Angry People in Local Newspapers

by Alistair Coleman

  I started getting filthy looks

  ‘I didn’t even get my own coat off before the mother who had organised the party came over and asked me to leave – she was really upset and told me that I was just plain rude to dress my child that way.

  ‘It made me so angry when she said that I was mocking her beliefs and I just walked out with my little girl.

  ‘A few hours later, she texted me and said that my child was no longer allowed to play with her child at the local playgroup where we met. She’s off her rocker.’

  We contacted Mrs Soy-Abbinton, and she told us that she ‘stands by’ her decision.

  She added: ‘There’s no way that she could plead ignorance and say that she didn’t know that I am a vegan and that I am raising my child to follow these beliefs.

  ‘I make it my business to let everyone in my circle of friends know on a regular basis, and my Facebook cover image is a large meme saying “Hardcore Mega-Vegans Do It All Night Long”.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say that she is plain ignorant and I can’t have her daughter anywhere near my Eddie any more.

  ‘You wouldn’t take your child to a Muslim birthday party dressed as a side of gammon after all.

  ‘That cow onesie gives out the impression that it is OK for humans to skin a real cow alive and wear the skin for their own entertainment.

  ‘I still feel sick now just thinking about it and I am considering my options. My lawyer has already told me that it could constitute a hate crime.’

  A disgusted father was shocked when he found live maggots in a Fray Bentos pie moments before cooking it for his children.

  Stuart discovered the grubs wriggling around inside the pie in front of his horrified wife Jane and their three children.

  The father of three was about to cook the Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie on Monday evening when he noticed there were clumps of pastry missing.

  When he looked more closely at the dish he was shocked to discover three maggots in the filling.

  ‘We were about to put it in the oven but we noticed there was a bit of pastry missing and then we saw the maggots,’ he said.

  ‘We were going absolutely mad. We were disgusted. We took lots of pictures of it but when we got in touch with Baxters, who make it, they fobbed us off.

  ‘I will never buy them again. I will never buy a pie out of a tin again. It is disgusting. It could have made my kids ill because at the start I just thought some of the pastry casing was missing but then I looked further. So the maggots must have eaten it away.

  “I will never buy a pie out of a tin again”

  ‘It is very gross. I only bought the pie days before. It is really horrible.

  ‘I dread to think how it happened. It might have happened in the factory. We think there may have been flies in the factory and they may have laid their eggs in the containers there.’

  “I dread to think how it happened”

  The family, who live near Evesham, bought the £2.49 pie from their local Iceland branch last week.

  Full-time mum Jane added: ‘I do not think the store is at fault at all. They cannot see what is inside the pies. I have kept it for evidence for the moment.’

  There were three maggots found in the pie and yet it was well within its best before date.

  A spokesman for Fray Bentos, which is owned by Baxters, said: ‘We have been informed of the claims made by the family regarding one of our Fray Bentos products and are treating their complaint as a priority.

  ‘Our immediate request on being contacted was to ask for the product to be returned so we could instigate an internal investigation into the can and its contents.

  ‘As of yet we have not received the product, therefore it is impossible for us to speculate further on these claims.’

  Tiffany and Philip, of Trowbridge, visited the Warminster Morrisons on a Thursday in January to do some grocery shopping. When the couple returned home they tucked into a pack of what they thought were Morrisons’ cheese and onion rolls – but to the horror of Tiffany, who describes herself as a demi-lacto vegan who eats dairy products, the rolls turned out to contain pork sausage meat.

  She said: ‘I felt physically sick when I realised. It is totally unacceptable that this would happen. For thirty years I have been very careful about what I eat because it used to be so difficult to find food when you went out that did cater to my diet; nowadays when you buy something you expect it to be what it says.

  when is a label not a label?

  ‘In our house we keep the meat and my food separated, we even use different chopping boards to prepare our food. The last time I remember eating meat is when I was pregnant with my son. Since then I haven’t eaten any, my body just rejects it.’

  Tiffany said the response from Morrisons, which referred to the mistake as an ‘incident’, was not good enough, adding that she expected more from the company.

  Philip said: ‘My partner hasn’t eaten meat for thirty years, and when it turned out the snack contained pork she was very sick and started suffering from major stomach cramps. I contacted the Food Standards Agency and said that it was lucky it wasn’t a nut allergy or something similar.

  ‘It just raises the question – when is a label not a label? We have the packaging still and it clearly says cheese and onion, so when do you stop believing in what the label says?

  ‘We were considering shopping at Morrisons in Warminster instead of our usual Tesco in Trowbridge but now I don’t think we will be returning.’

  I don’t think we will be returning

  In a statement from Morrisons, the company apologised for the error and emphasised that stopping mistakes like this happening is important to the supermarket chain.

  A spokesman said: ‘At Morrisons, we are very aware that for various reasons our customers may wish to avoid certain foods for personal beliefs, and therefore we take the correct labelling very seriously indeed.

  ‘We were very sorry to learn that the customer was sold an incorrectly labelled product, and have offered our sincerest apologies. We will ensure extra vigilance with regard to the correct labelling of these products, and will closely monitor it to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’

  A family ended up eating Quality Street to fill themselves up after a pub served up a Christmas lunch they say was sub-standard, cold and late.

  Emma from Gorse Hill booked in a day of festive fayre at Covingham Drive’s Messenger pub.

  For £37.99 the Greene-King-owned eaterie offered a three-course set menu, complete with mince pies and coffee.

  But instead of a plateful of Christmas cheer, Emma said the Messenger served up rock-hard stuffing balls, cold dinner and lengthy delays.

  ‘They ruined our Christmas day, without a doubt,’ Emma said.

  ‘It was a joke, you don’t want to cause a fuss but when you have waited an hour for a bowl of soup and two hours for a main course you have to.’

  Emma’s family, which included her two teenage sons and parents, were left hungry after the Christmas dinner debacle.

  ‘By the time I left I was so angry, I just wanted a cup of tea. You don’t imagine you’ll be eating Quality Streets for your main meal at Christmas.’

  By the time I left I was so angry, I just wanted a cup of tea

  When the eight-strong party arrived for their 2pm booking, Emma said her family were told they couldn’t sit down until cutlery was laid out.

  ‘At 2pm there was no sign of cutlery, my mum has a disability and my husband has bad sciatica so I decided we were sitting anyway, regardless of cutlery, by 3pm. By 4pm we were still waiting for our main meal even though three members of staff had come over and checked.

  ‘I had to stab the stuffing balls like you would spear a fish and they were so hard you felt like they were going to break your teeth. The parsnips weren’t so much caramelised as burnt, the other food was cold, it was just a disaster.’

  Emma said she was promised a discount which never materialised.

  ‘I was
told the manager had already cashed up for the day. They offered me a bottle of wine when I don’t even drink, which is a sign of how ridiculous it was.

  ‘I paid an £80 deposit and the total came to £300 when only one of us ate our meal. I feel ripped off. There was another table that had been waiting a similar amount of time to us, and the table next to us had a refund for the desserts that they had been waiting over an hour for and they gave up and walked out.

  I had to stab the stuffing balls like you would spear a fish

  ‘I felt like I had let my family down because I booked the place, and to see my parents not eating because of the cold food was awful,’ said Emma.

  The Messenger’s Facebook page has since had more complaints from fellow diners.

  In a Facebook post Messenger’s manager apologised for ‘letting down’ the diners.

  ‘Folks. I want to apologise for what happened yesterday and I promise you that no one is more let down than myself as a manager. I have no idea what went wrong in the kitchen but for you people that eat with us regularly, know that this is not like the Messenger. I know I can’t put yesterday right as it’s been done but I will be in contact with you individually to discuss this matter further. I can’t apologise enough to each and every one of you.’

  A spokesperson for the Messenger pub said: ‘We pride ourselves on providing excellent service for our customers and we apologise that, on this occasion, we did not meet the high standards expected of us. We are reaching out to the small number of affected customers to offer our apologies and gestures of goodwill and we hope to resolve this to each customer’s satisfaction, so that we can look forward to welcoming them back to the Messenger in the future.’

  A family got more than they bargained for at dinner time when they discovered part of a child’s dummy in a bag of rice from Iceland.

  Justin noticed a strange clear rubber object as he was sitting down to eat with his partner and their children.

  Only when he removed it from the food did he realise it was the rubber teat from a dummy.

  ‘It’s pretty shocking, I was disgusted,’ said Justin.

  ‘Think of the possibilities: I’ve got twin daughters, what if one of them had swallowed it or choked on it. The whole ordeal made me feel sick inside.’

  “The whole ordeal made me feel sick inside”

  The clear appearance of the dummy meant it was not possible to spot in the food.

  ‘My partner had laid it all out on the table and it was only then that I spotted it. I said: “What on earth is that?”

  ‘It was about an inch long, clearly rubber and it had a hollow bit at the top where the plastic would go in. We were shocked.’

  Justin’s partner, Hayley, had bought the bag of egg fried rice from the Iceland store in Gorse Hill.

  It wasn’t the first time she had picked up that particular item so she didn’t expect to have any problems.

  Justin and Hayley rang Iceland straight away to complain about the surprise discovery.

  They were given an email address and asked to send photos but when they did, the response they received did not reassure them that the company was taking the matter seriously.

  Justin said: ‘We rang customer services and they got us to email them the photos. To be honest the answer we got was pretty shoddy – they just said they would look into it, no apology at all.

  ‘It’s really poor customer service, especially from a national company: their attitude to the complaint was totally unacceptable.’

  “their attitude to the complaint was totally unacceptable”

  Justin is now expecting to receive some packaging from the firm so that he can send back the rice and the mystery rubber object to be looked at.

  Asked whether he and his partner would continue to shop at the store, Justin said it would all depend on how the company handled their complaint moving forward, but that so far he hadn’t been impressed at all.

  A spokesman from Iceland said: ‘Please be assured that we take all complaints extremely seriously.

  ‘We can confirm that the customer has been in touch with our customer care department regarding the foreign body. We have arranged for the item to be collected in order for our supplier to carry out a thorough investigation.

  ‘As soon as we have the results of this investigation we will get back in touch with the family.’

  ‘I wanted eight large sausage rolls and two steak bakes,’ said Linda, from Thorntree.

  ‘It was 8.45am and there were no pies at all displayed. I could see bags and bags of pies, all wrapped up on cages behind the counter. The trolley was ready to be pushed out.

  ‘But when I asked for the pies, I was told: “We can’t sell the pies until 9am.” I could have had a fruit pie, but not a meat pie.’

  A queue of five other confused customers formed at the ‘Oven Fresh’ counter in Berwick Hills Morrisons to demand their pastry fix last Wednesday.

  But staff were determined to abide pie the rules, telling customers the store had a new ‘no meat pies before 9am’ policy.

  ‘If they hadn’t been cooked, that would make sense,’ said grandmother-of-four Linda. ‘But the fact that they were baked, well – it’s ridiculous.

  the fact that they were baked, well – it’s ridiculous

  ‘If I could’ve reached over, I would have grabbed them myself. I wasn’t waiting fifteen minutes so I went to Cooplands. I was disappointed to say the least.’

  She added: ‘They are dictating to me when I can buy pies and when I can shop.’ Husband Tony, who eats fish and chips three days a week and rarely touches pastry, branded the decision ‘stupid’.

  They are dictating to me when I can buy pies

  The customer said: ‘When you’re faced with that situation at the counter, you start thinking: “Is it Candid Camera? Is it April Fool’s Day?”

  ‘You can have fruit pies, but you can’t have meat pies! We have always been able to get the pies before 9am. The decision makes no sense. I can’t see any logic.’

  Morrisons told The Gazette there is no ‘hard and fast policy’ and meat pies are simply baked for 9am to match customer demand.

  But Tony suggested a more sinister explanation.

  ‘There’s more to this,’ he said. ‘Morrisons have got their own agenda. They don’t want people to know about it. They have given too many ridiculous stories about why. They contradicted themselves over and over.

  ‘Who do they think us customers are? We are the people paying their wages.’

  The supermarket chain, with 500 stores up and down the UK, has now swallowed a piece of humble pie and issued an apology to the couple for the mi-steak.

  A spokesman said: ‘It appears that in this case we should have sold the customer their pies. We apologise for any inconvenience it might have caused.’

  TRANSPORT

  * * *

  It is part of the human condition to travel.

  See the world, migrate thousands of miles, or just take the bus to the corner shop for a lottery ticket and a four-pack of their second cheapest lager.

  So, with roaming in our very genetic make-up, why the hell does travelling make us so damn angry?

  We’re not talking road rage levels of fury. And not even about taking a plane, flying it all the way to your enemy’s house in order to drop two tons of cow manure down their chimney (although I am very much attracted to this idea in regard to a cowboy builder who still owes me a large amount of money), mainly because most of us have no access to aircraft or industrial quantities of animal turds.

  What we’re talking about is minor inconvenience because the council’s moved your bus stop 200 yards further down the road; or the fact that a railway guard has dared to ask to see your ticket although it is your right as a Sovereign Citizen of This Proud Nation never to have to bother with such fripperies as ‘paying your fare’.

  That’s the time to polish up your best pointing finger and get down to the bus shelter, or as close to the railway station
as the court order will allow, and get your face into the local rag.

  The main point you need to get across in these stories is a simple one: How those pencil-necked desk jockeys at the bus company have completely ruined your life because the bus stop is no longer directly opposite your front door. You may even throw in the winning phrase ‘I’m a prisoner inside my own home,’ even if you are photographed clearly outside your home. I promise you, nobody will notice.

  Even if the bus company hasn’t moved the bus stop from directly outside your door, you may still approach the local newspaper to complain about the bus stop directly outside your front door, mainly because you can’t walk about naked in your own home with all the lights on and the windows open.

  ‘I’m a prisoner in my own home,’ you can tell them, naked as the day you were born, clearly outside your own home. I’m telling you, this would make the front page.

  But it’s not all about buses. There are people with strong opinions about cars, planes, trains and [looking to future editions of this book] spaceships and matter transporters too.

  And if there’s one thing that is guaranteed to fill those thirty-two editorial pages of newsprint, it’s parking.

  People waving parking fine notifications are the bread and butter of local journalism, to the point that news titles are now stationing reporters by the exits and ticket machines at municipal car parks, dealing with thousands upon thousands of aggrieved motorists clutching £100 parking penalties to their chests, and looking like they’ve been slapped in the face.

  Parking outrage has got to the point, in recent months, where staff photographers at your favourite local newspapers have started carrying around a car door as part of their kit, so angry drivers can look like they are waving their letter from Total Bastard Parking Solutions out of a car window because their own motor is now a one-foot cube of crushed metal after they overstayed at their local out-of-town retail park for three minutes.