless you have an extremely varied personal life, that’s not the kind of thing we do in polite society.

  Unfortunately, people do have a regrettable habit of finding out what goes into their food, and when they do, it makes them very angry indeed.

  Then they go to their local papers to make sure everybody in the whole world knows what they’ve found in their food, and with the thought that a four-figure compensation cheque at the end of it wouldn’t be the worst outcome.

  Food fury has a very special place in the concept of angry people in local newspapers, because it is one-hundred-per-cent suited to angry faces.

  Food items such as the tinned meat pie with additional meat factory worker’s thumb photograph very well alongside the disgusted consumer who is grappling with the thought that they may have eaten a finger well before the thumb revealed itself, along with the very clear thought of getting enough compo out of Global Tinned Pies And Lead Figurines Ltd to go and retire on an island somewhere.

  In reality, Global Tinned Pies And Lead Figurines Ltd will offer them a replacement pie and a £10 ‘goodwill’ gesture, entirely in Global Tinned Pies And Lead Figurines Ltd gift tokens.

  And that is all you will ever get if you complain through the correct channels.

  So that’s why – if you find a packet of chocolate biscuits which have been coated with ham instead of chocolate – your first port of call should be your local newspaper (see here for a perfect example).

  There are two types of people who go to local newspapers when they have found something disgusting in their food:

  1. People who want to warn other people of the potential horrors waiting inside a popular brand of instant coffee that could make you glow in the dark. This accounts for 0.00001 per cent of ‘something wrong with my food’ local newspaper stories;

  2. People who want compo (the other 99.99999 per cent of these stories).

  The oxygen of publicity, this 99.99999 per cent think, will raise the offer of a free pie and the insulting goodwill gesture to something closer to expectations, to what: a Caribbean beach holiday to get over the shock, and a free pie?

  Unfortunately for them, the publicity only ever gets them the vouchers and public ridicule.

  But that’s not the end of the story when it comes to food fury in local newspapers.

  It’s one thing finding a whole deep-fried seagull in your [Insert random US state here] Fried Chicken take-out; it’s totally another if you’ve been the victim of bad service.

  Bad service in the food industry is up there with direct threats of death against you and your entire family for the very worst thing that can happen to you, and is treated as such in the local press.

  Charged 8p for sauce at your local takeaway? You’d better have The Advertiser’s newsroom on speed dial, because they’ll be straight down there with a photographer (see here for proof).

  Somebody drew a knob on the inside of your burger box? You’d better have rehearsed that angry face because that’s one photo that’s going viral right around the globe.

  Ah-ha! I hear you say – there should be billions of these photographs, because every single time I go shopping, I am insulted by shopkeepers and have coffee shop people openly putting salt in my cappuccino and writing the words ‘Big-nosed tosser’ on my cup.

  But you are wrong. Britain is a culture that nearly-but-not-quite says something when put out – even more so when it comes to food service.

  How many times have you been served completely the wrong order, at a temperature some ten degrees colder than Siberia, but tell the waiter everything’s OK when they come to check on you?

  ALL THE TIME, that’s how often.

  That’s why bad food service photographs are something special and to be treasured. These people have broken the mould, they’ve gone out there and said what every man jack of us has always wanted to say.

  And they’ve got free pie.

  ‘Kamikaze’ gulls have prevented a restaurant from serving food on its upper terrace.

  Dive-bombing gulls have been causing havoc for customers at a beach cafe, as well as injuring themselves.

  The owners of the establishment have put up signs asking customers not to take food up there, but are now looking at ways to combat the problem.

  The owner of the cafe, Mr Percy, said he did not have much choice in his decision.

  ‘We’ve stopped customers from eating upstairs due to our experiences over the last few years,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve been here six years now; the first year was fine, second year they started to suss it out and over the last couple of years they’ve interfered. They dive bomb down, straight in, they aren’t that intelligent though because they can’t get back out. They’d get stuck and smash against the glass, we’d find blood and all sorts up there. Of course, they’d also be nicking people’s food and, if a table hasn’t been cleared quick enough, it’s a bomb site.

  “it’s a bomb site”

  ‘So I decided last year no food upstairs, just drinks, coffees, beers etc.’

  Mr Percy is considering ways of keeping the gulls at bay.

  ‘We plan on rectifying the problem as soon as possible with either wire or netting, as it works elsewhere,’ he said.

  ‘Short of someone up there shooing them away all the time, there isn’t much else we can do for the moment. It’s a real shame that customers can’t eat up there.’

  Mr Percy believed he knew the reason the gulls had been targeting the cafe.

  ‘This all stems from someone feeding the birds every day for years. They would put bread up along the wall,’ he said. ‘The seagulls know it’s a feeding station, so they’ve been coming back for years and years. We know the seagull that does it the most, he’s got red markings on his face, we’ll see if he comes back this year.

  ‘The decking out the back which was OK for food is still open, but they’ve started to suss that out as well, they all line up along the rail. We are now having to forever shoo them away.’

  Although some customers have been disappointed at not being able to take in the views from the roof terrace while they eat, Mr Percy did not believe it would cause any damage to business.

  ‘Some customers have moaned like mad,’ he said. ‘But I think they would moan more if they’re just having a bite from a burger and a seagull comes snappy, snappy.

  ‘I don’t think it will affect business, maybe a couple of people might think, “I’m not going there”.’

  ‘I do feel sorry for the seagulls, but they’re flying vermin and they can go away.’

  “they’re flying vermin and they can go away”

  A sports coach claims he rocked up at his local KFC – only to be told by staff they wouldn’t cook him any chicken.

  Mr Roberts is still seething with the fast food giant about what went on that night. The sports coach turned up at 10.30pm one night this week looking forward to some freshly cooked, hot, fried meat. He claims he was told his chances of a meal were slim because of the number of customer orders piling in.

  But, fuming, he didn’t think that was a good enough excuse.

  I’m still quite irate

  He claimed things then went from bad to worse when staff told him he would have to wait potentially up to half an hour – by which point the store would be shut for the night.

  ‘They would have been closed!’ he said.

  He alleges that when he got to the counter, all staff could offer him were already prepared chicken wings as they were ready to lock up. Mr Roberts says he wasn’t the o
nly one annoyed – claiming that at least one customer stormed out.

  ‘I’m still quite irate,’ he said. ‘It’s just unacceptable.’

  It’s just unacceptable

  He claims he was offered a discount but thinks it wasn’t good enough. If it had been a fish and chip shop, he said, he’d have understood, but thought things would be different for a big chain.

  ‘Not good, to be honest,’ he said. ‘They could have told us when we walked in.’

  Not only that, but he said that staff had been ‘a bit rude’.

  It’s been a tough time for KFC this year, with some even calling it ‘the great chicken famine of 2018’.

  Many branches were low on stock last month after bad weather delayed their delivery trucks, leaving them offering only a ‘limited menu’.

  Back in February, KFC stores were closed all over the UK due to supplier issues and local police took to Twitter to tell people off for calling them about closures.

  Some people are clearly a bit too passionate about popcorn chicken.

  Mr Roberts was more pragmatic. In true sports-coach style, he said: ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.’

  Plymouth Herald reached out to KFC, which spoke to the branch in question and could not corroborate Mr Roberts’ story.

  A spokesman for the company said: ‘As far as we can confirm, this didn’t happen.’

  A young mum from Southend has been describing her outrage after her eight-month-old daughter was banned from attending a vegan child’s birthday party as she was wearing a cow onesie.

  Ms Hyde told our Chief Reporter that she arrived at the birthday bash with her daughter wearing an adorable cow onesie, not realising that birthday boy is being raised as vegan by his mum.

  She said: ‘As soon as I arrived at Funky House Soft Play in Ashingdon, I started getting filthy looks from a lot of the mums there. I only realised afterwards that they were all vegan as well.’