A heron

This post was originally a test to see if the phrase "Local man arrested for twatting a heron" could be found on Google.

It pops up from time to time on Twitter in a photo of a newspaper sales bill for The Evening News.

But try as you might, you won't find the original story.

And that's because there is no story - the photo is fake.

Funny, yes. Genuine, no.

Look closely and there are clues. How many local papers would actually use the word "local" in their bills? How many UK evening papers still have "Late Prices"? (Most "evening" papers these days are produced overnight, and many have dropped the word "Evening" from their name.)

As far as I can tell, there are three papers called the Evening News still going in the UK - in Manchester, Edinburgh and Norwich. None of them uses the font Bodoni Bold Italic for their titlepiece.

When the original picture was posted, mid-May 2013, searching for the phrase "local man arrested for twatting a heron" returned nothing. After my original post about it (now heavily edited), this blog was the only link returned by the search.

There are quite a few other links now, but still no story.

This post now has the highest number of clicks on my blog, having overtaken the ever-popular Jane Austen Spreads Her Tentacles. Which is a bit galling when I come to think of it. I've written much better stuff than this. I even won an award once.

Anyway, just to be absolutely clear, I have nothing to do with the original picture. I wrote about it in my blog because I was curious, and because so many people on Twitter seemed to take it at face value.

Local man arrested for twatting a heron. Hmmm.