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 pubs are terrible places now. I mean you wouldn't have known a decent pub at your age, I shouldn't think. They didn't have fucking music. They didn't have cigarette machines. They didn't sell the chemical beer. They were for proper drinkers, not for fucking yobs, hooligans. I want to go into a pub and meet interesting people, not to look at a lot of people sitting on the floor drinking out of tins. I can't stand it. Mostly people in your age group. Ruin pubs."