CRUMBRIA: 28.02.2026
SLEEPY Penrith snoozepaper, the Slumberland & Westmoreland Imperilled, has long indulged the fantasy that it has its finger firmly on the farming pulse.
Yet the weakly rural broadsheet has managed to drop the unforgivable bollock of forgetting that it is the 25th anniversary of the foot and mouth crisis.
Cumbria was the worst-hit county with 843 confirmed cases, 1.1 million animals slaughtered, an estimated £230 million lost, along with circa 7,000 tourism jobs. Some farming families never recovered.
Not a single key stroke marked the solemn silver anniversary in last week’s or this week’s paper.
At one time, any self-respecting “farming editor” who didn’t bust a gut to mark this dark episode in Cumbria’s history would have been deemed fit only for the Knacker’s Yard, and rightly so.
The Imperilled managed to go one worse.
No one supposedly in charge of the paper can say they didn’t know it was the anniversary.
Because the paper featured it this week as a footnote in its “25 years ago this week” nostalgia column, as shown below.
The contrast of the Penrith paper with its far superior rival, the Crumbling News, couldn’t be starker. While the Carlisle paper under Scroogequest ownership is now a shadow of its former shadow, indomitable farming editor, Maureen Hodges, clearly has a working memory and a much better contacts book.
Mighty Mo worked like a Trojan to pull off a front-page ‘splash’ on last week’s anniversary, followed by FOUR hugely readable inside pages featuring reflections, comments, flashbacks and lessons learned, as set out below.
Maureen reflected that the empty fields and smoking funeral pyres of the countryside “will forever be etched in the minds of many Cumbrians.”
Just not on the alleged farming desk, a mere 20 miles down the road in Penrith.
How long till readers decide that the only humane thing left to do is put the snoozepaper out of its misery?
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