TRADITIONALLY, SUMMER PRESENTS many and varied problems for our journalists: hardly any of them feel comfortable in swimming trunks, and even fewer are easy on the eye when semi-naked, yet this, of course, can be dealt with by staying in London, where most decent people wear clothes, if only for protection against our weather. But the silly-season difficulties arise due to the fact that the people who “make the news”, as our journalists term it, flock off to warmer shores.
THUS THE BARREL NEEDS A GOOD SCRAPING to get an interesting story, given that the Michael Jackson issue seems to have petered out long before its expected shelf-life suggested, the parliament has gone on holiday and cancelled the milk for the time being, football transfers seem to have been damaged by the new tax laws and the cricket is as dishwater dull as it is every year.
THEREFORE WE HAVE TO TURN TO ABSURD issues such as that of Jamie Neale, and his “miraculous” surviving of a “twelve day ordeal” in the Australian bush. In clear evidence that junior reporters are dealing with the odd pages in most of our standard newspapers while the big boys are away, the press have taken remarkably different tacks on the story: on the one hand there are the suspicious writers who suggest that going off into the bush with a bread roll, a bottle of water, no mobile phone and apparently no brains was either a confidence trick or the act of a dope; on the other are those who compare his survival to the achievements of Amundsen, Scott, Hilary and Aldrin.
NEALE ENDED UP BEING FOUND in the car park of the Woollaa-Woollaa Ramma-Damma-Billabong Holiday Inn in Hubble-Bubble District, I seem to remember, although perhaps someone should check these names, none the worse for wear. Twelve days surviving the bush without as much as an iPod is going some for a teenager nowadays. But he will be the better for it; so many adults had to do this for eight years, and so, in a way, we are all Bush survivors.
THUS THE BARREL NEEDS A GOOD SCRAPING to get an interesting story, given that the Michael Jackson issue seems to have petered out long before its expected shelf-life suggested, the parliament has gone on holiday and cancelled the milk for the time being, football transfers seem to have been damaged by the new tax laws and the cricket is as dishwater dull as it is every year.
THEREFORE WE HAVE TO TURN TO ABSURD issues such as that of Jamie Neale, and his “miraculous” surviving of a “twelve day ordeal” in the Australian bush. In clear evidence that junior reporters are dealing with the odd pages in most of our standard newspapers while the big boys are away, the press have taken remarkably different tacks on the story: on the one hand there are the suspicious writers who suggest that going off into the bush with a bread roll, a bottle of water, no mobile phone and apparently no brains was either a confidence trick or the act of a dope; on the other are those who compare his survival to the achievements of Amundsen, Scott, Hilary and Aldrin.
NEALE ENDED UP BEING FOUND in the car park of the Woollaa-Woollaa Ramma-Damma-Billabong Holiday Inn in Hubble-Bubble District, I seem to remember, although perhaps someone should check these names, none the worse for wear. Twelve days surviving the bush without as much as an iPod is going some for a teenager nowadays. But he will be the better for it; so many adults had to do this for eight years, and so, in a way, we are all Bush survivors.
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