You may think Portsmouth is a beautiful and historical port with lovely inhabitants. Well let me tell you, nothing could be further from the truth. So here is my definitive list of why Portsmouth sucks:
- The feral packs of kids
- the endless bass of the exhausts
- the no go area that is Guildhall Walk
- the eastern European thugs trading blows and insults and drug dealerships with the locals
- the almost total absence of culture (Hornpipe Cinema, where are you when we need you)
- the North End Wetherspoons
- the asbos
- the dilapidation of Fratton Park where millionaire footballers drive away from the gloom to their pads in the countryside with the last few hard-earned tenners of the locals burning holes in their Armani trousers
- the fading splendour of the Southsea villas now carved up into bedsits for ‘transient gentlemen’ and behaviorally-challenged young people
- the tiny numbers of beggars (like babies in an orphanage they soon learnt the futility of crying for help)
- the sewage pumping station that is below sea level
- the historic dockyard with its head stuck up its historic ****
- Gunwharf Quays
- the students who quickly learn the value of avoiding eye contact
- the Somerstown skyline in the day’s dying light
- the murders
- the crammed urban streets packed with four-wheel drives
- the hatchet-faced young women
- the horrified old men working in the newsagents
- the cheap housing being built on every square millimetre of greenery
- the football club chairman who thinks he’s Caesar
- Fred sodding Dineneage
- the endless rows of terraced houses
- the diet of lager and kebabs
- the shaved heads
- the baseball caps
- the stripey tops
- the beer bellies
- the knuckles
- the sovereign rings
- the white trainers
- Pompey dots
- the fights over cabs
- the nervous-looking coppers
- the sense of dread on every street corner
- the tense queues in the One Stops
- the drives to the country to escape only to find Leigh Park and Wecock Farm
- the pounding of the waves that will one day drown the place
- the pleading hope inside that somewhere in the town there are people who don’t find mindless violence funny
- Paulsgrove
- the muggings
- the vandalism
- the bi-annual footie-related misplaced patriotism fest that always, always turns into riots
- the hatred of Southampton
- the hatred of everyone else
- the bastardised cockney accent
- the kids swigging from lager cans
- the tracksuits
- the red faces
- the baffled old people thinking death might not be quite so bad after all
- the smell of dogsh*t
- the dogsh*t
- the look you get when buying a broadsheet newspaper and a bottle of wine that doesn’t come in a two-litre bottle
- the stabbings
- the slashings
- the shouting
- the racism
- the crappy jobs
- the grey factories
- the drizzle
- that ******* pointless £20 million tower they built 100 yards away from one of the most-deprived wards in Britain
- the traffic lights that favour a non-existent flow of traffic
- the empty libraries
- the jam-packed bookies
- Fratton Wetherspoons
- the tailgating
- those poor, brave cyclists
- the white vans
- the tattoos
- the sailors
- the endless drivel about regeneration (note to council: a tower block with a few bits of plastic stuck on it is still a tower block)
- the refusal to do any recycling
- that strange orange glow you get in the evenings
- the cctv
- the concrete
- the neighbours that won’t even make eye contact with you
- the ordinary people looking to move to Fareham
- Cosham Wetherspoons
- Port Solent
- Time and Envy
- South Parade Pier
- the sea
- the sea…
