You Are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain

by Tim Moore

The corridors appeared to have hosted a keenly contested race between a drunken horse and a motorcycle powered by gravy.

These places are grubby monuments to a kind of anti-Gillette masculinity, a lowest-common-denominator celebration of the worst a man can be.

It feels like the result of some painstaking scientific study to establish the environment in which caged rats exhibited the most profound levels of unease, stopping just short of the point where they began to eat themselves.

In a just world, every branch of Clinton’s Cards would be burnt to the ground at once by state decree, for the public good.

The residential crescent in front of the town hall was being stolen faster than it could be demolished:

a little old man in a splendid astrakhan hat and coat of matching trim, who now launched unbidden into an evidently well-rehearsed rundown of the panel’s grammatical errors.

A man after my own heart!

orthography

a veal fillet coated with batter and breadcrumbs, then deep fried, topped with béchamel sauce and parmesan, baked briefly in a pizza oven and laid on a bed of chips.

It was like a spam fritter left outside for a year in a land where it rained fondue.

doughtily

leitmotif,

milksop.

It felt like a scene from some personal remake of It’s a Wonderful Life, being shown how things would pan out if I went ahead and made that fateful decision to do nothing but eat crisps and smoke.

imprecation

opprobrium:

desultory,

bid

bade

East

Eastern

when I chose to take a phone-camera self-portrait.

At the threshold I wheeled round to hoist a farewell hand at my fellow working men. ‘Howay the shoes!’ I cried, before noisily and repeatedly attempting to exit through a locked door.

the Rorschach of blots on the landscape,

here at last was an area of outstanding natural disfigurement.

bahookie.

roughcast,

Today, of course, pebble-dash is simply a devastatingly effective means of wiping 10 per cent off the value of your home.

If there’s a health-hazard bandwagon to jump aboard, the Scots will push everyone else off and drive it whooping over a cliff.

More Scots die from skin cancer than Australians, with at least 150 annual deaths attributed directly to tanning salons.

It was the pleasantly lilted, home-spun discourse of Dr Finlay’s Fuck Book, or Fucker of the Glen.

Dralon

This entire nation is busily gorging, sizzling, smoking, idling and drinking itself to an early grave:

Methil.

hubristic

impetigo,

When and why did we forget how to make things properly?

When we started cutting corners, to save money.

Rolf Harris in a bootlace tie

a sawn-off suet drainpipe blocked with clumps of congealed haggis, smelling like it had been baked in an old lady’s handbag.

bridie-breath

staying in to watch Britain’s Got Biscuits and Police, Camera, Nudism.

‘stonner’

This tasted rather better than it looked, but then it looked like a forearm boiled in yogurt.

as we grumbled into Barrow-in-Furness past the toilet-paper factory.

Barrow-in-Furness was right out on a limb – so far out that the limb had been amputated and thrown off the Isle of Man ferry.

it’s an excellent place for doing things you don’t want to be seen doing, like tipping depleted uranium down the sink,

the sort of people who lived next to a big sign advertising The Walker’s Hostel or Canal Adventures and never crept out at night with a pot of paint and a puerile snigger.

rimed

‘Four and seven, FORTY-SEVEN! One and oh, THE NUMBER TEN! On his own, Tim the Paedo, PAEDO TIM!’

Personally speaking, Orville put the ‘S’ in my mothering instinct.

badinage

I honestly cannot think of a title that might deter either TV commissioning executives or the volunteering public. Britain’s Ugliest Dunce. Britain’s Drunkest Dentist. Britain’s Deadest Dog.

Five minutes later I walked outside wearing a crested grebe plucked from an oil slick.