SCHOOLS have been out for a couple of weeks, Yorkshire Day has been and gone, we’ve all had a good moan about the summer weather or lack of it, so it must mean we’re in the heart of the silly season.

First coined in 1861 in a London weekly review paper, the silly season is typified by the propensity for news outlets everywhere to come up with batty and dotty news stories with which to fill column inches and bulletin minutes because, apparently, there’s no other news about.

The silly season was in 1894 defined in the Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable as the time of year when ‘Parliament and the Law Courts are not sitting’ but in reality when it comes to parliamentary business any time of the year is the silly season, given all the jeers, cheers, harrumphs and boos that emanate from the commons chamber in the mother of all parliaments.

It’s not just us though. In Germany they call it the ‘sommerloch,’ which loosely translated means summer news hole and in France they talk about ‘la saison des marronniers, which is some reference of typically gallic whimsy to the growing of conker trees.

If you’re Dutch, Danish or Norwegian, people talk about cucumbers when referring to summer’s slow news periods. In Norway they even go as far to say that a news story surfacing during the optimum summer time is a piece of cucumber news. I rather like that – perhaps during the summer The Press could undergo a name change and call itself The York Cucumber… Better that than in Sweden and Finland where they refer to silly season tales as rotting month stories… It’s usually at this time of year that news editors, always desperate to fill blank news pages and time-yawning bulletins, but never more so than when half the reporting staff are on their jollies, manage to dig up old favourites like skate-boarding dogs, rudely shaped vegetables and giant sunflowers of Jack and the beanstalk proportions.

It’s also when, right on cue, the Loch Ness monster looms once again out of the deep, or mysterious panther-like cats creep stealthily through urban parks and woodland scaring the living daylights out of the local canine population.

Lurking monsters and marauding cats are all very well, but some silly season stories in recent years really have taken the biscuit when it comes to reporting life’s mundanities.

I couldn’t, for instance, envisage a stampede to the news stands to read the gripping tale of how Surrey firefighters rescued a pigeon from a roof in Reigate. (Why? Couldn't it fly off?) Though it beats cats getting stuck up trees, I suppose.

The Guardian once ran an online debate about whether a hotdog was a sandwich or not and a web-based magazine ran an investigation into how much it would cost to completely cover your arm in loom bands – those brightly coloured laggy bands loved by little girls everywhere. And so-called journalists it would appear.

In case you’re interested they reckoned it would be around £250… The South London Press once ran a story about squirrels getting high on crack after digging up abandoned stashes left by fleeing drug dealers. And I don’t know how many times we’ve been hearing about dive-bombing seagulls nicking holidaymakers’ fish and chips.

The Times – that once august organ known as the Thunderer – ran a picture story on its front page no less, showing a carp called Benson that had finally shuffled onto a fish hook and not managed to get off it again.

It was Britain’s best loved carp, mourned the paper, because it had been caught by anglers at least 60 times but was now no more. Making page one made that one heck of an obituary, never mind for a fish. Must have been a slow news day… In reality, it’s not just August that lends itself to the silly season, but pretty much every month of the year. For we now have access to so much silly quirkiness via the internet that every day throws up so many puerile and meaningless offerings that we’re in danger – if we haven’t already done so – of trivialising what we interpret as news.

But that, of course, is another story…