Occasionally the principal function of this job seems to be to field complaints, so it was good to hear from Tony Phillips. “I just have to let you know how good was Wednesday’s reporting of the Syrian crisis. The uncluttered front page with its simple headline above the dignified, heartbreaking picture of an innocent murdered child was stunningly effective. Well done to Martin Fletcher and all concerned.”
The front page was a departure from our usual style, as Simon Pearson, chief night editor, explains: “We had a lot of discussion, and it went on throughout the day, about how to approach this story. The Editor and senior staff were involved in what was, finally, a collegiate decision. The particular concern was about whether it would be right to show a dead child on the cover, but in the end, we felt that what was happening in Syria was so terrible that a new approach was needed. Nothing else would give the story the same kind of impact.”
Certainly this approach doesn’t seem to have been disputed by Times readers. In case my own mailbox was unrepresentative, I looked through the letters, as well as the comments on the website and, remarkably, found only one protester, and even she admitted that the picture was justified once she had read Martin Fletcher’s copy.
Incidentally, an e-mail from Meirav Micklem in Worthing, after my column last week, tends to confirm that my mailbox may be more jaded than is typical: “I was sorry to hear of the negative reactions to Giles Coren’s beautifully hilarious article. I’m Jewish and I laughed my head off at his descriptions of Oslo Court restaurant and its clientele. Sure, if anyone who isn’t Jewish had written the same thing, I’d have been offended, but laughing at ourselves is something we’ve always done. Please tell Giles we haven’t all lost our sense of humour.”
Consider it done.
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What’s that bird?
Someone must be feeling a right tit, if you’ll excuse the expression, after we perpetrated an unfortunate disconnect between text and pictures this week. “It helps,” Michael Stevenson writes from the Isle of Wight, “when identifying birds, to remember that great tits are not blue.”
Fair enough. We must have had a similar problem recently, prompting an e-mail from S. J. Smith, in Durham: “I enjoyed Derwent May’s article on the treecreeper; but if the illustration seriously means to represent the bird, then I’m a labradoodle.”
I know nature isn’t our strongest point — there’s not too much of it beside the old Fortress Wapping — but just to show the sort of issues we have here, I did look up “treecreeper” in our picture library, which is the subs’ first port of call for illustrations. There was only one result, and it was a snap of a horse going over a fence at Newbury.
The picture desk assures me that they are meticulous about demanding the Latin names for birds, flowers, and other such, before they do their research, but that the picture agencies — and occasionally writers, I fear — are not always quite so good with their classifications. Anyway, let’s hope Derwent sticks to blackbirds and robins for a while.
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Playing mind games
Not for nothing is our puzzles section called Mind Games. Last week we made a lot of people feel very clever, briefly, by giving them the same quiz questions two days running, and on Saturday a layout mishap resulted in the last three clues of the jumbo crossword being overlaid with a photograph of the Prince of Wales in a pair of headphones getting down with the youth. No substitute, we realise.
Many apologies for both irritations, and thanks to Doris Clark, who e-mailed to thank me for sending the missing clues: “It might interest you to know that this crossword keeps a group of ladies at the Golf Club busy after our lunch every Monday.”
Respect, Doris. With a few gins, I hope.
The cheek of it
There has been no shortage — I wonder why — of pictures of the Olympic beach volleyball team in the paper lately, but their charms aren’t universally appreciated. Ruth Wilson, of Clevedon, North Somerset, took exception to our front page last Saturday: “If I wanted to see cheeks like that on my newspaper, I could buy The Sun. Please do not repeat!”
If she did take our sister paper, I guess Mrs Wilson would know that page 3 tends to specialise in front views, but we get the point. But brace yourselves, chaps. There are an awful lot more abs and glutes where those came from and we’re still seven weeks away from the opening ceremony. I’d like to say we’ll steer away from the beach volleyball and concentrate on Romanian weightlifters for a while, but I think I’d be lying.
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Strictly no bathing
Jerome Starkey wrote a fascinating story from Kenya about the ruined grandeur of Clouds, a one-time hangout of the infamous Happy Valley set. He explained how the ornate bath, with its lion’s head spout, was now unused for lack of running water, and that the current residents “had built a long-drop on one of the lawns instead”.
This prompted an e-mail from “Norman”, who wondered if something had gone missing in the editing. “I would not recommend taking a bath in a long-drop,” he says, and I think anyone familiar with antipodean slang would agree.
Thanks for the tip.
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