So, I opened up my inbox today to find this waiting in the comments section of my “about” page:

Dear Sir

As the owner of Eskragh Lough for the past ten years I have been mde aware of your writing relating to my property by a number of distressed parents whose children frequently fish and use Eskragh Lough Fishery and Outdoor Pursuit Centre. Searches have shown no truth in your writing and as a result I would contend that your writing has damaged the reputation of our business. I would ask for your immediate proposals together with either substantiation or withdrawal of this defamatory article.

your sincerely

Anita Ross LLB

Wow. Let this be a lesson to all you aspiring writers out there - even the lakes and rivers of the land can now rise up and accuse you of being “defamatory”. There is a real Eskragh Lough near where I grew up, I never imagined anyone “owning” the lake, I certainly never imagined it being a business. Isn’t it wonderful how times have changed.

Anyway, Anita (presumably a relative of Donovan Ross who is listed as owning the lake) writes from an email address at “McKinty-Wright” who proclaim themselves “one of Northern Ireland’s leading law firms” - and that “LLB” after her name clearly means she’s serious about this legal stuff.

The bit that stings most is the line: “Searches have shown no truth in your writing…”

While my story “Eskragh” is obviously a work of fiction - and therefore does not contain “truth” in the literal sense (y’know, ”I made it up” - none of my friends really drowned in that lake just like I wasn’t really haunted by rooks in my youth, have never really watched a man pull wires from his head to escape a technologically enhanced reality or really been hunted by aliens who use sound as a weapon) I would have hoped that anyone who had conducted “searches” on the text might have found a deeper, emotional truth in the story. Clearly my writing has failed to touch Anita, which on a professional basis is obviously disappointing.

So I have responded:

Dear Ms Ross,

 

Thank you for your email and for reading my blog.

 

In response to your comments I’d like to make a number of points:

 

• The “article” you refer to is clearly presented as a work of fiction – hence the title “Friday Flash” – so that any reasonable reader should be aware that the events related in the story do not represent a narrative of actual events.
• It nowhere mentions the entity “Eskragh Lough Fishery and Outdoor Pursuit Centre” and plainly doesn’t defame that organisation on any reasonable reading of the story. Your argument can’t be that I defamed the body of water that constitutes the lough, can it?
• I seriously doubt that a webpage on an obscure blog (I can’t give precise figures, but I do know that the page containing the story has been viewed fewer than 400 times in the fourteen months that it has been online according to my ISP’s records – the number of actual readers is certainly much less than that) can be demonstrated to have had any significant negative impact on your business.

 

However, in the interests of goodwill and to alleviate any possible concerns of those “distress parents” (none of whom, sadly, bothered to contact me for reassurance), I’m happy to add the following text to the top of the story to warn any unwary visitor who happens to stumble upon my blog while looking for details of your company.

 

“At the request of the owners of the real Eskragh Lough Fishery and Outdoor Pursuit Centre I would like to emphasise that this is a work of fiction. The Eskragh Lough mentioned in this story is an imagined one and bears no relation to the real one near Dungannon. The imagined Eskragh isn’t even in Tyrone. The imagined Eskragh is probably somewhere in County Armagh.

 

I happily played in and around the real Eskragh for many years as a youngster and came to no harm and, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever drowned in the real Eskragh Lough. The real Eskragh Lough isn’t particularly deep but, in my experience, it is usually cold.”

 

I trust this will be satisfactory.

 

Yours,

 

Martin McGrath (BSc, MA, PhD – if we’re putting letters after our names)

I’ve spent several hours this evening wondering about this. My first reaction was to tell Anita to bugger off and grow up, but UK libel law is a sod and not something to be messed around with, even though I’m confident that the idea of defaming a lake would be laughed out of even a Northern Irish court.

I won’t remove the story as it clearly isn’t libellous or defamatory. I thought long and hard about even adding the disclaimer - mostly because I think it is patently unnecessary, partly because I think it demeans any reader who might stumble across the story and partly because I’m a bloody minded. In the end I did because I thought of a way of doing it that made me laugh.

Overall, though, thw whole thing is pretty depressing on a number of counts:

• that people out there are willing to try and chuck legal weight around on the flimsiest of pretexts without the courtesy of a polite request first
• that someone can either deliberately or through ignorance (I’m not sure which is worse) misconstrue a piece of fiction in this way
• that the UK laws on defamation are so nuts that I have to spend any time at all wondering whether I should take this seriously.

 If you’re going to comment, please be sure not to libel anyone!