HARTLEYPOOL is a smashing little seaside resort, a true jewel of the north-west. Here’s an unprompted article detailing what I love so ruddy much about it.
The culture
Naysayers on Wikipedia claim it is just ‘a port town in County Durham, England’. I say it’s so much more than that. Hartleypool is a veritable Athens of modern times, housing such beacons of cultural life as the Battery Museum and an art gallery, which I imagine is a great place for using Latin pick-up lines on posh women.
The people
My favourite thing about Hartleypool is, without a shadow of a doubt, the 93,000 people who live there for whom we’ve created 180,000 new jobs. They scorn the Islington elite. They’re not interested in handouts but real, sustained British investment in their British future, and their children’s British future, and their grandchildren’s children’s British future.
The monkey hanging
I simply adore Hartleypool’s xenophobia, to the extent of hanging a monkey because they thought it was a Frenchman spying for dastardly old Napoleon Bonaparte. A good example to us all. Rest assured I’m not at all unnerved by their football team’s monkey mascot H’Angus, who no doubt Labour would eliminate as a ‘racist hate crime’.
The illuminations
Hartleypool is, of course, most famous for its gorgeous light show every Christmas time. Like moths to a lambent flame, easily-delighted Northern folk trek hundreds of miles to visit the stunning seafront and take in the Vegas-like glamour, enjoying ballroom dancing in the famous tower and a tram ride off the end of the pier.
The monkey mayor
In 2002, the people of Hartleypool elected a monkey-man as mayor. And whether he was a man in a monkey suit, as people claim, or a time-traveller from an ape-ruled future as I believe, I respect any electorate that votes for a novelty candidate for mayor as a laugh, then re-elects them because why not. Such people are the backbone of Britain.
