Website trend sweeps Durham

Aunty Gherkin

In the last few weeks, a new fad has taken over Durham. Inspired by popular American satirical website The Onion and the success of its tribute site the Durham Shallot, it seems that everyone is getting in line for a slice of the vegetable pie (or should that be pasty?)

"What you do is, you design a website, name it after some obscure vegetable and then fill it with satirical made-up news articles about life in Durham," elaborates the editor of new website the Aidans Asparagus gleefully. "And the best bit is, you get to be anonymous and then you can secretly laugh at people you see in the corridor because they don't know it's you. Then you feel really superior and you can forget about how they all laughed at you because you pissed yourself that time when you were drunk in the bar and you know nobody has ever forgotten it, even though it was two years ago in freshers week, so you just hide in your room reading Linux manuals and painting little models from Lord of the Rings . . . oh God, I hate my life."

Other sites which have recently made an appearance include the Mildert Mushroom, the Cuths Cabbage, the Trevs Tomato and the Marys Cucumber. However, an unbiased source feels that the Collingwood Gherkin has something special to offer which none of these others possess.

"Yeah, well, to put it bluntly, it's me," says our general editor, the pseudonymous "Aunty Gherkin". "I'm not being arrogant but with a genius of this calibre behind the helm how can we go wrong? I don't know who these others think they are, jumping on my bandwagon, basking in my reflected glory. I mean, the Trevs Tomato, what's that all about? It's not even a bloody vegetable, it's a fruit. Come on, everyone knows that, how ignorant can you be?"

Friends of "Aunty Gherkin" report that he has been acting strangely ever since he produced the first issue of the Collingwood Gherkin. "I think all this secret identity stuff has gone to his head," says neighbour Charlie Benedict. "He even tried to turn his en-suite bathroom into some kind of top-secret 'gherkin cave'." An anonymous proposal submitted to DSU suggesting that the Nightbus should be redesigned as a "gherkinmobile" are suspected to have originated from the same source.