NewsBiscuit

It was returns only last night, at the box office for the revival of Samuel Beckett’s black comedy, starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. The play depicts two down-at-heel political parties who spend the whole play waiting for the mysterious ‘Gordo’ to resign.

Some critics regard Gordo as representing God - a view that Gordo himself appears to share. But nobody really knows what it all means, because after an interminable series of comical and futile dialogues between the main characters Gordo is still in office and nothing whatsoever has changed.

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Paul Atkins, a resident of Ryde on the Isle of Wight, yesterday became the first person to be banned from the social networking site ‘Twitter’ for being far too dull. The Twitter site is an example of ‘micro blogging’ in which users post short messages in the style of mobile phone text messages throughout the day in answer to the simple question ‘What are you doing?’. It rose to prominence during the recent hotel sieges in Mumbai when eye witnesses used it to keep up a stream of reportage from the scene using their mobile phones, posting useful comments like ‘I hear gunfire’.

Mr Atkins, who has recently retired from a mid-level post in the IOW Council’s accounts department, seems to have had somewhat less exciting events to report.

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Arthur Spriggs, 78, of Sandown IoW was found slumped over his computer this morning and later pronounced dead of exhaustion, after attempting to answer every single spam email in his inbox.

Arthur’s widow Maisie, 75, tearfully explained that her late husband was meticulously polite all his life, and believed it was good manners to answer all correspondence promptly.

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A middle-aged couple from the Isle of Wight are the toast of the literary scene today after publishing what the London Review of Books has called ‘the standalone achievement in British literary history’. Mr and Mrs Harris, whose only previous works have included notes for the milkman and a firm but fair letter of complaint to the council about overhanging branches, penned the seven-line postcard for a neighbour while on a city-break in Paris and are now firm favourites to pick up both the Booker and a Nobel prize for Literature.

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Government officials have announced that the historic Isle of Wight town of Shanklin has been selected as Britain’s first set-aside town. During the next six months the municipality and surrounding villages will be evacuated, businesses will be closed and utilities will be cut off. The area will then be left to lie fallow for a two year period.

Set-aside is an old farming method where a field is left unused, or fallow, for a period of time to allow the soil to replenish nutrients and thus remain fertile for the next phase of crop rotation. In 2007 a government think-tank hit upon the idea of using this technique to revitalise parts of the country during recession.

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