N: The Nation's Favourite Undergraduate

'The walk along the blackpath from Teesside
Takes years; a sunny, Brownie dream of ease
Of bank holidays at the good seaside.'

Andy Croft

* * * * * * * *

Thank you fair press for being so kind
about this beautiful home town of mine.
Hiding down south behind your overpriced desks
obscures your view of our industrial wreck.
You think we're too stupid to really understand
that you, dahn sarf, are the Lords of the land.

'The North-South divide - it doesn't exist!'
So where's my mam and dad on the list of the rich?
Their ideas based on weeks of hard research,
ours on a lifetime of years in the dirt.
So I'll tell you for nowt mate, it bloody well does!
Take pub politics up here: it's all them and us.

We gamble, we drink, take drugs all the time;
at least so we're told by those down the line.
We steal, beat our kids and piss dole money away,
but, fuck, what else can we do all day?
Give a dog a bad name and it'll stick, just like glue:
that's what happened on Teesside - no thanks to you!

Then Robson left. That gave you good scope
to piss on the corpses of good kindly folk
and blacken the name to far worse than shite -
God, did you ever really believe you were right?
We may lack the culture, we're not avant-garde
but we know about real life, real life is hard.

We don't read the broadsheets, or so you say;
and only watch soap operas to fill up the day.
We see the pictures of real civilisation:
doctors and lawyers (well above our station).
No, we like to stick to what we best know
about industry, lost ages of iron, steel and coal.