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HOWWAY THE DELUDED 6-9-06
Peter Holmes
In my many years as an exiled proud Pommy, an ex-pat living in Australia, I've always found it very interesting how the Aussies and the people from the many other countries that make up this cultural melting-pot find the Brit tribe so intriguing.
How amazing it is that one tribe of people talk and even think differently to another tribe who literally only live across the river. They find the individual and unique regional dialects, ways, and competitiveness of the tribes of Great Britain totally fascinating.
It's not a phenomenon that is unique to the British Isles, but it's generally accepted that the British probably have more regional dialects and sub-cultures than any other nation on this cosmopolitan Earth and that they are some of the most eccentric souls on the Planet.
Which brings me to one of our neighbouring tribes, the Geordies.
What a vociferous reaction we have seen from our dummy-spitting neighbours this past week or so. All over the simple fact that a couple of prized professional footballers opted for the relative small town life of Premiership football in leafy suburban Middlesbrough, over the greatest City in the known world, snubbing the magnificence of the Toon in the process.
Those fools could have gone further north to the hugely exciting and ultra-vibrant life in the fashionable fast lane giga-tropolis of neon Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, official capital of Geordieworld.
The collective and very loud harrumph was an audible explosion of angst which belted across the moors of Durham like a linear hurricane into the glades of lush verdant 'darling buds of May' Teesside.
With our self-effacing nature, we the Smogs, found it all very predictable and extremely entertaining with our ability to find a joke in anything especially our own situation, no matter how dire, which is completely opposite to the nature of the Geordie tribe up t'road. While we have a giggle at ourselves, they self-grandiose themselves to the point of parody.
We get called dwellers of a smog filled industrial wasteland, so what do we do, we adopt the name as Smoggies, call ourselves 'Smogmonsters on Tour' while playing in Europe, the small Yorkshire town that roared while the Jardies and the Mackems watched the Bill.
All those supposed chemicals and apparent exposure to isotopes, nuclear waste, cancer on toast and Kryptonite over the years have certainly made us smarter, while the fog on the Tyne has dulled the senses of our Jardie neighbours. I think personally and reckon you'll agree that it's better to be labelled a Smoggy by a detractor than a plastic Geordie, eh.
Delusion though is a funny thing, not in the ho-ho-he-he sense but, in the extremely sad and essentially pitiful sense. It's a rare mental occurrence that few individuals suffer from and usually requires some form of therapy or medical help somewhere along the line, like sessions on the couch with a psychiatrist.
When a whole section of society, a veritable race of folk, suffer from the same identical delusional behaviour and allow it to pervade the whole community, well it should be quite worrying. In relation to the tribe Geordie it all has gone on so long it actually ends up laughable. We're all in it together this superiority complex, so let's party in the Toon cuckoo's nest, howway like yahayee!
Us Smogs wouldn't be allowed to get away with it but simply because Tony Blurr, the UK's venerable leader and boss of the spin party, purports to be a Jardie, the whole Geordie nation go undiagnosed to roam the planet spouting their delusional psycho babble, unchecked and well, delusional with grandeur.
They could actually be misunderstood folk, so, I'll furnish you with some little known facts I have recently discovered about the Tyne Clan. I'd like you to come with Uncle ErimusRed on this journey so we can explore a few of those myths and stories here, then better armed with these illuminating tit-bits you can make your own conclusions.
For a start, I bet you didn't know that Quasimodo, the infamous hunchback of Notre-Dame was actually a Jardie, a scaffolder from the cobbled back alleys of Jarrow no less?
Bollocks, I can hear you uttering!
Well the fable goes that in his youth, he'd worked the black colliery seams underground at the coalface but the oppression and darkness got to him causing him to walk in a bent hunched and knuckle-dragging form.
So, for the good of his failing health he left the subterranean hellhole behind him and climbed upwards to the sun and became a scaffolder, a man of daring practising exploits in the clouds. He also had other health issues like the thyroid problem that gave him googy eyes out on stalks, and a kite the size of a pregnant Vicar of Dibly. Bert Blacklock was his name, and his hobby was toad-sexing and rearing champion racing snails.
A man of principle, he heard that the French actually ate snails with a side helping of frog's legs and was so appalled by this that he actually walked to Paris from Jarrow, nae he marched, to protest at the ill-treatment of his pets by the French. He empathised with the molluscs and was determined to 'Save the Snail!'
He even made the front page of the Ironopolis Globe and Telegraph, the leading paper in burgeoning Middlesbrough, that infant Hercules, it's editorial stated;
"Warning! Humpy-backed lunatic from Jarrow walking through our town to France, even uglier than your average Geordie so keep the kids indoors as he might frighten them!"
Well, when wor Jimmy got to Paris he heard that there were snails at Notre dame but, the dopey oik had misheard the pigeon English from a helpful Frenchie who he'd asked directions from. The Frenchie had actually told him there were sales on at the markets beneath Notre Dame's historic spires.
Galloping up the Champs-Elysee he was amazed when he saw the magnificent building as it was clothed in wooden scaffolding. So, he did what all good scaffys do. He ignored the safety rules and climbed it from the outside like a simian rock-ape rattling up the side like a scalded shithouse rat.
Part way up, he spotted a rope swinging in the breeze and tugged wildly on it, lost his footing then promptly slipped off the scaffold and fell over the side while holding on to the sisal for grim life. The bells started ringing loudly and erratically causing the multitude below at the thriving markets to look up to see a strange looking man with a hump on his back, wild googy eyes, head like a drover's dog chewing a wasp, manically swinging on the bell rope shouting, "The bells the bells, tha makin' me deaf ya know!!!"
You see, the infamous hump was actually Bert's second head hidden under his tunic and the Froggies mistook it for a hump. What with this plus his many other physical aberrances, the throng were frightened. They wrongly thought he was some monstrous hunchback who had taken over their church tower and named him Quasimodo on the spot, which, roughly translated means;
"Ugly, humpy-backed Geordie son of a pig dog!"
Then we come to the living phenomena of the Tyne, the very essence of Geordiness in flesh and blood, Alan Shearer. Revered by the Toon Army, that collection of prized beer guts and tattoos, as Big Al, the Magpie God, a man who can do no wrong in the eyes of his people. Just as the Spanish nicknamed our erstwhile saviour Terry Venables, El Tel, they also gave Shearer the same accolade calling him El Bow.
Not many people know this but, Alan Shearer had a very serious childhood illness which necessitated surgery for the removal of his charisma and his funny bone. That pioneering charisma bypass operation changed the course of his life.
Prior to that episode of juvenile sickness, the young Shearer was intent on becoming the first Jardie to leave school at 16 instead of 11, and become the first Geordie Astronaut. The history books could have read Buzz Aldrin, Neal Armstrong, Buzz Lightyear, Al Shearer. How ironic he now has a vaste expanse of space between his ears.
When he was interviewed by the legendary Michael Parkinson, his answer to every question was: "Referee! Are you blind can't you see he keeps head-butting my elbow?"
Shearer is of course now a media zombie, I mean guru, and on BBC North. Recently he carried out an interview of his own with the equally as exciting and gregarious Glen Roeder. The viewing figures saw record audiences around the Tyne region but the record lowest TV audience of all time of just four homes on Teesside. The four were actually people who'd left the TV on to keep their budgies company while they took solace in the pub. All were prosecuted by the RSPCA for extreme cruelty to animals!
Did you know that the Jardies most famous landmark, the Tyne Bridge, is only a toy one, a model for the giant coat hangar in Sydney Harbour? Unlike the unique bridges that straddle the mighty Tees, the Newport and Transporter Bridges, real men's bridges, built by real men for real men on Teesside of Teesside steel by Teesside steel men.
Fashioned from the earth's raw mineral riches, turned into iron and steel by testosterone oozing work-hardened sons of the infant Hercules.
We, the Smogs, also built the Tyne and the Sydney Harbour bridges too, but only in our lunch break while we building every other steel bridge on the planet.
Synonymous, Men, Steel and Boro! Brings a tear to your eye and a lump to your throat eh!
The Geordies think satire is a chair with long legs and irony is what you do with an ironing board. That is apart from one of Newcastle's own genius' savants Paul 'Gazza - Daft as a brush' Gascoigne. It's widely reported that Gazza once stated about Alan Shearer, when quizzed by journalists at an England camp, as a fellow Jardie what the enigmatic Shearer was really like, he said;
"Most people only see his front side, but I know his backside very well, the one he hides from the public. He's just a Geordie barmpot like me and likes a laugh!"
Which just goes to show, Gazza actually does understand irony, and gurgling lager.
Now talking of booze, Newcastle Brown Ale, that famous beer of the Toon, is a veritable world icon brewed for the Jardie Republic from virginal pure melt water from the upper reaches of the Tyne itself. But what gives Broon it's unique flavour is that it apparently contains the very essence of Geordie, an ingredient I can reveal is actually made by distilling Tyne water and coal silt through the old boots of Wor Jackie Milburn and passing it over a bed of Alan Shearer's dried faeces. Which probably explains the pale brown colouration & very unique flavour.
Newcastle's original football strip was actually a white shirt but when 'Wor Lass' washed her 'Hinnies' top after each game she hung it on the railings outside the house in the laneway. Legend has it that there was that much coal dust on the palings it striped the shirts in black, hence the now famous Magpie kit.
The Guinness Book of Records states; The yodelling world record was actually set, not as you'd think, off some piste in Austria or Switzerland but, in the St. James' Park trophy room. Apparently, the initial yodel from Hexham yodelologist, Quentin Wentout, reverberated for nearly three days and rumour has it that it's going on still.
Newcastle United Football Club haven't actually won anything since Alan Shearer's arse was no bigger than a shirt button, yet their delusional supporters still insist they are the biggest club on the planet, which is fair enough as all Jardies are living on a different planet to the rest of us anyway.
One thing is for sure, they claim that St. James' Park is the biggest stadium on the planet with a capacity approaching four million. During night games the floodlights are so bright that in the far solar-system of Outer Ursa Minor, the Ignops on planet Ogg, think it's the birth of a new star.
You can always tell a Geordie but you can't tell him nowt.
You can have a fishy on a little dishy when the boat comes in, along the Tyne into the valley of the deluded.
Enough Said,
ErimusRed.
TALK ABOUT IT IN THE NEW HOLGATE MESSAGE BOARD
BACK TO PETER HOLMES' LETTER FROM AUSTRALIA INDEX
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