Huddersfield pensioner Arthur Davies lost no time in contacting local reporters when a mysterious orange glow appeared in the sky behind his house.
‘I’d never seen t’like of it before,’ said Davies, 68. ‘It were like a silent ballet playing out in translucent magnificence, giving temporary form and substance to an erstwhile depthless abyss.’
‘So I told the missus to ring t’paper and tell them it were t’northern lights, just like it said there’d be in t’paper. And then we both stood in childlike wonder at nature writ large on the timeless canvas of nothingness. Each flicker of glowing auroric benevolence seemed to beckon us more clearly than the last, offering us celestial sanctuary from the hard earth below,’ he added.
‘And then Maureen said, ‘Is it not that new ring-road up by B&Q?’. And she were right, it were. Then man from t’paper came and said it were just t’streetlights making t’sky orange. It weren’t t’northern lights at all.’
Mr Davies said that would be the last time he believed anything he read in the bloody papers.
