May Contain Noughts: 2000-2010

10. People in the Grosvenor swim about in their own wee and bob

We’ve had absolutely minging summers this decade, so when the Grosvenor flooded out and the car park was filled with three feet of water in July of 2009, what else could the punters do but throw caution to the wind and throw an impromptu pool party, like they were in The Sims or summat? What a shame that the fire brigade had to show up and spoil the fun by pointing out the flood was actually caused by blocked drains, they were actually swimming about in three feet of diluted effluent, and what they were doing was effectively the equivalent of drinking Bulwell Lido before licking the floor of Rock City, circa 1983. Boo.

9. Mansfield Town consider a name change

The noughties were a rotten decade for the Stags, with relegation out of the League, dwindling finances, and a series of supporter protests – one of which ended up involving only one man, who locked himself in the toilets at half-time for a cry, and another one where the chairman got panned by a supporter in his own boardroom. The real piss-taking occurred in 2008, however, when John Batchelor (who had changed his name in the past to John Top-Gear and John B&Q) announced plans to call the club ‘Harchester United’ after the protagonists in Dream Team (a Sky TV show that was watched by about 12 people, 11 of whom thought another episode of The Simpsons was coming on and couldn’t be arsed to switch over). Mansfield sorts responded by making up a few new names for him, mainly related to lady-bits. 

8. The Broxtowe Kitchen-nicker

Who says romance is dead? Not in Broxtowe in April 2007 it wasn’t, when an enterprising besotted mouth-breather finally gave his ex that kitchen she always wanted – the one belonging to the house across the road, which he dismantled, nicked, and reassembled in her house. Unfortunately, her extremely convincing story – that she was upstairs giving the kids a bath while he was putting it together and came down to see it magically installed by the Kitchen Fairies – was knocked back by Babylon, and they both got done.

7. The Kegworth Catapult Man

Nottingham had a bit of a reputation for crime this decade, with, oh, about fifty million news stories about how we regularly go to the graves of our own grandparents, rip out their gold fillings, and then dob them in at Ca$h Converter so we buy some crack to keep our kiddies awake so they can climb through windows at 3am. Fortunately, some of us still valiantly fight crime - and none more so than Joe Weston-Webb, a former stuntman who created the UK’s biggest anti-burglar device; a 30ft Roman catapult that fired chicken droppings onto unsuspecting crims. Sadly, police stopped him from using a cannon that would fire rubber-tipped railway sleepers, which he used to fire his wife across the River Avon. 

6. Forest player curls one off on the floor of a Lace Market bar

Forest were awful for most of the decade, but they never sunk as low as this; the team celebration of a 5-0 battering by Oldham in December 2006 which involved assorted startings-on in various third division footballer pubs, throwing drinks on each other, skidding across the floor like three year-old nephews at wedding dos, a Christmas tree getting set alight and culminating in the team watching their mate squat on the floor of the bogs and crimp one out in one of the better bars in town. We just hope he had the courtesy to wipe his 'arris. 

5. The Arnold Hill School Stripper

How did you spend the day of your sixteenth birthday, dear reader? I was busy failing a Maths CSE, and discovering to my dismay that nobody wanted any off me even though I was now ‘legal’. If only my Mam was as cool as the one who decided to treat her lad to a Gorillagram during a drama lesson, only for the booking to get mixed up. A stripper arrived, attaching a dog collar to the youth’s neck and striping his arse with a whip sixteen times, getting her kit off to Britney Spears, and allowing him to rub whipped cream into her arse before the teacher could pick her jaw up off the floor and put a stop to it. And talking of birthday treats… 

4. Bulwell Dad tries to help 14 year-old son lose cherry on Forest Road

Caring Dad, quite possibly worried that his lad was nearly 15 and still hadn’t got one of the fair maidens of Bulwell up the stick or on Jeremy Kyle yet, decides to show him that sexual intercourse is a simple - yet sacred - exchange of tenderness between man who can’t be arsed to get his trousers completely off and pock-marked crack addict with the names of her kids tattooed on her jubblies. In a graveyard. Unfortunately, Dad ends up asking a plain clothes officer if she wants ‘business’, and is immediately hauled off to the nick and slapped upon the Sex Offenders Register. Never mind, it’s Christmas soon. Maybe Santa will bring a smackheaded Albanian.

3. Eastwood banjo-twangers liven up a Saturday night in town by playing Human Conkers

The noughties were a vintage year for mouth-breathery aficionados, as demonstrated by this charming story about two cousins from Eastwood - but aren’t they all related in some way? – who decided to come to Nottingham (known as ‘That There Big City With The Electricity’) for a night out. Seeing as one of them owed an undisclosed sum to a local dealer (quite possibly a cow), they decided to take a couple of pool balls in socks with them, as you do. By the time they got to – sigh – Yates, they were so kaylide and bored that they decided to have a (defendant’s words) ‘play fight’ and started re-enacting scenes from Scum (but not the one in the greenhouse, thankfully), ending in one of them lying in a pool of blood.

2. Cinderhill man gets massive homosexual tattoo on his back

Quoth The Sun; “PROUD Paul Croft got a tattoo of Harry Potter wizard Albus Dumbledore on his back – but is now being teased by pals after he was outed as GAY.” (note the use of the word ‘PROUD’ - that's shorthand for 'if you met him in the street and pointed out that he had a mystical homosexual tattooed on his back, he would pull your entire digestive system out of your mouth and strangle you with it’.)

The poor sod ended up getting a massive shaming off fellow factory workers, who previously seemed to think that spending £500 on a tattoo containing someone from a kiddies’ book was acceptable behaviour. 'It’s been terrible,' said Paul, as he presumably prepared to get a massive tat of something a bit more macho on his chest, like the Village People. 'I’ve always liked Dumbledore – just not in that way.'

1. The Filipino Mail Order Bride Phone-Wank Scam

Andrew Vandarahe wins our award for creative businessman of the decade – not only for running a pound-a-minute Filipino mail-order bride service in 2004 where clients could actually speak to the ladies over the phone (whilst glopping away like bored zoo monkeys), but for calling his company Jabba Communications, which was probably a great description of the people using his services. But it all came crashing down in 2004, when a trading standards investigation discovered that the women in question were not crated-up Filipino fiancées, but mams from Sherwood putting on oriental accents and offering ‘Soo-keh Foo-keh twenteh paahnd’. They even had crib sheets about the Philippines stuck to their desks, just in case punters stopped mid-joff and shouted, 'Hey! What’s the average yearly rainfall in the Zamboanga peninsula?'

Mr Vandarahe got taxed £1,625 and went back to his old job of being a taxi driver, whilst phone-wankers across the county tried to rebuild their shattered lives. 'You thought you were talking to a Filipino girl and some had the accent just right,' said one. 'But when you heard the girl say ‘Ayup’ and ‘Cheers, me duck’ you knew it was a con.'