Someone please show the Daily Mail a map

This is brilliant. I missed the original Twitter storm, but apparently some pictures starting circulating last week apparently showing members of the Ku Klux Klan walking through East Barnet. (East Barnet is where we live, about a 20 minute walk away from college).

Anyway, it turns out that they weren’t Ku Klux Klan members, they were merely choristers from the local Methodist Church – wearing robes – on their way up to the local Anglican Church. Someone had taken a photo and they’d got mistaken … you can read all about it here.

Now the Daily Fail, sorry, Mail picked it up and ran a story about it. Then, when they realised they were wrong, the published this article correcting it. (I apologise for linking to the Mail, by the way, please try and avoid looking at any of the links in case the red mist sets in). That article is unintentionally hilarious: they have got the location completely wrong.

The pictures were taken in Essex and created a frenzy on Twitter, with one member of the public even calling the police, urging them to investigate.

East Barnet is not in Essex. It’s in Hertfordshire, or Greater London … whichever way you look at a map, not Essex.

After it was uploaded to Twitter Essex police carried out a search of the area on the night of January 31 and told MailOnline that they hadn’t found anything suspicious.

I would love it if they had actually called up Essex Police.

But, to my mind, the most hilarious thing is the picture of the church they’ve put up. That’s definitely not East Barnet Methodist Church… I’ve got no idea where it is. This is the real church, which is the first result if you put “East Barnet Methodist Church” into Google.

Clearly this is exactly the kind of investigative journalism the British newspaper industry has been missing.”East Barnet? That’s in Essex, isn’t it? And let’s include a picture of a random Methodist Church”. The crazy thing is, it would have been the work of about ten seconds to verify that a) East Barnet is not in Essex; b) ‘East Barnet Methodist Church’ is actually, well, East Barnet Methodist Church. Genius.