Saturday 22 September 2012

Dunston Miners Gala Success



The Bandstand has been informed that the Dunston Miners Gala has taken place today and was a wholehearted success.

For those who don’t know, the event takes place in and around the town of Dunston, in the northeast of England, which is that bit above Scotch Corner where the rest of us dump our nuclear waste.

The event has a serious side. Those who are still standing after a breakfast of heavy drinking will follow the route that the old pit ponies took before they closed all the collieries. But, however they dress it up, the day is less about history and more about getting pissed.

Secretary Mary Tweed said, “This is a celebration of our mining heritage. However, you won’t attract the average brass band up here on that premise. What you need to do is promise them a very heavy all-day drinking session. As Kevin Costner once said in Field of Dreams (or at least I think that’s right)...”If you build it, they will come”.

As celebrated historian David Carkeys said, “These northeast pit villages have, for hundreds of years, been the domain of the vagrant, the vagabond, the ne’er-do-well and the miscreant. This land is now the home of the teenage single mother, wheeling a pushchair that was rescued from a skip whilst drinking cheap cider from a can, the stomping ground of the burnt out car left in a primary school playground and the Bermuda Triangle of the permanently washed up and bone idle”.

Social commentator Hector Hydrangea once said, “That people in the 19th Century lived in such squalor in these northeast pit villages is beyond belief. The fact that they still live in such squalor there now is testament to their ability to live in squalor generation after generation.”

Most importantly, we have lost Malcolm. He was up there following the Netherton Nuclear Fuels Band. We thought we’d stir up the apple cart and follow a band sponsored by nuclear fuels to a celebration of coal mining in an attempt to drum up followers through the ensuing controversy. However, the last we heard Malcolm was on the quayside in Newcastle waiting for a taxi.