The world’s curtain-twitching grassing-up of people and their new conspicuously aggressive exercise regimes has come to the attention of U.K. police, with forces warning folk not to take the law into their own hands when deciding what is or is not an acceptable form of daily exercise.
Everyone’s local Facebook groups are full of tedious warriors complaining that cyclists are riding their bikes too far right now, for example, or shouting that a jogger pausing to tie a shoelace in a park is the metaphorical flap of a butterfly’s wings that’ll eventually lead to 42,000 additional U.K. deaths in June.
The U.K.’s National Rural Crime Network says it’s received reports of much “small-scale vigilantism” in the countryside, where it says roads have been blocked to stop cyclists entering villages and some police forces have logged complaints of cars “driving aggressively at cyclists” who the drivers perceive as being unwelcome outsiders, because as everyone knows, showing knees spreads disease.
Julia Mulligan, chair of the National Rural Crime Network, said: “People have been making it clear that people coming from long distances to enjoy our local beauty spots that are not local to them are not welcome. There have been signs put up, we’ve had people calling cyclists out,” as even in these difficult days people still go out of their way to find ways to hate people riding bikes for some bizarre reason.
This post originally appeared on Gizmodo UK, which is gobbling up the news in a different timezone.