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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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Protect Our Local Slums

Protestors have launched a vigorous campaign in response to plans to return a derelict and abandoned housing estate to nature. The Park Estate in Warwick was built in the early fifties and its two-hundred and fifty prefabricated houses were never meant to last more than a few years. Nevertheless, the last tenant moved out only two years ago, since when the properties have been boarded up, fenced off and left to decay. This latest plan will now see the estate bulldozed to make way for a country park consisting of managed woods, grasslands and a small lake.

Inevitably, there has been strong opposition to the scheme and a sizeable section of the local population have objected fiercely. "We don't want our traditional slums ruined by areas of natural beauty," said loud-mouthed campaigner Louisa Scum, 24, who has lived in the area ever since she was 22. "All those trees and bushes will ruin the character of the area. It's all very well for the local councillors and their cronies - they all live in cosy little slums in town. They don't have to worry about having all that nature on their doorstep, do they? But what about us? What about our kids? Where are they going to play once they've torn down all the dangerous condemned buildings and cleaned up all the polluted waste ground? In a tree? I don't bloody think so!"

Local publican Maurice Phlegm, 54, has set up a Facebook page where protestors can register their opposition. He is keen to persuade the council to rethink the plan in the light of the likely impact on the area's infrastructure. "More fields means more cows," he argued. "And our highways are barely sufficient to cope with the traffic as it is. Gawd knows what's going to happen when there are suddenly all these new cows on the roads. They drive like maniacs."

Stop Being Nasty UK

A new charity has been launched to combat 'nastiness' in the UK. Stop Being Nasty UK has been set up to raise awareness of unpleasant behaviour, abusive language and derisive comments that permeate many areas of life in the UK. Their mission is to tackle the issues head on with a series of hard hitting posters and lapel badges.

The charity's founder, Lucinda Pigface-Trollop, explained how the organisation came about. "I once went into a shop with my friends and the lady who worked there was absolutely beastly," she told us. "She really was horrid and my friends and I were only looking around and chatting amongst ourselves. I mean, I know some people have to work for a living and I'm sure that it's really quite awful, but there's no need to take it out on others, is there?"

Lucinda once worked for two weekends in the farm shop on her father's estate, and she knows just how easy it is for high pressure situations to trigger aggressive behaviour. So when she was looking around for something to do after leaving university, this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

"Daddy said that I had to either settle down and raise some children or jolly well find myself a vocation," Lucinda explained. "That's when I had the brainwave to start this charity. It's a brilliant wheeze. The local authority has given me absolutely tons of money, because apparently it means they can tick a box or something. And I don't even have to deliver any proper results. 'Soft outcomes', they call it. As long as I say I'm 'raising awareness', they just keep giving me more cash. It's easy; it makes me wonder why everyone isn't doing it."

Perpetual Stasis

The idea of a perpetual motion machine has caught the imaginations of inventors throughout history, despite the accepted laws of physics telling us that such a thing is impossible. There have been many who have claimed to have constructed such a device - some have been self-deluding crackpots, others out-and-out fraudsters, but in every case their efforts have ultimately been exposed as failures.

But such a machine, if it were possible, would have a profound impact and it is for this reason that the search goes on, pursued both by professional, fully-funded teams working with the latest equipment and facilities, and by lunatic amateurs pottering away in their garages and garden sheds with bits of string, bicycle wheels and rusty old tins.

Firmly inhabiting this latter category is Herman Gland, who has been working on the problem for more than twenty years. Mr Gland, however, is coming at the matter from a novel direction. He reasons that if it is possible to make a perpetual motion machine - a device which will continue to operate indefinitely without any input of energy - then it follows that it is equally possible to build a perpetual stasis machine - a device which remains static no matter how much energy you put into it.

Gland's initial attempts to build such a machine were understandably basic. He began by nailing a grapefruit to a post, but found that it was ridiculously easy to dislodge. He then tried supergluing a Mars bar to a table leg. This set-up proved slightly more resilient but ultimately no match for the dog, which ate it when Gland popped out to put the kettle on.

Of Gland's early experiments, the most successful was when he left his car parked in a neighbouring alleyway. It stayed there, motionless, for just over eight months before the council finally came to tow it away, which was impressive but still fell some way short of the most commonly accepted definition of 'perpetual'.

In more recent years, Gland has experimented with more sophisticated techniques and has invested in powerful magnets, advanced superconductors and a laser pointer that he bought on eBay. All this was a lot of fun, although essentially pointless.

But now Herman Gland believes that he has accidentally stumbled across the real deal after spotting a broken washing machine dumped in the front garden of the house opposite. The appliance has been there for over a year now, without anyone making any attempt to move it, and Gland firmly believes that it will remain where it is indefinitely.