Sheff’s historic reputation for protest took a turn for the absurd this week as the news of a tree-felling protester arrested for playing a plastic trumpet and setting off a rape alarm hit national headlines.
A YouTube video circulating online shows a 57-year-old woman on Rivelin Valley rd protesting the planned tree-felling in the area, an ongoing feud familiar to most in the city.
The video, dated Wednesday 21st March, shows her first she setting off a rape alarm, arguing the felling was ‘raping the trees’, and asking what law she was breaking by playing her plastic vuvuzela-style horn. (Remember them from the 2010 World Cup?).
After turning the alarm off, she can be seen giving the instrument a solitary ‘toot’, causing police officers to put her in the back of a police van and confiscate the horn.
According to the Guardian, the trumpeting protester has been given a courts summons after a complaint from a member of the public. The charge? Causing intentional harm or distress.
Despite the *somewhat* farcical nature of this incident, it comes after an increasingly fraught tensions between protesters who say police presence is unnecessary and police who say growing numbers of protesters is causing safety concerns.
But whichever side you take, we can perhaps all join in hoping the spectacularly irritating vuvuzela trend doesn’t see a resurgence…
