The Process of Geordification

The Process of Geordification.

The Process of Geordification

The Process of Geordification.
An ode to my first few months in Newcastle. 

(Please note that this is littered with huge generalisations based on nothing but my own experience, so don’t read on if you’re offended by subtle-as-a-brick writing)

      So, a matter of months after Elvis discovered us in the bunk beds of the tour bus, Nick asked me to move in with him.
      But because I’m a modern feminist woman I turned him down in favour of my career.
      Not really.  After a half-arsed, pretendy attempt at writing all the pros and cons down, I booked my one-way easyjet ticket. We are all flesh, blood, hormones and heart, after all. And when chubby Cupid strikes with his little arrow, none of us is immune.
      Besides, Newcastle is only a few hours away from London, I told myself. It can’t be that different.

Oh, but it can.

I think maybe the first thing I noticed was the men. In the city of London, I’d been accustomed to men visibly recoiling when they heard my Welsh accent. They would abruptly end whatever conversation we were having,  practically shooing me away as if I were some dirty peasant girl. And then they’d check their pockets after I’d left to make sure their Saville Row wallets were still in place.
      But in Newcastle, I struck gold. The Welsh accent actually sounds like a posh Geordie accent. And the men up here have a real thing about ‘uptown girls’, they love to believe that they’re punching above their weight, so I was instantly regarded with a shy reverence from any man I spoke to. Result. Gypsy to Posh Girl in one plane ride. 
    The other thing about the men I noticed was this: they LOVE women. All women – thin, fat, tall, short, fake, real, young, old – you name us, they love us. They look at all women with this glint in their eyes: as though the woman in question were sticky toffee pudding, or chips, or some such other delicious, edible thing.
    Of course my brain was horrified at such objectification of the female of the species. My heart, however, my poor little heart grown so accustomed to being ignored, lit up like a candle whenever a man called me ‘Pet’ with that uniquely Geordie glint in his eye. (I was, remember, an impressionable 9 year old when Robson Green played cheeky Squaddie Tucker on ‘Soldier Soldier’ and an almighty 10 year crush on him began – only to cease, instantly, when he took up fishing.)

The other thing that took me by surprise is Geordie socialising. The men and the women go out separately, in gender-specific gangs, as though every weekend were a Stag or Hen Do. Girls’ Nights Out, Jolly Boys’ Outings. The girls stick together and the boys stick together, not conversing, until after midnight and a great many vodkas, when the beer goggles, the need for a cwtch, and a desire to keep warm, become all encompassing. Then, and only then, do the two sexes reach for one another in the dark streets of the Bigg Market.
      However, seen as Nick was the only person I knew in the city, I didn’t have any girls to go out with. So I had to gate crash a good few of his Jolly Boys’ Outings in those first few months. And to be fair to his friends, they never complained. Well, not to my face, anyway. I would drink insane amounts in an attempt to keep up, and declare loudly to any girls within earshot, ‘You see, I haven’t made any female friends yet. Not one. No, no friends for me just yet. I’m sure I’ll meet some friendly girls soon though…’ 
      Invariably, every night out would end with the boys playing some card game I couldn’t follow in Aspers. So I’d take myself off to ‘The Deal or No Deal’ slot machine and test my general knowledge for hours on end, squinting at the multiple choices and banging Noel’s face with my fist whenever I got it wrong.
    One eventful night in Aspers when I’d had triple vodkas all evening,  I managed to convince myself I was psychic. I wandered from gaming table to table, whispering ‘Its 28, trust me, I know it’s going to land on 28, I’ve got a feeling,’ to random strangers. When one absolute eejit actually believed my psychic prowess and bet everything he had left on number 28, and then subsequently lost, I was asked to leave. Up until then, Nick had been doing everything in his power to be every friend I would ever need, including doing my keep fit DVDs with me. But in the taxi on the way home from the casino that night, he said, ‘I think it might be time for you to get some friends, pet.’

Going out in a big multi-gendered gang of boys and girls, all of us together, is probably the thing I miss the most about pre-Geordie life. But going out with ‘just the girls’ does have its benefits.
      My favourite being: there is no one to tell you you’re wearing too much make up. As a child of the 80s my approach to make up has always been ‘throw as much colour onto your face as possible and see how much sticks’. I never could grasp the notion of ‘natural-looking make up’ or ‘focussing on just one feature. ‘ When you come from an era where blue eyeshadow, bronzed cheeks and red lips WORN AT THE SAME TIME is not only acceptable but practically de rigeur, its hard to adjust to London’s ‘mascara and slick of lipgloss’ routine. So I was so relieved to discover that Geordie girls are just like me. The first time I ventured out on a Saturday night and saw just how dressed up they were and just how much make up they had on, I felt as though I’d arrived in some kind of girly-girl Nirvana. I had found my spiritual home. 

The living situation was…interesting. Nick and I had the loft room of a big, old house that Nick shared with 3 other men. One of the other men was a convicted peeping tom, or Peeping Dave, as his name actually was. In keeping with my new gung-ho determination to take everything my new life in Newcastle could throw at me, I told myself I could cope with this. I could live with 4 men. 
    To be fair though, it wasn’t ideal. It was filthy, everything in the house was falling apart, and we couldn’t even complain to the landlord (the landlord being Nick’s father, a man so mean he makes the Kray twins look like a cuddly comedy duo. He makes the Kray twins look like Ant and Dec). 
      One of the various things that didn’t work was the lock on the bathroom door. I was having a bath one day when Paddy, the new boy, accidentally walked in. Unfortunately, I wasn’t laying in the bath with huge bubbly bubbles protecting my modesty, I was stood up, and climbing out of the bath in an unflattering display of full frontal nudity. All of the colour drained from poor Paddy’s face and he was so embarrassed that he never spoke to me again. Indeed, he moved out just a few days later. Peeping Dave never quite recovered from the incident either, so annoyed was he by the missed opportunity to peep. He broke himself a nice little hole in the frosted glass of the bathroom door in an attempt to be ready for the next time I took a bath, however. I don’t know why he bothered, he had already seen me in my underwear. (On my first visit to Newcastle, he sneaked up the stairs to our loft room whilst I was getting dressed. Thanks to Nick’s minimalist taste, there was no furniture for me to hide behind so I had to try and fit behind a skinny oak beam in the middle of the room. ‘Dave, get down them stairs NOW!’ Nick shouted. ‘Whey, it’s not like she’s Kate Moss or owt, is it?’ Dave mumbled as he ran back down the steps. Apparently, only skinny girls have the right to hide their bodies from perverts…)

I had a lot of time on my hands in those first few weeks, before I found work. So I did what any self-respecting girl does when she’s just moved into her new boyfriend’s flat: I went snooping. And I found what people always find when they snoop around someone else’s belongings: something they don’t want to see.
    I discovered a box. 
    A box full of old love letters and presents. 
    From a girl named Mandy. 
    And another girl named Gemma.
    And another, named Zoe.
    Jennifer, Alison, Phillipa, Sue (only funny if you’re old enough to remember Beautiful South).
    Seriously, anyone struggling for a girl’s name for their baby, just get in touch. Nick’s magic box will have the answer. I don’t know what disturbed me most – the sheer amount of women that claimed to be in love with my boyfriend, or the sheer ferocity with which they all loved him. Poems dedicated to every little thing he was GOOD at ‘doing’, odes to ‘that little fleshy bit between his eyebrows,’ or ‘that little mole by his ear’, scrap books documenting special little moments, sexy presents and IOUs for God-knows-whats. 
    If there were ever a punishment that befits the crime of snooping then this was it. I put the box back in the drawer and I never spoke or thought of it again.
    Of course I didn’t do that. Are you NUTS? I sat on the edge of our bed with the box in my hands and awaited  Nick’s return so that we could ‘discuss’ it. So that we could discuss every little trinket and every word written and every memory documented until I was sure he was over them. All of them. 
      That was an argument and a half…

      Also part of my Geordification, was my re-introduction to singing.  If there’s anything to put you off singing for life, its spending 6 years auditioning in London. Singing, previously my most favourite thing to do in the whole world, had become like maths to me: I was always trying to work out some secret formula. Maybe if I do THIS song in THAT key then I’ll get the part? Or maybe if I do that bit in my head voice but lower my larynx in that verse, they’ll give me a recall. So when Nick introduced the notion of ‘just getting up and having a go’ at a pub one night, I thought I was going to throw up. What? Just get up there? Unprepared? Unrehearsed? In front of all these people? Do people just let you do that up here? Without auditioning you first?  The only way I could even conceive of doing a song, was if I drank two bottles – yes, bottles -of wine first. I drank so much that I threw up out of both of Nick’s skylight windows the following day.  Peeping Dave snitched on me: he’d been trying to spy through our window when he’d seen me running and back forth with a mop and bucket trying to clear away all the evidence before Nick came home from work.

Another thing that was very different from London was the job hunt. In London, a hugely populated, highly competitive climate, I’d learned to say ‘yes’ to any question asked in order to get a job. Can you horse ride bare-back? Yes! Can you speak Italian? Of course! Can you stage fight? Yes! Will you go bald for a role? Yes! Will you do lesbian love scenes? Yes. Yes! YES!  That’s the first rule of drama school: say you can do it, whatever it is, and worry about the details later. So I applied the same thinking to my job search in Newcastle. The problem is, when you apply that attitude to a job search in a smaller, friendlier, perhaps more naive city, you end up with 15 different jobs, 14 of which you aren’t even qualified to do. So I had to learn to say ‘No.’ No. A strangely empowering word which I heard a lot in London  – but never got the chance to say.

Now onto the friendliness. Oh it’s lovely. It really is. To smile at someone and have them actually smile BACK! Oh the joy! Of course it isn’t the people of London’s fault that they aren’t considered friendly – they’re too knackered, they’re EXHAUSTED, from the commute and the competitiveness and the crappy air down in the tube, they can’t even be arsed to smile at the friends they’ve already got, let alone smile at potential new friends. So cut them some slack before you judge them. But it is nice to be back in the bosom of a people that show you some warmth. Like being back in Wales – only with less mountains and more snow.
      Yes, the snow. To use a Geordieism, what is the Craic with that? It’s FREEZING up here. Seriously. Who knew? I packed all my flimsy dresses to come up here and the only way I get to wear them is if I put them with tights and a cardi, thus negating the power of the dress. I used to look nice – well, sometimes – but now I look like a librarian every day. And not a sexy one with pointy glasses on her eyes and a pencil between her teeth. Just one that’s trying desperately hard to keep warm in sub zero conditions. I moved up here with a silky nightie to wear to bed, but instead I have to rely on my onesie and our electric blanket. How can it be that much colder? It’s all the same country, isn’t it?

And the wind, oh my God, the wind. Within 3 months of being up here and scrunching my face up against that bitter cold wind every day, I’d aged 10 years. Where is it from? And why is it like that? It’s not normal. 

 

I’ve got to go now – it’s Date Night tonight so I need to start the first layer of make up now…

Thanks for reading! Kelly xxx
Copyright March 2013

Who is cheating on who?

Who is cheating on who?.

Who is cheating on who?

To the woman that appeared on’This Morning’ today to talk about her husband’s infidelity. I believe your name is Angela.

Let me see if I have your story straight:

‘One day a woman works doubly hard and manages to break through that reinforced glass ceiling to get herself an excellent career. She is, however, married to a man who, despite his biological advantage, can’t secure himself some similar success.

So she takes the job to provide for her family (and because, let’s be bloody honest here, she’s worked for it and deserves it). The job involves a good deal of travel.

Wimpy-pathetic-excuse-for-a-man at home starts to feel vulnerable and insecure and emasculated and cheats on his wife to remind himself that he does have a penis (however small…).

Super Woman, instead of realising that she’s far too intelligent and successful and wonderful to waste time on this useless walking erection, BLAMES HERSELF. 

And then she sets about warning the rest of us that we too may ‘push’ our husbands into cheating if we become too successful.’

So to be sure that I have your message straight, I THINK you’re saying:

Us women should all ignore our intelligent and ambitious instincts, put the children to bed, the food on the table, lie down with our legs in the air and wait until our husbands come home (from jobs that are less well paid than ours). 

Woman, in saying all this, you have betrayed us, the female species as a whole, in an even worse way than your husband betrayed you. I’m guessing you’re also the sort of person that thinks a woman is asking for rape if she wears a skirt. Oh, and you probably think the vote is wasted on us too. In fact, why should they let us out of the house at all? Things were mush simpler when we were chained to the kitchen sink, weren’t they? Men didn’t cheat then. Did they…?

There are some lovely countries in the Middle East that you might want to visit. The women are largely illiterate, domestic abuse is rife, rape is an every day fact of life. The women are covered up and gagged. They exist solely for their men. It’ll suit you down to the ground.

Alternatively, take a time machine back to 1950. Because 2013 doesn’t need you. 

Thank you.