YES MY FRIENDS I have returned from my lifely visit to Durham, a town that is known as the party capital of nowhere. If you don't know where Durham is, just imagine a mythical land where all the fun and cool things are born. Then imagine the town right next to that mythical land, seperated by a fifteen metre tall wall of reinforced concrete, barbed razorwire, guard towers with those cool searchlights and machine gun equipped SWAT-Nazis, a town where you will find NOTHING fun except for row upon row of boring-ass towns, closed coal mines and weird-smellin' inbred people with mushrooms instead of faces.
Why did I choose to go to Durham, then, if I knew that it was going to be so fecken shite? Why did I make the conscious decision to relocate myself for FOUR WHOLE DAYS (days which could better have been spent with, ooh, I don't know... MY NEW-OLD GIRLFRIEND) to what is basically Britain's boredom sphincter? Why did I do it? Well, to answer that question, I have two simple responses...
Response the First: I didn't make the conscious decision. I was told I was going. Then I was shot in the neck with a tranquiliser dart, gagged, hog-tied with those cable-tie things, padlocked to the boot of the car which was then covered in a thin layer of concrete, placed on a car-transporter which was then wrapped in that impossible-to-break plastic stuff they use to package batteries and disposible cameras, then picked up by fifteen helicopters and air-lifted to just outside of Oxford. Then I was placed in a car and we drove the remainder of the way there.
Response the Second: There were two concrete reasons for going to Durham. The first reason is that apparently there's a University there that I might consider going to (after seeing the ghost town that is Durham city... unlikely). The second is that my Grandad (legend) was apparently born and raised in a town outside of Durshit and wanted to go back to visit the place of his childhood. Ok, I can accept that. Although, thinking about it, the idea of somebody being RAISED near to Durham is somewhat oxmoronic as it seems to me that Durham is generally a place where people go to die.
There were a Lot of old people at Durham, as my Grandad liked to point out, usually with jeers of "look at that fat old biddy!" or "hey, check out the fat man!". Legend. I have learnt quite a lot of things about old people on this trip. One of the most interesting is that whenever an old person says goodbye to another old person, she always says "I'll see you soon," in a really forceful tone of voice, as though trying to persuade old person no.2 that it really is going to happen and one of them isn't going to die in the meantime. It's like when people have put a huge amount of money on the black at roulette, and they stand at the table going 'It's gonna be black, I KNOW it's gonna be black, it's black. Definitely black. Black.' And then it's red and they lose all their money and sell their property and have to go live in some shithole like, say, Durham.
Of course, I'm making Durham sound like it was just one huge black hole of dullness, old people, and depressing DEATH. Which of course, it wasn't. I mean, there's a lot of inherent comedy value to be had out of the people and architecture of Durham and the surrounding area. Specifically the people. Specifically, the accents of the people.
Who remembers that TV show Biker Grove? The one in that crap youth center where everyone sat about talking about Issues Relevant To The Youth Of Today? And the theme tune was like Biker... Groooove! Biker... Groooooove! Biker Biker, Biker GROOVE YEAH! A-ha! A-ha! A-ha! Thinking about it, with a show that had such an empasis on bikers, there was very little two-wheeled locomotion going on. But yeah, you all remember that show? And you remember the crazy accents that the entire cast put on? Well - get this - PEOPLE ACTUALLY TALK LIKE THAT UP NORTH!!!!!1!! I was really impressed when I first realised that; I honestly thought that the silly accents that the Baika Groave kids put on was just, like, an extended joke. Like the silly accents the Teletubbies do.
"Eh-Oh Tinky Winky!"
"Ooh-Aye man let's go down the Groave, pet."
Can you tell a difference? I can't. So yeah, there was a lot of fun to be had from ripping the piss out of the native speakers, which me and grandad did an awful lot. And, I mean, it's not like there was literally nothing whatsoever to do in Durham. Because they had a lot (and I mean A Lot) of coal mines, and coal mines are awesome. I also had a special interest in coal mines, especially as I'd just read Zola's Germinal, that paeon of depressing coal miners, and I'm planning to write a book about living cups of tea who have to mine teabags out of underground caverns and no I'm not even joking.
Of course, all of the mines were totally disused and closed down and had been so for like ten years, but hey, there was this quite good MONUMENT on a really windy field that took like an hour to walk to. And if we'd had time (and oh god what a tragedy that we didn't) we could've gone to visit Beamish, Living Museum of the Year 2004 and 2002 (God damn those bastards at the Durham Coal and Iron Dildo Emporium in 2003, 2005 and 2006, eh?), a magical place which has a replica coal mine where 'you won't stop beaming from start to finish'. Do you get it? DO YOU GET IT? BEAMING sounds like BEAMISH. AHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA. I laughed for like fifteen minutes when I first heard that gem. Then I swiped the leaflet and smuggled it home in my rectum for your viewing pleasure:
Who WOULDN'T want to go visit Beamish and hang out with Inspector Gordon and his merry gang there? I'll tell you who wouldn't - heartless bastards with no sense of fun and joy. To be honest, I was pretty impressed with the quality of the leaflet (excluding that cockhead four from the back who was obviously enjoying his job as the paperboy far too much), until I noticed an interesting little detail on the front cover. Look at the dates just above the word "Beamish". Now, originally I thought they referred to a historical period 1825-1913. But no, that's an "&" in the middle of those dates. This is a theme park concentrating SPECIFICALLY on the dates of 1825 AND 1913. Just those dates. None in between. Now I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure that it's a concrete Historical Fact that literally nothing interesting happened in either 1825 or 1913. They are basically the retarded half-brothers of the historical dates. Nobody cares about them, nobody likes them. Their own mothers don't even love them. 1919 (Treaty of Marseilles... yeah? I can't remember and I wrote an essay on this for my history AS level) throws dinner parties and invites all the other years, but 1913's invite gets mysteriously lost in the post. 1898 (Boer War I think) gets the rest of the 19th century to line up and says "All the years I like, take a step forward" and all the years step forward, but then 1898 is like "Not so fast, sonny" to 1825, who runs off crying and cuts itself in its room. Even the other shit years, like 1856 (Treaty of Paris... who the fuck cares?) don't wanna hang about with 1825 and 1913. So why anybody would wanna devote a theme park after them, when as far as I know there isn't a single WW2 Theme Park about (think about it... it'd rule), I just don't know.
But I was willing to give Beamish a chance, so I checked out the Special Events 2005 list. Alarm bells are rung when I see that they haven't even updated the fecken brochure yet. Then continue to ring when I see that the events specifically highlighted as "Major Events" are -and I swear to fuck I'm not making this up - Steam Glorious Steam, Napoleonic Muster, Horse Ploughing Match, Prize Leek Show and Harvest Festival, and Classic Car Day. For fuck's sake. And this place was like, the premier tourist attraction that Durham had to offer.
I could keep talking, and I could mention my grandad's plan for dealing with the Chinese (Plan A: Put some poisonous chemical in all the reservoirs which'd kill them all, or at the very least give them a bad stomach ache. Plan B: Drop ten or twelve nuclear bombs on China - this plan was rejected because it'd spoil the chinese countryside. Plan C: Somehow hypnotise them using television and get them to all jump en masse into the sea. He was seriously offering these as theories for 'dealing with' China. Out of other mouths, they would seem genocidal, murderous, evil and disturbing, but coming from my Grandad they are just HILARIOUS), or the huge amount of neuroses I got whenever I thought about my girlfriend, but do you want to hear about that? No. So instead I'll finish with a cartoon strip that my little sister drew of the Tomcia relationship.
The captions at the bottom are "Thomas has a party but no1 comes", and "Thomas phones Lucia every day". I also want to make clear that my mate did NOT steal Lucia. That's just heresay. I didn't really like him and he didn't steal her ANYWAY, and who cares, I'm going out with her now so who has the last laugh? Me.
And just in case you were at a loss for what the moral of the cartoon strip was, my little sister has kindly obliged to fill you in...
Yeah whatever. At least I can spell "doesn't", you little retard.
In conclusion: Fuck Durham. And fuck Cyprus too, for an entirely different reason.
