England Underwater And The Republic Of Tewkesbury

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

THE Mail uses the words on its front page, resisting the urge to replace “boards” with “floorboards” as Tirley, Gloucester become an underwater reef. The Mirror just repeats the Rime, so too the Sun.

“Looting, panic buying and a water shortage” have stripped the shelves bare, says the Times’ front-page headline.

But there is water in parts of the West Country. Loadsa water. Fill your boots. Fill your houses, your garages and your cars.

“FLOODS CHAOS” says the Express, its long grey beard and glittering eye looking at the £2bn-worth of damage. “IT WILL GET EVEN WORSE.” Egads!” And: “Thousands more face heartbreak in floods.”

This is a disaster. This is Britain’s war on weather. This is Britain’s ‘Nham - Cheltenham. The shelves of the local Sainsbury’s store have been shorn of provisions – even the Jamie Oliver range selling out. Harry Potter books have long gone.

Gloucester and Oxford are on “red alert”. Tewkesbury is cut off from the rest of the country. The Mail speaks of a feeding station offering soup and sandwiches (pukka chicken and couscous) to the stranded.

This is the Republic of Tewkesbury, an island peoples. A woman is pictured walking through the surf with two children. The children are identically dressed in nationalistic pinks and whites. The madness is talking hold in the New Republic. The western wave is aflame with talk of outsiders across the seas with two heads and a thousand, thousand slimy things.

We need to make sense of this weary time; we need a voice to shout. A slimy thing, with slimy legs to tell us what we see.

And here is the Mail’s Quentin Letts to tell us: “My panic rose as fast as the river. Water gushed from the floorboards through every pore in our house.”

There is talk of a “mad, foaming force of brown water”; “little sign of the miseries to come”; “fingers of water;” and “retribution.”

An act of God to punish us all? We should repent and pray that we can swim to Tesco’s…

Anorak

Posted: 23rd, July 2007 | In: Tabloids Comments (7) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink