Are you local?

Every day I tend to pick up the local rag, the Yorkshire Evening Post. As the name suggests, it's a paper that's available every morning, and has lots of news of things to do with Yorkshire, except stuff in Bradford, Halifax, Hull, York, Scarborough, Doncaster, Sheffield, Huddersfield or anywhere not within spitting distance of Leeds.

Inside, you've got the typical local type things that you'd expect. You've got the day's burning headline, usually featuring some pie-in-the-sky rumour about some multi-million development that might be coming to the city, you've got the typical "ahhhhhhh" story, the pointless space fillers and more local sport that you can shake a stick at.
You've also, bunged somewhere in the middle, got the letters page, which is always cause for some amusement.
You usually get the village idiot or the local snob moaning about how such and such is the end of all civilisation as we know it, how all the roads shouldn't be resurfaced and how we should all have to drive around on dirt tracks so that the bi-centenary roadworks don't cause traffic jams and how breast-feeding in public is the root of all evil.

At the moment though, I've been engrossed in the current drama that is the smelly bus drivers.
Basically, the paper ran a story of the 'pointless space filer' catagory saying that a survey found that buses stink. Now we all know that buses stink in the colloquial sense, but this survey focused more on the litteral term of stink, reffering to the unsavoury odour of Leeds' bus drivers.
The day after, the paper must have been absolutly inundated with a letter agreeing completly with the surveys findings and how the smell of the bloke sat in the front cab was the very breason why he doesn't use public transport, much preffering to drive his Mercedes to work. Two days after, around three more letters, two from bus drivers completly denying the charges put before them and then, another day later, a helpful reader give her advice on how people could stay B.O free by simply using anti-persperant and washing their shirts. A sort of public service if you will.

It's over a week and a half since the story ran and the letters are probably still flooding in. I sometimes question why I buy the paper, seeing as there isn't that much 'news' of interest, but the comedy value sometimes is unrivaled!