Half-arsed, putting off going to work, news digest

HOT!




Ferenc Gyurcsany resigns as Hungarian PM, but not before deploying some ever-so-slightly emotionally manipulative language (he's such a Blairite). Actually, it all seems to be a ploy to prevent President Sólyom calling an early general election, but let's allow the almost completely unmourned (and, lest we forget, multi-millionaire 'socialist') Gyurcsany have his moment of spurious dignity. Here's a quick flashback of his career highlights:

Saudi 'terrorists' (Feri's cracking wheeze about the supposed extracurricular activities of the Saudi national football team.)

A moment of unguarded honesty brings a major European capital to a standstill.

OFF!



On the subject of people who can't be trusted to be left alone with a microphone for five minutes, Chris Moyles is in hot water again/ Chris Moyles has been a dick again/ Chris Moyles is still not funny.

I hate to say it, but I frequently feel as if Moyles is the embodiment of the noughties British zeitgeist.




THE PRESS!




And, carrying on the theme of zeitgeist-embodying loudmouths, The Damned United, Tom Hooper's adaptation of David Peace's novelisation of Brian Clough's scarcely believable 44 days in charge of Dirty Leeds (made more dirty by their being Moyles's team of choice) is out this weekend. The BBC's Pat Murphy interviews Martin O'Neill, manager of Aston Villa and former Clough underling, about it here. O'Neill is, as ever, an eloquent interviewee (he studied law at Queen's University prior to joining Forest, and is an avid amateur criminologist in his spare time), and I was surprised by the uncanny resemblance of his diction - close, spare, precise - to my dad's.

Ferencváros - Newcastle, 1996

I remember the hype around this game really distinctly, for some reason. I also remember absolutely despising Newcastle at the time and really, really wanting Fradi to win. All the attention before the game focused on the home team's prodigiously talented young midfielder Krisztián Lisztes, who some pundits were painting as the great new hope for Hungarian football. Sadly, Lisztes's career has been dogged by a series of injuries and, while he's won plenty of trophies in the Bundesliga with VFB Stuttgart and Werder Bremen, there seems to be a sense that he might have become a real star. As is sometimes the case, the Czechs ended up with publicity at the expense of the Hungarians, and the most famous midfielder to come out of Central Europe in the mid-1990s was the great Pavel Nedvěd, who is still going strong at 36 for Juventus.

A few things came out of this video for me. Firstly, the extent to which Hungarian football has declined over the last decade. When FTC's name came out of the hat as Newcastle's draw, they were genuinely considered a threat to Shearer et al's chance of progressing. Nowadays, Huungarian sides are looked upon as soft touches: when Zalaegerszeg-based ZTE sneaked a 1-0 first leg victory against Manchester United in a 2002 Champions League qualifier (before being thumped 5-0 in the return at Old Trafford) it was considered an upset of almost implausible magnitude. The result was so unusual that, according to some of my (non-football-loving, female) students, Béla Koplárovics, scorer of the winning goal in Zalaegerszeg, attained overnight fame throughout the country.

Secondly, of course, is the decline of Newcastle over a similar period. Given some of the players they've fielded since the unpleasant sacking of Bobby Robson in 2004 (not to mention some of those that Robson himself chose to deploy) it's probably surprising that they've lasted this long without being relegated. This year, their number might well be up, and my guess is that it's only the plight of semi-local rivals Middlesborough, the subject of internet rumours regarding imminent administration (rumours, I'd best stress, on the internet), that's acting as any kind of comfort for them at the moment. Just seeing the short clip above brought back memories of how good that Albert - Lee - Ginola (left on the bench that night in Budapest) - Ferdinand - Shearer side could be. Srnicek's early error, however, is an augury of how the next thirteen years were to turn out.

Thirdly, there's a lovely moment in the video where Rob Lee sees a slightly-scuffed shot hit the post and then trickle teasingly along the line before the Fradi goalkeeper comes to his senses and jumps on it. Various Newcastle forwards raise their hands as if they're about to begin celebrating, but as soon as the referee signals 'no goal' they're back to business. There's no John Terry-esque referee-harrassing here. Have we really got this bad this quickly?

'A small club gamely failing in a rich man's world' (or not, as the case may be)

Eminently correct football Cassandra David Conn on the crisis at my club, which only seems to find itself in the news when everything has gone wrong.

Quack, croak, glug, and whatever noise a water boatman makes Pt. II

Further to last month's note about an imminent proliferation of ponds, Teesside has got in on the act by creating a new waterfowl reserve at Saltholme, between Hartlepool and Billingham. There are already a few reserves around there, notably at Seal Sands, where we once spent a day on a school trip, learning absolutely nothing but having a fantastic time chucking sand at each other and trying to make the teacher cry. The article is right, though: there's definitely something East Anglian (read: Sebaldian) about that stretch of coastline, although I dare say that you can still go walking there without coming upon a method-writing UEA creative writing student at every turn in the path. Or Will Self.

Yorkshire Gothic (Again)

Carol Rumens selects the 'Lyke Wake Dirge', a fourteenth century funerary poem in Cleveland dialect, as her poem of the week. Brrr.

Here is a link to Pentangle's brilliant setting of the poem, which unfortunately has a homemade montage of some American graveyards attached.

'Is that smoke I can smell? Quick, pass my fiddle.'

'Self-facilitating media node' Rio Ferdinand interviews embattled PM Gordon Brown about life, leadership, and Raith Rovers for the Observer Sport Monthly.

Brighouse, Bootle, Featherstone, Speke...

Interesting, vaguely psychogeographic, article on the effects of the CC on the towns and cities of the M62 corridor here. I'm particularly taken with the rumour about Glasshoughton (spelled incorrectly in the article) Xscape. Indoor ski complexes somehow seem to gloss all of the industrial, economic, and technological upheavals of Britain in the Callaghan - Brown period, which I'm going to (probably annoyingly) call the 'long eighties' here. The visual, and some might say social, focal point of late-period-Ballard imaginative construct Milton Keynes is an Xscape which is visible from as far away as the M1 interchange: it's a frightening place (for a dyed-in-the-wool northerner) and an odd template for - and one has to use the word tentatively in the case of Rugby League Land's former industrial centres - the 'regeneration' of Britain beyond the Trent. Anyway, congratulations to the Observer for an engaging and refreshingly un-patronising article about the north.

Youll like this...not a lot, but you'll like it

Of course, everyone else in the world will have used the same title for posts on this subject. Lazy me.

South Bank's finest conservatively-minded celebrity magician has a blog. Sample excerpt:

Whilst on the plane to Barbados I saw the headlines about Prince Harry and an explosion of reaction to him calling a co-soldier a ‘Paki’. When I saw it had happened two years ago I had to ponder upon who caused the ‘explosion of reaction’. I don’t think it was Prince Harry if it was two years ago (because I didn’t hear the explosion then) but rather the media NOW who had just found out and decided to try to throw the shit as far and wide as they could. I wonder why? Who cares? After all isn’t it an abbreviation of Pakistani? I know that I couldn’t care less if someone calls me a ‘Brit’ and would think myself to be a pretty pompous ass if I did. The soldier concerned seemed to have treat it in the right way, recognised it for what it is, a nickname, and got on with living. How desperate can newspapers get? Oops sorry. Did I say NEWS papers? ; Isn’t this story to old to be considered as ‘news?

Woah, Paul. Outrageous. Someone's got to stand up for the decent majority in this country and stick it to the PC brigade blah blah blah blah. I'd suggest Paul and his ilk go and live on Charlie Brooker's imaginary 'Daily Mail Island', only the Mail seem to have got his goat by publishing unflattering pictures of Debbie McGee.

(Seriously, though: what makes some people think that 'Paki' and 'Brit' could possibly occupy equal ranking in the league table of offensive words?)

Also, I hope you have noticed that Daniels, although definitely not a 'pompous ass', ends many of his simple statements with either one or two question marks??

I hope he doesn't do any crazy magic on me now.

New Year, Old Myopia

Kate Kellaway's article on place in literature. Apparently, setting a novel in Hounslow or Willesden is a radical departure from the Hampstead convention. Except Kellaway tries to defend the Hampstead convention by making out that its critics (J.G. Ballard, a Hounslow-and-Willesden man himself, is one of these) are actually promoting an anti-woman agenda. (!)

Of course, the eye of this article only shifts away from London and its immediate environs about halfway down, when we're given examples of regional fiction which are either so blindingly obvious as to scarcely need mentioning (anyone writing an article on literature for a serious newspaper should know better than to try and present Niall Griffiths as an obscure author) or simply not regional. Phillip Hensher's The Northern Clemency, for example, is the product of a southern-minded, if not precisely southern, author looking to show that he can 'write the north'. The thing about The Northern Clemency, however, is that it packages its content with the London-based reader in mind: as a record of the Miners' Strike, for example, it is very much of the persuasion that the strike requires a framing of quaint, Full Monty-ish, otherness rather than (as in the case of David Peace's GB84) becoming the metanarrative in itself.

Reading M. John Harrison's Climbers, and A.L. Kennedy's well-founded remarks in Kellaway's article, I'm led to think that the real regional novel needs to make as few concessions as possible to a demand for the staged regional picturesque. Climbers uses its locational details in a way that would seem deictic or anatopic to the non-northern reader; that is, all place names ('Stand Edge', 'Holmfirth', 'Ellesmere Port') are unframed and stand-alone. Descriptions of, say, the industry of the Cheshire plain are made with reference to a knowledge that is already familiar with that place: Harrison rebels against the pressure of the industry to situate the non-provincial reader, implicitly arguing that the north-west is only as in need of locational explication as, for example, Regent's Park. One finds the same in many of Mark E. Smith's lyrics (my favourite? 'They talk of Chile/ while driving through Haslingden', from English Scheme.) One might even note that the Lakes Poets tended to treat their settings as givens, rather than write 'I drove up the M6 for four and a half hours/ got stuck in traffic on the toll bit near Birmingham/ listened to Radio 4 on the way/ made knowing remarks about Withnail and I/ then wandered lonely as a cloud.' That's what people like Hensher don't do, and I think that this detail is more important in the scheme of English cultural politics than is commonly admitted.

Anyway, I've covered most of this before. It's actually coalescing into a proper, grown-up article now - has anyone heard of a Journal of Northern Studies I can submit it to?

2009 - The End of the (Literary) Affair

So, I noticed that my good friends at the Guardian Guide gave David Peace, longtime head whippet of contemporary British fiction as far as I'm concerned, the entire 'D' section in their 'things to watch 2009' listings, only they were talking less about the writing itself than forthcoming film and TV adaptations of 'factive' football parable The Damned United and Doomsday-by-white-dogshit crime sequence the Red Riding quartet. In protest, I'm re-reading TDU so I can be especially pernickety and cranky when the big screen version comes, but I think it's RR I'm dreading more. I just know that this will go one of two types of terrible: Scenario 'A' see it hammered into the Prime Suspect slot, with the result that it solicits thousands upon thousands of complaints from the Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells demographic and any aesthetic merit of the programme will go undiscussed due to the resultant controversy. Scenario 'B', which is, now I come to think about it, the more likely, will see the writers doing everything in their power to turn it into Prime Suspect, only set in the 1970s and in Leeds, so it'll be more like Prime Suspect with additional Life on Mars.

The third scenario is that it is absolutely brilliant and everyone responds to it with the same gusto that has hitherto been reserved for The Wire, only I won't be able to see it, with the result that my totally puerile 'I liked it first' gene will kick in. If this is the case, I apologise inadvance...

Juvenile Angst Regarding Self-Revelation, Commence...

New feature, then, and one that I've ummed and aaahed about for a (very) long time. I've been planning on getting some of my poetry up on here for a long time, but I've kept holding it back for reasons that I'm sure are too obvious to need explaining. Anyway, what I think I'm going to do is post one a week, beginning with a few week's worth of old stuff that isn't going to appear anywhere else. In theory, my first published poem should be arriving over the winter in the third S/S/Y/K anthology, so I'll start with something which belongs more or less to the vintage of the one they're going to print.

I won't explicate every week, but I usually have a little preamble which goes with the following poem when I do readings. I've never really gone in for high-concept poetry (it's a bit whimsical for my liking), but this piece is an exception. When I wrote 'A Treasure Hunt Book', I'd just read Peter Davison's travelogue-cum-literary history-cum-cultural analysis The Idea of North, which got me thinking about the mythopoetics of northern England: this was before I'd come into contact with the novels of David Peace and M. John Harrison, and all I really had to go on was David Storey and a few Michael Haslam poems. Now, of course, I've read round my subject a bit more and I have a first edition of Basil Bunting's Objectivistic 'northern Waste Land' Briggflatts sitting, well-thumbed, on a shelf.

Anyway - there was a long ramble about my gripes with the ongoing promotion of antimodernist northern poets at the expense of experimentalists like Barry MacSweeney, but I've excised it - I remembered the books that came out in the 1980s where the text was a series of cryptic clues pertaining to a real treasure trove that was secreted somewhere in the UK. All place names were removed: you had to work out the location through poetic riddles and some lovely, but artistically-licensed, illustration. The most fantastic things about these books were that the better ones worked as stand-alone texts for children whose parents had better things to do than spending every weekend shuttling up and down the M1 looking for a distinctively-shaped tree.

This, then, is the first poem I have to offer, and it's loosely inspired by those books, and by the North, and it was written in the first flush of my discovery of the British Poetry Revival. I've edited some of the more portentous bits; I still don't love it (it's rather fey).

Don't beat me up next time you see me...

A Treasure-Hunt Book

Beards of cloud clot the last strand of sky,
over the apex of the terrace, patronyms vaporised; poised.

It has been dark in Tromsø since noon:
you might know the experiment

(a tusk plied with spiders,
the thesis pre-Columbine.)

So - what is finally given up?
What's there to chuck at feet?

Even the humanities
still demand evidence that we don't act
on whim and, in a pirate town,

a bench adheres to its esplanade
with pathetic dedication. Enjoy the view, I did.

This was The Other Town.
I stepped onto the ashen platform and knew

that a cane-hilt once showered sparks
as fists unclenched, alleviated

when a callused palm brushed, accidentally at first,
the waistband of a landlocked wife.

Yes, that platform is scored
by parasols dropped for many reasons,
but how can we guess all of them

when we have fixtures, over the spine,
and must hurtle along culvert road, no article,

over the seeping dam of the reservoir,
and forfeit breath at the chicanes

of the obstinate crofter(s)
ennobled in M-way digressions. Anyhow.

This roseate melt of emblems
bleeds south like icing

until it ceases to count in the midshires.
Spa towns reek past their function
and are ignored, we must resort

to an under-framed sandstone castle,
its littoral the lair of a family worm

whose coils might be unwound to
demarcate what we have, rising in arches

from alliterating estuaries. Dunes there crumple,
the excursion is spoilt, and seahoused fishwives

are carried, put out, to the cheaper saloons
on a saline updraft of dialect.

We watch them insist on making
the best of a day in which they
won’t strain their eyes at every sail

reporting rumours, almost from the frigid zone,
almost from the shrouded nub.

Mileage of currents is figured in
thousands, drowning is radial

but its effect is not dispersed in time.
Cold contracts, chaffing our local disparity,

and it only pulls up at the now-known fault-line,
the true point, I think, of submersion.

I Spy...

'north-western non-league team at home in the FA Cup 1st Round'

For five points:

- Jovial, optimistic pensioners looking for a bus.

- Former league striker with a point to prove.

- Man dressed as a viking in the bar before the game, honking a klaxon.


For ten points:

- Uncannily identical middle-aged couple who have chosen vigorous support of a footballing minnow in preference to having children. Because of this, they treat away games in the cup as particularly important parents evening or nativity plays.

- Home fans singing disparaging songs about visiting team's lowly/ semi-professional status (ie. 'Sunday league, Sunday league, Sunday league'/ 'Come in a taxi/ you could have come in a taxi'/ 'What's it like to see a seat'.)

- Overly confident home team wasting first half hour on Cruyff turns and fifty yard volleys.

- Home team becoming frustrated and forgetting how to play football.

For twenty points:

- Dawning realisation on part of home fans that lowly visitors have plundered a replay.

- Celebrating vikings, pensioners and childless superfans who know that the replay is likely to yield an upset.

I love English football.

Report: Last three weeks

Lists are so often my way back into writing after a period of block and my head is all lists at the moment: things to read lists, things to pack lists, people to call lists. In a nod to my imminent destination, I might punningly add Franz Liszt, or 'Liszt Ferenc',* to this list of lists. Anyway, here's a list of things I've been up to since finishing.

- Neatened up, as per the wish expressed in this post. I have bought new shoes and trousers, all from charity shops, and so the combination of Primark jeans/ ragged trainers can be forgotten for a while.
- Danced in a nightclub, albeit briefly.
- Been to three football matches. Darlo v. Bradford (won 2-1), Darlo v. Dagenham (won 3-0) and Grimsby v. Darlo (won 2-1). Grimsby was a frightening, apocalyptic-seeming place, where I was very hungover and cold. Naturally, this made the whole afternoon memorable.
- Been to Manchester and visited the Imperial War Museum North. Here, I had a horrible attack of vertigo on the viewing gallery.
- Made my second trip of the year to the cosy environs of Saddleworth to drink lots of real ale. Saw my first gritter of the year.
- Watched the fireworks at Richmond Castle (they caused a huge onset of nostalgia).
- Visited the Steve McQueen exhibit at the Baltic (review to come, one day).
- Reminded myself what Yorkshire rain is like. See also: Yorkshire bitter.

Budapest in four days...

* Although my efforts to acquaint myself with Hungarian music have been limited to Bartok and ersatz Britpop bands on Myspace.

Latest compulsive detective thing

Hi. I've still not done a decent-length post for a while. That's because I'm up in Yorkshire, where I have access to my Mum's extensive collection of Ian Rankin novels, to which I have now become utterly addicted. Seeing as I have to work while I'm up here, my spare time is consumed with acquainting myself with Inspector Rebus, or dragging myself away from books and going to look at the Burkean-sublime waterfall in full flood.

Oh, and scribbling fragments of fiction. It's begun.

Chaos!

Hello, from the sanctity of a rainswept North Yorkshire.

I have a bound copy of the PhD and three weeks left to sort out the rubbish bits, so I've come home with a bagful of hard literary theory (Kristeva; Brooke-Rose; Abraham/ Torok; not to mention The Interpretation of Dreams.) The panic might explain why I haven't written anything on here for a week. I'm meaning to do a sweeping football post at some time, seeing as all of my cultural cathexes have been, erm, already allocated.

Hopefully whack something proper on over the weekend.

J

It's going to be shite

David Cameron in 'Completely Transparent' Shocker

So, Cameron's denounced Policy Exchange's report on the irredeemable northern cities as 'insane'.

Now why would he do that, I wonder? It surely couldn't be an absolutely shameless attempt to butter up any marginal constituencies in those areas (of which, it must be said, there are not exactly a lot) and thereby try and alter the image of the Conservatives as having victimised the north over a sustained period of time. Could it? I'm looking at you, by the way, Boris. The last - utterly patronising -attempt to redress this attitude that I recall (without Googling) was William Hague* and his ostentatiously ludicrous drinking claims (the ones that would have made him a teenage alcoholic if they'd been true.)

Anyway, it's all a bit 'night of the long knives', isn't it. Cameron's big buddies at PE become personae non gratae on a count of of-its-moment expediency. As far as I can see it - and defending right-wing policy advisory groups is not exactly the name of my game - PE were only doing what they thought was their job, even if they do seem to have delegated the 'summary of findings' report to the work experience kid.** The report might have been both grossly insensitive, lazy and impractical, but PE probably thought they'd kicked ass and come up with a hard-hitting, radical solution:

(In a conference centre in Wellingborough or Daventry or somewhere like that. PE on stage in front of Tory delegations from Bradford, Liverpool, Sunderland and Hull, plus a coterie of celebrities from those cities - let's say Maureen Lipman, David Hockney, Steve Cram and Ringo Starr...)

PE: 'Well, thankyou for attending our northern regeneration conference, which we're holding in the south midlands, which makes it look as if we're meeting you halfway, but seeing as our transport links are about sixteen times better than yours, took us an hour while it took you six. Apart from you, Steve Cram, who came on foot from Sunderland and thus arrived more promptly than the Grand Central rail service.*** Now, you might not like what we have to tell you, but it's hard-hitting and radical. We had top brains working on this project (work experience boy smothered by the ex-Met officers TPE have hired as security.) Now, what we've come up with is this...'

(Projector creaks from ceiling)





Audience: (Silence. Unsettling stares.)

David Cameron (Arriving late, propping his bike against the wall): I'm sorry, did I miss anything...oh shit.

It sounds horribly like the episode of Peep Show where Mark has to give a paper to a board meeting in Kettering and tells them that their plans are hopelessly wrong and ineffective because he's lost the plot...


* A patron of several curry establishments in my place of origin, which (being agricultural and, particularly in the eastern half of the constituency where the Tees commuter belt lies, relatively well-heeled) is one of the few blue blips on a political map of the north. I'd say that the fact that all the Indian restaurants in the area have photos of him behind their tills was political opportunism on his part, but he's so frequently witnessed digging into a chicken jalfrezi that one has to admit that he just really, really loves curry...

** I can see him now, sitting in his Kevin and Perry-esque sticky sock strewn bedroom with a pencil in his mouth and two box files full of questionnaires and pie charts in front of him. 'Hmmm...this has to be in tomorrow. I know, I'll just tell the entire population of the Mersey and Wear conurbations to migrate to Cirencester. That'll work, just like when the Simpsons left Springfield so Homer could go and work for Hank Scorpio.'


*** Can you get canned laughter on a blog?

What qualifications does one need to join a 'think tank'?

Apparently, some northern cities are in a state of inexorable decline, and their residents should move to prosperous southern cities to avoide becoming trapped.

Whoever participated in this think tank must have been very brave. Not only have they suggested to the residents of Liverpool and Sunderland should up sticks for the bright lights and dreaming spires*, they've also implied that any potential economic renaissance in said locations would have to be ancillary to those already underway in nearby (hence despised) places such as Manchester and Newcastle. Well, it would be, but apparently the cities in the studies are such basket cases that they are now beyond any benevolence their neighbours might be capable of bestowing. I really wouldn't want to be the one to go into a pub in Sunderland and announce that everyone should move to Winchester because, if the Geordies couldn't save them, they certainly wouldn't be capable of doing it themselves.

This also invites the thought of en masse migrations, so the residents of Cambridge might want to sell up now, before the entire population of Bradford hove into view on the Fenland horizon...

* Did they come up with this plan after reading some old Smiths lyrics and watching a Shelagh Delaney play?

Post 100, 2008

It was going to be about the Booker longlist, but let's have something more celebratory:

Yorkshire free to fly own flag

When Jenny and I went travelling in Spain, which is now a shocking four years ago, we went to an all-night feria in Malaga. There were literally hundreds of different beer tents, most of which had their own theme as they were sponsored by different organisations. We wanted to hear some rock music, and the only place we could hear it playing from was the Malaga Young Communists beer tent. We went in there and got a drink and were invited to write the name of our local organisation on the wall as many other visitors to the tent had; there was lots of things like 'Hamburg Communists' and 'Palermo Communists'. Anyway, we used our space to make a claim for the 'Yorkshire Liberation Front'. I like to think that somewhere in Andalusia a socialist meeting-place has a set of 'Free Compo' stickers in solidarity with us.

And, just to celebrate our new-found autonomy once again:

Pseudo-literary metro-harpies: makes me feel a bit 'Plaid Cymru'

I'm feeling het-up today, as the feature below might explain. It's boiling hot, I've got lots of fiddly editing to do, and I would rather be anywhere but in a computer room with the atmosphere of a thermometer in Pompeii.

Anyway, what's sticking in my craw right now is this. Wife in the North. Yes, that's right. The address is for the blog but this entirely charmless project first came to my attention in Newcastle Waterstones a few weeks ago. I'd like to think that after I exited with a copy of Peter Gay's Modernism - The Lure of Heresy a mob of affronted Geordies descended on the place, removed all copies of this piece of vapid, Londoncentric shit and burned them under Charles Grey's austere gaze. Sorry Mum, sorry Dad, sorry friends: I'm swearing again, but...but how do I not? Right, as far as I can ascertain from Wife in the North's blog, her schtick is this:

1 - Being a 'Yummy Mummy'. Note to Haribo: could this be a new range aimed at Oedipal sweet-tooths?

2 - Being alone and afraid because the North is full of mass-murdering lorry drivers, mummies who aren't particularly yummy and compulsively smoke L&B, various clones of Michael from Alan Partidge and Peter Beardsley.

3 - Missing the bright cultural lights of London, a city whose entertainment claims to fame include avant-garde masterpieces such as Cats and The Mousetrap.

4 - Missing the sophisticated humour of the London middle classes, which - as I'm coming to understand it - generally involves making snotty jokes about writers who have never dined at Nigella Lawson's house.

5 - Missing the fabulous social opportunities afforded by good ol' London town, a city in which the only remotely useful transportation system shuts down at midnight and is replaced by a bus network apparently planned by Pingu and a fleet of hyperpriced mini cabs.

6 - Treating the locals as picturesque imbeciles to be exploited for their tasty artesan produce.

7 - Acting as if everyone in the north is a racist scumbag, despite her yearning to live in one of those effectively gated north London communities where the only people from ethnic minority backgrounds one ever meets are kept busy selling Oyster cards.

8 - Being unable to accept that rural places evolve at a different pace, and are therefore unlikely to be inundated with vintage clothes and jewellery emporiums any time soon.

9 - Being a complete and utter doyle, all of the time, and having no idea that you are doing so.

You have to question this woman's motives. If she feels so uncomfortable and cast adrift in beautiful, beautiful Northumberland why doesn't she move back to London? Is there any chance for a spiritual redemption, perhaps...maybe she could start drinking at the Free Trade Inn in Newcastle and read the collected poems of Basil Bunting and The Far Corner and go and watch the mellifluously-named Blyth Spartans play football and go to see bands at the Cluny and photo exhibitions at Side and of course the bloody Baltic and concerts at the Sage and comedy at the Live Theatre and walk in Kielder Forest and the Coquet Valley and on the sands at Bamburgh and Lindisfarne and enjoy Geordie humour and marvel at one of the most beautiful pieces of public art in the United Kingdom and even fishing in the Tyne Valley like in that episode of The Likely Lads where Terry interrupts Bob and Thelma's romantic weekend AND EVERY OTHER BLOODY THING YOU COULD DO IN THE NORTH-EAST WHICH IS MORE WONDERFUL AND LESS SOUL-DESTROYING THAN SPENDING ALL NIGHT IN GASTROPUBS ON WANDSWORTH COMMON BITCHING AND SCRATCHING WITH THE REST OF THE CYNICAL HACKS YOU FIND DOWN THERE.

I'm convinced that the London media attitude towards the north is motivated by a complete inability to understand what is, to all intents and purposes, a completely different country. It's all well and good when we're being Ross Noble-like, getting up on stage and being self-deprecating and savantish, but figures like Mark E. Smith are clearly much harder to deal with.

Another thing that has pissed me off recently, by the way, is the manner in which certain middlebrow metropolitan novels (I won't name names, I could get in trouble) have started to incorporate this very, very, very, very, very watered-down version of psychogeography as a quasi-intellectual justification for liking living in Crouch End. Look, twats: from Poe to Baudelaire to Benjamin to Debord to Sinclair, the procurement of jamon iberico and sunblushed tomatoes has never been a central component of urbanist thought. Sod off. The fact that you enjoy walking around cities does not necessarily make you into an expert into the poetics of the metropolis.

Anyway. Phew. Ow.