12 signs that your neighbourhood Facebook group has invaded your thinking way too much . . .

Your local Facebook page can tell you a lot about your part of town, village, or neighbourhood - great local walks. Reminders as to when the bins should be put out. Which streets to avoid at night. But for all the delights that your neck of the woods has to offer its great and good, there are always a few keyboard warriors who seem to have nothing more to do but fill your timeline with their endless local vendettas . . .

12 signs that your neighbourhood Facebook group has invaded your thinking way too much!

1. Your mind is soured by dark thoughts concerning those who fail to pick up after their dog at random intervals throughout your day.

2. Your evenings are spent constantly waiting for a police helicopter to circle the neighbourhood, and for a local busybody to subsequently demand, "ANYONE KNOW WHY THERE'S A POLICE CHOPPER ABOVE?"

3. On seeing an unmarked van being driven around your neighbourhood you are possessed by an unrelenting need to broadcast this fact to anyone in a 5 mile radius, along with racial and socio-economic profiling of the van's driver, and their registration plate.

4. You feel it would be prudent to ask people, via the Internet, if the Internet is currently down.

5. You believe that it is a human right that your locality is populated with someone who is able and willing to furnish you with the phone number of your local DHL/Hermes/FedEx driver.

6. Dog poo is seriously spending more time in your mind than - it seems! - in your neighbourhood's official dog poo bins. A simple walk along local streets is spent starting at grass verges in the secret hope that an abandoned pile of poo will stoke a similar sense of delicious, indignant rage that seems to possess so many of your neighbours.

7. You are filled with an ongoing suspicion that an evil entity within your village is maliciously lighting bonfires/barbecues to coincide with your hanging out the washing in an attempt to make you smell constantly smoky.

8. Have something old, knackered, and worthless to sell? No matter, the irrepressible manner with which your community’s most undeservedly successful salespeople attempt to hard-sell their detritus has you convinced you have a thoroughly unearned right to set an outrageous price for the broken shoe rack that has been cluttering up your garage since 1993.

9. You often wonder if any of the more frequent, borderline-fascist posters to your neighbourhood Facebook page were created by a dictatorial local parish councillor in order to control you and your neighbours' lives via fear and paranoia.

10. You flex your social conscience muscle after a minor local incident by expressing that you "hope everyone's okay xxx," after each and every incident – from a misplaced scarf to major gas leak - is reported on your local page, yet would happily pass these very same people on the street as if they were invisible.

11. You are plagued by a compunction to utilise all of your neighbours’ various beauty treatments, regardless of the fact that their clientele/victims seem to have had their make-up applied by a giddy orangutan, and their hair based upon the very worst do's of 1987.

12. You harbour a secret, malevolent desire to rear a pack of lawless hounds and have them defecate liberally upon the lawns of the most indignant local dog poo-whingers as you look out from your highest window while cackling maniacally and refreshing your local Facebook group page, watching the world burn.

JS Harding is a novelist and humour writer who has written for BBC Comedy and NewsThump. His psychological thriller, Under Rand Farm, written under the pen name LJ Denholm is available via Amazon, while his forthcoming humour novel, The Good Dr Grevaday? is slated for release in early 2022.