The Essex Herald

Last weeks headline regarding the Braintree By-election should have read, “Braintree goes to the polls” and not, “The poles go to Braintree”.

Landfill Tawny’s social club, “The Armpit” will reopen this weekend following last year’s mystery fire. New owner Les Being is hoping the opening night will be a great success. Unfortunately, said Les, the original act we booked let us down at the last minute but I was very lucky when my mate Tom put me in touch with a visiting novelty act from Thailand called “The Doppelgangers”. The two women, Lay De Buoy and Sum Young-Chic perform their act using only ping-pong balls’ beer glasses and bananas. Les said, “This sounds like good old fashioned entertainment and we would welcome parents to bring their children along to the opening night as this act should appeal to the whole family.

Before taking on the role of club owner Les was a keep fit instructor. He had to give it up when so many of his students got injured that the Chelmsford hospital fracture clinic named a ward after him. Prior to that Les briefly lived in the USA where he ran a successful Florida dating agency called “Everglade Partners”. This is where he met the love of his life, Hilda Hunchback who you will all know as The Heralds health and beauty expert.

Last week saw the closure of the Landfill Tawny Echo, the oldest newspaper in the world. It is now incorporated in The Essex Herald. The Echo has been printing papers from its works in Schit Street for at least 2000 years. Over that time it has covered many stories. Reprinted below is the front page from July 1943 and covers the amazing tale of local resident, Private Ian Trenchfoot and his daring escape from Colditz Castle. Ian is now 103 and runs the Landfill Tawny museum.

Private Ian Trenchfoot of the Landfill Tawny special reserve heavy armoured division returned home yesterday following his daring escape from Colditz castle. Ian was captured behind enemy lines in early June. He was immediately imprisoned in Colditz.

The Germans said that for him the war was over, but Ian had other ideas. Within days Ian had hatched a plan to escape. "I decided to make a German officers uniform out of old blankets", said Ian. "That was the easy part, getting the necessary travel papers would prove more difficult. Fortunately the type of paper I needed was the same as used by the guards for their holiday rota. I found a guard who was up for a bribe and managed to obtain one sheet of paper in exchange for a bar of Red Cross chocolate, half an ounce of tobacco and my season ticket for The Queens Theatre, Hornchurch, that was a real pity as I was really looking forward to seeing the local checkout girls upcoming musical adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace". We asked Ian how he managed to forge the papers. "It wasn’t easy," said Ian, "you have to make do with what little you can find. All I had was a rusty razor blade, an old potato, some vegetable dye and a Hewlett Packard type 57M laser printer. All those years of watching Blue Peter were not wasted".

The plan worked and Ian made good his escape. He travelled at night and made his way to France only stopping to visit the First World War trenches at Ypres. We asked Ian what he thought was the most dangerous part of his epic journey; “I suppose the most dangerous part was getting the night bus from Basildon to Landfill Tawny, I had to pass three pubs to get to the bus and it was dark.”

Ian has now been granted 24 hours leave before he returns to his unit in Germany.

Pictured below are the forged papers made by Ian

Today was a sad day for train spotters as the Landfill Tawny rail link closed. The line which ran between Landfill Tawny and Chelmsford via Slurry Bottom has been open since 1808. Local resident and chief engineer Patrick Puffer (103) has worked on the line for most of that time, eighty years to be precise. He left for only a short time in the early 60’s to follow his dream and the bright lights of Liverpool. There he joined a band called The Silver Beatles. Mr Puffer told the Herald, “When the band wanted to go to Hamburg in Germany it was all too much for me, I missed my trains too much so decided to leave the band and return to Landfill Tawny. I’ve never looked back”. Mr Puffer used his redundancy money to buy the Landfill Tawny Express which now sits in his garage. “I will get this old girl going again; she only needs a few minor adjustments”

The Landfill Tawny Express as she was in 1956

Lamdfill Tawn Halt 1810

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Patrick Puffer in his garage with the Landfill Tawny Express

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Patrick Puffer with The Silver Beatles in 1961

A massive earthquake rocked the Essex Town of Basildon causing over 30 million pounds worth of improvements

In an attempt to restore normal life, local authorities are working around the clock with civil engineers to restore power to the mobile phone masts.

Local resident Tracy Wannabe said “It was like the worst day of my life, right. You know, I was texting my mate right when like my phone, right went off all of a sudden, right. It’s like so unfair, right. One minute it woz working and then it woz like nuffink”

Spokesman for Essex police Norman Plod said “Despite the enormous devastation I am pleased to say that none of the counties fifteen thousand speed cameras have been damaged”. He went on to say “Falling debris from a house in Vange triggered one of the cameras and we will be speaking to that resident in due course”

Black marketeers wasted no time and within two hours of the quake, tubs of curried flavour pot noodles had risen to over £5.00 each. A local supermarket was looted. Amongst the items stolen were ten bottles of Chablis, three tins of red salmon and a copy of the Times. Police say that acting on intelligence they are looking outside the district for the culprits.

Another local man Mr Angry said, “This is outrageous, I warned the council about this. I said that only collecting recycled waste once every two weeks would lead to disaster. I sent them over two hundred letters and they just ignored them all”

More news as it comes in.

The editorial team would like to apologise in advance if the main picture causes any offence. We received two pictures of the disaster zone, one before and one after. The short time we had prior to publishing made it impossible to select the after shot as it looks so similar to the before shot.