Here’s a heart-warming tale from last weekend that might briefly distract you from the horribly aggressive, angry place the world has become.

About three years I thought I’d try to spice up the Wrexham commentaries with a bit of interaction. It’s always good to bring in different viewpoints, or answer questions from those who can’t see the game for themselves.

Thus, #askwxm was born: a hashtag whose intention was to allow supporters to get in touch in a swift, simple way in order to bring variety to our broadcast.

It worked beautifully, but a small scale. This was before the takeover, and the amount of listeners we had was limited by that. A hardcore of about 30 fans would use #askwxm to get in touch, but naturally the number in contact fluctuated wildly from match to match.

Sometimes there’d be a fairly constant stream of interesting stuff, but sometimes it was quite the opposite. There were some games, usually home games with large attendances, where most of the fans were in the ground, when absolutely nobody got in touch!

The takeover changed all that. We persisted with #askwxm as we felt it could prove to be a useful first point of contact between our new fanbase and the club. This was, after all, before the National League finally gave the go-ahead for matches to be streamed abroad so if you wanted to keep abreast with what was happening, we were your best bet.

The #askwxm community grew swiftly and delightfully. Existing fans and new ones mingled happily, exchanging ideas and information. We could dip into them during commentary and try to encourage discussion on points they’d raised.

When “Welcome to Wrexham ” aired, this rather cosy little endeavour absolutely blew up! Suddenly we were inundated with #askwxm questions, comments and all manner of other things. It became impossible to keep up with the flow of interactions and do a commentary at the same time, so it was time to expand.

We now do an hour-long #askwxm podcast, to sweep up questions which we didn’t get to, and to offer those we’d answered which were of particular interest another airing.

It’s been a wonderful, if time-consuming, endeavour, but what happened last weekend came completely out of the blue.

It was one of my co-commentators, Bill Long, who drew my attention to it: a spontaneous #askwxm supporters group had established itself with the intention of unleashing the potential of the community we’d created.

There’s a lot of interest in the women’s team, and quite rightly as they’ve just enjoyed a magnificent season. Our new, overseas fans are particularly eager, not least because it hasn’t been possible to offer the same level of coverage to them as the men’s team get.

So, a group of supporters in the USA created the group, with the intention of making up for their inability to attend the final women’s game of the season by holding a virtual bucket collection. Appropriately, they chose Welsh Women’s Aid as the recipients, a charity which supports women and children in danger of abuse and violence.

They made over £100 on the first evening, and by the time we’d had a chance to air their good work in our commentary a few times, that figure had risen to nearly £1,000! Not a bad first 24 hours for a fund-raising campaign which hoped to raise £200! The page remains open until the women’s game a week next Sunday, so hopefully that figure will multiply by then.

I should emphasise that I take no credit for this – I’ve merely mentioned it in commentary and on social media – but I still take immense pride in it. My intention, once the takeover happened and we found ourselves attracting the interest of a surge of new fans, was to not only report on the football, but to give a full picture of the good the club has done, especially under the leadership of the WST.

“Welcome to Wrexham” flourished exactly because it successfully put this across: people were not only hooked by the drama on the pitch, but by the heart they could recognise in the community which formed around the club, and its beneficial effect on Wrexham itself.

Anybody who flick through old editions of The Leader will know that I’ve consistently written about the value of the football club on the local community. I’m utterly thrilled to find that we’ve attracted the sort of new fans who see that as clearly as I do.