To ask what the drama is in your local Facebook group?

[ItsTheDramaaMick]

Ours is a on fire at the moment. Usually it's just dog poo and why is the helicopter out, and tourists parking in the pub car park to go for a walk and getting a ticket..

However in the last week or so it has popped off and I'm living for the drama 🤣 it's not even the local community groups,

It's beef between 2 niche (very niche) hobby pages where one is saying x will happen and the other is saying y will happen, then page 1 started posting passive aggressive comments on the page of page 2 and frankly it's incredible.

Any one else got something fun going on, on their Facebook groups?

Bins. TBF the collections have been all over the place for the past couple of weeks and it's a poorly thought out service in general - binbags and plastic boxes rather than actual bins in a lot of places. So it is a problem. But now someone quite senior at the council has chimed in using her own personal account to tell everyone to get a grip and stop making such a fuss. The ensuing fury could yet make the local press!

I'll admit I hadn't looked at mine for months until inspired to do so by this thread. It's pretty typical stuff, really.

Fires (with active/live drone footage) and associated claims of said fires being 'insurance jobs' etc.

Grand Prix Racer Boys' nightly route via non traffic-calmed streets waking babies (no-one knows who these boy racers are, certainly NOT their own sons with the souped-up Corsas/Golfs etc.) Reasonable questions being asked as to why Police seem unable to hear (and intercept) them when everyone in a five mile radius can hear them.

Garden Waste Collection robust advice to not pay the Council's most recent demand of £50pa/per home to have garden waste bins emptied. This advice is based on 'insider info' that indicates staff have been told to collect the bins anyway as they have no idea who has paid and who has not.

Community Initiatives - foodbanks, baby-banks, warm-hubs, lunch clubs (elderly), live nude drawing classes (models sought), and a 'meet and munch' club for single parents at lunch time.

Ongoing News - there is one major story bubbling away and I now intend to follow it with keen interest. It involves replacing the most 'notorious' roundabout in Scotland with a managed traffic system.

Having negotiated said roundabout (in its many, many, many various lane configurations) on a daily basis, over 40+ years it holds no fears for me - clean license, no insurance claims.

There are two very opposing sides in the ongoing 'discussion'. Those like me who are competent, considerate drivers who consider the roundabout to be safe when used by competent, considerate drivers. And, those whom I'm assuming are not competent, considerate drivers who call the roundabout a death trap etc. etc. and who are eagerly awaiting the reconfiguration. I may be being unkind, but I think those who are eager for the change have not yet realised how many months/years of chaos they are facing whilst the work is done. I believe their road rage is currently in the mere foothills of its existence when compared to what awaits them.

Fortunately for me, I'm retired 😁and can choose if/when I need to traverse that junction (or what in future will be a series of junctions). I can easily avoid the gridlocked junctions as those with no patience, a sense of entitlement and simmering road rage simply block the junctions as they are not prepared to wait their turn.

Shared

My kitten hasn't been seen for over an hour.

Six weeks after this was posted in Queensland, Australia it has made it's way to Suffolk. It has meanwhile not been found in Rio or Reykjavik but hugs have been sent and questions have been raised as to whether Hun is okay.

Hun is okay. So is the kitten - who was curled up on the bed and is now six weeks older. And has been missing for nearly half an hour over three weeks ago but is currently having eyes kept out for it in Buenos Aires and Helsinki. Hugs have been sent.

We had minor cake wars last week with someone asking for cake maker recommendations and rival makers and their acolytes passive aggressively slagging each others creations off.

Someone's dog gets out fairly often and patience is running low every time they post asking for people to look out for naughty Fido. She's been actively and explicitly called a crap owner now several times but amusingly never rises to it. And you know when it's about to kick off as you can hear the bloody dog barking usually.

Chemtrails. It's summer here (NZ) and the weather is nice. But every day there's a post of a vapour trail, saying that it's the government seeding the sky to make it rain, to spoil our summer. (Why the government wants this, who knows?). Then there's a big bunfight with lots of people posting "do your own research" and tinfoil hat memes.

Usually: this town is such a shithole, shops closing (true but some great shops remain and likely everyone posting that went to out of town retail parks or fucking amazon for Xmas shopping), "no one speaks English any more", xyz.

Yesterday: We are NOT the oldest town in England. In response to a post by the local paper. Someone suggested Amesbury is because of the stone circle ffs

Thankfully lots of sane people do live here, just very few post on Facebook, making it look like we're a load of xenophobic nutters

@raspberrycheesecakes SE London by any chance? I was literally almost killed by Planters Of Doom™ because it delayed paramedics reaching me but I’ve somehow managed not to yell at FaceBook about it at any stage… (I know, impressive).

@fgscat If it wasn’t for it now being a city I’d’ve guessed you’re in Colchester as that’s the place that’s loudest about it (Because Pliny 🙄); but while Amesbury is a bit out there, it has claim depending on how you define terms (ie continuous settlement or not). It’s Thatcham that holds Guinness Book of Records titles though; & Abingdon has been in continuous settlement since the Paeleolithic era. So I can actually understand people getting het up any definitive claim being made 😶

Well, there's plenty of bin moans. Usually along the lines of "it's dicusting [sic] that the bins aren't being collected from x area tomorrow for the second time in 5 years and the council is going to put on an extra collection the following day what do we pay our taxes for binmen are lazy".

Frequent "Will the selfish person playing music on Y Street turn their music down. It's been going on for 30 minutes."

My favourite the other day was an admin post moaning about the amount of people who post asking things that could easily be Googled. Ironically, the admins make live all the posts. They literally post all the queries that could be Googled.

We have a sheep that keeps escaping....

We get posts asking if someone’s lost a pet bird/ parrot, usually it’s the local wild parakeets.

Not Fb but we have a Forum website.

Top of the "gossip" section: High pitched noise heard every night. Resolved: it's another resident's dodgy boiler.

Then: muggings by 5 black youths outside Sainsbury's.

The post is always late. (Nothing new there, but the thread is 20 pages long).

On Saturday afternoon someone saw 10 police officers force their way into a house. What's going on? Resolved: it's none of your business.

Missing cats

Roundabouts and the roadworks to make them "better"

Injured hedgehogs

All pretty dull tbh!

2 flakes of snow were seen up on the hill so everyone is panicking about being snowed in and they must get to Tesco ASAP
Managed 1 week without road works but now they are going to shut the town off both ends with road works went down well!
floods and how this time we only had a couple of flooded cellars in the town
missing cats as usual or is this any cat that has been feeding for x weeks and it looks hungry tell me a cat that doesn't

People complaining about potholes, the traffic warden (small village but he’s frequently here so presumably lucrative for the Council?), sheep getting out, muddy footpaths (seriously?) through the woods and miscellaneous things going for free.

Do you happen to live in Caterham?

LTN - a few years after implementation, some people are still furious that they can't rat run on some residential streets anymore.
Also terrible parking outside chicken shops.

Sheep, building, floods, dog poo, feeding other people's cats, low level anti social behaviour, car park charges coming in at a local nature reserve, is it right to take photos of floods looking beautiful considering the damage caused?

Sadly never enough moaning about speeding maniacs on the country lanes for my liking.

Live in a perfect village for this madness.

We have a household who allow their 4/5 dogs to free roam. Main A road runs through the village. People now just tag the owners when their dogs are trotting down the middle of the road. We've also had pigs, horses and a llama on the bolt recently.

We have a huge office block that is sitting empty currently. The custodian wants to turn it into a commune with a floor for vegan-only residents, no monetary deposits or background checks, all decided on the residents 'ethos'. All very woo, until he announced that any bad behaviour would result in jnstant enjection, or their electric being turned off for a period 😂 giveth with one hand, then hold over the barrel with another. Unsurprisingly, this went down like a cup of cold sick.

It's VERY hippy, so we often get events focused around the phases of the moon, primal screaming etc.

The best one was an invitation to come and join a 'cuddle puddle' - pay your cash to come and roll around on the floor cuddling strangers. It was stressed that this WASNT sexual though. Just paying to roll about and stroke your fellow villagers.

It's brilliant.

….’racist yokel’ ?

We had this and apparently the protesters won.

However, We now have an enormous pizza place beside another school.

The new pizza place is filled with and surrounded by young teenagers eating pizza.

So I suppose the first set of protestors were right, except- where do said teenagers get the money for pizza?

We have lots of glorious photos and drone footage of the floods along the various local rivers. It is pretty bad as a main A road into Henley is shut, and at the weekend a major roundabout was shut - absolute carnage if you are driving anywhere

Quite sad really a lot of cows drowned in a field not too far from me, the farmer has had them drown before and knows that field is a risk. His name is in the gutter and people want him prosecuted. Otherwise it’s just usual dog poo, people asking for work, the occasional lost item. Someone has taken to posting bad parking with a photo on of the offending vehicle.

@rainpleasestop well the McDonalds did cause a problem as all the stupid little wannabe road men congregate there and have harassed lots of people. It’s calmed down now after the police were called a few times.

Every other post on our village group is people either asking if anyone has seen their Evri parcel, or people having random Evri parcels chucked in their garden. Or people asking if anyone has contact details for the Evri driver. I sense a theme...