A Few Notes on Yorkshire and the North of England for the American Tourist
YORKSHIRE
Yorkshire is virtually a country of its own, quite distinct from the rest of England. The city of York is a must. The Dales and North Yorkshire moors are engaging. You will be able to imagine Heathcliffe standing there, the wind sweeping through his hair as he broods over the lack of proper sanitation which killed off most of the Brontë’s. That and uh… drink.
Leeds is in many ways the second city of England. Forget Birmingham. You don’t want to go there anyway. The road system in Birmingham is execrable. It was designed in the 1960s by city planners on acid. I can hear them now. ‘Oh wow man, if we put in all these junctions and roundabouts we can have like a totally holistic road network. Wouldn’t that be so cool?’ Not. Don’t ever try to drive there. Leeds has the largest number of clubs per capita of any city in the UK which tells you just about everything that you need to know about the place. Paaarrty!!
If you want to truly ingratiate yourself with anyone from Yorkshire, ask them if they have hanged any monkeys lately. This incident is indicative of the level of intellectual achievement that persists in the area to this day. During the Napoleonic Wars a French ship sunk off the coast of Yorkshire and a monkey in a French military costume washed up on the beach in Hartlepool. It was clear to the local populace that the monkey could be nothing other than a French spy so under the protocols of war they strung the bugger up!
According to Historic-UK.com, Hartlepool United’s mascot is a monkey called H’Angus the Monkey, and the local Rugby Union team Hartlepool Rovers are known as the Monkeyhangers. The successful mayoral candidate in the 2002 local elections, Stuart Drummond, campaigned dressed in the costume of H’Angus the Monkey, using the election slogan “free bananas for schoolchildren”, a promise he was unfortunately unable to keep.
Yorkshiremen are renowned for their stubbornness and for growing up hard. The quintessential Yorkshireman is called Sam Small. Typical of Sam’s attitude to life was displayed during his days in the Army. Sam received a dressing down from his Sergeant who then knocked his rifle out of his hands. The Sergeant then ordered him to pick it up. Sam replied. ‘A (you) knocked it down ‘a can pick it oop!’
Their women are reserved, until about the sixth vodka tonic, when they turn feral, and one then needs to proceed with caution. It is important to bear in mind that all casual sex in England only happens under the lubricating assistance of large quantities of alcohol and is more easily achieved on the beaches of Spain or Greece than in a grey Northern City on a Saturday night.
There is nothing I can say about the culture of Yorkshire that couldn’t be better said than four middle-aged, successful Yorkshiremen describing it themselves
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t’ mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi’ his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of ‘ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to ‘ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o’clock at night and lick road clean wit’ tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit’ bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. they won’t believe you.
ALL:
They won’t!
As attested by Monty Python
THE NORTH
I love the North of England. It’s so very real and in your face. Where to start? If you’re a tourist and you’ve seen the Tower, Westminster Abbey, Oxford’s dreaming spires, an idyllic Cotswold village and have finished chasing the ghost of Charles Edward Stuart around Scotland I recommend that the place to go if you want to know what the real England is all about is Blackpool. Blackpool is where real Brits go on holiday. It is a poor man’s Las Vegas with seriously dodgy weather. What’s great about it is it’s so in-your-face, blunt and unapologetic — just like your average working-class Brit. Blackpool, like the people that holiday there, will tell you unapologetically to your face: ‘You fookin’ Yanks are always fookin’ complaining. You’ve got it fookin’ made, but you fookin’ whinge about everything: “There’s too much fookin’ choice, my fookin’ parents fooked me up, me fookin’ son couldn’t afford a new fookin’ car this year.” Well fook you! I had to eat handful of cold gravel for fookin’ breakfast every morning when I was lad.’
I had to leave. So will you, but you’ve got to see it.
Newcastle is an interesting town and good for a day or two. A word of warning though, they do not speak English there. They speak a language called Geordie. You will not understand it. Trust me.
I was once in a Gentlemen’s (sic) Club in Newcastle. This was an interesting cultural experience. Every girl in the place had her name tattooed on the small of her back. Now it struck me that if you were concerned about getting trashed to the point where you forgot your name, having it tattooed on the small of your back wasn’t the most convenient place to do it. The only practical application I could think of for this would be as an aide memoir for your partner — but then only in certain positions. ‘Oh yeah baby, that’s so good! Oh…uh…uh…oh yeah…. uh Kim!’
I recommend that you avoid Middlesborough. This is without doubt the worst city in the entire United Kingdom. Do not go there! If you spend any time there you will have a psychotic break. Also, they don’t speak English there either. They speak a variant of the Yorkshire dialect and will kick the shit out of you if you confuse them with Geordies.
Liverpool is a grim, shitty city. It does have a certain faded grandeur because of the money that came into the place from the slave trade. It has the best examples of Victorian architecture outside London, except the buildings are filthy and falling down. No doubt you’ll actually go there on some misguided Beatles pilgrimage. The city fathers certainly hope so. Fuck, even I’ve been to the Cavern Club. Liverpudlians are called Scousers. So what do you call a Scouser in a suit? The defendant. That about sums the place up.
The thing I love most about the North though is that they’re tough. If you visit Northern England, you must go in the winter. Choose any town. They’re all the same. The girls are so poor that none of them can afford more than half a dress. On a Friday or Saturday night in January they spill out of the pubs, steam literally pouring off their waxed and polished skin as they head for the clubs. They’re all wearing nothing but halter tops, miniskirts and fake tans. As one Geordie girl explained it to me: ‘Why would you want to wear a coat in the wintertime? You’ll just lose valuable drinking time queuing for the cloak room, plus you’ll have to spend money storing the coat which would be better spent on drink!’ Don’t ‘cha just love ‘em? This is for real.
Also, they have a great sense of humour. The following article recently appeared in an English journal. Many Americans will no doubt be appalled by this, having been brain-washed since youth by Puritans and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union about the perils of demon drink. The English know better. Northerners even more so.
OUR CHILDREN CAN’T HOLD THEIR BOOZE, ADMIT NORTHERNERS
PARENTS in the North say they are ‘deeply shamed’ after new figures revealed their children are lightweights, unable to handle a proper session.
New government figures show record numbers of Northern youngsters being admitted to hospital with ‘alcohol-related illness’, after consuming as little as four pints of weak, effervescent Australian lager.
Lancashire parent, Tom Logan, said: ‘Kids these days don’t have the commitment or discipline to handle session drinking. They throw up at the drop of a hat, and worse still they often crawl off to bed after being sick rather than just carrying on as if nothing’s happened, like you’re supposed to.
‘Parents are responsible for teaching their children how to drink, and that means leading by example even if you end up losing your job and have to sell all your chairs to Cash Converters.
Drinking consultant Emma Bradford suggested that one possible solution could lie in ‘twinning’ the under-14s with a borderline alcoholic scaffolder or travelling marquee erector at least twice their age.
She said: ‘Placing children under the mentorship of an itinerant manual worker, ideally a burly male with a neck tattoo and at least one deeply bitter divorce behind him, creates a great context for experiencing heavy drinking and also a keen sense of how shit the world is.
‘I also recommend starting reluctant young drinkers on shorts rather than beer, as spirits offer a higher alcohol content per volume, ideal for smaller stomachs.’
Stephen Malley, 13, from Leeds, said: ‘There’s a lot of pressure from friends to study diligently and spend weekends playing cricket or going orienteering, like some fucking poof.
‘Personally, I’d rather go out Friday and wake-up Sunday in a skip. I guess you just have to be strong-willed.’
