At 9:17am on Tuesday, 6 October 2026, former Mayor of Wigan, 66-year-old Reginald Pottle, was observed by eleven commuters and a station cat laughing at a nutsack. The nutsack in question, a leather satchel belonging to 34-year-old barrister Imogen Crawley, had been placed on the platform bench beside him. Pottle, who had just alighted from the 08:44 from Manchester Piccadilly, later told reporters that he ‘couldn’t care less’ about the ensuing scandal, adding that the satchel’s stitching was ‘a shew of provincial decline’. A video of the incident, filmed by a rail enthusiast, has been viewed 2.3 million times. Pottle’s wife, Marjorie, 64, has not spoken to him since, preferring to communicate through a series of hand-written notes pinned to the fridge.
The Nutsack in Question
The outrage has been swift and organised. A Change.org petition, launched by a woman from Bolton who identifies only as ‘Disgusted of Horwich’, has gathered 14,000 signatures demanding Pottle’s removal from the Wigan Pier Heritage Trust, of which he is honorary vice-chair. The trust’s chairman, Gerald Ffoulkes-Smythe, issued a statement saying the board would ‘consider the matter at its next meeting, scheduled for the third Tuesday of November, unless the weather is inclement’. The local Conservative association, of which Pottle is a life member, has suspended him pending an internal review, though the review’s terms of reference have yet to be agreed, and sources suggest they may never be. Meanwhile, the nutsack itself, a 2019 model by the firm ‘Tanner & Sons’, has been placed into protective storage at Wigan’s Museum of Local Life, where it is to be displayed behind glass with a plaque reading ‘The Relic of Shame’.
Your Correspondent Investigates
Your correspondent has been despatched to Wigan to investigate, and has spent the morning in the station buffet, where a small sherry was obtained at considerable personal expense. The buffet’s proprietor, a man named Cyril who has worked there since 1972, reports that the nutsack has been the subject of 47 separate complaints to the station manager, all of them from people who were not present at the time. ‘One fellow rang from Doncaster,’ Cyril says, ‘and demanded to know whether the nutsack had been properly sanitised. I told him it had been, but he didn’t believe me. He said he’d be writing to his MP.’ The MP in question, a man named Nigel Bunting, has already issued a statement condemning ‘the normalisation of public laughter at leather goods’ and has called for a parliamentary debate, which is scheduled for the first Thursday after the autumn recess, assuming a quorum can be found.
The Former Mayor Speaks
Pottle, interviewed at his semi-detached home in Ashton-in-Makerfield, remains unrepentant. ‘I laughed,’ he tells your correspondent, ‘because the satchel was shaped like a scrotum. That is all. I laughed for three seconds, then I returned to my crossword.’ He produces the crossword in question, a copy of the Daily Telegraph from the previous Saturday, and points to a half-completed clue: ‘Scrotum, perhaps, in leather (7)’. The answer, he says, is ‘nutsack’, which he had already written in pencil. ‘It was a coincidence,’ he insists, ‘but a beautiful one.’ He then offers your correspondent a sherry, which is declined, as one is already working. His wife, Marjorie, enters the room and places a note on the mantelpiece. It reads: ‘You have brought shame upon this household. The cat is sleeping in the shed.’ Pottle shrugs. ‘She’ll come round,’ he says. ‘She always does. She just needs time to cool off.’
The Late Turn
In a development that has taken everyone by surprise, the nutsack’s owner, Imogen Crawley, has come forward to defend Pottle. ‘I have reviewed the footage,’ she tells the Wigan Observer, ‘and I can confirm that my satchel does, in fact, resemble a scrotum. I have known this for years. It is why I bought it. I find it amusing, and I find Mr Pottle’s laughter entirely justified.’ She adds that she has since received 200 offers to buy the satchel, including one from a Japanese collector who wishes to display it in a museum of unusual objects. ‘I am keeping it,’ she says, ‘but I am considering changing its name from “The Relic of Shame” to “The Relic of Mirth”.’
Your correspondent confesses to a reluctant admiration for Mr Pottle. Here is a man who laughed at a scrotum-shaped satchel, and who has refused, under a torrent of national opprobrium, to pretend otherwise. There was a time, one recalls, when a man could laugh at a nutsack without fear of a parliamentary debate. There was a time when the nation’s sense of humour was robust enough to absorb such a shew of civic degeneracy and move on. That time, it appears, has passed. The nutsack, your correspondent predicts, will outlast us all. It will sit in its glass case at the Museum of Local Life, a mute testament to a species that once knew how to laugh at itself and then forgot. Your correspondent finishes her sherry, and notes that the bottle is empty. The weather, as ever, is closing in.
