You get called an English cunt, well in my case a ‘shite not funny English cunt’ on Youtube for your stand up sketches that have nothing to do with English-ness, then when one of those ‘Ingurlund’ type clubs like West Ham or Wolves start chanting derogatory stuff eluding to you being Scottish, you feel like a lot of people in this part of the World always feel, that we’re very much a nation of our own. I’ve always thought that and I know a majority of others do as well. Most of us keep it to ourselves. Others are a bit wanky about it with their ‘Larn Yersel Geordie’ books or their sentences that contain stotty cakes, netties and boolin and such like so as to over exaggerate their purity as a North Easterner.

That’s the trouble though you see, North Easterner doesn’t sound good. Apart from anything else, it has a nod to London in the title. It’s the North East of England. If it was Britain (because when I last checked, that’s where we still lived, despite the SNP’s denial) we’d be in the Midlands which I’ve never heard anyone from this area say before.

Also in recent years you’ve had places like Liverpool triumphantly claiming to not be English but ‘Scouse’. This is a place that is very comfortable with it‘s own identity. It has a people that are very confident of who they are and what they are and I admire them while being embarrassed for them at the same time. Do they care about what the rest of the country thinks of them? Maybe they’re blissfully ignorant of the fact that they’re like that toe curlingly embarrassing cousin at a family do. I do think that they think that there are only two types of people in England and that’s Scousers and people who would like to be Scouse. You have to admire that. If you’ve been there you’ll know that they do like to think that it is a unique place and it is in a way but not in the grandiose way that a lot of them think it is. Also identikit cities are killing any kind of individualism Britain has got left.

I’m not selling the Northumbrian Assembly in a corny American Western type of a way by the way. I just want people to come on Sunday because I want to start something that might hit some great heights one day. I just feel that this is the time for someone to start a political party for the North East to break away from the rest of the country. The first one to start a Northumbrian Party can have permanently free guest list tickets for my Sunday night show, how’s that?!!

My gig didn’t happen last night. I got told about it as I was driving down. That’s show business as they say. No doubt I’ll be sorted with some remuneration and another gig but it felt weird to drive in a big anti clockwise oblong shape round the country for 6 hours, a shift in itself. The one big plus point is that I listened to a CD of Richard Prior’s early work on the pointless journey. I laughed out loud a lot of times, he was a funny, funny man and his sketches were funny all the way. It renews your faith in stand up after watching suit man followed by skinny jeans lego hair then back to suit man talking rubbish with the occasional titillating woman that’s about as daring as a Sunday School teacher in between.

I think Prior was from Illinois or somewhere, no doubt someone probably thinks he’s a shite not funny Illinois cunt, but it’s all about opinions, one of the freedoms we take for granted in England, Britain, or as Lydon said ’I thought it was the UK, or just another country- Another council tenancy'

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