by A profile of the regional desk’s most productive writer and the pub chain that serves as his office
Roper Penberthy has written for the regional desk at prat.uk for eleven years and has, in that time, never filed a story from anywhere other than a Wetherspoons. Not the same one. He estimates he has worked from four hundred and covers a different town each week by the method of arriving on the earliest cheap train, finding the nearest branch, ordering a coffee he describes as legally a coffee, and waiting for the town to walk in and tell him what has gone wrong.
The method
Roper’s view is that every town in Britain has one room where its grievances are aired in full, and that the room is now, in most towns, a converted cinema or bank with a carpet that nobody chose. He sits by the door. Within an hour someone at the next table will have explained the council, the bypass, the bench and the man at the council responsible for the bench. By the second coffee he has a story. By the third he has the spokesperson’s title, which he says is always suggested by the room, since the room has been complaining about the real person for months and knows precisely how long the title should be.
Morag Sinclair, who edits him, says that Roper’s stories are the only ones on the desk that arrive with the residents’ sigh already in them, and that her too-easy rule has been applied to his copy twice in eleven years, both times for roundabouts.
The carpets
Roper keeps a record of the carpets. Each branch has its own, commissioned for the building, and he photographs it on arrival and files it with the story. The archive holds four hundred carpet photographs in a box Marjorie labelled Not Pigeons, and Roper maintains that the carpet tells him what kind of town he is in before anyone speaks. A carpet with a lot of gold means a town that used to have money. A carpet with a lot of green means a town that used to have a mill. A carpet with a lot of purple means the branch used to be a church, and the stories from those, he says, are the best, because the room remembers.
The stories
His most read piece concerned a town in Lancashire whose council had bought a machine to count potholes and lost it in one, a story he heard in full from a man who turned out to be the councillor responsible and who bought the third coffee. His most letters came from a piece on a Kent town where the branch had been renamed after a local worthy and the room had spent a year refusing to use the name. And his most reprinted line, from a piece on a coastal town, was that the pub’s carpet had more pattern than the town’s planning policy and had lasted longer.
Objections
The chain has never objected to the arrangement and has never been asked to. Roper has never named it in copy, referring only to the branch, and the fact-checkers accept the branch as a real place on the grounds that it always is. The style guide has one line about him, added by Emily, which reads Penberthy: coffee is not a commercial reference, and which he has asked to have on his headstone.
The regional desk view
Morag says that Roper is the only writer on the paper who has never filed a story about London and has never wanted to, and that when the editor asked him to cover a Camden branch for a special edition he declined on the grounds that London does not sigh, it tuts, and the tut does not carry. The editor accepted this and gave the story to Camden Rose, who filed it from a coffee shop the editor does not enter, which she says was the point.
Next week
Roper is in Cumbria. The branch was a bank. The carpet is gold with a little green, which he says means money then a mill, and he has already heard about the bench. Morag has asked whether there is a roundabout. He has said he will not answer that question from a pub.
