There won’t have been many days in the last 199 years of the Cumberland News’s proud history that a keen sub-editor will have been able to write the following headline.

But in our brave new digital world, then anything’s possible – even ‘Firm lands order for 250,000 chocolate sprouts’.

The delicious offering about a manufacturer creating a new game called Sprout Roulette was discovered on the business website in-Cumbria, part of the independent former Cumbrian Newspapers Group (now called CN Group, we understand, to reflect its primary raison d’etre is no longer publishing newspapers).

The Carlisle-based group, right on the Scottish border, can go back to 1815 around the time of the Battle of Waterloo for its first newspaper – the Carlisle Patriot – which later became the Cumberland News weekly.