For many years – longer than your ‘umble scribe chooses to remember – satirical magazine Private Eye has featured a column entitled Dumb Britain, which documents the hilariously wrong and ingorant answers given by contestants on television quiz shows.
However, dumbness in the form of lack of knowledge, intelligence or common-sense is not confined to the small screen; myriad examples may be found in real life, as evidenced by the photograph below taken in St Mark’s Road (note the apostrophe, Bristol City Council! Ed.) in Easton last week when the street was undergoing road works.
Maybe Private Eye should expand the criteria for Dumb Britain.
According to Wikipedia, “A county is a type of officially recognized geographical division within a modern country, federal state, or province.”
Within England shires were established in the Anglo-Saxon period, shires were established as areas used for the raising of taxes and usually had a fortified town at their centre. This became known as the shire town or later the county town. In many cases, the shires were named after their shire town (for example Bedfordshire).
Middlesex is one of the thirty-nine historic counties of England. Its name is derived from its origin as a homeland for the Middle Saxons in the early Middle Ages, with the county subsequently part of that territory in the ninth or tenth century. As a county it managed to survive for the best part of a millennium, finally being abolished by the London Government Act 1963, which came into force on 1 April 1965.
The cardboard county of Avon has a rather different history to the former shire named after the home of the Middle Saxons. It was a non-metropolitan and ceremonial county in the west of England which existed between 1974 and 1996. Named after the Bristol Avon, it comprised the cities of Bath and Bristol plus parts of south Gloucestershire and Somerset, which formed the other two local authorities – Northavon and Woodspring – within the county. Avon proved to be deeply unpopular, with locals bemoaning in some instances Bristol’s loss of county status in its own right, as well as traditional affiliations to both Gloucestershire and Somerset respectively. In 1996, the county was abolished and its administrative area split between four new unitary authorities: Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.
Although both Middlesex and Avon have officially been abolished that does not mean their use has been discontinued, usually by the uninformed. There are still organisations out there which believe Bristol is part of Avon and that the county named after the Middle Saxons still exist. One of these is currently in the news.
One of those organisations is Pizza Hut, which has announced a number of closures of its outlets in the Untied Kingdom, as reported by the Bristol Post/Live.
All told, 68 Pizza Hut restaurants will close after the company behind its the US brand’s UK venues entered administration. These include the following five outlets in the aforementioned non-existent counties, as listed by Bristol’s paper of (warped) record:
Bristol, Avon;
Cribbs Causeway, Avon;
Enfield, Middlesex;
Feltham, Middlesex; and
Hayes, Middlesex.
A few news outlets, such as the BBC, actually took the trouble to remove the erroneous county labels instead of blindly copying and pasting the list verbatim from the original press release.
For those still in need of a junk food fix, plenty of other pizza outlets are still open to the public in both real and non-existent counties. 😀
Reports about unexpected or unexplained deaths are not exactly uncommon fare for the local press anywhere.
However, what made this particular incident unusual was the manner in which the reporter chose to represent the subsequent action of the police after attending the incident, as quoted directly from the piece itself.
Efforts are currently ongoing to identify him in order to update his next of kin.
Update?
Use of appropriate language is just as important in writing for the local media as it is to a scientist writing a paper or an author penning a work of fiction. The poor man’s next of kin are not like software or kitchen cabinets!
For the benefit of any passing media studies graduates pretending to be journalists, you would have been told by any half-decent sub-editor that relatives and the next of kin are either notified or informed of their loved one’s untimely demise. Lumping grieving family in with software that needs a bug fix is not only very bad English indeed, but abysmal writing not worthy of being classed as journalism.
Slow news days are typically when a lot of ‘filler‘ material (like food hygiene ratings if your name is the Bristol Post/Live. Ed.) is published to fill the otherwise empty space in a traditional dead tree publication.
However, this tendency and the phrase itself seem to have adapted without any trouble to the digital age and online publishing.
A fine example of this was apparent when your ‘umble scribe visited the Shropshire Star website earlier today and scrolled down the news page as far as the Motors news section.
Click on the image for the full size version.
The observant visitor will notice there is not a tinned, motorised three piece suite in sight in any of today’s stories for petrolheads!
A return visit at 14.00h revealed the pace of news had picked up: one of the pieces shown above was finally replaced by a motoring article.
A huge new floor mural celebrating Bristol’s ‘past, present and future’ has been unveiled in The Centre as the focus for the area that previously had fountains on it.
This new artwork, produced by the artist Oshii and a team of fellow artists put together by the Bedminster urban art festival organisation UpFest, is absolutely stunning and covers an area more than 700m2.
Image courtesy of Our Common Ground
But is it mural? asks the wordsmith who resides inside your ‘umble scribe.
The answer is a definite no in the strictest sense. The Tate, somewhat of an authority in the art world defines a mural as follows:
A mural is a painting applied directly to a wall usually in a public space.
Bristol’s latest public artwork is executed in paint and is in a public space, but it’s on the ground, not a wall or ceiling, so is not strictly a mural in the accepted sense of the word, hence the less than accurate floor mural devised by the Post.
It’s not a mosaic, one of the only forms of decorative artwork applied to a flat horizontal surface as no tiles (also known as tesserae. Ed.) are used in its creation.
Perhaps the term painted pavement would be a better term in view of the existence of the Cosmati Pavement before the grand altar in Westminster Abbey.
Cosmati Pavement in Westminster Abbey. Image courtesy pf Wikimedia Commons
If readers can come up with a more accurate and apposite term for the Centre’s newest artwork (which makes a refreshing change from statues of the dead white males so beloved of our Victorian forebears. Ed.), please feel free to post suggestions in the comment below.
The West of England Combined Authority – usually abbreviated to WECA – was established in February 2017 and covers the local authorities of Bristol City Council, Bath & NE Somerset and South Gloucestershire. The decision to establish WECA – after being proposed by central government – was one taken by the local authorities involved. There was neither consultation of the residents concerned, nor a referendum of the relevant electorates to seek their approval. Your ‘umble scribe therefore regards its democratic legitimacy as dubious.
The first election for the mayor of the new authority was held on 4th May 2017. It was won by South Gloucestershire Conservative politician Tim Bowles, a man who shunned publicity so much he was known by some in local social media circles as Invisible Tim.
The invisibility of the WECA mayor all changed when the next incumbent arrived in 2021, Labour’s Dan Norris. Norris so craved publicity he made great efforts to get his name in the media and in the public’s head so much that his efforts bordered on the narcissistic, leading your correspondent to refer to Norris in social media posts as Dan, Dan the Vanity Man. Indeed, it could be said that Norris would have attended the opening of an envelope if a press photographer was present to record the event.
Norris was renowned for two acts of self-promotion during his term of office, both involving buses. Firstly, his name appeared on posters on every bus stop in the WECA area, but more on that topic later. Secondly, not content with getting his name of every bus stop in the district, Norris decided he ought to be on the side of a bus as well, purporting to promote driving a bus for a living and advertise a free bus travel scheme, but actually a chance to get likenesses of a vain man and his dog on the side of a double-decker. WECA spent £10,000 on this sycophantic stunt that was ultimately ruled to have been spent ‘unlawfully’.
Norris’ term as WECA mayor ended in disgrace. He became an MP and was for the last part of his term of office Dan ‘Two Jobs’ Norris. In April 2025 Dan, Dan the Vanity Man was arrested by Avon and Somerset Police on suspicion of rape, child sex offences, child abduction and misconduct in public office.
Continuity vanity
In May Norris’ term of office ended. His replacement is Helen Godwin, who has been involved in local politics since 2016, according to her Wikipedia entry.
However, very little has changed with the change of incumbent. There’s still a free bus travel scheme (but for children of school age. Ed.) and the bus stop posters now feature Godwin’s name instead of her predecessor’s.
One might believe on the strength of the above evidence that something is seriously amiss in the West of England Combined Authority. For the last four years and for the foreseeable future, the authority seems to be in the grip of what is normally referred to as the cult of personality.
Wikipedia defines the cult of personality as follows:
A cult of personality, or a cult of the leader, is the result of an effort which is made to create an idealized and heroic image of an admirable leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. Historically, it has been developed through techniques such as the manipulation of the mass media, the dissemination of propaganda, the staging of spectacles, the manipulation of the arts, the instilling of patriotism, and government-organized demonstrations and rallies.
In addition to obvious examples like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Argentina’s Juan Peron, the cult of personality has over the centuries affected countries spanning the entire alphabet from Albania to Zimbabwe. It is currently flourishing in the United States where his MAGA lout supporters think Donald John Trump, the disgraced former 45th president and current disgraceful 47th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist in chief, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat, can do no wrong.
In 1988 the US band Living Colour released a single, The Cult of Personality off their debut album Vivid. Taling about the single, band member Vernon Reid stated; “The whole idea was to move past the duality of: That’s a good person and that’s a bad person. What do the good and the bad have in common? Is there something that unites Gandhi and Mussolini? Why are they who they are? And part of it is charisma.“. Reid also remarked: “‘Cult of Personality’ was about celebrity, but on a political level. It asked what made us follow these individuals who were larger than life yet still human beings.“
Some consumer clickbait from yesterday’s Bristol ‘Live’, a Reach plc local news title.
Articles for the same product also appeared in other Reach plc titles such as the Manchester Evening News and Birmingham ‘Live’, although their readers were not informed that curvaceousness comes in four colours, as were the good burghers of Bristol.
The reason for this is because the headline writers on those papers can recognise ambiguity, unlike those at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth.
More years ago than he cares to remember, your ‘umble scribe was asked by one of his local ward councillors (now retired) to come up with a hashtag to publicise our fight against grime – litter, fly-tipping. fly-posting and other environmental crimes – in Bristol’s inner city wards of Easton and Lawrence Hill.
And so #TidyBS5 was born.
Well over a decade later, it’s very encouraging to see others using it, as per this mattress currently gracing St Mark’s Grove.
First Group has a virtual monopoly on public transport in Bristol via its buses and GWR Trains. However, its inability to run any service to timetable – no matter how important – has earned it the nickname of Worst Group.
First Bus was all over the local media at the start of June when it announced the opening of a new bus depot in the city’s Hengrove area for servicing its fleet of electric buses which will eventually total 74 vehicles.
Your ‘umble scribe recently tried out one of the new double decker electric buses on the Number 24 route, which runs between Ashton and Southmead Hospital. On the whole the experience was very positive. The bus was clean, the ride silent and smooth. However, at this point a significant however enters the picture, namely that your correspondent was less than impressed by the greenwashing on the sides of the bus.
Greenwashing (a compound word modeled on “whitewash”), also called green sheen, is a form of advertising or marketing spin that deceptively uses green PR and green marketing to persuade the public that an organization’s products, goals, or policies are environmentally friendly. Companies that intentionally adopt greenwashing communication strategies often do so to distance themselves from their environmental lapses or those of their suppliers.[6] Firms engage in greenwashing for two primary reasons: to appear legitimate and to project an image of environmental responsibility to the public.
Whilst the engines of the new buses produce zero greenhouse gases or particulate emissions, that does not necessarily mean the vehicles are entirely free of emissions, especially when significant elements of the vehicle produce particulates due to wear and tear caused by their function. The two components involved are the brakes and tyres.
Until First acquires vehicles with zero tyre and brake wear, they should continue to be called out for being less than honest with the (travelling) public.
In a further perceived blow to Bristol’s allegedly long-suffering but volubly vocal motoring lobby, Bristol City Council has announced it is investigating alternative uses for two current car parks, according to Bristol247.
One of the two, near the SS Great Britain down the city docks and known as the Maritime Heritage Centre Car Park, is being investigated as a site for up to 150 flats. However, the fate of the other behind the Counts Louse (which some insist on calling City Hall. Ed.) is completely different; it’s due to be superseded by, er, jargon, i.e. special words or expressions used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand, in this instance something termed a last-mile micro-consolidation hub.
Thankfully a picture showing what this could look like has been provided by WSP, the city council’s chosen gibberish partners.
Yer tiz, as we say in Bristol.
Image courtesy of WSP
According to WSP, the gibberish “will provide a sustainable solution for freight deliveries, reducing reliance on traditional vans and supporting the city’s decarbonisation goals”.
Note how yet more jargon has to be used to explain the initial gobbledygook. If two loads of jargon are required to explain a fairly simple concept, perhaps the verbal diarrhoea merchants need to have a long sit down and a rethink. 😀
One of those organisations is Pizza Hut, which has announced a number of closures of its outlets in the Untied Kingdom, as 
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