Washington, I feel, is best described as the metaphorical s**t on the metaphorical Rockport boot which is Sunderland. Decades of under development and closure of the local pits and industries (which served to keep the ****** hordes of charver families in confined spaces underground for extended periods of time and thus away from the minority population of respectable people) has led to a plague of Burberry-clad, acne encrusted, apelike, ugly mutants swamping this town’s various districts, the already monstrous council flats of which Washington mainly comprises soiled even more by the ubiquitous presence of a charvette’s XXL sized Sunderland AFC pregnancy wear blowing in the wind whilst ******* out to dry from the ****** verandas of these hovels.
The local youths, spilling endlessly out from the charver production line that is Washington’s laughable comprehensive schools, find endless excitement by congregating in village centres or The Galleries, a 1970s concrete monstrosity claiming to be a shopping mall but in fact is a large creche where Declans and Chantelles take their little ones, the perfect advert for contraception, to keep them occupied amongst the rows of charity shops and budget clothes and bling stores within, whilst mummy and daddy, veterans of the ante-natal clinic at age 14, meet with other like minded individuals outside the McDonald’s to discuss who-shagged-who, obviously hot gossip in this town where charver wife-swapping and subsequent pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey style random ********** leads to an urban population where everyone is everyone else’s cousin.
After The Galleries, our charver population proceeds to the aforementioned village centres, home to the Indian shops supplying them, practically intravenously, with their cider and alcopops. Here, should one not wish to forever have an inverted imprint of an SAFC medallion ring a feature of their eyelid, one should avoid at all costs. Whatever appeal they find in such a Charve-moot, littering the ground with burger wrappers, chewing gum, saliva and everything but the third page of every tabloid newspaper currently published, I do not know. There are obviously very important social rituals taking place here, but are, clearly, far too highly-strung and subtle for me to detect their true nature and purpose.
So, I finish with some words of advice: when you are driving north along the A1 and make that fatal left turn onto the slip-road that delivers you nicely to the outer boundaries of Washington – marked by a signpost that has not yet been repaired since a joyrider crashed into it – yes, once you smell that odour of fast food and s**t that hangs about the town like radiation within the Hiroshima gene pool, marking the territory of the Washington Charver like a mangy, mongrel dog marks its territory by pissing against a lamp-post, make sure you are equipped with, at the least, a psychotherapist and an armed bodyguard. Or alternatively, take a weapon of some sort. Don’t succumb to the hypnotically oppressive and unavoidable Burberry-patterned mentality of Washington, and <strike>**** yourself</strike> start self-harming.
