Is this the official start of the silly season?

Daft news stories have been scarce this summer. Have we been looking hard enough?
A squirrel who appeared in Melissa Brandts' holiday snap
A squirrel that appeared in Melissa Brandts' holiday photograph at Lake Minnewanka, Canada. Photograph: Melissa Brandts

The first silly season stories normally arrive, like sharks off the Cornish coast, some time in early August. For this reason silly season stories are often about sharks. Other qualifying items include dubious survey results, full-page features about the history of the bra timed to coincide with some wholly unanticipated anniversary, or tales in which disabled farm animals are given prosthetic limbs instead of being eaten.

This year, however, the usual glut of silly season stories appears to have failed to turn up. Normally when this happens it is because an unexpected blast of actual news – some freak weather, say, or a political crisis – has pushed the silly stuff off the page. But so far this summer nothing too unpredictable has happened.

What's going on? Have hard times made us too dour to enjoy stories about aubergines that look like Winston Churchill? Can we blame the internet, or perhaps the death of Michael Jackson, for making hard news and weird news one and the same? Is it possible that last year's silly season never ended, and we didn't notice?

A trawl through the week's papers does turn up a few possible sightings. The front page of Wednesday's Sun screamed: "PIRATES IN ENGLISH CHANNEL", which, had you elected not to read the corresponding text, might have led you to believe that there were pirates in the English Channel. It turns out a ship that may or may not have contained some pirates passed through the Channel some weeks ago. Nevertheless breathless updates on the missing pirate ship should fill the papers for at least a week, unless Alan Duncan has anything else to say.

The Daily Mirror ran a story about David Cameron being "stalked by killer slime", which is to say that some gas given off by seaweed killed a horse somewhere in the vicinity of Cameron's unknown French holiday destination. Elsewhere it was reported that the difficult question most often asked by children is "Where do babies come from?", according to a survey that must break some kind of record for levels of meaninglessness. The Guardian ran a story about a crystal ball starting a fire by refracting the sun's rays on to some curtains, though it did not go so far, as another paper did, as to chide the crystal ball for its failure to predict such an outcome. Many papers carried a picture of a lame duck wearing a special sandal fitted by a cobbler. The next day, several others made use of a self-timed holiday snap into which a curious squirrel had insinuated itself.

Between them, at least, these items contain the key elements of a silly season story, as indeed does the one you're reading now: an oversized picture of a cute or disabled animal; an amusing if implausible headline; a weasel-worded sentence that restates the headline in more cautious terms (something like: "This year, however, the usual glut of silly season stories appears to have failed to turn up"); a penultimate paragraph that tries to play down the significance of ample evidence to the contrary; and a final sentence that undermines everything that has come before. So you see: the silly season has arrived after all, and right on time, too.