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Welcome to Belper

With its busy shopping streets packed with unique independent businesses, its history and heritage, its parks, reserves and beautiful spaces, Belper in Derbyshire is a great place to visit.

Find out more about this thriving, historic market town here: belper.madhm.uk.

Welcome to Belper

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Fluff

Startling new data suggests that the amount of fluff in the Earth's biosphere will shortly reach catastrophic proportions.

Some fluff

Until recently, most of the fluff on the planet was of natural origin, usually produced by dandelions, certain birds and as a result of particularly woolly sheep becoming snagged on bushes. However since the invention of the 'pocket' in 1542, levels of artificial fluff have risen dramatically.

Today's modern synthetic pockets can produce fluff at an alarming rate, and in 2021 an initiative was introduced to encourage clothing manufacturers to convert pockets to more environmentally friendly polymers. This went some way towards stemming the ongoing tide of fluff, but critics have suggested that it's too little, too late.

Besides, pockets are really only part of the problem. Fluff is also found down the backs of refrigerators, it forms spontaneously in attics and it is one of the chief by-products in the manufacture of lard.

Mail Order Tattoos

A company in Perth, Australia is now offering a unique 'Tattoo by Post' service.

Mail Order Tattoos

You can send off for their catalogue, consisting of one hundred flaps of loosely bound skin samples, decorated with over six hundred different designs. You choose the one you want, fill in an order form and send it off, along with you arm, thigh, buttock or whichever area of your body you want tattooing. They will then return the freshly tattooed body part to you within twenty-eight days.

The company also does piercings, but they suggest that if you intend to send your cock through the post, you should use registered mail.

Fly-Tipping Astronauts Target Local Man's Garden

"Inconsiderate spacemen are making my life hell," says victim.

"I don't think it's wholly unreasonable to expect spacemen to stop dumping their garbage in my back garden." So says Alexander Cravat, who is fed up with astronauts on the International Space Station discarding their rubbish on his property.

"It started six months ago," said Mr Cravat, a self-employed weasel stuffer from Essex. "Each morning I wake up to find piles of trash heaped up against the fence. At first I thought it was the local kids, but then I noticed stuff that you wouldn't expect to find in ordinary household waste. Things like empty oxygen cylinders, burnt-out circuit boards, tatty old star maps and an inordinate number of Twix wrappers. That's when I thought to myself 'Hello - that's bloody spacemen, that is'."

Mr Cravat has now filed a legal claim to recover the cost of cleaning up the mess, including £12.99 for a new brush. He has also asked the local authority to bring a prosecution for fly-tipping, but a spokesman for the council was reluctant to offer much hope of success.

"The problem we have is in uncovering hard evidence that astronauts were responsible," he explained. "Mr Cravat has shown us several items that he claims can only have come from the International Space Station. We have passed these to our technical advisers but their view is that a dry cleaning ticket for a space suit and a battered Haynes Manual for a Soyuz capsule are circumstantial evidence at best."

Nevertheless, the council's environmental health department has sent an investigator to try and catch the culprits in the act - although at the moment he's in hospital with concussion, after being hit by a superheated baked bean can that had reached terminal velocity as it plummeted to the ground from low Earth orbit. Or, at least, that's what Mr Cravat believes; the local police have been unwilling to rule out the possibility that it was hurled from the top deck of a bus.