Two nights ago I watched “Geordie Shore”. They were in Mexico. I am amazed that we are not already at war with Mexico. Arguably the highlight of the show was one of the lasses (the word “lady” would not be appropriate) so arse-holed to breakfast time she couldn’t get into her hotel room and pissed in a shoe-box in a hotel corridor in Cancun. She’d also been out shopping, see. So she used a shoe-box to preserve her dignity. The last time I saw anything like that in a hotel corridor it was whilst watching “The Shining”. And it was the carpets. God knows about the carpets in that Mexican gaff.
Now far be it from me (and all that) but if you watch “Geordie Shore” please do not think Newcastle is entirely like that. I’m from there and whilst I have done questionable things I have never micturated into a cardboard box in a hotel in the Americas (or any other (in)continent). I am proud of where I am from. The magnificent Georgian architecture that T Dan Smith and John Poulson didn’t (thank God!) quite manage to tear down entirely and our awesome bridges and industrial heritage (alas now largely heritage). Or our two fine universities, or the Theatre Royal (only place outside of London or Stratford the RSC plays every year) or the Lit & Phil - largest private library outside of London (basic fees - less I think for students - about 100 quid a year). And then there are the great Geordies who like built all this around us. Why for the Olympics did they have Ken doing Isambard Kingdom Brunel when he could have done George Stephenson? Perhaps Danny Boyle was being clever. Brunel’s schemes wasted huge amounts of investor’s dosh on white elephants* so it was perhaps fitting.
Anyway. Back to slags pissing in cardboard boxes. Now I have never seen the feat performed (though to be fair she was so wankerated that pissing in the Pacific would have been impressive) but I did experience something curiously similar many years ago. For some unearthly reason me and my mates had decided to go to a pub in Prudhoe (must have been about 18). One of my mates (not me) had heard it’s great for pulling. It wasn’t so we have a couple of pints and buggerth off. Now at the bus stop there is the sound of crepuscular rummaging. And then a scene from Viz unfolds. a Fat Slag (sorry no other term can convey my meaning) hoves into view and says, “Lads you’re missin’ a reet treat - me pal’s having a piss behind them bushes”. What do you reckon happened next? Usain Bolt on roller-skates with a JATO singeing his lycra wouldn’t have beaten us to the next bus stop. I mean there is going on the pull and hoping to meet an attractive girl and there is pissing in a shoe-box in Mexico or behind bushes in Northumberland. Now, +1 for doing it relatively discretely in the bushes (when you gotta go and are utterly titted and aren’t in Mexico with a shoe-box and all that…) and -1,000 for having a mate who thinks bushulent urination sexually enticing. And looks like Jabba the Hutt’s god-daughter.
Key quotes from the Geordie Shore miss-fits parade… I have included my own comments.
“I should have a degree in pulling women.” - whatever!
“Dress to impress, that’s me” - that is from a geezer.
“I would never kiss anyone without a six-pack” - that is possibly ironically brilliant.
“My biggest fear is getting wrinkles.” - that is also from a geezer.
“I’m fit, I’m flirty and I’ve got double Fs.” - that isn’t from a geezer**.
“I am a Geordie girl with a V.I.P. edge.” - whatever!
“I can talk the back legs off a donkey!” - “hind legs” you numpty!
“The hardest graft I’ve ever done is doing my hair.” - that’s from a geezer.
“I got the bangin body, and the banter to match.” - cart/horse misarrangement
“I got the looks, I got the charm, it just works.” - bully for you.
“Geordie Shore” is a total disgrace but it is as watchable as a Zeppelin crash. “Oh the huge manatee!”
And BTW. As far as I know “bangin’” (used all the time in “Geordie Shore”) has never been a euphemism for sexual intercourse in the North East. It is something they simply made-up for the show. Everyone knows the traditional mating call of the Geordie is “Gerrup them stairs!” or maybe I am merely quoting Viz. I wouldn’t know but then I’m a “posh Geordie” from West Gateshead where they have like trees and shit. And bushes. Not that posh.
*The Great Eastern ship was built to sail to Australia and back without re-coaling. Brunel hadn’t bothered to check if there was coal in Australia. There is. Loads of it.
**I have dated a girl of roughly that bra-size. One of the twats I knew thought it hilarious to talk about the “only two reasons” Nick is dating her. I honestly - honestly - hadn’t noticed - and she was a bit sensitive because she was a student on a very limited budget and had enormous trouble finding nice bras. The crassness of some people astonishes me. My “mate” saying that is a sort of middle-class version of the going behind the bushes thing I mentioned. But then he was a twat. He was the sort of twat that couldn’t understand that I might select a partner on the basis of them being an intelligent girl who made me laugh and was generally fun to be around. And yeah, she had nice breasts but that was none of his fucking business.
“Anyway. Back to slags pissing in cardboard boxes. “
Maybe, in the next Olympics…?
If you think I’m paying GBP20bn for that… Not when they do it up North for free.
A lot of wisdom here Nick.
I will have to visit you both again - if I am welcome.
I appear to have missed this most edifying and educational programme Nick, what channel is it on?
Bath Theatre Royal gets the RSC every year too. We get all the good ones.
One of my flatmates in Nottingham was a Geordie. He had a full on accent and was so quiet and soft spoken it took me six months to understand half of what he was saying.
I thought Boyle’s Industrial Revolution segment in the opening ceremony was slagging it off not praising it myself, Dark Satanic Mills and all that. And it’s the bucolic idyll that he want’s us to get back to. We will be there soon of course when the lights go out and the windmills fail to cope.
Brunel did lose loads of money didn’t he? Magnificent engineer and all that, but take the Clifton Suspension Bridge here in Bristol, wonderful achievement, but what’s it for? There is virtually nothing on the other side of it but The Ashton Court estate and winding lanes to Portishead, Clevedon and Weston Super Mare. It wasn’t a vital artery connecting two places that would take hours to circumnavigate otherwise, it takes about ten minutes via the Cumberland Basin to reach that side of the Avon, so it was just a vanity project really.
RAB,
I think IKB’s problem was that he was an “engineer”. He wasn’t a shipping engineer or a civil engineer or a mechanical engineer. He thought he could do the lot. And as Feynman put it even the smartest can make right tits of themselves outside their field. Anyway building bridges to nowhere makes IKB somewhat ahead of his time. The US Congress would’ve loved him!
Paul,
You are of course welcome! But we are re-decorating at the mo! BTW I suspect you could train it fairly directly from Kettering - change at Sheffield - and it’s a five minute walk from the station through this pleasant little gaff. Basically if you can get to Sheffield you can get here.
cf your last paragraph, so it was the tits then?
Henry,
I am a bit vague as to where you are going. If you are asking E had very nice breasts. She also had curvy buttocks, a nice stomach (for this grim Northern bastard to rest his pint of bitter on) and neat legs. Oh, did I mention the pretty face or long blonde hair or that she could dance and she was smart and loving and funny? See that is my point. Apart from the fact that all of the lasses on Geordie Shore seem to have been creosoted (when was the last time you looked at a shed and felt “lurve”) they aren’t smart, loving and funny. They are unmitigated moos. The lads are probably worse.
So this is what happened. It had been a hard day’s night at the Black Orchid in Nottingham and me and my mate had given-up on the night to the extent we were drinking Coke and speaking of pushing off and this blonde (and her mate) ask to sit with us. Well, why not. I am not being disparaging about the “mate” but this was ‘95 and I don’t think I saw her again but I did see E again so you can forgive me for lack of detail on her companion. I walked her back to Nightingale Hall and behind the reception desk, amongst musty copies of the Yellow Pages, engaged in “frottage”. She told me what it meant - she’d done Latin at school. And then we hooked-up. And then I lost her phone number so I went round and she hollered from a window as I turned to leave after getting no joy at reception. It was almost Hollywood.
If I’m honest a large part of that was the frottage and the “frottage” definition. The fact she had big tits really didn’t occur. Obviously it was nice subsequently. But it played no role in our getting together or our break-up.
Actually what hooked me apart from her charm (note I don’t pluralize) was that she trusted me to walk her home. I like that in a girl. I like that in me.
Oh, and she was a theology student. My interest in and knowledge of the Qu’ran starts with her. She was astonished anyone could believe it.
And I probably shouldn’t say this. Part of my understanding came directly from the relationship. Yes, we had a sexual relationship but without vaginal sex. She was an Anglican of sorts. She wanted to lose her virginity on her wedding night but was up for much the rest! So if I can at the age of 21 lie naked in bed with a well fit bird I’d just given a hand-job to and me with hormones raging like a Chinese swimmer and yet not rape her why would I feel the need to ravish somebody at the bus stop at 8am not wearing hijab?
Perhaps because much Islamic thinking is of women as property and modern Western thinking is of them as free agents? Perhaps that is why I didn’t really notice E’s large breasts but her ready wit and charm and why I had a four month relationship that was red-lined but steered very close to that line at times. Perhaps, and it is a hard thing to say, because me and E are fucking civilized and there are barbarians at the gates who will cut clitoris out and stitch the vulva to make sex a grim ordeal to preserve virginity.
Or.
There are girls who date me and for religious reasons don’t want to have sex before marriage and guys like me who respect that even though both of us at somel level you know…
One is a “morality” imposed by grotesque force and the other is morality that stems from actual morality.
Nick -
Oh the huge manatee!
That is just genius. I am so going to steal that.*
when was the last time you looked at a shed and felt “lurve”
I’m guessing you’ve not seen this yet.
As for IKB being an engineer: one of the cool things about the Tyne quayside is that if you look up and down it you can pretty much get a history of British engineering: the Stephensons weren’t engineers. They had no training and no ability to work out formulas; they had only experience and optimism. That’s why the High Level Bridge is so damn overbuilt.
From there you can work your way through the Swing Bridge (by my personal hero) and the Tyne Bridge, and end up at the Redheaugh’s minimalist ribbon of concrete floating in space.
Oh, and as for the Millennienniennium Bridge - as elegant as it is, I reckon they missed a trick there. They should have added seat restraints to those benches along the bridge so you could ride the bridge when it was raised. Sorta like Alton Towers On the Tyne. Hell, I’d pay money for that.
* That whole ‘I am so going to X’, BTW, is another construction that was made up for a TV show - in this case, for ‘Friends’.
nickm: As far as I know “bangin’”…is something they simply made-up for the show.
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actually it’s an Americanism - I hear it alot over here; it doesn’t surprise me that it has caught on in the UK. Interesting aside, I’m starting to hear the Britishism ‘bloody’[especially 'bloody hell'] here in the US more often; a testitment to the culturual transfer between the Anglosphere.
Also, they really made a British version Jersey Shore? Really? I’m all for the US getting our revenge on you Brits for inflicting the Teletubbies on us, but that’s really taking it a bit far (it is generally accepted that “The Jersey Shore” is the worst disaster to hit the Mid-Atlantic states, second only to 9/11).
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Oh the Huge Manatee!
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uh…I don’t even….wat?
Zack -
It’s a cultural reference to Herbert Morrison’s commentary on the Hindenburg’s crash at Lakenhurst, NJ, in 1937. Morrison is famous for having said, “Oh, the humanity.”
The internet has brought us all closer together. When I first went to the USA in the mid ’90s nobody had the slightest idea that the word “wanker” was offensive.
PST, yes, I got the reference, I was just trying to be funny. Let’s be honest, the idea of an exploding giant sirenia is rather surreal.
I gave up my Sky subscription seven years ago because of the constant repeats and recycled crap.
Still not regretting it.
“When I first went to the USA in the mid ’90s nobody had the slightest idea that the word “wanker” was offensive”
I advised an American friend to stop telling girls he thought they had a nice Fanny for similar reasons.
SAoT,
In Florida I was once entertained with a family history story by one of my then girlfs’s rellies. Apparently when the family (her mother’s side) pitched-up at Ellis Island in 1900 with the Romanian-Jewish surname “Doktor” in order to “fit it” they decide to name their first-born child - a daughter - Frances which they shortened to Fanny. So yeah, Fanny Doktor. Now the weird thing is the lady who told me this (who is an anecdotalist held in high regard throughout the State of Florida ) thought this funny for slightly (a few cms I guess) different reasons that I did. I almost said it after the punchline. I almost said, “Don’t tell me she became a gynecologist?” I really had to restrain myself here but I did. I also in the US never asked for the toilets because it’s always bathrooms or restrooms or something weird. And don’t even ask me about the enormous Aussie Rugby player I once chatted to on a Spanish beach, “These cheap Spanish thongs are really chafing - can’t you Europeans make anything that works”. I said “VW cars.” and he limped away. I could have mentioned the koala piss Aussies sell as beer here. I didn’t because it is mainly made in Leeds and it’s a pass because I know full well our upside-down cousins (and yes I have cousins the wrong way up) have excellent beer. They just sell us the shite. The Septics do the same trick. With Jean-Claude who was sexually molested by “big sweaty bears”. That could also be taken in two ways if you catch my drift.
When living in Los Angeles back in the early 1990’s I still smoked, but unfortunately worked in a smoke free business park, where it was a five minute trudge (albeit in glorious sunshine) past the gates to have a smoke.
One evening as we were packing up to go, the nicotine cravings were riding high, I made of the mistake of saying “Thank god for that, I could murder a fag”.
The “WTF” reaction from my American office buddy was something you wouldn’t believe.
When I first went to America you could smoke on the plane.
It’s on Sky is it? Thank’s Lynne. Yes more than enough crap on Freeview for me.
John,
When PBS took Eastenders from the BBC way back peeps were thoroughly confused by Dot Cotton popping out of the laundrette “for a fag”.
One of the great experiences of any city is sitting in the very front of the metro car as it pops out of the tunnel from Gateshead heading North over the river - better than anything at Alton Towers because it doesn’t make you throw up over passers by!
I have actually stood in the middle of this bridge and taken photographs - lost now sadly. (It was before the Metro opened in case you are wondering…)
NickM, the “tits” remark was a facetious jibe. I honestly didn’t expect a dissertation in reply.