After decades of making covers for books that already had covers in the first place, society today had a moment of collective reflection and asked itself ‘Seriously, what the feck are we playing at?’
Local father Jim Edco from Newry told us. “I was half way through wrapping a dozen jotters in wallpaper last night when I suddenly realised – what am I doing this for? They must only be worth about 10p each, and now they look worse than when I started.”
Neighbour Laura Staedtler agreed. “I have been backing my wains’ books for years but only cos my mammy did it for me. I phoned her to ask what the whole point of it was and she didn’t know either. She’s away to ring my granny to ask her. It’s all very mysterious. Kinda like The Da Vinci Code, except with wallpaper.”
Even local academics don’t know the purpose of the age-old ritual. “Feck, we assumed parents knew!” admitted Jill Cleaver-Arch from the Education Authority. “We thought they were trying to get rid of oul shite they had laying around the house.”
However one former pupil told us that book backing teaches kids about the class divide in society.
“Working-class kids use wallpaper,” explained Ted Biro from Lurgan, “gammy floral stuff their Ma picked out to annoy their Da. Whereas middle-class kids use plain brown paper that most wains only ever see on Blue Peter. However the ones with really loaded folks use that stick-on plasticy laminate shite. F**king show-offs!”
The news comes as a blow to generations of local people, who for years have dutifully carried hundreds of metric tonnes of leftover wallpaper to-and-from school for no apparent reason.
“I feel cheated” said Jim Prittstick from Enniskillen. “My ma backed my books in woodchip FFS! And nothing good ever came from having wood in school”