Herald Highlight: A Finger of Fudge is Just Enough...

Now, in a feature the critics are already calling "semi-regular", we look at the slightly more legible of the two main free-sheets in our fair city, the Herald AM.

There was a single story that seems to have caught the imagination of all and sundry:

FINGER OF BLAME! That headline works on so many levels! For those who may not have heard the story, English 17-year-old Guy Wallace was visiting Dublin for Patrick's Day and, after a few underage scoops in tourist fave hangout Temple Bar, called in to McDonald's for some authentic Irish chow. Whereupon, he claims, he was set upon by a savage bolus of Micks (his words, probably). He awoke in hospital to find he had misplaced a finger. 

Now, ordinarily this tragic tale of dismemberment would end there with minimal follow-up from the Gardaí. But young Master Wallace returned to the UK and capitalised on his sob story by going on local radio. And in doing so, miraculously regained clarity of recollection as to how he lost the finger; he'd been a little hazy on that point before. 

The youths in Mickey D's, he said, had pursued him down the street, held his hand against the kerbside and jumped on his little finger until it snapped off! How immensely rude of them! I knew there was a rough element in Dublin, but this sounds like it came out of some demented torture-porn movie.

The truth however, as Occam's Razor predicts, is a lot simpler. Though no less entertaining. Apparently, Sir Guy of Wallace-shire panicked when asked by a gang of skangers where he was from, fled down the street and drunkenly tried to scale a serrated metal fence surrounding Eircom offices off O'Connell Street. And that's where he and poor pinky parted company. Gardaí found the AWOL finger on top of the railing, tragically too late for it to be reattached.

Now, all of that is hilarious enough by itself but here's where the true genius of the Herald AM people comes in: A witness described the finger as looking quite like "a burnt sausage". How best to give the discerning reader a visual on that? Well, damn it all, why not just print a colour picture of a burnt sausage in the bottom left of the front page? They missed a trick though by not having the caption read "Artist's conception of how the finger may have looked if retrieved by Gardaí with a fork." 

Nonetheless, hats off, Herald AM. Once again you have raised the stakes. Metro, take note.