By Isle of Wight Observer
At 7am on a Bank Holiday Sunday, while most of the Island was sound asleep, an urgent crisis unfolded at Church Litten. Two council contractors, armed with high-pressure washers, engaged in a race against time. Their mission? To protect somebody unknown from a devastating piece of local gossip before dog walkers arrived: someone, somewhere in town, allegedly, “is a cheater.”
No tax-payer resource was spared to defend the anonymous and faithless lover. The contractors scrubbed hard, leaving a ghostly outline etched into the brickwork. Somebody clearly had their heart broken badly enough to turn to graffiti to make their feelings known.
Yet a few steps away, outside the Lord Louis Library, a far more tragic victim of public slander was being cruelly called out. For months the wall had declared: “SCRUMPY SMELLS.”
Where was the emergency Sunday morning scrub team for Scrumpy? Did Scrumpy not deserve a rapid response? Apparently, being branded a romantic fraud warrants dawn intervention, but poor, malodorous Scrumpy had to endure eternal defamation.
When asked why they protected one Islander’s reputation and not the other, the council explained they were waiting on a “specialist contractor” for the porous brickwork who could remove the offending message, whether it be “spray paint, marker pen, or other substances”. Thankfully, the specialist team eventually removed most of the slur against poor Scrumpy – though they curiously left an intriguing fragment, perhaps suspecting it’s a Banksy original. Although the IW Council has form with one of those.
However, the most important lesson to Islanders is clear: if you are going to be slandered, make sure you’re accused of infidelity rather than bad body odour – at least then you get the VIP breakfast-time clean-up treatment.
Tilly Walder