The Idler

Sunderland

04 August 2005

Not so much a town as a mortuary. Industry has long departed, leaving the residents to shuffle round the town’s meagre consumer options like zombies in a George A Romero movie – while seagulls shit on them.

Daniel Etherington

“SOUTHERN BASTARDS FUCK OFF”

The Crowtree leisure centre dominates the centre of this town. Rusting and stained with grime, it is divided by a walkway where you come across old men gawping through the glass at swimming children. Its size and location also means the street it’s on never gets any daylight (or rather the watery and grey light that passes for daylight in Sunderland). The rest of the town consists of demolition plots, run down rented accommodation and housing estates. But its the people that really make a town what it is, and Sunderland’s population of shell suited, knuckle-dragging inbreeds really do make it what it is.

There’s graffiti at the bus station reading “Southern bastards – fuck off back south and keep the North East Northern” in three feet high lettering, and daily beating, robbing and abuse of “outsiders”.

I had a landlord who was so inbred he only spoke in vowels – a clipped stuttering sound like ah-eh ah-eh o hu hu. He once told me “we don’t like outsiders, us. A lot of people want that university closed”. Presumably the gene pool had been polluted by a visiting student from Bishop Auckland or Middlesborough and would take hundreds more years of inbreeding to put things right again. It’s true the local intellectual could breath with his mouth closed.

Shaun Alcock

21 STREET STREET

I used to be neutral about football but since having witnessed the endless violence “because we lost” from hords of lifeless Sunderland no hopes who have nothing in their life but a football – and a pretty poor football team at that. I have to say that I actively dislike football because of these twats.

I used to live on Amberley Street – as featured on Crime Watch and Panorama’s special on car crime. Pretty cool if you wanted weed and party smarties – and volence off the Hell Angels chapter who used to live in a bricked up house. I said “used to live” because the council decided in its wisdom to knock down the whole street. I suppose there won’t be any more managers of the Tap and Spile tied up and held at gun point in the cellar with the phone lines cut for stopping the locals from dealing drugs from the the front bar as if it was Wendy Herbal Supermarket.

Anybody that’s had the delight of roaming the numerous housing estates will clearly understand Viz’s wicked accurate collectable hearloom “21 Steet Street”.

Sunderland’s local girls (wifeys) are very skilled at applying orange foundation with the cleanest tide mark I’ve ever seen – so in line with the cheak that their pasty necks can still proudly show the litter of trophy love bites. While I used to wear long-johns, jeans, 2 t-shirts, a jumper, 2 jackets and a hat in the winter the local wear very cheap, light cotton summer clothes with packs of Royal 25’s neatly placed up their t-shirt sleaves.