The winner of October's Do It Like Prescott award ...

... is Labour MP Mike Amesbury. I found out about this pugilist politician from a feature on my Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet. On the home screen of this handy device, it displays the icons of the main apps I have chosen to put there. Swiping to the right brings up additional screens that I have created. Swiping to the left, however, brings up a page curated by Google in which they display various snippets culled from newspapers, websites, YouTube etc of topics which they think might interest me. They have never actually bothered to ask me what I would like to see but it is mostly relevant so I tolerate it.

 

This is a bit from tonight's offering and my attention was immediately drawn, not to the story of the fisticuffs but those dangling dots, the ellipsis, at the end of the unfinished strapline. Google does this because it wants to jam in as much content as it can onto the screen.  As a result, the most fascinating part of the story has been cropped. 

I could, I suppose, click on the picture and read the details. Sky News would undoubtedly fill in the gaps in a moment.  I could search online for additional information. But that is not the Ramblings way. We work with what we are given. Mr Amesbury punched a man in... in what? This, gentle reader, is what we shall ponder.

This is like one of those smug Radio 4 panel games where the jovial host invites his guests to finish the sentence in the most risible fashion they can concoct, with ensuing hilarity all round. But I need no guests. Here are a few of my suggestions

Mike Amesbury punched a man in ....

• A fit of jealousy
• The saloon bar of the Dog and Duck, Runcorn (his constituency, if you didn't know)
• his dressing gown [Mr Amesbury's or that of his antagonist? Ed]
• the early hours of Saturday morning,
• spite of them having just enjoyed a man-hug and a bag of crisps on the pier at Blackpool
• lieu of accepting the rent on the allotment of which Mr Amesbury is the owner
• order to prove to some doubters that he "still had it in him"
• time to the fast movement of Elgar's Cello Concerto
• a senseless act of violence to draw attention to the lack of police on the streets

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Readers! Can you do better in our "What did Mike Amesbury punch a man in?" competition. Send in your entries to the usual address enclosing a stamped but not addressed envelope²  The winners of the funniest comments will be given the chance to meet Stephen Fry!³   The Editor's decision, should he ever get around to making one, which, quite frankly, is a bit of a long shot given one thing and another, is about as final as it is likely to get unless anyone else wants to step in.

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Footnotes:

1. John Prescott won undying fame for his duel with an egg-throwing voter in the 2001 General Election.
2. Don't bother writing your address on it, we won't be sending it back , but any stamps that can be steamed off will go to the "Pay the Ramblings Editor a living wage "appeal.
3. We will notify you of the country, and if possible, the city, that Mr Fry is believed to be staying in and supply a weblink to a travel agency from which you may obtain tickets for travel. We are, sadly, not able to assist in the financing of any arrangements you may make, nor can we guarantee that Mr Fry will be there, or that he will consent to meeting you if you should happen to be in his immediate vicinity, nor that his bodyguard will not "do an Amesbury" on you if you do rush up saying "I won the Ramblings contest".

Aurora Sensation or not, as the case may be

 I had thought that the idiocy of local news stories featuring enticing headlines, followed by little more than what we serious journalists call "utter bilge", had reached its nadir with the big cat that wasn't story that featured a few weeks ago. How wrong I was! [Good strapline that, I shall save it for future use: Ed].

Today's snippet must rank amongst the most utterly pointless uses of a news medium since, I don't know, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle straplined "Monk finds Holy Grail" and followed it up with "According to a man who claims his neighbour heard about it from a passing minstrel who said his brother-in-law definitely heard a rumour about it at the Winchester Fair from a man called Ethelbert the Liar". We are used to finding garbage from the garbage websites mostly operated by Reach but this is worse. It was on the BBC website. And not the entertainment section either but the BBC News!! [Yes, two whole exclamation marks there and I utterly concur with their use on this occasion, and damn the expense: Ed]

Here it is. I've cut all bar the first sentence of the copy and that is more than enough, believe me.

source: BBC

This is the entire story, bar some stuff about how she went onto social media that is of no consequence. The BBC news department regarded "slightly disappointed" as good enough to record the incident for posterity and to take up valuable disk space on their servers.

There might have been a decent story here. Suppose the content was something like this:

The woman, aged 53, with three childen and a gerbil, became so distraught with worry after telling all her friends on social media about the wonderful aurora that she has left her family home, taken up residence in a beach hut near Sheringham and has changed her name to Boudicca the Unforgiven. She has vowed never to speak again until either seven years have elapsed or she receives an apology and a year's supply of tomatoes from the factory, and has launched a website called FakeAuroras.co.uk which has already attracted no fewer than 14 visitors, including two from Canada who have written supportive messages that they frequently mistake the lights from the local disco as being messages from space aliens.

As it happens, she was just "slightly disappointed". Come on, George King (and when you fill official forms that have the surname first, does it seem odd naming yourself after a monarch?). Not "massively" or "overwhelmingly" or the ever-popular "incredibly" but just a little bit, hardly at all really, in fact she's already forgotten the whole thing, or would have had not a journalist with absolutely nothing to do and a deadline to fill stumbled over her Facebook page and thought "This is it, Georgie-boy, this is the big one, next stop Panorama and look out Amol Rajan, I'm coming for you". Now the whole sorry episode has come back to haunt her and her name is being plastered over the media (but not in this column because we respect the identy of innocent citizens plagued and pilloried by the paparazzi) [I had one of those last night, the cheese was a bit off if you ask me: Ed].

How easy it would be for me to create a few bitingly-satiric spoof pieces such as "Red traffic light changes to green and utterly baffles pensioner" or "Local footballer misses a pass and fans regret it" or "Two teenagers went into a shop to buy something but it wasn't in stock, although it had been last week". I don't think I will. I don't think I can outdo the inanity of the original.