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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.

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Young Methuselah

The BBC has commissioned a brand new drama for its winter schedule. The Adventures of Young Methuselah will air on Saturday night and will feature the exploits of the famous historical figure as he fights crime in ancient Mesopotamia.

"Yeah, well, he's the old guy from the bible, right?" said the BBC's Head of Barrel Scrapings, Harry Tit. "Thought so. Well, we wanted to make him relevant to today's young adult audience. We thought, hey, rather than have this crotchety old guy, we'll ditch the whole 'Victor Meldrew' thing, and follow his adventures when he's young and trendy and hot. We really wanted to tell this guy's story. Also, we've done everybody else, so it was either this or frickin' Ivanhoe."

The series begins in September, and the BBC promises thrills aplenty over its thirteen week run as we join Methuselah and his two sidekicks, Ghandi and Tufty the Squirrel, as they encounter ancient wizards, power-mad oligarchs, electric dinosaurs and futurist space cyborgs from the fifth dimension.

Henrietta the Accountancy Horse

Many and varied are the stories of remarkable animals and their extraordinary talents. One recalls Jep, the Welsh Border Colley who was famed throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century for its ability to talk. Then there was Arthur, the skateboarding duck of Arkansas, who was exhibited by Barnum and ultimately retired to a golden gem-encrusted duck house, a very rich duck indeed. And obviously there are innumerable stories of horses that could apparently count, signalling the answers to complex mathematical conundrums by clopping out the answers with their hooves.

Invariably, many of these equine marvels were exposed as fakes. But not Henrietta, the Bakersfield Wonder, an Arabian mare working in Wisconsin in the 1920s. Not only was she able to answer questions without interference from any human agent, but she could also solve quite complex mathematical puzzles. In fact, she was so numerically adept that she set up an accountancy business and boasted some extremely influential clients. Until, that is, she was busted for tax fraud in 1931. After serving ten years, she ended up as a turf accountant, before finally overdosing on horse tranquilisers and liniment in an unfurnished single-bedroomed apartment in Brooklyn.

Burgers vs. Bangers

When amateur inventor Darius Bottomly discovered a cache of over 200 burnt and blackened bangers hidden in a patch of weeds at the bottom of his garden he obviously assumed that he had chanced upon some kind of natural sausage spring. But when groundwater tests revealed an almost total absence of pork or beef, the mystery deepened. It was only once he had observed his neighbour dropping them over the fence after a family barbecue that he realised that his garden was being used as a dumping ground for unwanted food.

Bottomly's response was to develop the self-propelling burger, a drone patty that can, at a given signal, flip itself up off the barbecue and strike any target within a two hundred yard radius. The test flight of the prototype saw not only a successful launch but also a confirmed kill as it smashed straight through next door's patio window and fatally impacted the family's second favourite goldfish.

Bottomly's neighbour has since retaliated by stepping up his sausage dumping activities, launching wave after wave of the frazzled bangers over the boundary at random times throughout the day. And although Bottomly admits that he is currently under siege, he is confident that the tide of the conflict will turn just as soon as he has perfected his sausage-seeking chicken drumstick which will be able to knock incoming meat products out of the air before they have chance to do any real damage.

Space Cress

Scientists may be one step closer to identifying a candidate for dark matter, the unknown substance that accounts for nearly 85% of the mass of the universe. Professor Boz Dangler, Visiting Professor of Peanuts at CERN, says that inspiration struck him as he was tucking into a salad in the staff canteen.

"I noticed that while the celery, the lettuce, the radishes and the tomatoes were all easily identifiable, a significant portion of the total mass of my lunch appeared to be hidden. It was only when I looked under the cucumber that I noticed the cress. Tasteless and odourless, the cress only reacted weakly with the other ingredients and was therefore almost impossible to detect. It was then that I realised that the universe's missing mass must be cress. Not ordinary cress, of course - that would be silly. Space cress."

The Professor may not have to wait too long for proof of his theory. Next month the European Space Agency will launch OCO, the Orbital Coleslaw Observer, which will train its instruments on the Carina nebula, a vast cloud of expanding balsamic vinegar which has recently been the subject of much speculation as it is thought to contain herbs which do not occur naturally on Earth.