Robin Hood quits, Council buy Jaguars, Adlington wins gold medal, DG installs CCTV, 73-year-old jailed for concrete attack and Forest fans banned
August 3
A Cotgrave meathead gets jailed for racially harassing the owner of Shalimar Takeaway (you can’t miss it: it’s in between Five Star Key Cutters and Kid Creole’s Halal Butchers) and making the owner deliver free pizzas. For three years. I can’t get the image out of my mind of Jeffrey Daniel and Jody Whatley depositing all manner of bodily fluids on a deep-pan. And now, neither can you.
August 6
Figures released by the Tories claim that Nottingham’s hospitals are the chattiest in the country, with the highest rates of vermin in wards, clinics, operating theatres and especially in A&E on Saturday nights.
August 8
Jonas Armstrong quits the role of Robin Hood in the TV series. Good. His accent was rammell.
August 12
Mansfield’s heroine addiction is sated by Rebecca Adlington winning her first gold medal, meaning that - at the time - Mansfield stands above Russia in the Olympic medal table.
August 13
The council announce that they’re getting a couple of new Jaguars in for the Lord Mayor and Sheriff of Nottingham. Why not get them some real ones? If your Lord Mayor was going to open a garden fete and he was bringing a big proper jungle cat (hopefully slipping it off the leash every now and then to set it on local disaffected youths), you’d go, wouldn’t you?
August 16
Rebecca Adlington wins her second gold medal. She could now walk about with the chunkiest, most valuable earrings ever seen in Notts, if she felt like it.
August 19
Viccy Baths loses its bid for heritage status when English Heritage. I went to a wrestling match there when I was a kid and was told to ‘fuck off’ by Giant Haystacks. If that’s not ‘heritage’, I don’t know what is.
August 20
DG cars become the first taxi firm in the country to install CCTV cameras in all its cars. If there is a God up there, that means we could be having the Taxi Channel on satellite as early as 2009, with programmes such as Slagwatch, I’ve Just Chinned A Bouncer, Get Me
Out Of Here, and Ooer, I Though I Had A Tenner. Leg It!
August 22
Nottingham, getting extremely jealous of Mansfield, claims a gold medal for itself when Tim Brabant wins the 1000m kayak gold. So what if he’s from Walton-on-Thames? And come to think of it, all those canoeing medals should belong to us. I bet all those people who won cycling medals had a Grifter at some point in their lives. And Usain Bolt pretends to be Robin Hood. Yeah, we won the Olympics, actually.
August 27
Rebecca Adlington returns to a heroes welcome in Mansfield . The locals parade her round the town, wave flags about, and then dob the medals into Ca$h Converters when she’s not looking.
September 5
The Lenton Swimming Pool reopens after it was bought off the council for a tenner. I’m still waiting to hear from them about my offer to take the Council House off their hands for a fiver, so I can make it into a real one with stonecladding, a massive satellite dish hanging off the side and some proper double glazing.
September 8
A mentalist 73-year-old racist from Wollaton gets six months in the nick for chucking a lump of concrete at a neighbour, after getting an ASBO banning him from being a nob to anyone within half a kilometre of his house. A terrible indictment of the way society treats our elderly racists - give ‘em a mini-bus service, or summat.
September 11
A man in Bestwood barricades himself into his house, kicking a police siege and getting the local junior school shut down for the day. He was later seen being carried around the estate by jubilant nine-year-olds.
September 10
Six Forest-supporting knuckle-draggers get banned from football matches after trashing a pub in Derby - which, seeing as Forest were actually playing in Port Vale at the time and they stopped off for a fag-and-violence break on the way, is a bit much. And seeing as Forest are bottom of the Championship at the moment, shouldn’t they be made to watch?
September 15
A Sherwood girl makes it to the finals of Miss Black Britain, sparking off the biggest debate in the Evening Post’s lamentable website forum since ‘Eeh, they only wear turbans so they can ride motorbikes without helmets’, ‘They come over here, and take our jobs’ and ‘They serve cats in their restaurants, you know’.
September 12
Mansfield wins another Olympic swimming gold, as Sam Hynd wins the 400m freestyle in the Paralympics - proving my theory that people from Mansfield, aware that global warming will submerge most of the UK under water, are mutating into human fish and will eventually enslave us under an iron fin. For God’s sake, Nottingham - put this paper down and have sex with as many dolphins as you possibly can. Now.
September 18
A 92-year-old from Newark breaks his own record for the world’s longest cucumber at a whopping 36.1 inches, which sparks a bidding war between seven porn companies.
September 19
Local boxing legend Dave Needham dies in Thailand from liver problems. I used to pretend he was my brother at junior school to avoid getting bullied. (I also had another imaginary brother called Andy, who was a soldier who was so rock that he was the only
white man to be allowed to join the Gurkhas).
September 20
A local businessman claims that he stopped paying the mortgage on Clifton Hall (a mansion that was worth £3.6million when I wrote this piece, but is probably going for £1.7 by the time you read it) because it was haunted by ghosts that screamed like buggery. If my landlord’s reading this; soz that I’ve not come up with the rent yet, but there’s an absolutely massive spider in the bathroom. It’s like a bleddy potato with legs.
September 22
Student murdered above pub. German suspect. Links to abusive behaviour on internet forum. I’d like to apologise right now to everyone I called a ‘dog’s ringpiece’ on the LeftLion forum.
September 23
A jeweller in Derby Road takes out an advert in the paper offering to buy gold teeth, which will probably kick off a spate of beheadings amongst local drug dealers over the next few months. Fortunately, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
September 25
Nottingham wins the annual Britain in Bloom competition, being named Champion of Champions thanks to its year-round commitment, composting scheme, and entrepreneurial gardeners who rig up hydroponic systems in their own flats and garages.
September 27
Nottingham Trent University announce plans to assemble a videogames museum, full of ancient cabinets and old Space Invaders. They haven’t realised that there’s already something like that nearby - it’s called ‘Skegness’.
September 28
The zombified corpse of Naddinhayum hauls itself up from the grave when Russell Crowe announces that he’ll be playing both Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Jesus Christ, Russ, why stop there? Why not have a go at playing 20,000 piss-stinking peasants and Maid Marian an’all?
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