From the parish pump

 

The local newspaper puts a story across five columns on its front page today: pay up or I’ll sue says bride’s mum”, the story being that a bride and groom had to find a new venue for their wedding reception after the fire escape at a club was condemned. I know Seaford is provincial, but surely this cannot be the most important thing to have happened in the area in the past seven days?
In other news, the reader will learn that a youth let off a firework on an industrial estate, some scrap metal was stolen from a recycling centre and, in the aptly named parish pump section, that a woman was woken up in the night by a car colliding with a traffic island. And people criticise blogs for triviality and parochialism…
The latest Information World Review gives excessive space to the maunderings of Andrew Keen, in both an interview and a review of the Cult of the Amateur. Keen believes, apparently, that the whole of civilisation is threatened by blogs and that the ‘mainstream media’ are the authoritative guardians of our heritage. I doubt if Keen can ever have read a copy of an English tabloid national newspaper, or a local one.