Yarm
Highlight: The Flighty Cod chip shop
Lowlight: Waiting to get served in the Black Bull and then tasting the beer afterwards.
Yarm is the worst sort of town: a whited sepulchre.
Superficially, it appears an attractive market town in the industrial wasteland of Teesside. However, spending any amount of time there one will discover that no resident has any taste or cultural discernment, the pubs attract a crowd similar to that found in the Costa del Sol, complete with fake tans and skimpy clothes.
Weekends and Tuesdays (singles night) are even worse with fighting yobs and divorcees on the hunt from out of town to pull the perceived better class, and hence (they assume) richer, resident of Yarm. . After 11 the only place to go is upstairs above a pub for a disco where the once-tasted, never-forgotten Tetley Imperial is served. Taxis will then charge a minimum of �5 to take you half a mile out of the place.
Nowhere is the famed northern friendliness on show.
"All my peers and contemporaries, their work ethic is utterly dictated by materialism: the amount of compromise they will make. I've seen them all, from the beginning. I was famous before all of them. I see them now, and I swear to you, they are the living dead. Their work is dead. They have no sparkle about their lives, about themselves. They're just treading water - they're not even treading water, they're treading fucking syrup. Bad syrup."