PLEASE, internet users, repeat after me: I will NOT stand by and let ridiculous, racist lies go unchallenged.
Yes, I know I’ve banged on about this before (remember the whopper I uncovered about Starbucks allegedly refusing to serve coffee to our troops in Iraq because “they didn’t support the war”?), but I’ve had another round robin, just as insidious.
I won’t insult you with the details, save to say it involves a Muslim woman in a bourkah allegedly berating a supermarket checkout girl for wearing “an English flag pin”, and then being taken to task for her “impudence” by a man in the same queue.
No names, no supermarket identified, no town or country revealed. In fact, it had a distinctly American feel about it, despite constant references to “our English troops” as if there were no Welsh, Irish or Scots serving out there.
It could just as easily have been fictionalised and circulated by the BNP (British Nasty Party) and its leader Nick Griffin, who, if Essex voters are really as stupid as I think they may be, might one day be known as Britain’s Barking MP.
Anyway, by the time it reached me this piece of trash had infected at least 25 other web users in the chain, who had added their chorus of agreement and passed it on without pausing to question its provenance.
To each of those recipients I expressed my doubts regarding the email’s authenticity (not least because to have captured the volley of direct quotations it repeated verbatim would have required a tape recorder or 150 words per minute shorthand) and begged each of them to distribute my feelings to anyone else they believed had received the message.
A waste of time? I don’t think so. I can’t believe our brave men and women on the front line would wish to hide behind such a tissue of vicious lies.
COUNTRYFILE, BBC2’s weekly touchy-feely trip to Britain’s rural pastures, came up our way last weekend and the arrival of the presenter for lunch at the Red Lion in Milfield caused quite a stir in the back bar.
“It’s that John Noakes!” whispered Old Bob, deep in his cups remembering Blue Peter. One of the darts players insisted he’d just shared the Gents with Michael Aspel. “Nah, it was Mike Neville,” argued his pal, a great Look North fan.
Quietly, poor John Craven (formerly of Newsround, for all you sixty-year-old teenagers) paid for his lunch and slipped, unrecognised, out of the pub.
POSTAL dispute or no postal dispute, a well-earned word of praise for the postman who managed to deliver a letter which was not only NOT addressed to us by name but which also carried entirely the wrong postcode.
Nice one, Neil Lyons. But who was the silly sender who so poorly addressed our letter? Why, the Royal Mail, of course!
FARMERS up this way have a woeful sense of priorities but, I have to admit, there’s a certain worldly wisdom to these two tales I picked up at Young Farmers’ Night in the local.
First one concerned an old boy who came across his brother lying in the field, stiff and cold and dead to the world. Asked later why he left his collie to watch over the body while he carried on over the fields, he pointed up the hill and said:
“I spotted a ram on his back up there . . . coulda cost me money if I’d left HIM lying!”
Then there was the shepherd who, summoned by his wife’s screams, arrived to find she’d been bitten by the dog.
“That’s the second time this week,” she sobbed. “He’ll have to go!”
The old herd scratched his chin. “There’s a lot of sheep to be fetched down,” he said, and set off with the collie to round them up and pen them.
And THEN he shot the dog.
Yes, I know I’ve banged on about this before (remember the whopper I uncovered about Starbucks allegedly refusing to serve coffee to our troops in Iraq because “they didn’t support the war”?), but I’ve had another round robin, just as insidious.
I won’t insult you with the details, save to say it involves a Muslim woman in a bourkah allegedly berating a supermarket checkout girl for wearing “an English flag pin”, and then being taken to task for her “impudence” by a man in the same queue.
No names, no supermarket identified, no town or country revealed. In fact, it had a distinctly American feel about it, despite constant references to “our English troops” as if there were no Welsh, Irish or Scots serving out there.
It could just as easily have been fictionalised and circulated by the BNP (British Nasty Party) and its leader Nick Griffin, who, if Essex voters are really as stupid as I think they may be, might one day be known as Britain’s Barking MP.
Anyway, by the time it reached me this piece of trash had infected at least 25 other web users in the chain, who had added their chorus of agreement and passed it on without pausing to question its provenance.
To each of those recipients I expressed my doubts regarding the email’s authenticity (not least because to have captured the volley of direct quotations it repeated verbatim would have required a tape recorder or 150 words per minute shorthand) and begged each of them to distribute my feelings to anyone else they believed had received the message.
A waste of time? I don’t think so. I can’t believe our brave men and women on the front line would wish to hide behind such a tissue of vicious lies.
COUNTRYFILE, BBC2’s weekly touchy-feely trip to Britain’s rural pastures, came up our way last weekend and the arrival of the presenter for lunch at the Red Lion in Milfield caused quite a stir in the back bar.
“It’s that John Noakes!” whispered Old Bob, deep in his cups remembering Blue Peter. One of the darts players insisted he’d just shared the Gents with Michael Aspel. “Nah, it was Mike Neville,” argued his pal, a great Look North fan.
Quietly, poor John Craven (formerly of Newsround, for all you sixty-year-old teenagers) paid for his lunch and slipped, unrecognised, out of the pub.
POSTAL dispute or no postal dispute, a well-earned word of praise for the postman who managed to deliver a letter which was not only NOT addressed to us by name but which also carried entirely the wrong postcode.
Nice one, Neil Lyons. But who was the silly sender who so poorly addressed our letter? Why, the Royal Mail, of course!
FARMERS up this way have a woeful sense of priorities but, I have to admit, there’s a certain worldly wisdom to these two tales I picked up at Young Farmers’ Night in the local.
First one concerned an old boy who came across his brother lying in the field, stiff and cold and dead to the world. Asked later why he left his collie to watch over the body while he carried on over the fields, he pointed up the hill and said:
“I spotted a ram on his back up there . . . coulda cost me money if I’d left HIM lying!”
Then there was the shepherd who, summoned by his wife’s screams, arrived to find she’d been bitten by the dog.
“That’s the second time this week,” she sobbed. “He’ll have to go!”
The old herd scratched his chin. “There’s a lot of sheep to be fetched down,” he said, and set off with the collie to round them up and pen them.
And THEN he shot the dog.
First published November 20, 2009 in The Journal, Newcastle-upon-Tyne UK
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