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.
