I wanna tell you a story...or 150

Originally printed in the Bath Chronicle on Sepetmber 2 to talk about the success of the Chronicle's first ever short story competition to write a story in 250 words in line with our 250th anniversary

Sep 2

When you launch a competition in the paper – particularly one that has never been done before – it is always with a certain amount of trepidation.

Will anybody bother entering? Will people take it seriously? And if nobody enters, is there a big enough cloth to wipe away the egg from my face?
A
ll of these went through my mind when we launched our short story competition as part of our 250th anniversary celebrations.

I came up with the idea of getting readers to write a story about TheBath Chronicle in exactly 250 words – it is not an easy task, not one that wouldn’t require a good amount of thinking and planning and certainly not one we had done before.

Would this be an idea like the Sinclair C5 or playing Emile Heskey up front – ideas that were just not meant to be?

Well, I need not have feared. When we closed the entries earlier this week we totted up that we had received more than 150 – a remarkable figure in my opinion as each entry took time and thought to produce.

What has particularly pleased me is the wide range of ages of those who have taken part. It is said that there is a good book (and presumably a good short story) in everyone and clearly age was no barrier in this context. We have received entries from people of all ages – schoolchildren, students, those in their 20s, 30s and 40s, a big batch from those in their 50s and 60s and then plenty in the 70-90 brackets too.

We deliberately asked for ages on the entry form to get a flavour of who enters and it was amusing to see how many people qualified their ages – ie, hello Dean Gallagher of Odd Down who is nine years AND ten months and also to Suzanna Mead of Southwick who is 41 but was keen to tell me that her son says ‘she looks 35’!

One of the other things we did was to make the subject matter for your story completely open and we’ve been astounded at the variety of subjects covered.

We have seen stories set in the past, set in the future, set on the day of Armageddon and set during a number of major historical events including the Second World War.

In addition we have seen all manner of odd chracters entering TheBath Chronicle newsroom with King George III, Beau Nash, Roman soldiers, talking lions and even the odd gull muscling in as our readers let their imagination run riot.

And now comes the tricky bit. Along with a number of my colleagues (who unwisely agreed to help me judge!) we’ve got to try to whittle down this amazing collection of stories into a shortlist – and it really won’t be easy.

There can ultimately be only one winner but I have been so impressed with the quality and breadth of the entry this year that I’m very tempted to make this an annual contest because clearly we’ve got some very talented story writers out there and it would be great fun to have this battle every year.

251 words next year perhaps?

Bath may hate the gulls - but I love brainy pigeons

As regular readers of the Bath Chronicle's letters pages will know, there are many things that make the good people of this fine city very angry.

Issues around transport, planning, cycling, litter, rugby or even God divide our letter writers totally and many debates can go on for months.

There is, however, one victim of Chronicle letter-writing-rage that rarely gets any support at all. And that is the city’s famous (or rather infamous) gulls.




The latest edition of the Chronicle (July 9) for example has two different letters on the subject and it is fair to say neither writer exactly recommends the gulls for local citizens of the year. These poor feathered chaps seem about as popular as well, bird flu, with most inhabitants of this city.

My main problem with them is not that I'm woken up at ridiculous hours by these birds (as many people are), but that I suffer from what appears to be the city’s
11th commandment, the one that reads:

'Whenever thou washeth thy car, within 30 minutes one of the flying squad will have depositeth their load on thy bonnet'.

It is uncanny how they know that I’ve been to the car wash. But they do. They really do.

Now, I’m not about to defend these gulls (and please note they are not actually seagulls for we have no sea) but I did get thinking at the weekend that one of their nearest cousins might possibly just be the most intelligent creature on this planet.

Now allow me to explain . . .

Let’s imagine that I ask you to meet me at 9am tomorrow at Bath’s new bus station. All I will tell you is that we are going on a bus journey to an unknown destination. I will ask you to bring no money, no maps, no compasses and no other form of navigation.

I will then fill the coach with hundreds of other people, black out the windows then drive you to the coast, put you on a ferry and then travel deep into Europe. At some point I will then throw open the doors and say: “Now find your way home without looking at any road signs or talking to anyone. And do it quickly because we are timing you.”

It would be a pretty hopeless task, wouldn’t it? But not, oh reader, if you are a homing pigeon.

Probably because there is no football on at the moment, I’m spending far too much time thinking about odd things and having seen a few pigeons fly over my house on Saturday, I got to wondering how on earth these gull-esque types can be routinely dropped in the middle of nowhere and still get home for tea?

I did a bit of research which made me even more confused (it talked about them using the ‘Earth’s magnetic field’ or the ‘spatial distribution of atmospheric odours’, whatever the heck that means), but it seems nobody really knows how a pigeon does it. Especially as we all presume they have a very small brain (i.e. if anybody calls you bird-brain it is not usually a compliment.)

So is it just possible that Jack Duckworth was right all along and pigeons might just be more intelligent in their own way than the average Nobel Prize winner?

Apparently not everyone agrees with my latest bizarre thesis about these underrated flying machines because I saw an authoritative list of the top 10 most intelligent animals/birds and it was dominated by monkeys and the odd dolphin and pig.
Birds were nowhere to be seen and only the African grey parrot seemed to pass the animal IQ test – but, hey, I sure would like to see them fly back to their continent . . .

So the next time you, or I, curse the sticky deposit of a gull or indeed a pigeon, maybe, just maybe, we should think again. They must just be spreading some genes of the most incredible intelligence on Earth.

Or am I just gull-ible?