There are few things guaranteed to bring a wry smile to a journalist’s lips more than a fellow hack becoming the focus of a news story. Simon Harvey, now a freelance writer based in Nottingham, has shared with HoldTheFrontPage this tale of his 15 minutes of fame when he worked for The Henley Standard. And he’d love it if some more of you out there came clean about your moment in the spotlight

It’s not the fact that I was struck by lightning that bothered me. What really bothered me was that, as a trainee reporter, I thought I’d got that all-important first big break.

Summer weekend duties at the Henley Standard seemed dominated by identical fetes opened by identicial “C-rated” celebrities at identical villages. It was always with a grudging acceptance that I agreed to capture in both words and photographs the endless round of cheesy children’s ice-cream smiles, grotesquely enormous vegetables and people generally having “fun”.

I was posing one such photograph on a cloudy South Oxfordshire Saturday afternoon as two young children were climbing into a small carriage about to be pulled by a docile donkey around the Nettlebed fete.

But all hell let loose when torrential rain like stair rods descended amid rumbling thunder and semi-darkness. I hastily put up my umbrella to shield the office camera from the wet and placed the view finder to my eye to get my shot and go home but before I could snap the shutter, a crack of thunder made the donkey bolt at a fantastic speed across a cricket pitch towards a packed car park.

Screaming for their lives, the kids clung on, the carriage door flapped open and shut and the donkey showed a turn of pace which would have graced any race track.

I saw a front page story, I saw my first exclusive, I saw a public inquiry at Oxfordshire County Council to debate the use of animal rides at public events and I saw a long-running campaign as the Standard championed the cause to ban such potentially dangerous rides. My weekly days are over, I maniacally mused. This is what the dailies are made of.

I confess that it was with a spring in my non-rubber step that I raced across the cricket square, camera bag swinging wildly at my side, a metal camera in one hand and a metal umbrella in the other. I ran in pursuit of two wildly screaming parents, the Territorial Army who’d abandoned their assault course, three amply-proportioned members of the Nettlebed Women’s Institute and a face painter now regretting her own happy clown visage.

It was at this precise moment in what seemed like a slow motion action replay, that I was aware of a lightning flash and a simultaneous, and not unattractive, blue flame streaking down my umbrella shaft. It hit my wet hand and caused me to jump pathetically. It was a mild shock but it rooted me to the spot.

It felt like seconds, it must have been minutes. When I looked towards the expected car park carnage, burly TA members were walking the donkey back, followed closely by relieved parents and sobbing children.

The Editor went with two stories, a narrowly-averted donkey disaster and “Standard man struck by lightning”.

The rest of the office laughed long and loud but there was precious little sympathy. In journalistic terms it would have been better if I’d sustained even a mild injury, perhaps a singed or smouldering notebook or a dramatic photograph of the lightning strike. Instead, I had a photo of blurred grass, testament not to my heroism but to the second I yelped and pressed the shutter by mistake.

It hasn’t affected my long-term health and my big story was not long in coming but just occasionally a terrifyingly-nervous smile crosses my face when I change a lightbulb and my family swear the light is switched off.

Now tell us YOUR story of when the tables were turned and YOU made the headlines in your newspaper. Ring the HoldTheFrontPage newsdesk on
01332 291111 x6022, or e-mail us now

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