Pete Cashmore: Crocodile selfies, an election mishap & spicing up toilet time

The chocolate advent calendars and pigs in blankets (mmm, pigs in blankets. . .) have appeared in my local supermarket, the Wolves FC shop is selling some truly ghastly – and I mean that as a compliment –

Christmas jumpers, and the mercury on our collective thermometer has plunged as icy winds have started to blow.

Now the one thing you can expect from this time of year is dodgy festive cash-ins. It's just the way of things that purveyors of everyday items attempt to cash in on jovial yuletide bonhomie, it happens every year.

Even so, I had to chortle/shake my head in disbelief at the news that one high street retailer, who shall remain nameless, is this year producing a type of toilet paper that is specifically scented with mulled spices.

Indeed, so festive and authentically Christmas-smelling is this toilet paper that it actually has a little Christmas tree and two snowflakes on the packet. This, it practically screams at us, is THE most festive of all toilet papers, and to use any other kind of toilet paper during this most wonderful time of the year is a direct insult to the baby Jesus.

I don't know about you, but when I pop to the lavatory, I want to be sure that my tidings of comfort and joy don't dip one iota, so to have a toilet roll on hand that will remind me of drinking warm spicy wine in a nippy beer garden will provide me with great delight.

I just wish that they did a version that smells of pigs in blankets.

The US election is now over which, from a writer's point of view, is like having an overflowing goldmine of material unceremoniously dynamited in front of your very eyes.

That said, with Donald Trump the winning candidate, it's unlikely we'll run out of stuff to write about for a while. Pretty much everybody in the right-thinking world was desperate for Trump to lose – oh well – and in the final days before the big election, newspapers all around the world were pulling out all the stops to remind us what a reprehensible human being he is.

As a writer (or so they tell me), I was particularly impressed with Canada's Toronto Star, which took the time to publish 500 lies that Trump told during his campaign. 500 lies! Not even Nigel Farage could manage that.

The general consensus is that Trump was so economical with the truth that he may as well have claimed to have seen footage of Hillary sacrificing kittens in a bid to appease her pagan gods, for all the difference it would have made to the veracity levels of his general bilge-spouting.

But my favourite story came from New Hampshire, where Trump was visiting with his retinue, which included campaign chief executive Stephen Bannon, one of the people responsible for coming up with Trump's messages and making sure that he stuck to them.

As the group prepared one such message by feeding a speech into a teleprompter on stage, one of the hot lights on the stage started to have an unfortunate effect on Mr Bannon's trousers. To put not too fine a point on it, they started to smoulder. Had he not noticed the acrid smell of burnt acrylic, there may well have been a calamitous trouser eruption that endangered his very life.

In other words, as they composed one of Mr Trump's lie-heavy speeches, one of his campaign chief's pants were on fire. There are some stories where a punchline simply isn't necessary.

And there are some stories which simply must be told, thunderbolts of news so Earth-shattering that to deny their telling would be like holding back a tidal wave with a cocktail umbrella.

This is one of those stories.

It comes from the Westmorland Gazette in the Lake District, and it's a real 'hold the front page, stop the presses and hang onto your hats' classic.

Basically, and I shudder even as I type the words, Carnforth Civic Hall has got a new vacuum cleaner.

I know! The newspaper understandably went big on this exclusive and provided their readership with all the salacious details of what I'm pretty sure is now known in Carnforth and the surrounding area as Vacuumcleanergate.

The old one, it was revealed at a council meeting, was 'no longer serviceable' and so public funds, taxpayers' money indeed, was splurged on a new one.

The article didn't say what kind of vacuum cleaner the new one happens to be – my money's on a Dyson, they seem very popular at the moment – but then when you have a story like this one, you don't just splurge it all in one go, you drip-feed it to your readership in instalments.

I for one will be following the breaking story of the new Carnforth Town Hall vacuum cleaner every step of the way, and will keep you, my beloved reader(s), informed.

One of life's great pleasures, apart from laughing at absurdly dull local newspaper stories, is laughing at those less fortunate then yourself in the brains department coming a spectacular cropper.

Step forward Danish backpacker Johnny Bonde, who is currently recuperating in hospital after. . . well, being a bit of an idiot really.

Young Johnny was in Lake Kununnura in the north of the country last week, when he spotted a freshwater crocodile. Rather than submit to the normal human instinct to run away very fast, he decided to attempt a selfie with the croc in the background.

"Next thing I know," said Johnny from his hospital bed, "I was sliding down the river bank. . ."

The upshot of it all is that Johnny, to put not too fine a point on it, fell backwards and landed on top of the crocodile. And none of us really wants to be bodyslamming a crocodile, it's not going to end well.

Understandably peeved, the beast decided to get the hapless tourist by the arm and shake him about a bit, severely chewing up his arm in the process. Johnny, luckily for him, was able to scramble away, albeit with an arm looking like a well-munched ham.

"It was me being stupid," he said afterwards with admirable self-awareness. Any more stupidity of this magnitude, and a tilt at the US presidency must surely follow.