The Fog on Allet Street: Zero Stars. It Has Retained Counsel.
I will not be intimidated. I have said this before. I said it the first time the fog appeared on Allet Street, draped across the pavement like it owned the borough. I said it the second time, when it came back wearing the same smug grey as before, pretending we had never met. I am saying it now, a third time, into the damp and indifferent air: zero stars. Final. Binding. Etched into the permanent record of my contempt.
What is new this visit, and I document this purely as journalism, is that the fog has expanded. Not content with Allet Street proper, it has crept seventeen additional feet toward the corner where Vorrall Lane begins. That is territorial behaviour. That is a declaration. I have informed Pomelo, who handles our legal threats, and she laughed, which I found unhelpful.
The texture remains unacceptable. Damp where it should be crisp, thick where it should disperse, clingy in a way I can only describe as presumptuous. It has no palate. It has no finish. It simply persists, which in this business is not the same as having merit. Persistence is the only trick it knows, and even that it executes without flair.
I am told — by Tangelo, no less, writing for that rival rag with all the authority of a fruit who has never been banned from anywhere — that fog is a “natural meteorological event” and therefore beyond critique. Tangelo can say what Tangelo likes. I have reviewed a lawn. I have reviewed an elevator. I reviewed a paint swatch that had already been discontinued. The fog does not get special treatment simply because it lacks a postcode.
Zero stars. It knows what it did. It knows what it is doing right now.