Dear readers — just one day after delivering on one campaign pledge, we’re back to fulfil another, with the return of our monthly Good News edition. This month’s offering includes a flame war triggering a random act of kindness, a council success story and a stammering superstar. Read on for your monthly burst of positivity, after a quick word from this edition's sponsor.
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Buck Wood Bikegate
When 50-year-old hairdresser Gill moved to Newfield Green, after her divorce meant she could no longer afford to live in Meersbrook, some of her friends worried that her new neighbourhood was “dead dodgy”. She reckons they were ignoring the highlights of life in Gleadless Valley, like its lovely green spaces. In particular, Gill fell so thoroughly in love with Buck Wood, six hectares of largely untouched woodland just outside her new home, that she created an Instagram account to have somewhere to put all the photos she was taking. “I was feeling a bit whimsical,” she tells me over the phone, “so I set it up as if I were the woods.”
For almost a month, very few people took any notice. On 25 May, however, she posted something despairing about an old motorbike that had been flytipped in the woods and the Instagram algorithm, attracted to a whiff of negativity like a moth to an open flame, began pushing it onto strangers’ feeds. Gill says she had been reporting the bike to the council for months and it infuriated her that nothing was done. “I went full Karen,” she admits. “When you go to green spaces in wealthy areas, you don’t see things like that. People might argue that’s because there’s not as much of that behaviour but I disagree — I think if someone dumps an old bike in a wealthy area, it gets moved.”
In character as Buck Wood, she wrote that the bike was “poisoning her belly,” which appears to have been the crucial thing that caused her post to blow up. The internet peanut gallery did not appreciate the whimsy of her decision to roleplay as a local green space. “I got hundreds of comments calling me sad and gay and mental,” Gill says. “It seems there are people out there who are pro-fly-tipping, who knew?” While she didn’t let this affect her too much, she was irritated by the number of people crowing that she should move it herself. “As if humans only come in varieties that can shift a motorbike,” she says. “I’m no nanan but I couldn’t move that by myself.”
“So I decided to have a bit of fun,” Gill says, “and start responding to people with the energy they came to me with — a little bit mean or whatever.” Which is how she ended up getting into a fairly undignified spat with a total stranger, a 28-year-old from Gateshead with the username @jeff_the_drunk.
A needlessly hostile exchange in a comment section? Hardly news, you may be thinking, and certainly not good news. Except — for quite possibly the first time in internet history — this flame war ended up achieving something positive. “Tell you what mate, seeing as you refuse to pull your finger out, I’ll do it,” Jeff wrote. “My only condition is that I’m going to take a massive fat shite in the woods, and we can see how your belly likes the taste of that.” (Over the phone, Jeff admits that he did not deliver on that threat, although it doesn’t sound like Gill would have minded that much. “If he thinks he’d be the first person to take a shit in those woods, I have some sad news for him about Gleadless.”)
When I ask Jeff why an argument with a stranger motivated him to make a five-hour round trip from Gateshead to Sheffield to drag a burnt-out motorbike out of the woods with a rope, he doesn’t seem entirely sure. “What I didn’t understand was how heavy the bike would be or how difficult the terrain in the woods was,” he says. “It was hard work but I got it done in the end.” He suspects he was motivated to do it largely because the idea he would was so ridiculous. “Also it started pissing me off that loads of people were liking my comment or leaving their own,” he adds, “and none of them had done it, even though probably a lot of them were based in Sheffield.”
That evening, Gill says her phone started blowing up with Instagram notifications, photo after photo of Jeff and his spaniel Howard dragging the bike out of the woods. “I was literally crying while telling people, I just think it’s an absolutely mint thing to do,” she says. “The moral of the story is that bullying is good really!” (The Tribune does not endorse this takeaway.)
If you’d like to prevent Buck Wood’s next stomach ache, Gill recommends filling out the council’s survey on how it manages parks and green spaces, which closes on 11 September.
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