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Let's take a moment here and be silly.

In fact why just a moment? Why not a minute? Or an hour? A week? To hell with it - it's time to go the whole hog and have a silly season.

This is clearly the path of thought which great media minds of yore stumbled along as they enjoyed a convivial pint in a Fleet Street boozer on a lazy early Summer day. It was probably the start of the same drinking session which led to a national newspaper thinking it was a jolly lark to put ubbs on page 3, but that's another story.

We are deeply embedded in the silly season at the moment, with schools on holiday and Gordon browning himself on a beach (geddit?) we have to look to more unusual sources of news.

It seems that the bizarre is coming to us however, as we have had a spate of bizarre animals bothering the people of Brent. This week started with a lady calling in saying there was a large African parrot in her garden refusing to come down from its tree (the parrot that is, not the lady, I think she was calling from her house, though it could have been a treehouse, you should never assume).

After our reporter Tom Lawrence had discussed the finer points of parrot etiquette (apparently it's impolite to call them Polly on first meeting) the lady revealed she did not wish to have her name in print and the story crumbled around our ears. You would be amazed how often this happens, but if you think about it if we wrote stories with anonymous people in them we could make up any old nonsense (for a good example of this see those columns in more low-brow papers which begin with things like: "Which boy band star has a second nose growing out of his armpit?,,,").

Having been left distinctly dejected by the loss of our squawking story spirits were only raised by the appearance of a reptilian member of the menagerie which is clearly loose on Brent's streets. As he prepared to head off to work on Monday morning Aqeel Bashir was confronted by a rather nasty looking serpent slithering around his hallway.

In my books this is the time to run far far away, all the way to Australia if you can manage it (where apparently they don't have any snakes), and write your house of as an unfortunate loss. However Aqeel and his mum chose the other option and chased their viperous visitor into a bucket before calling for help.

This obviously makes a cracking story, but it does make me wonder what we're going to have discovered next. A lion in the loo? A walrus in the washing machine? Maybe a bonobo in the bedroom (okay, I'll stop now). Whatever the next P T Barnhamesque offering I await it with anticipation and long may the silliness continue.

As an interesting footnote, as our erstwhile Mr Lawrence concluded his interview with Aqeel he happened to mention that his was not the only tropical animal to turn up in the borough this week only to be met with the reply: "Oh really? My mate lost a parrot the other day..."

You have nothing to fear except fear itself.

At least that's what we are led to believe in Harrow.

As the borough's police are so keen to remind us we rank highly amongst the safest places in London (we used to be number one but a few enterprising crooks soon put a stop to that). Obviously this is safety in terms of police crime figures, not the number of people injured in falling piano accidents or subjected to octopus attacks, I'm not sure who keeps the figures for that sort of thing.

But what do you do if your job is tackling crime and there's not a lot of it about (at least not the kind that will get you in trouble with bean counters in Whitehall)? Simple - you go after fear.

Fear of crime is actually a tangible target for modern police and regularly appears on their lists of priorities which need addressing in the borough. I'm not sure exactly how you measure this, I assume with surveys which ask questions such as:

Do you think crime in Harrow is:

a) Less scary than a kitten sneezing.
b) Scarier than the 1960s Batman but less scary than the Dark Knight.
c) Scarier than having to deliver a speech to the Oxford student union while only wearing y-fronts but less scary than waking up married to Amy Winehouse.
d) Scarier than finding out Noel's House Party is returning to our screens?

Whatever the case one of the worse offenders police big wigs (and subsequently big helmets) have identified as causing said fear of crime to rise is us, the humble press.

The problem is real crime, when it happens, is terrifying, but it is also compellingly interesting. This is a basic fact of human nature, and feel free to deny your place in the gene pool, but your average member of the public (and I include myself in this) wants to know what has happened if vans full of cops in lab coats turn up in their street and start turning the place into a spider's web of police tape.

Our job is to tell people what has happened and present the facts in a non-alarmist way. Unfortunately the facts themselves often are alarming, and that's where we can come under fire.

Imagine a chap dressed as a samurai starts racing around the streets of Harrow turning shoppers into sushi with a sword. Now, this is unpleasant, and you may find yourself thinking twice before nipping out to Marks & Spencer for a couple of weeks, but if you picked up the Harrow Observer and our front page story was 'Happy rabbits frolick on the Hill', with no mention of the rampant swordsman, you would wonder what on earth we were playing at calling ourselves a newspaper.

In the end unfortunately it's not the news which is scary, it's crime which people are afraid of, and there really is no way of changing that (if you did achieve this you would end up with a very bizarre world). That said, you should always try to keep in perspective that for every poor victim who makes it onto the front page there are millions of people out there who will never suffer at the hands of criminals. Remember, don't have nightmares.

As a dedicated public transport user one of my pet hates is people conducting conversations on their mobile phones.
I have no real complaint with the noise, unless the chatterer in question is Brian Blessed this will normally be of a reasonable volume, it's not being able to hear the other side of the conversation which gets my elephant (I used to have a goat but that was got too many times in the past - it's trickier to get an elephant).
The thing is I am nosey as hell, and if I have to sit opposite some one-woman knitting circle whose entire side of the dialogue seems to consist of repeating the phrase "she never", then the least she could do is take some time to explain to me what it was Bradley did at the party which has led Sharon to call her engagement off and why everyone thinks Jane's baby looks like a peanut but are all too polite to tell her.
This nosiness is something I believe I share with many of my colleagues, as the beauty of being a journalist is it is a free ticket to pry into people's lives.
As a journalist you can live vicariously through the dozens of people you speak to everyday, questioning them on their opinions, their lifestyles and often the life-changing events they have been through.
I have noticed that very few reporters develop skills outside work after taking up the job.
I'm not saying reporters are talentless, it's just that often they have one degree of separation from a talent.
For example, I can't play the drums, speak Cantonese or fly planes, but I bet if it was needed for a story I could find people who could do all these things with a quick flick through my contact book.
Being a reporter gives you the opportunity to dip into all these lifestyles and our skill is communicating this taster to the reader.
It is our job to ask the questions everyone wants to ask but are too British to pipe up with.
So, just so you know, apparently Bradley "told Sharon's mum's mate Mel that his mate Gary had called Sharon's best friend Tina fat and now Sharon won't have that man at her wedding."

If most careers have a greasy ladder which you must climb then journalism has an ice cliff which must be navigated using only your teeth.
The problem is there are swarms of people who sign up to the hollywood image of reporting, where seasoned hacks spend weeks working on one story, going undercover with the mob, bedding beautiful blonde femme fatales and eventually bringing down the corrupt government.
This means that once you do get a toothhold on the journalism cliff there is a constant stream of keen hopefuls snapping at your heels, ready to jump into your grave if you fall.
However this does have a plus side - this pool of enthusiastic hopefuls provides an unending resource of free labour for newsrooms across the country, under the guise of work experience.
At the Observer we have a near constant stream of work experienceys at our disposal, most of whom come in for a week.
It always surprises me the variety of quality in the hopefuls who come shuffling through our door.
The best ones are quick on the uptake, ask for things to do, listen to advice and get on with things (and make tea without having to be asked).
Occasionally however you get a candidate who I find it hard to believe dressed themselves in the morning, and often look like they did so in the dark.
The very worst just sit in their chair like Banquo's ghost, just staring into their computer screen and practically jumping under the desk if the phone rings.
Some of the things I have seen work experienceys get up to in the past absolutely beggar belief.
We had a chap in once who spent hours emphatically sighing and stretching in his chair like a cat, while achieving absolutely zero work for five whole days.
We started sending him out the office to "look for stories" just so we didn't have to watch his bizarre chair yoga routine all day.
Another young lady went out to fetch a paper from the newsagents ten minutes from our office and arrived back two hours later having "got lost".
I don't mind if work experienceys struggle writing stories or if they ask a million questions because they are unsure what they need to do, these are all things which need to be learned and that's the point of doing the placement. But a lack of enthusiasm is unforgivable.
Yes, you're not being paid to be here, yes, you're being given all the jobs no one wants to do and yes, I will have sugar in my tea, but this is the career you and a million other people want and if you want to beat those other million you are going to have to make the effort.
It may seem harsh but if you make an impression you will be the first person people are looking to if a job comes up in the newsroom so it depresses me when people don't give this opportunity their all.
In the end we have all done our share of work experience and it is always important to remember what it's like when you're at the bottom of the cliff looking up.

Suspicion is an important trait for journalists.
It is always vital to remember that for most people who are speaking to you voluntarily there is normally an angle from which they will be benefiting.
This may be the unemployed mother-of-three who is telling you about the terrible conditions of her council house because secretly she just wants to be moved away from her neighbour, or the local councillor who tips you off about a problem in the borough because it reflects badly on the opposition party.
With both these cases it is possible to see and understand the complainants motivation, yet still make an interesting yet balanced story by exploring both sides.
The most obvious people with agendas are press officers. Quite simply, they are paid to promote good news and limit the damage on bad.
There is an almost spiteful prejudice towards PR in journalism and, whatever seasoned hacks may say, a lot of it is born out of snobbery.
I have not known the supposed "halcyon days" of journalism which the portly red-faced survivors of Fleet Street harp on about at any given opportunity. In these days supposedly no organisations had press officers, you could spend four hours at lunch time in the pub with the head of the Met Police DCI Gene Hunt and pigs flew in the window and dropped stories on your desk as you sat in an alcoholic stupor waiting for the internet to be invented.
Since I started my career everyone from the Mayor of London to the local birdspotting club has had someone who handles their press. As a journalist it can at times be very frustrating to have access to organisations restricted to a small team of employees and there is nothing more infuriating than turning up at the scene of a police incident only to be told by PCs on the cordon that you will have to contact the press office to find out what is going on. But what journalists so often fail to realise is how intimidating it can be to be approached and quizzed on a subject by someone who is recording all your words and will probably reproduce them to be read by thousands of others.
Even writing this blog I have time to pick my words carefully, edit and reedit it and I know it will not be spun out of context, because I'm the one publishing it. If someone rang me up and asked me to give my opinion out of the blue and they would write it all down I'm sure this would just be an incoherent mass of drivel (even more so than it is now), which would invariably include something which would get me fired.
Press officers are there to make sure your average worker doesn't have to deal with the unfamiliar world of journalism and a good one can often be more of a help than a hindrance.
But before I get a host of mocking emails from my colleagues claiming I have 'gone to the dark side' I will end this entry with my top five things a bad press officer can do which make me so angry I want to swear in front of nuns:

5) Send out press releases without a single word of real English, filled to the brim with meaningless phrases like "transgenerational partnership".
4) Ask me when my deadline is then completely fail to get any kind of response in time and not even have the courtesy to phone.
3) Provide a quote but refuse to attribute it to anyone except a faceless spokesperson - if 99-year-old Mrs Biddleswaite has had the courage to give us her name when complaining about the poor service she received in a supermarket then the international chain which runs said store could have the decency to scrape up a real employee to apologise on its behalf.
2) Ring me up with a story that has no relevance at all to the area we cover then reveal they are clearly completely ignorant of what kind of publication we are.
1) And worst of all crimes - try to tell me that something I'm enquiring about "really isn't a story" and maybe I should just drop it. When you run the paper you can decide what stories are done and which ones aren't, until then just answer my question like you're paid to. Grrrr... I hope I don't pass any nunneries on the way home.

To err is human, to spell check is divine. Admittedly this may not be the traditional form of this idiom, but I wish I had paid it some heed last week.
For reporters accuracy must be paramount, you can write the most interesting story in the world, but if the details are incorrect it will sweep the very foundations out from under it.
Last week battle lines were somewhat drawn up after I raised the hackles of our rival publication with one of my earlier entries regarding us scooping them on the website. Unfortunately there is nothing more self-indulgent and frankly boring than a petty dispute brought into the public domain, so I will extend the olive branch of peace here and now, but one very good point was raised by my nameless rival.
It may seem pedantic to some to focus on the fact that we spelt the word 'occasion' wrong in our coverage of a story, but this genuinely is a serious crime in journalism.
If a reporter cannot be accurate in the words he or she writes then how can they be trusted to be accurate in the facts they present to a reader?
News is often extremely sensitive for those involved and there have been several occasions (carefully spell checked) when I have been acting in an editorial capacity and people have rung me angry with a story.
Most common of these complaints is petty criminals, many of whom will be angry when their court case is covered for all the world to see. I firmly believe that if people do not want the world to know what they have been up to they shouldn't be breaking the law in the first place, and furthermore a trial is, generally, open to the public and therefore a matter of public record, which we have every right to report.
This is a fairly standard opinion amongst journalist and I am confident in presenting it to aforementioned complainers. However, if we have made an error in the story, such as spelling a name wrong or attributing the wrong age to someone, it completely undermines the argument. Simple mistakes such as that call into question all the other facts in the article and are indefensible.
Now I'm not saying mistakes won't happen, and I would prefer if you didn't go rifling through all your copies of the Observer (or even this blog) with a red marker pen and a dictionary, but it is our job to make sure they happen as infrequently as possible. Spell checks are a start, but nothing can properly replace taking time to thoroughly go over copy and make sure you're happy with what you've written.
One final thought, I've read and reread this entry and checked the spelling on every word I'm unsure of, but irony being what it is I'm sure there's a mistake in here somewhere. So congratulations to whoever spots it, but you're not getting a prize!

It's all go in the newsroom this week - quite literally.
On Wednesday our esteemed editor Lindsay Coulson will be hanging up her green visor and braces (okay, she doesn't wear these, but one day I hope to encounter an editor who does) and moving off to pastures new. Actually, there aren't many pastures where she's heading, as she's off to Westminster to work for its council press office.
Also this month we are losing our much-loved sports editor John Comfort, who will no doubt be familiar to our readers, many of whom will have spend a drizzly Saturday afternoon stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him on the borders of various sports fields, watching the borough's hopefuls throw themselves around in the mud.
And finally (at least I hope this is all for now), our news editor Emily Twinch is weeks away from departure, having returned from a holiday in Cuba and handed in her notice. Rumours of her joining the revolution several years too late are, I'm assured, unfounded.
This all leaves us with a rather bare looking news desk, but thankfully reinforcements are on their way. In this case the reinforcements come in the shape of David Tilley, the content editor at the Uxbridge Gazette, who next week is being tranferred across to take the helm here at the Observer.
A new editor is always an interesting time for a paper, as they bring their own ideas, style and enthusiasm to it. Observant readers can quite quickly spot when this happens, as often regular features which are not working out are dropped and new and exciting ones appear in their place.
I won't take any guesses as to what David has in store for the Observer, but keep your eye's peeled over the next few months and I bet you can spot them yourself.

Covering breaking news as it happens is a real relay race to be first.
With a weekly paper you have time to put a story together, explore every angle, consider different presentations and get reactions from people invloved.But with the internet it's all about being first with the facts. To do this you need a smooth relay between reporter, photographer and news desk, and this week, I'm proud to say, we have pulled it off with aplomb.
Firstly there was a big case of a prolific robber at Harrow Crown Court on Thursday which our reporter David Baker was sent to cover.
On arriving at court a journalist from a rival organ was also present, and the scene was set for a race to get the verdict up in the public domain first. Following the sentencing from the judge David did a sterling effort in quickly ringing in the story for me to post on our site. I shan't say who got it up first between us and our rivals because there's nothing worse than being a bad winner.
Similarly our chief reporer Ian Proctor met Dave 'Hug a hoodie' Cameron at Harrow Civic Centre today, accompanied by photographer Stuart Emmerson. Within an hour of his arrival we had both pictures and a taster of our exclusive interview on the website.
It's quite a thrill getting news from source to you, dear reader, in such a short time, and something which almost every journalist enjoys. The challenge is to make sure stories are accurate, interesting and informative, so that nothing is compromised.
As our website grows in size and popularity the race will never truly end, but I'm hoping we're going to keep picking up gold medals along the way.