I have lived in Reading for 11 years now and my experience of ***** has been wide and frequent.
In the ‘Golden Age’ of the Spice Girls, it was ‘cool’ to dress like sporty spice and to my knowledge this was not only acceptable but fashionable. This phase passed and in my young innocence, I presumed that everyone had got over this craze. How wrong I was.
Some time passed and I started at a secondary school. It could be said that I was somewhat sheltered at my all girls grammar school from the epidemic that occurred in the following years.
My friends and I became more and more aware of the **** breeding in our town. They started off being labelled trendies. This then progressed to townies or rudeboys. We then discovered that there was a new class of townie, the ***** or ****. These not only had the unmistakeable dress sense, but the thieving habits and unstoppable attitude problems to match.
They seem to congregate in the dated ‘Broad Street Mall’ where there is a Mark One, New Look, tk maxx, Virgin Megastores and a dodgey market outside: all in all, **** heaven. They are never seen in groups smaller than 4, presumably because should they feel the need to defend themselves, they would need 4 times the brain power.
It is true that the majority of ***** that I see are under the age of 18, but sadly the **** culture does not stop at this age. White van drivers are common in my area, and their natural reaction to any sign of female lifeform is to beep their horn, lean out of the passenger window and shout. The noise they make can only be descibed as oooiiiit baaaaiii which presumable means ‘alright babe?’
There are 2 main types of townie in Reading:
– those from the council estates and ‘ghetto’ culture (and proud) who tend to wear cheap sports brands, less bling and more 59p-from-superdrug gel.
– Those from the leafy suburbs who pretend they are from the ‘ghetto’ whose mummy and daddy buy them the more expensive, clean sports gear, who drip in ‘ice’ and bling, who can afford a nice new vw golf, but instead buy a vauxhall astra and ‘beef it up’.
The latter type also tend to go around on expensive bikes, or oh-so-macho electric scooters.
So far I have mainly talked about the male ****. The female ones are equally common and who I tend to hear on the buses, mouthing off about who dumped who and what shaznay said about tash. The two halves of the **** population come together at valentines day and other special events for an under 18s foam party aka meat-market-disco-with-bubble-machine.
The female of the **** species is the most verbally aggressive and ‘bitchy’ of them all. Common phrases are ‘what ya lookin at’ ‘hullaahh!’ (used if an insult is supposedly touche) ‘shup’ (abbreviation of shut up) ‘waeva’ (abbreviation of whatever)
She will wear ridiculosly tight jeans (regardless of how flattering/unflattering this is) with ‘booty’ or ‘playboy’ or a similarly unsavoury slogan across the rear. No matter how cold the weather gets, she will always wear a skimpy top into town, occasionally with a lovely parka or puffa jacket over the top.
Her hair will be greasy looking. It will most lokely be in a high pony tail to one side, with tendrils of hair left out. What is done with the tendrils varies: they can either be made into ringlets and gelled, curled around in front of the ear and gelled, orstuck across the forehead with gel in some way. If her hair moves due to wind etc, she has failed.
***** tend to congregate in Reading town centre (an area of low concentration – not many of them live in Reading itself) from areas of high concentration eg. caversham, whitley (suburbs) or nearby wokingham (a strong contender for chavville status).
