A bizarre-looking fir tree sliced in half during a neighborly dispute over bird droppings has become a popular tourist attraction with its own Google reviews in the Waterthorpe suburb of Sheffield, England.

Three years ago, the now-famous half-cut fir tree of Waterhope made international news headlines for the first time. Located on the edge of Bharat Mistry’s property, it extended its evergreen crown on the driveway of Irene and Graham Lee. The birds nesting in the 25-year-old fir tree had become a nuisance to the Lee’s as they constantly had to clean their driveway of droppings. At first, the two parties involved tried to find an amicable solution, like trimming the branches or installing nets to prevent birds from nesting in it, but since no compromise was reached, the Lees took matters into their own hands and hired an arborist to cut the tree in half and remove its branches from their property. Photos of the odd-looking tree quickly went viral and the tree became a local tourist attraction.

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The Holme, a 205-year-old London mansion is currently on the market for an eye-watering £250 million ($300 million), which makes it the world’s most expensive mansion.

Known as the “White House of Regent’s Park”, because of its massive scale and similar style facade as that of Washington DC’s iconic presidential residence, The Holme features 40 bedrooms, eight garages, a tennis court, a sauna, a library, and a “grand dining room”, as part of its 29,000 sq ft of living space.  Built in 1818 by Georgian property developer James Burton, The Holme served as a residence for the Burton family, before being used by Bedford College for several decades. It became a private residence in the 1980s and has been on the market several times since, fetching astronomical prices every time. Today, it is being sold for £250 million ($300 million), the highest price set for any mansion, ever.

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The Isles of Scilly Football League is the world’s smallest official football league, consisting of only two teams that play each other seventeen times a season.

As the home of football, England has always been crazy about the team sport, and the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago of more than 140 islands off the southwestern tip of Cornwall, is no exception. Like many other regions of England, the isles have their own football league, but what sets them apart is the size of the league – it consists of just two teams, the Garrison Gunners and the Woolpack Wanderers, that play each other every weekend during a season, as well as in two yearly cups and the traditional ‘Old Men versus the Youngsters’ game played on Boxing Day.

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When it comes to unusual and unappetizing-looking Christmas dishes, there are few meals out there that can compete with the Stargazy Pie, a pie with fish heads protruding through the crust, appearing to be gazing skyward.

England is home to a variety of pies, from classics like apple pie and pork pie, to less known treats like steak and ale pie, or pot pie. But none of these pastry treats hold a candle to the famous Stargazy Pie, when it comes to wow factor. No matter how elaborate your pie design is, you just can’t beat half a dozen cooked sardine heads (and sometimes tails) sticking out from the hearty dough crust, looking towards the sky. It looks almost as “delicious” as Japan’s alien dumplings, doesn’t it?

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The Bolton Strid, a narrow segment of the River Wharfe in North England has a reputation that doesn’t quite suite its picturesque appearance – it is informally known as the most dangerous stretch of water in the world, with an alleged fatality rate of 100 percent for everyone unlucky enough to have fallen in it.

There is no official death toll for the Strid, but its deadliness is infamous not only in Yorkshire, but the whole of England, and judging by the literary references to its appetite for taking lives going back centuries, one would say that its reputation is well deserved. Part of what makes the Strid so dangerous is how calm and harmless it looks to the unsuspecting stranger, which is why there are now signs along its banks that read “The Strid is dangerous and has claimed lives in the past. Please stand well back and beware slippery rocks!”

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Hundreds of people, including families with children, were branded “covidiots” after being spotted breaking social distancing rules on the shores of a toxic lake formed on the site of an old chalk quarry, and even jumping in the dangerous water.

The old quarry at Chinnor, in Oxfordshire, has become known as the “Chinnor Riviera” or the “Blue Lagoon”, after its deceptively turquoise water became a hot spot among local teens but also families with young kids, especially after the end of the Covid-19 quarantine. Last weekend, locals alerted police forces in the area about the presence of hundreds of people on the private property, a closed chalk quarry. Despite its alluring color, the flooded quarry contains highly alkaline substances, is highly toxic and can cause serious health issues.

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A disgruntled painter and decorator took revenge on the person who allegedly refused to pay him the sum they had a greed on by painting an angry graffiti message on the building he had painted.

People passing by the former North Star Club building in Bolsover, England last month were surprised to see a peculiar message painted in black over the cream exterior – “Want your house painting? Don’t be like Terry, pay the bill! Now you will!” It was the work of Dean Reeves, a local painter and decorator who claims that he was hired to paint the building, which is being converted into flats, for a fee, but that the client refused to pay him £500 ($645) of what he was owed. Sick of being asked to do jobs that he hadn’t initially agreed to in order to get paid, the 50-year-old painter decided to teach his client a lesson.

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Most people think that cats are nature’s ultimate rat catchers, but they’re actually a lot less efficient in catching and killing rodents than dogs.

Rats are known to breed at an alarming rate, and in the English countryside it’s easy for farms to be overrun by disease-spreading rodents. When rats become too much for farmers to handle, it’s up to small companies like Suffolk and Norfolk Rat Pack to come in and clean up with the help of some small but exceptionally skilled rodent hunters. Suffolk and Norfolk Rat Pack specialises in training dog breeds that genetically designed to catch rats; they travel all around the UK helping farmers clean up their rat infested properties in a matter of hours. Their most successful endeavour yet occurred earlier this month, when a pack of eight dogs managed to kill no less than 730 rats in only seven hours.

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An elderly couple in the UK claimed that they were held hostage by a pair of seagulls nesting on the roof of their Lancashire home. Every time they tried to leave the birds would become aggressive and attack them.

Roy and Brenda Pickard’s story sounds like a real life version of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Birds”. The elderly couple were held hostage in their own home by a pair of adult Herring Gulls after the birds’  chicks slipped on the roof of the house and landed onto the canopy directly above the front door. Every time Roy tried opening the front door, he was confronted by two angry squawking adult seagulls. One time, when he decided to take his chances and go outside, the 71-year-old was hit so hard on the back of the head that he had to be taken to the hospital for help. Local authorities have installed a gazebo outside the couple’s home, which should offer some protection, but that’s the best they can do for now.

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A wannabe ‘killer clown’ who dressed like popular Batman villain The Joker was recently jailed for terrorizing the people of Nottinghamshire, in England, for three months.

29-year-old Damien Hammond, a homeless and jobless man who styled himself like Heath Ledger’s character in the hit movie The Dark Knight Rises, has been jailed for 22 weeks and banned from Nottingham for three years, after going on a three-month crime spree just a few miles from the real-life Gotham village. Hammond, who is well known around Nottingham for his obsession with The Joker, reportedly pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct towards staff in various retail stores, waving a gun-shaped cigarette lighter while standing in traffic, and striking a police officer, among other charges. After hearing his sentence, the accused, who showed up to court with bright green hair, said “Send me to prison, I don’t care”. Typical Joker…

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A man managed to get himself jailed for 16 weeks and miss the birth of his child, after lying to his pregnant girlfriend that he had been kidnapped, just so he could get drunk with his buddies.

This kidnapping prank gone wrong took place in January, when Leigh Ford, a 45-year-old man from Blackpool, England, made several frantic phone calls to his pregnant partner Zoe Doyle, telling her that he had been kidnapped and that he was going to be tortured unless she transferred all the money she had into the kidnappers’ bank account. At first, the woman thought he was kidding, but he sounded really scared, and there were other men shouting in the background, threatening to cut off Leigh’s legs, and pour hot water on him. So she complied, but she also called the police.

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A 24-year-old man from Southampton, England, was banned from contacting his parents for five years after they got so fed up with his constant pestering for money that they got a restraining order against him.

A restraining order was issued against Matthew Kerley last year by the Crown Prosecution Service, after his parents complained that his constant begging for money had caused them extreme anxiety and stress. He was also jailed for 32 weeks on charges of harassment, but continued to contact his mother and father after that, despite the restraining order preventing him from doing that for five years. For example, last month, he called his parents for money over 30 times in 24 hours, with some of the calls being made in the middle of the night.

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Wealthy residents of an elite neighborhood in Bristol, England have installed ‘anti-bird spikes’ on trees  in an attempt to protect their expensive cars from bird droppings.

The spikes, which are commonly used to prevent birds from roosting and nesting on building ledges over public sidewalks, were nailed to two trees in the exclusive Clifton area of the city, near the wildlife-rich Downs and the Avon gorge. The use of these spikes in trees has outraged locals and environmentalists alike, with one Twitter user calling it a war on wildlife. The affected trees have been described by a local Green Party councilor as uninhabitable to birds. A spokesperson for Bristol city council, however, said that the trees were on private property, so there was nothing that the local authorities could do to stop them. The spikes had apparently already been in place for several years.

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Inspired by the 2004 Tom Hanks film The Terminal, a homeless army veteran looking for a place to sleep recently decided to move into Heathrow Airport. He originally planned on staying for a couple of nights, but he’s been living there for almost a month.

A former member of the Parachute Regiment who served in Northern Ireland before working in private security, Simon Jones – fake name to protect his identity – fell on hard times after his business collapsed and his romantic relationship ended. Penniless and with no place to sleep, he remembered watching The Terminal, in which the main character is forced to live in an airport after war breaks out in his country leaving him stateless, and decided to crash at Heathrow Airport – the busiest in Europe – for a couple of nights.

“I suddenly lost everything when my business, which provided high-risk assignments and the training of personnel, collapsed. The business put an enormous strain on my relationship and we separated. I was suddenly homeless and, because all the bank accounts were in joint names, penniless,” Jones told English newspaper The Sunday Express. “I was mulling over what to do. I don’t want to be a burden on anybody, so felt I couldn’t stay on friends’ floors for more than a night or two, especially since I can’t pay my way. Then I remembered the Tom Hanks film about the bloke living at an airport. I realized there would be washing facilities and even free wi-fi.”

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Convinced that smartphones are ruining our social lives as well as the pub experience, the owner of a newly-opened bar in Brighton, England has decided to get people socializing the old-fashioned way by disabling their cellphone reception.

Instead of texting, checking emails or browsing the internet, patrons of the Gin Tub bar will have to pass the time by actually interacting with their friends, dates or even complete strangers. Owner Steve Tyler could have simply asked guests not to use their phones in his bar, but instead of banning them, he opted to disable them completely. The Gin Tub has a Faraday cage built into its ceiling, which makes getting a reception inside the venue impossible. He says it was the only exception in Britain’s 2006 Wireless Telegraphy Act that otherwise outlaws the use of signal blockers. So yes, it’s 100% legal.

“Mobile phones have killed pubs. When you go out socially, you don’t need social media,” Tyler says. “Rather than telling people they can’t use they phones we’ve basically disabled them.” He makes sure to clarify that the Faraday shield doesn’t jam phone signals, as that would be illegal. Instead the 19th-century device prevents the signal from getting inside.

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