When Journalists Attack: In Britian’s Shark Alley
AS the Sun has reported all week, Britain is in the grip of shark madness. From the Island of Tewkesbury to Anthea Turner’s shark-print cushion covers and dish No. 54 on Mr Wang’s takeaway menu, the shark-crazed has taken bite.
The sharks are coming. Only the Highlands of Scotland are safe, and only then if you stay out of the rivers and deeper puddles.
We Britons cluster together for safety. What to do? We are fin-ished.
Thankfully, the Sun can help. In the front-page news story “We swim with Jaws…AND LIVE!” readers see a Great White shark menacing the Sun’s man in a wetsuit.
“I have reported from the blood-soaked streets of Somalia, tracked down the Taliban and survived a mortar attack in the Israel-Lebanon war,” says Oliver Harvey.
“But staring into the face of a Great White shark was the most terrifying moment of my life.”
But he’s writing the story, right? He’s not communicating from the other side or from deep within the belly of the beast. Harvey is on the scene, gamely dicing with death in the deep. Live from a pothole on Gloucester High Road.
But he’s not. Harvey is in South Africa. He is in “Shark Alley”. He is in a cage. A seal decoy is tossed into the sea. The Great White grips the inflatable in its maw. The decoy is the size and shape of a child.
Egads! Indeed, dear reader. Save us all. And spare the little children and blow-up seals. Harvey returns to the surface. He has survived. But what of the next flood and the meting icecaps?
“The mix of rotting pilchard, seasickness and terror-induced adrenalin was too much and I vomited again and again,” he writes.
And we too feel uneasy. And vow never to go into the water in anywhere called Shark Alley, or that cul-de-sac by grocer’s in Oxford. Not even if we are fleeing the Taliban…
Posted: 3rd, August 2007 | In: Tabloids Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
