The Place of My Birth Has Gone Insane

Posted on the campus of  East Tennessee
University Campus. Source

I was born in the North Devonshire town of Bideford, which is located on the North coast of that English peninsula jutting South-Westerly from the mouth of the River Severn where it merges with salt water at the city of Bristol. So far as I am aware, at the time of my birth, Bideford was a sane and civilized place, although as we moved elsewhere shortly thereafter, I remember little about my time there other than the occasion of being held in the arms of a red-faced gentleman shouting over the banister to someone downstairs: "It's a boy."

But in recent times, so Breitbart reports, under the all pervasive pressure of politically correct propaganda,  the town of Bideford seems to have suffered something of a collective neurotic break.Trouble arose over the fact that, 160 years ago, the Victorian author Charles Kingsley, in his historical novel Westward Ho!, dubbed Bideford “The Little White Town,” because of the many white buildings which give the town its character. 

In reference to this literary designation, mention of "The Little White town" appear on signs at entrances to, and within, the town, a fact that has now caused panic. Thus:

town councillor and former town mayor Dermot McGeough complained that “The wording ‘Little White Town’ can be perceived as ...racist and not politically correct”.

Specifically, Mayor McGeough said that:

“The wording ‘Little White Town’ can be perceived as a racist slur...” At a council meeting, he therefore put forward a motion that “the words ‘Little White Town’ be removed from all signs within the town and at the town entrances.”

Happily, it can be reported that a survey of town residents revealed opposition to this piece of imbecility by a margin of more than two to one. but Council was insistent, although, in the end, it opted for a compromise, ordering signs to bear the words: “Charles Kingsley’s ‘Little White Town’ (1855),” suggesting to any politically correct twit that it was just Charles Kingsley who was a white supremacist, not the present-day inhabitants of the town. 

But Bideford's PC cretinism may not yet have run its course, since Councillor Peter Lawrence raised the question of whether ‘Bideford Black,’ a unique earth pigment mined in the area, should be renamed.