NORTHERN towns and villages do their utmost to make themselves hostile environments for cosmopolitan southerners. Here’s how:
Remote areas don’t have an Uber
You’re late for a wedding on a beautiful country farm, so you pull up Uber to book a ride for the six-mile trip from the B&B you’re staying in. After five nonplussed minutes trying to understand why the nearest driver is two hours away, you finally realise that it does not operate here. You berate your host for living in the ‘arse-end of the f**king sticks’, before apologising profusely and paying her £50 to drive you.
It’s three degrees colder past York
The city of York is the last bastion of civilisation before you reach the badlands of Tyneside and the huge, flat vistas of Northumberland, which to a southerner like you might as well be the freezing Arctic tundra. Even in a puffer jacket and the expensive snow boots you purchased for the trip you think the weather is bitter, despite the fact that the locals are wearing shorts.
There are no special country lanes for cyclists
You chose a Pennines cycling holiday because it gives you a chance to flaunt your pricey new bike, but the area doesn’t accommodate cyclists at all. You can’t see for hedgerows and are terrified by a local screaming round a bend in a Land Rover every 30 seconds. You’ve brought much-needed tourism to this rundown rural backwater, the least they could do is tarmac some of their fields to give you a special lane to ride in.
Pies aren’t as ubiquitous as promised
You thought you’d be dining on mutton pie, chips and a barm cake, whatever the f**k that is, when you visited Bradford, but what you’ve actually ended up with is the best curry you’ve ever eaten in your life. You didn’t come all this way for delicious food, you came for something weird that you could photograph and put on Instagram to make your southern mates laugh.
It’s not grim enough
Having never been beyond Birmingham before, you believed all the stories about the North being a soot-blackened hellhole, riven with poverty and children losing limbs in mills. So when you find vibrant metropolitan cities, beautiful scenery and a pint that costs less than a fiver, you feel short-changed. Where’s the poverty porn safari you were promised?
Everyone is too nice
Everyone is so friendly that you’re instantly suspicious. What do they want? Are they trying to manipulate you into buying something? The average southerner is used to being ignored or tutted at everywhere they go, and is freaked out by this sinister niceness. So much so that they piss off home as soon as possible. Well played, Northerners.
