I nearly
Posted this in reply to Enzyme’s excellent Stoke post just below, but I think there’s enough for a new post.

Newcastle. Not the proper Newcastle you understand, but Newcastle-Under-Lyme, a matter of minutes from Stoke and from Keele University where I attended.

Living in Newcastle was, to be honest, not that good. But it’s a really weird place.

We lived on pretty much the main road going through Newcastle. Called, relatively inexplicably, Liverpool Road, it was a dual carriageway. There was 6 feet of pavement and another 6 feet of path between front door and road.

We lived less than a minutes’ walk from 6 different takeaways and 3 off licences. The convenience was second to none, but the associated midlander clientele wasn’t. Among your harmless alcoholics and old people, you had groups of vicious, spitting, seething cauldrons of hormones commonly known as ‘chavs’. Now the boys at least we didn’t have too much trouble with – we acknowledged that they were far more likely to do us damage than us them, and they noted that we were exceptionally larger and hairier than them. So at least when it came to students vs. chavs there was a sort of truce.

The girls however – whole other story. 12-13 year old, puffer jacket wearing, hair ripping their scalp off by their ponytail, gum chewing, dance music blaring from phone, skanks. Truly horrible to behold. But the attitude to us was the icing. Unlike the boys they had no fear of retribution – they were girls, we couldn’t be knocking seven shades of shit out of them.

We were visiting our favourite kebab house for the 4th time that week, I was having a quick fag while they knocked up our pitas, 2 of the above-mentioned sauntered along. ‘Give us a fag’ was uttered. ‘Err, no’ was replied. This went back and forth once more until ‘say that once more and I’ll fucking stab you.’ Again, I offered that they should fist eachother and leave me alone with my cancer stick. Their response? To step inside, walk up to my admittedly mild-mannered friend Tim, and take his can of Lilt. Out the door and off down the street.

Continuing in the vein of thievery, one of the idiots living in our house left the sitting room window open one night. The window that looks directly onto the dual carriageway. Naturally, during the night the window was ripped off and we lost all the DVDs and the PS2 in the sitting room. They then came back one day while everyone was out, ripped off a kitchen window (round the back and over a fence this time) and up through the house. They walked straight past my room with PC, widescreen LCD and hundreds of DVDs and went for housemates’ laptop. Obviously they were only there for a very quick raid. They got a good look though and came back again, this time tearing an entire window out in a downstairs bedroom. Luckily I’d taken the hint by that point and taken all my valuable stuff out of the house.

In contrast, I saw more super/hypercars in that town than I have anywhere else. Porsches were frankly commonplace, a bit like a Golf. Ferraris were seen regularly, and we followed at least 2 Lamborghini Gallardo Spyders through town. I even saw a Bentley Brooklands once. Honestly, now – who lives or at least works in a town where you get so many people described as above and where you can buy a 3 bed semi for £70k, and drives a car worth knocking on £300k? I always saw Newcastle supercar drivers as somehow ‘big fishes in a small pond’ – if they were that successful, they wouldn’t ever leave London! Most enjoyable was picturing them going back to their 3 bed terrace in their Gallardo.

So yes, Newcastle-Under-Lyme. Very conflicted place.
( Rookie You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel, Fri 30 Oct 2009, 14:09, 6 replies)

I'm guessing you lived in Cross Heath, or thereabouts, then.
Newcastle is very strange like that.

I never really understood the high-end-car levels in the town. Having been brought up in the Westlands, I could sort of understand a lot of Volvo or Saab-driving types - the Westlands is where all the teachers, solicitors and doctors live. But that's not the Lamborghini crowd. I have no idea where they congregate.

Nor do I understand what kind of person buys one of those flats by the Bearpit Roundabout. Who'd pay £100k or more for something so small and badly-put-together when you can get a proper house with garden and walls not made of papier-mache for not much more? Well, who apart from the Lamborgini crowd.

But quite how they make their money beats me.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 30 Oct 2009, 14:16, closed)

Until I read this
I thought "what's he talking about, my brother lives in N-u-L and it's not that bad."

My brother is a teacher and lives in Westlands. QED.
( Sonic the Hedgetrimmer doesn't care what you think, Fri 30 Oct 2009, 15:10, closed)

Indeed
it was Cross Heath. We would always drive past the prestige car club near the Morrisons - how a place like that can stay open there just beggars belief.
( Rookie You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel, Fri 30 Oct 2009, 15:14, closed)

I had the strangest parking ticket in Newcastle-Under-Lyme in 2004
On Sundays, the parking restrictions where the market is held were removed. I returned to my vehicle to find an official police parking ticket that informed me that I "may" have broken the law. There was no fine to pay and it was signed by the issuing police officer.

I kept it for years.
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Fri 30 Oct 2009, 14:19, closed)

Oh - by the way...
As a Castilian, N-u-L is the real Newcastle. There's a Roman ruin to prove it, somewhere in the vicinity of Pool Dam.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 30 Oct 2009, 14:22, closed)

Newcastle Is Gods Country
The scary thing is that Newcastle is almost palacial compared to Stoke, I've lived in few places around Staffordshire, and Tunstall is like Hell on Earth. In the shower of shit that is Stoke on Trent, Tunstall is the crowning turd to top it all off.
(McJuurgensHaircut is authorised and regulated by your mum., Fri 30 Oct 2009, 15:40, closed)