THE MAN IN THE CRACK

CRUMBRIA: 1.4.2026

It was just after first light at Cumbria Chronic HQ five weeks ago when I received the first of a string of bewildering messages. It was “Old Tom” or, as he preferred to call himself, “The Man in the Crack.”

At the time I was staring down a day of the usual political tip-offs: axe-grinders with a scandal to share, but no evidence whatsoever for me to publish.

The rain here hadn’t stopped for three days. Dawn had brought in a sea fog to the yard, like something out of a horror film. Inside, my oats tasted off and damp had infested my cupboards. Two writing assignments had fallen through.

I was inches away from shutting down the Chronic and packing it all in for good. Hell, why not take some ludicrously paid part-time PR job? My bank account said: “yes”, but all my instincts of right and wrong screamed: “Don’t you dare.”

Instead, I decided to reply to Old Tom. Yes, I messaged him, I would follow up his story.

I wanted to know more about “The Man in the Crack”. I wanted to meet the man caught up, as he said, in a hellish town hall twilight zone.

Old Tom’s main complaint, at first, left me cold. He told me he was being “hounded” for non-payment of Council Tax. “Isn’t every bugger?” I asked. Then he let slip the twist. Two councils were chasing him. Since local government reorganisation and a redrawing of the maps here, half his ramshackle farmhouse in the wilds had been placed in Cumberland, while his sprawling garden, shed and barn bedroom had been wrongly designated as falling into Wokemorland.

A hell on earth, barely imaginable.

Or as Tom put it: “They’ve split the map! I’ve fallen down the crack in the arse cheeks of two councils. I go to kip in Cumberland but can get up, walk along my landing and have a slash in Westmorland and never leave the house.”

Both councils wanted their pound of flesh, he said, and it was getting serious. They were bombing his house with brown envelopes. “Those buff ones with the little plastic winders in,” Tom unnecessarily over-explained.

It was all coming to a head soon, he said, with what he described as a “big, fuck off court case”. Could The Cumbria Chronic, he asked, the most accurate but least factual news service out there, catapult his story into the national media?

“Possibly,” I said. “Go on.”

Badly painted council boundary lines were not Old Tom’s only complaint. The real trouble, he said, was “me bloody bins”. Both councils were passing the buck over who should take which bin away, he said.

“My old fella used to say they give them a job in government because they couldn’t push a fucking broom cart!” said Tom. “You ring ’em up and it’s just awah, wah, wah, wah!” He said he was sick of people in authority always telling him to go online. “Sod that for a game of dominoes!” he said. “I haven’t got any of that hi-fi and wi-fi and bi-fi and fucking hi-fly and shit-fi. You do realise it’s a spying instrument, don’t you?”

“That’s only the start of it. Wait till you hear about me pothole. It looks like an asteroid’s come down.”

I agreed to meet Tom at his local pub. For legal reasons and to conceal where he lives, I’ll have to call it the Cock and Bull. I’ll also have to refer to Tom’s place as “Boundary Farm”. A good name, given that it was, he said, at the centre of a legal boundary dispute “heading for Strasbourg any second now,” which would bring down the political leadership of both councils, prompt fresh elections and vaporise every council tax bill in a mile-wide radius of the disputed area.

The pub was in one of our timeless backwaters. Somewhere between Aspatria and Wigton. Old Tom’s ridiculous directions didn’t help me find it. “You’ll see a massive pylon on your left, right? Ignore that. You want the right one as you come left. Go past the old bus shelter they’ve taken away and come hither towards the field that’s got a bull in it.” Finding it wasn’t easy. I frantically circled a four-square-mile area, getting more antagonised on every circuit. I ended up missing Old Tom, who claimed he had been outside all the time “shouting and waving like a daft bastard.”

Old Tom was shorter than I had imagined: badger-like and barrel-chested, with fat fists and something black and furtive buzzing around his pale blue eyes. Although that might just have been a little fly trapped behind the lenses of my own glasses.

Tom said he was a retired tanker driver for Pirla Fuels Ltd, and had inherited the land just prior to the Council reorganisation. He had brought with him the tell-tale sign of obsessives everywhere. Four over-packed A4 folders zipped in crinkly freezer bags. For two hours we went through maps, leases and legal letters, many of them contradicting each other.

“I just keep topping meself up with this stuff,” he said of his whisky, of which he had five. “It’s a preservative!”

“Come on, let’s go to the farm. I want to show you Vredefort.”

I later learned that Vredefort was the name of the world’s largest crater.

To be honest, I was bitterly disappointed. The pothole was noticeable, but I’ve seen worse.

“I’ve seen bigger dog poos,” I told Tom. He ranted on that one council had been out and filled in “half the hole” and told him the other council would “come back to do their half.”

In this day and age, that seemed entirely feasible.

Leading me down an overgrown garden path, we walked the “disputed” edge of the council boundary in a light drizzle. Then he reached the precise point, where, he said, the two council “lines” had incorrectly met. He stopped and spread his legs and arms as far as his bad hip would allow.

“Look,” he yelled in the rain. “This leg’s in Westmorland! And this one” — he pulled it awkwardly across with both hands — “is in Cumberland!”

“That line you can’t actually see should not be there,” he shouted, pointing in the direction of a bull that was noisily evacuating its bowels.

“And if that line isn’t really there, then this place doesn’t exist.” By this time, the back of my throat was starting to catch the overpowering wang of bullshit on two fronts.

“But where’s your hard proof, Tom?”

“I’ve got proof!” he roared. “I’ve got a photo of one council manager who came out here last year. He had a pencil-thin moustache and highly polished brogues, giving it the big ’un about geographic studies and this studies and that studies and liberal studies. I said, ‘How tall are you, son?’ He said, ‘Six foot one.’ I said, ‘You should be in fucking Tesco stacking the top shelves, then.’ He said, ‘You can’t talk to us like that.’ I said, ‘I just fucking have done, mate!’”

I decided it was time to leave. Before I did, Tom insisted on showing me his collection of handmade bus shelter replicas, built in honour, he said, of various historic bus shelters taken away. On one of them he had written in magic marker: BUS WANKERS. “Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Because absolute arseholes wouldn’t fit,” he replied.

I made the mistake of suggesting that, while local government seemed to want the shirt off your frigging back and its leaders were always playing silly buggers with politics, it still contained a lot of good people just trying to do a difficult job.

“That’s absolutely politically correct bullshit!” Tom exploded. “The people running these places now are absolute no-marks who get paid £80,000 a year to talk absolute shite. These are the bastards now in charge of things, which is why this country is so fucking fucked.”

I drove away, leaving Tom alone in the lane, staring at the ripples blowing across Vredefort.

Back at Chronic HQ, I made a few discreet calls and things took a stranger turn. One of my contacts could not confirm any names linked to the address Old Tom had given me for his property, citing GDPR. But they said there was no such property anyway. The other council’s electoral register, contained a very similar-sounding property but not the right name or his name.

Nothing tallied up.

The pothole, the farm and the “man in the crack” were all there. I had seen them with my own eyes. It was only the official paperwork that had begun to go haywire.

I then established there was no impending European court action involving Boundary Farm. Nor has there ever been any limited company called Pirla Fuels Ltd.

I needed to know Tom’s game.

I went back out to Tom’s place but there was no sign of him. His bins had blown over and Vredefort was under water. I called at the pub. A different barman this time said he didn’t know anyone called “Tom”, but when I described him, he identified him as “Jack”, known locally as “Joe” or “matey boy”.

“Joe, he said, had gone to stay with his brother in South Africa warning regulars that the national media “are about to descend” .

Reaching for a glass, the barman told me: “He’s never been the same fella since he was laid off.”

“Aye,” I said. “Pirla Fuels?”

“No,” the barman replied. “The council. He got the push a while back.”

My blood ran cold. “He can’t have worked for the council,” I said. “He spoke far too much sense!”

Not long after that, in a series of messages, “Tom” admitted he had been “pulling my pisser” all along. He had not give me the true details because he hadn’t been sure that I wasn’t from ‘the authorities’ myself. Sure enough, his late-night message bombardment gradually faded. “Don’t print a word or I’ll see you in court as well!”

By then, it was hard to tell whether he wanted help, publicity or simply an audience.

Whatever his real identity was, that’s where my story ends. Tom, Jack, Joe — it hardly seemed to matter any more. By then, I was no longer entirely sure that I hadn’t fallen down a crack in Cumbria myself.