Yes, there's a pandemic, but the silly season isn't cancelled. Cue the invading jellyfish
Whatever happened to the murder hornets? Weren’t they supposed to be here by now, murdering us? A man in my local Covid-19 mutual aid Whatsapp group says he saw one outside a nearby Indian restaurant; a claim I might have screengrabbed and sent directly to the tabloids if we hadn’t by now moved on to jellyfish. We’ve had sharks, killer bees, and a “lion” on the loose in Essex. But if you were wondering whether – during a pandemic – silly season is cancelled, the answer is a definitive no, and its poster child for this year is the jellyfish.
Supposed invasive species have been a British summertime stalwart, certainly as long as I can remember. This month, in spite of another quite obvious threat, a number of scare stories about “swarms” of jellyfish are involved in turning the British coastline into what the Sun headlined “Jell on Earth”. Which is both a cute attempt at distraction and a nostalgic call-back to a time when the risk of getting stung by something might have been a serious worry. Because, in the months without any input from Westminster, we have to be terrified of something. Does the prevalence of invasive species and dangerous foreign fauna in these news stories have anything to do with a deeply racist and xenophobic national psyche? Well, I can’t say for sure. But coverage of “Africanised” killer bees in 2018’s silly season definitely nudges me towards “yes”.
What a quaint, quirky, and not remotely dumb little island we seem to inhabit, while our MPs are off on their holidays
Oh, for the days of nail-biting over “stoned sheep”, though. In May 2016, several national publications ran a story about a “psychotic rampage” carried out by some sheep who had eaten the remains of a cannabis farm fly-tipped in an inevitably “sleepy” Welsh village. All was well until the local livestock became drug addicts, wasn’t it? What a quaint, quirky, and not remotely dumb little island we seem to inhabit, while our MPs are off on their holidays. Speaking of which, it wouldn’t be silly season at all without sharks.
In July last year, the Mirror warned us that great white sharks “could stalk UK waters by 2050”, and that “some” had claimed they had already arrived. I guess it’s Steven Spielberg who has the most to answer for when it comes to the media’s obsession with shark attacks. But according to the often-repeated factoid, falling coconuts kill more people than sharks. Sure, fact-checking website snopes.com traced this dubious titbit back to a press release by a travel insurance company. But I’d still like to see a silly season article on killer coconut trees – if only to balance out the shark content a little. Shark content which can, in fact, be traced back to the 19th century, in which a Times letter to the editor from August 1898 mentions a “5ft shark” being hauled onto a fishing boat in the Channel.
While we’re on the subject of charismatic megafauna, possibly the greatest and most archetypal silly season story of all is that of the 2012 “Essex lion”. On this historic occasion, several sightings of a big cat near Clacton-on-Sea, including a photo so grainy it could be mistaken for a post-impressionist painting, prompted an “extensive” police search. In a twist not quite worthy of M Night Shyamalan, the “lion” turned out to be a slightly large ginger domestic cat named Teddy Bear. This is a story that, in the context of Covid, now seems well and truly, off-the-chart twee.
It’s almost quite galling to look back on a time when The Discourse covered anything other than the effectiveness of face masks, or a raging argument over just how many people will die if we reopen schools. Even if we have strayed into “swarms of jellyfish” territory this summer. Oh, and according to both the New York Post and the Daily Star, the murder hornets haven’t gone away, after all. I get the strong sense “murder hornets” are going to be one of those wart-like scare stories that seem to pop up again and again, from year to year, without any of the fearful speculations seeming to materialise. Like the invincible “giant London rats”, or the spiel about cats spreading brain parasites that make us love them.
But jellyfish, plagues of venomous insects, lions and sharks aside, we all know that the deadliest animal alive is none other than man. Which brings us to what is possibly the most frightening silly season story of all time; that of Cat Bin Lady. In late August 2010, CCTV footage of a woman picking up a cat and tossing it into a wheelie bin resulted in the Independent headline “Is Mary Bale the most evil woman in Britain?”. Mary Bale (AKA Cat Bin Lady), a bank clerk from Coventry, was the slow news sensation of summer 2010. The story had all the hallmarks of such: a cute animal, menacing, grainy footage, a bizarre act for which there is seemingly no explanation whatsoever. Was it a protest of some sort? Was it a single embodiment of the id of a nation at the beginning of the Cameron era? Was it art? Bale herself described it as a “split second of misjudgment”. One thing is for certain though: the golden age of silly season is far behind us.
• Eleanor Margolis is a columnist for the i newspaper and Diva
