The Truth Is Out There.....

Been a wee bit of a bizarre week here and it's all to do with a tweet I posted regarding my home town.

You see, last Monday afternoon (7th June) I posted a photo I'd come across on an image board whilst searching for forest reference pics (It's an illustrator thing):

I chose Dudley as mainly because I thought it was funny and kinda summed up my home town.

I mean as a kid we had a 'Devil Tree' behind the house as well as the infamous 'Zombie Lake' (and a local scary caravan dwelling serial killer 'Red Face' - it was the early 80s and less enlightened times, sorry) so why not aliens?


Anyway I showed it to Rho, had a giggle and thought nothing else of it, until that is a few days later when it had amassed over a million views.

Crikey I thought and then got back to tweeting about bad movies and the like.

It was then that things got really weird.

First there were the emails from various newspapers followed by even more hits which meant that I'd had to turn the notifications off as my phone was shaking like a really shaky thing and it was starting to scare me as I assumed it was possessed.

Jump forward to today and a friend of mine sent me this:

And that's just the ones I found so far.

Bloomin' flip! As the cool kids say.

So I reckon it's time to announce that I'm sorry to say it's not real and, as I said, I only picked Sedgley as it's my home town and thought it would give people a giggle, never realised it'd go viral! 

But it's not just that, it's fascinating - to me at least - how it seems to have resonated with folk, reading the replies to various postings it's taken in everything from a sheer boredom with lockdown, to Priti Patel's immigration policy to the distance to the local (Stourbridge) tip since the Dudley one has closed via the 'hidden' meaning behind the red 'to'....plus everyone thinks in some way that their hometown is a wee bit odd at times.

Oh yes, and the folk how actually want it to be real. 

I've just had a thought and I reckon - at a push - I could pretend that this was some well planned social experiment/performance art thing and try to get a few quid off it but I'm just gonna be honest and say - again - that I just thought it was fairly funny.


 So, to everyone who had a giggle at it - you're welcome.


And to everyone else, don't worry tho' I'm sure the truth is - still - out there, as is the actual person who took the pic....whom I've been trying to find since in the hope of at least being able to buy them a pint or two!

Ash Lloyd