You can never have too much news about the dangers of narrowboat stoves getting out of control. And last weekend Lewis Cowen of the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald reported the latest tragedy, near Devizes:
Fire fighters from Devizes attended a small fire in a chimney on a narrowboat on the Kennet and Avon Canal near Sells Green.
Two fire appliances from Devizes were sent to the boat just after 4pm today.
They were met with smoke on arrival and the fire was quickly under control.
There is not thought to be any serious damage to the boat.
Of course, it's easy to laugh at this story. But behind it there may be many questions to ask and lessons to learn. Was the stove coal- or wood-fired? Had the chimney been swept properly? Did the smoke spread through the boat? Were alcohol or drugs involved?
These are good questions, but they aren't ones that a local paper will ask, especially when it's a space-filling story as the deadline approaches. And this story might not have reached us at all if it was just going to be published online.
I wonder if the journalist was in a competition with his confrères to get the dullest story of the year into the paper?
It would echo Claud Cockburn's tale in his autobiography In Time Of Trouble, where he says that one year he was the office winner of a 'dull headline' competition in The Times, with 'Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead.'
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