Even if you don’t live anywhere near SE11, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that last night there was a shit storm of epic proportions last night in Kennington, South London. And I almost meant that literally.
At around 8pm esterday evening, a sewage pipe burst on Clapham road, creating a deluge of poo water, the force of which was so great it caused the road surface to collapse. A literal torrent of poo.
It’s pretty grim stuff – apparently basement flats hat to be evacuated after they became flooded with the water. The shit water. But the unexpected hero of the hour was Arthur Fitzpatrick, a 25 year-old private chef and Kennington resident, who was quoted as saying the police had ‘overreacted a bit’ about the whole thing by the Evening Standard.
Mr Fitzpatrick went viral after the paper also published a picture of him looking as furious as a man from Tunbridge Wells who’d just written a letter of complain to the Telegraph.
Resplendent in red trouser, a tweed jacket, suede shoes and Bo-Jo hair, Mr Harris is pictured clutching his iPad Mini the way most London residents held onto their ration books during a particularly bad air raid in the Blitz. The picture is so much more than the sum of it's parts - it’s unintentionally, laugh-out-loud hilarious.
The Internet has leaped on this the way only the Internet can (basically with a hash tag and a fake Arthur Fitzpatrick Twitter account, which is yet to do anything exciting). Here are just a few of the responses so far…
We have every confidence that Arthur Fitzpatrick will be trending by tea time. But why have we all leapt on the story? Perhaps it's a sign that we’re finally sick of the relentless gentrification of our big cities, pushing house prices up, and the poor out. Or maybe we’re just really enjoy laughing at a man in red trousers looking cross. Which is pretty funny.
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Picture: PA
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.