“YOU know when your commute to work begins to resemble the opening scenes from Fargo that it's turning out to be a chilly week.”

This is the line I used to open an article I wrote on snowy conditions last year while at the North Wales Weekly News, and in the interests of promoting recycling I thought it’d go here nicely.
The Champion offices really look like something out of a Christmas card this morning, but only because the car park’s been lost under inches of snow. The stuff dominates the news as soon as it falls, because we Brits aren’t terribly good with it.

I was looking forward to seeing if the Life On Cars Mini really would live up to my suggestion of it being perfect for a snowy commute, but a frozen – and therefore dead – engine saw off that one. Actually, it was a blessing in disguise.

Miserable motorists were trudging along at 15mph when they weren’t spinning, sliding and skidding all over the place, and my new mode of transport (the 42 bus, courtesy of Arriva) only got me in slightly late.

Meanwhile, the editor’s let the train take the strain because his car was too buried to move, while one of our subbing team was lucky to get in at all. Cue the inevitable “Have our roads been gritted properly?” story.

So far I already know that MPs John Pugh and Rosie Cooper aren’t best pleased with the gritting (or lack of it). We’ll let you know the full extent of the misery later in the week.For us, the show must go on, because newspapers don’t write themselves.

Unfortunately – according to the weathermen at least – the snow must go on too...

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IT’S official: OFSTED have cancelled Christmas!

Or at least that would have been the line if a potentially brilliant tip-off on a West Lancashire story had actually come good. Sometimes the best stories remain just that – stories.

The small snag of the tale not being true means it’d be cruel to name the school involved, where a surprise inspection by the education watchdog has scuppered plans to put on a play in their local village hall.

While it’s bad news for us – we love our Christmas pics – I can’t begin to imagine how bad it must be for the poor children who have been forced to postpone their festive treat until January. That’s right. January.

It would have gone fantastically with a piece a colleague’s written this week about Formby children being advised not to shake Santa’s hand this year in case they risk catching swine flu. Yet while there’s no disputing that particular tale (check out the picture in tomorrow’s Champion, or enlarge the picture at the top by clicking on it), mine proved a tad trickier.

While the West Lancashire school’s performance has been cancelled due to an OFSTED visit, a closer inspection of my own revealed it was only a preview performance afforded to a pensioners’ group, and not the final show itself. Naturally said pensioners – by this point the only real losers in this story – refused to comment.

I’m sure some jammy young journalist would have still salivated at the prospect of this festively flavoured story, but in the end I decided to see what I’d get by sticking with the truth.

The next story I wrote was about a Skelmersdale firm marketing a fragrance made just for the Pope. Amazingly, that one really is true…

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IT’S FRIDAY and – with the weekend fast approaching – we Champions have been asked to think of the things that utterly infuriate us.

We’re considering running a series on our pet rants, tentatively titled I’m not being funny, but…, so we’ve asked to come up with the list of things that really grind our gears.

I’m generally quite a placid person, but:

1) People, particularly pensioners, who walk too slowly are really annoying, leading you to think your life is slowly ebbing away as you trudge miserably behind them. Pavements ought to have a minimum speed limit of at least 3mph.

2) Who thought putting supermarkets in petrol station kiosks was a good idea? The amount of times I’ve wanted to spend £5 on petrol, and got stuck for what feels like an eternity behind some twirp who insists on buying not petrol, not diesel, but 28 boxes of Birds Eye fish fingers. Why?

3) Boilers that only choose to stop working on the one Monday morning when you’re running late. Taking a bath in tepid water when you’re already 20 minutes late is never fun.

There’s lots more besides, and if we were allowed to choose people in our lists, I’d opt for the chap pictured at the top for his oft-celebrated role in making the world a slightly better fed – but much more irritated – place.

Do you have any suggestions for what really winds you up? Leave a comment or get in touch at david.simister@champnews.com.

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NEWS just in: the vomiting bug which plagued a Lord Street hotel last week has struck another Southport!

The norovirus which caused the Scarisbrick Hotel to temporarily close its doors after an outbreak among guests is not only rumoured to be affecting a second of the town’s hotels – see tomorrow’s Champion – but in another Southport altogether, according to this report from our friends at Click Liverpool.

I’m not sure exactly which “second Southport” they’re referring to, because as far as I know our pleasant home on the North West coast is the only Southport, in this country at least.

It could be that the winter vomiting bug has defied the laws of medical science and spread specifically to one of our namesakes overseas. However, I’ve checked the news in Southport, Queensland (Australia), Southport, Maine (USA) and even Southport, KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), and so far no outbreaks have been confirmed.

It could be that the subs meant to say a second Southport hotel was affected, but if there any developments from our friends abroad, we’ll keep you posted.

Check out the excellent Funnies Section on Hold The Front Page for this sort of thing.

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HOW would you like some money to set up your own newspaper?

That’s the question being posed this week by the Welsh Assembly, who are considering following up their financial support to radio stations in the principality by giving grants to groups starting their own “community newspapers”.

It’s a great idea, but how will it work?

I worked once on a proud title in North Wales called The Vale Advertiser, which is absolutely the sort of title that communities love; small, but in touch with the people who read it. Or at least it was until owners Trinity Mirror closed both it and its office down last year, and that’s the problem affecting readers of smaller titles across the country.

It’s obvious why a lot of smaller papers have been shut down – they don’t make any money – so the idea of enterprising editors starting up their own operations, freed from the constraints of satisfying shareholders of huge media companies, with Welsh Assembly money isn’t a bad one. The only question is how.

In the Facebook era almost anyone can claim they’re providing “community news”, so it’s tricky to know when to stop sending out the cheques. I know of a hugely controversial blog in the Llandudno area with lots of suspicious exclusives; would they qualify? And if someone’s prepared to give you effectively free funding, what would they expect in return?

Taking steps to make sure people are still wound up by their newspapers together as a community is an important step, but if it’s going to be fair and independent, it’ll have to be watched very carefully.

There’s also one other small problem stopping community-orientated papers like The Champion from being eligible. We aren’t Welsh enough.

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