Wow!


Middlesbrough might seem like a beaten down, poluted, ugly, crime infested sick joke for an uninteresting city, but oh no, don't be fooled! Middlesbrough is rockingly cool in a really authentic way!


I wonder if there could be a market for sociorealistic tourism? Then the café crowds of trendy assess and the intelligenzia could come here and experience real rough! Next time you watch a movie with tough guys or mean streets, you can shrug your shoulders with that knowingly unimpressed untouchable cool, and truthfully claim, that you have 'done that, been there already.'Forget the wild, wild west and ghetto fabulous, Middlesbrough is where it's at!


Why, it was in Middlesbrough I was attacked on the streets for the first time.


It was outside my bedroom window in Middlesbrough, I saw cops chasing criminals with submachine guns shouting, "Get down on the floor! Get down on the floor! Hands above your head!" for the first time.


It was of course in Middlesbrough, that I first had a police SWAT team bang my door down at 3 AM in the night. Complete with 6 black clad guys with submachine guns up in my face, and shoutings of "drop your keys!", "Hands above your head!" and of course the old classic, "who else is in this house?"


But today came my favourite.


We received an anonymously looking letter. It turned out that it was from the parole board. A Ms. so-and-so is going to be released from prison on parole soon, and she has listed our home, as the place she is planning to stay! Either this is a superbly constructed practical joke (it is not, I have already phoned the parole board), or there must have lived some pretty scary people in this house before us.


So remind me, dear imaginary readers, that come May this year, I should expect a butch woman with knuckle tatoos and very little luggage on our doorstep.

It just occured to me, that we have no less than 4 prams/pushchairs in our possession. 4 (four!), and that is not counting the 2 toy ones the girls have. As I gazed around the carpark, I noticed we also have 3 vacuum cleaners. We have a problem. We might think we are normal folks, but we have a problem. "Oh no, we are not attached to material possessions; we only have 4 prams and 3 vacuum cleaners. I can assure you that each and every one of them are just the absolutely bare essentials!"

Now follows the grim tales of rehab...