A change would do us good (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

A change would do us good

3:49pm Wednesday 18th February 2009

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I think we need to stir things up a bit.

The office, quiet as ever on a Wednesday afternoon as two of the three newsdesks are able to chillax, have lunch and stop panicking, their deadlines having been and gone, is rife with gloom and doom.

It's a festival of misery right before deadline. Everyone's stressed and tetchy and worried about getting everything to fit together and the flow of silly comments, today anyway, is at an all-time low.

On top of this is the continuing flood of terrible news (death, destruction, fly-tipping. Actually, the fly-tipping story's quite funny this week but you'll have to wait to see it in the paper) and if things don't change, there is, I fear, a real risk of a collective nervous breakdown.

Entertaining as that might be to the outside observer, it would probably be better avoided for the greater good of the news consuming public and I therefore propose a radical change.

This is a public appeal for GOOD NEWS. Or FUNNY NEWS. Or even DOWNRIGHT BIZARRE and FRANKLY IMPROBABLE NEWS. We need more of it. It might not go in the paper as I doubt it would do enough to stem the tide of bad news, but it would at least make us all a bit less miserable for a while.

Please, save us all from weeping into our rapidly cooling cups of undrunk tea. Throw us a bone! If you know of a retired circus monkey that saved its owner's life by enacting an elaborate acrobatic display in the front garden, thus alerting the authorities to an imminent fire, let us know.

Or perhaps your elderly grandmother is a former member of the KGB and spent the greater part of her life on the run after becoming a double agent for Britain but has since been exonerated and now campaigns for the rights of endangered Sumatran bushbabies through tap dance.

Or maybe you beat an incredibly rare and life-threatening elbow disorder and went on to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe in an inflatable row boat, thereby raising several million pounds for charity. Actually, that probably would go in the paper, thinking about it.

Or at least it would be more likely to go in than the monkey thing...

The best we've mustered so far is a potential fight to the death between two of the senior reporters - you know, all in the name of good journalism - but sadly, (or not, depending on how you look at it) that came to nothing. At any rate, you get the idea.

If only such utterly fantastic and miraculous things actually happened in real life...