91Èȱ¬

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

Today's Paper Monitor is all about celebrating quotes - the things that people say, the icing on the story cake, the gem a journalist instantly knows is gold dust.

So, a woman shouts out "I'm Jack Sparrow" - but this woman is slightly worse for wear and about to do something completely unadvisable. In a boat. Here's The Sun's headline: ". It does what it says on the tin.

Alison Watson, who had been on a Lambrini binge, was heard shouting "I'm Jack Sparrow" and "I'm a pirate" as she made her escape on a double-decker ferry, according to the newspaper. She reportedly claimed she "would have ended up in St Tropez" if she hadn't been caught. And here are just four words that conjure up the image of what happened next on that fateful day in Dartmouth Devon. According to one witness, the ferry began hitting other vessels "like a pinball machine".

Over to the Daily Mail, and it's the story about at a swimming pond in Hampstead Heath, London.

Here's a swimmer who, from his quotes, appears to have got off lightly:

"I've had a couple of nips on my toes in the past few months, usually when I stop for a rest and tread water. But some people have been nipped in altogether more sensitive places, which doesn't bear thinking about."

Indeed, it doesn't. And here's something else that doesn't bear thinking about - people swim there naked. A spokesman for the City of London Corporation advises swimmers to "wear clothes". Sound advice.

By the way, in The Daily Telegraph suggests that the solution to the menace might not lie "in armour-plated swimming costumes but in our stomachs":

"Crayfish may be the natural, free, nutritious successor to the oyster. We must eat them -before they eat us."

Paper Monitor will now leave you with this quote from original It Girl Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, who with the Daily Mail with a cracker (first rule of feature writing, get the best quotes up top).

Speaking about her west London roof terrace, she says:

"I've got two guitars and a whole recording studio up here. In the evening people come round and sit about making music. Then I do a headstand and, as soon as you've gone, bounce off the walls and have a good laugh."

Don't try this in the office.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• - What's this?