That attitude is the reason so many email in-boxes are filled up with glurge. Thank you so very much.
In the interest of fighting glurge, and since I posted the OP, here’s a truncated version of the original print article (that I read in a newsagents), with a photograph of the family, and here’s an op-ed about it.
The article says she attends Danes Hill school, in Oxshott, Surrey. Here is the school’s website.
This is another article from a more respectable news source about the incident, that strongly resembles the original Sun print story, but doesn’t cite it as its source. That article quotes the school’s headmaster:
Here is a picture of an “R. Parfitt (M.A., M.Sc.) Headmaster”.
So many of the details seem to check out.
Another bit of searching reveals that The New York Post has reprinted another Sun article that differs from the original that I saw. This article has an interview with the American manager of the Marriott hotel at which they were staying:
Here is an article about Mr Smith’s appointment to this position and a picture of him.
Yes it does look as though the story checks out. It is just my inbuilt mistrust of anything printed in the Sun that made me doubt it. Well done that girl.
Sure, jjimm. In a newsagent’s 
.
Anyway, I don’t think you need to defend your source quite so vigourously. For all the flak it gets here, it’s no National Enquirer. As you said, it’s not in the habit of just inventing stories wholesale.
Honestly. Well OK it was a petrol station.
I was at a loose end and there was some doubt, so I thought I’d have a look for some sort of corroboration. I’m not emotionally involved in the story’s validity, though I am glad that it seems to check out.
…gee, I think Hallboy would have been one who rushed out to pick up the flopping fishies… :smack:
Just a note about The Sun.
It is not a Weekly World News or Daily Sport type of paper. It does adhere to the basic tenets of journalism pretty strictly. Sure, it will go for a sensationalist angle, but VERY rarely would they fall for and print an urban legend. Just because it is a downmarket paper does not mean it is not accurate.