Hartlepool 1989

A further extract from Ultra Violence. Chapter Six, "The Sixth Circle of Hell", focuses on an attack on Notts County supporters by a mix of a thousand Hartlepool and Middlesborough fans. Notts play up there tonight. The area has been significantly regenerated, but there is no love of strangers, southerners or people from Nottingham among the locals, whose team are being threatened for the second year running with relegation out of the league.

You can find this on Amazon or, if you're skint, contact the author. There are still a few copies of this edition.

November 1989

Hartlepool is one of the most deprived areas in the whole country. 

Thatcher had done a number on the main industries - the steel, the shipping, the docks and the coal. Nothing left up here. Zero. A scorched earth policy passed by a southern elite who fly straight past. 

More women than men work in Hartlepool, in part time jobs on the high street or in the corner shop. Fifty per cent unemployment, a hundred per cent hopelessness and the locals are angry about it. 

Visiting football supporters tend to be the outlets for that anger. Especially Southerners - a relative category in which visitors from Nottingham nestle snugly.

You look out the window as the train rolls into the town, a smell of sulphur stirred by the old train’s brake. The hellish smell matches what you see outside. 

The North Sea, a dank, restless, murky, overfished, oil-slicked and polluted stretch of water on the edge of Europe. 

In the silver grey sky, a flock of seagulls escapes inland, a storm brewing out in the mist. A post-apocalyptic tableau, as if someone had exploded a thermonuclear device nearby - a doomsday weapon that had demolished everything for twenty miles. The few remaining satanic mills now ruins, ghosts, stark mausoleums, the foundations on which they stand fragile, the soil poisoned and infertile.

It is getting dark outside. 

An inkling of snow in the air and a gathering wind. You spot a gaggle of dirty kids digging for something, perhaps buried treasure, atop a heap of chemically enhanced soil and rocky debris. Others cycle up and down toxic hillocks on Choppers and Grifters.

The train trundles into an outer district; row upon row of terracing. Kerbsides stripped of their cars, streetlights yet to flicker. Behind that, in the distance, you see more dead grass, more slag heaps crawling with hopelessness, gravel and rubble.

You pass malformed metal shapes, strange unidentifiable wreckage and blasted brickwork. 

More rocks, miles of coiled wire, torched vans and burned out cars - the desolate inheritance of a proud industrial past, gutted and filleted for no real reason other than the vengeance of a shopkeeper’s daughter.

You are uneasy too: This kind of environment creates monsters and you are not expecting a result. 

The only result you really want is to get in, watch Notts get through to the third round and a potential moneyspinner with a proper club - a City, a Liverpool, a United, maybe even Forest - and then get out of there as fast as possible.

You’ve had a good season so far with several good rucks around the country. You’re making a name for yourself as someone who can be relied upon in a punch up. You don’t cry and you don’t run. 

If you’re taking a kicking - like that time in the car park at Walsall, or at Doncaster station against Palace - you take your beating like a man.

You’ve been invited today by Younger Bully and you had to come whether you wanted to or not. There was no choice. You’re no shitter, but you’d much rather be watching the Lumberjack Championships on ITV this afternoon than trying to survive this hellhole.

You tell no one this, for obvious reasons.

63 Year Old Accused of Violent Disorder...And They Called My Book Far Fetched!

Full Story from The Lancashire Evening Telegraph HERE

Football fans accused of violent disorder after mass brawl in Burnley Miners Club

Burnley Miners Club

The 23 accused men include seven over the age of fifty and 

"63-year-old Timothy Wilkinson, of xxxxxxxxxxx, Burnley"

I wrote about over-aged hooligans in my book, Violent Disorder, a book which tried to bring a certain level of social comment to the football hooliporn genre and which received mixed reviews as a result. I should have just written a book with loads of fighting in it.

Here's a rather cynical view of the phenomenon of overaged football hooligans expressed by one of the Bully Brothers, the book's protagonists. 

The older men, veterans of the glory years of quite terrifying football violence in the seventies and eighties, appear unable to give up this sporadic, random, urban, tribal violence, which leads to feelings which they describe as "better than sex". 

You know Jimbo?

I do.

He’s just been at it.

He’s sixty? He was sixty at Bournemouth. They had a party for him.

I know. Good, innit?

I overheard this conversation.

Sixty.

To this day, I would not have believed that sixty year olds fought at football matches, but HobNob isn’t far off, only a decade and a bit away, and I looked at him, in his black shirt and full head of chestnut brown hair, trotting across the canal bridge, like a man half his age. 

The sixty of my youth isn’t the sixty of this generation, the health service performing miracles in keeping people alive. 

No more war, healthy eating, and health conscious wives with plenty of culinary ideas other than fish and chips. The end of cigarettes, changing genetic profiles, society’s veneration of everything young and that incredible sense of the pointlessness of the modern world.

Sixty.

The more you looked at the issue of aged football hooligans, there was a certain amount of logic in it.

It was just a number.

One after fifty nine and one before sixty one.

Some Sikh geezer ran the London Marathon, and he was a hundred and two.

I know an eighty year old who runs ten kilometres a day.

Thirty years ago, sixty meant you were virtually dead, your shifts in a rice pudding factory a millstone around your neck. Weekends spent imprisoned in an armchair, your armchair, a seat to be avoided by everyone for more reasons than one; exhausted, watching a dead television with dead celebrities, dead themes, dead ideas, dead adverts, dead chat and dead game shows, drinking Double Diamond straight from the can, eating fish and chips (extinct fish, potatoes saturated in dead fat) straight from the football pages of The Sun. 

Missus slaving, cooking and cleaning, transfixed by a reverie of  Marigold fantasies involving her hunky next door neighbour. 

Eventually, Mr Sixty would nurture a streaky combover and his nostril gaps would swell like a pike’s gills and his cheesy teeth would loosen: Tarnished eyes amidst sunken sockets. A scent sticking to him, a diaphanous presence the consistency of muslin in his faggy armchair on his faggy carpet with his faggy TV, and by the time he was sixty five and retired, he would be six feet under after a massive coronary and his missus of thirty years, before her month of grief was over, would be enjoying her next door neighbour’s attentions, her fantasies realised because her rice pudding slave husband was dead at sixty, she fancied her neighbour something rotten, and luckily for her, those feelings were reciprocated.

Today, the sixty-year-old was off his armchair.

Having a good runabout in Nottingham Town Centre with his mates, his Hackett Cap and blouson, his hundred quid jeans, his Gazelles. Keeping fit, keeping active. A healthy regime for the modern age.

Gym in the week.

10k on the treadmill.

Five-a-side with the lads.

Salads and plenty of extra virgin olive oil.

No cigarettes.

No drinking at lunchtime.

No drinking in the week.

Kick fuck out of some know-nothing Coventry arsehole on a Saturday afternoon with the chaps.

No more armchairs any more.

All the heroes are on the streets.