By Barry Hutchings
Warning! The following is a load of ole waffle and contains no inner truths.
1972. The Illicit hat trade was out of hand. Cheap, poorly made fezzes had flooded Frankfurt. Boorish berets from Baghdad had buried Bermuda and New York was awash with beanies and baseball caps. Style had been sacrificed on the altar of bad taste. Something had to be done. My chief called me in and told me I had to fly to North Shields and investigate the ‘Geordie connection’. I wasn’t looking forward to this. North Shields was notorious for rain, rain and more rain. When Simmie Harper met me at North Shields International it was still raining. Simmie was my contact. A tough, world-weary reporter who wrote for Chirton Publishing. She was the tenacious investigative journalist who discovered that there was something fishy down on the quay. She drove me to the offices of her magazine, entitled, ‘I’m Indifferent to North Shields’, with the strapline, Meh! In France they would have called it, Bof!, and it would have been full of existential angst. I would have read it too. But here, in North Shields, it was articles about rain, scaffolding and leaking roofs.
“The idea is,” said Simmie. “Is to chip away at hope. We don’t want hope. We want misery. Our goal is to crush whimsey. To smother art. To persecute poets and clear out their foul poetic smell!”
I was aghast. “Surely you don’t mean that,” I protested.
She winked. “You’ve understood. There is something rotten in the state Tynemouth. And I mean to get to the bottom of it.”
She told me what she had learnt. Agents from Whitley Bay had set up an aspiration dispersal field. The, ‘I can’t be arsed generators’, had been hidden in a network of lighthouses and statues. The benign grin of Stan Laurel and the upright stance of Admiral Collingwood were emitting particles of ‘…meh’ on the quantum level. A super position had been created and when the wave function is collapsed, North Shields will be doomed to a constant light drizzle in a lattice of multi-dimensional scaffolding. Roofers will be in the ascendancy. Something had to be done.
To this end, I proposed a hat wearing event. If enough hats were worn, hats of a particular comedy value, hats of a rakish style, then a few infectious smiles might be formed. And this, coupled with the natural Geordie good cheer, would lead to a runaway hat singularity… a big bang of good will if you like, and from it… the end of rain and the beginning of summer. Until that is, the clocks go back. But rest assured, in the alternative universe created, North Shields will be loved, art will thrive, and songs will be sung. And poets? Nah… banish them to Whitley Bay and be done with them.
