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| People sometimes wonder why I'm a bit odd - in that I write poetry and am a bit scruffy and that. Anyway, here is the possible answer - the town that was the setting for my todlerdom right up to my first faltering steps into the big grown up world. Skelmersdale... |
| A long, long time ago.... |
According to my geography teacher when I was 12, Skelmersdale means the Valley of Satan � Skelmer used to be �Skejmer�which means Satan in like, Greek or Welsh or Scouse or something, and dale means valley. So this little valley of Skejmer toddled along, being a place for Romans to walk through on their way to Liverpool from Wigan, and then being a mining town for a bit, not doing much until the 1960�s when the scousers noticed it� In the 60�s, the council in Liverpool offered all the skint scousers dead cheap council housing in some shit town about 20 miles away. The council thought loads of people would move there, and planned to build a hospital and a shopping center and a cinema and all the usual shite you get in a normal town. But hardly anyone moved there, what with it being shit, so the council never built owt. So now it�s just some shit little town where everyone talks like scousers and does fuck all. |
| Round-a-abouts and fucked up Sculptures that live on them |
| The 1960's, the Scousers get involved |
| Why I'm rubbish at crossing roads |
| When Skem was built up in the 60�s someone got an award for desiging it so as you never have to cross a road. It�s all subways and bridges. There�s less road accidents like, but, for one, you just get mugged in the subways, or have to wade through the huge puddles that seem to gather there, or you throw yourself off one of the bridges once you�ve got sick of admiring the sculptures, but best of all, and I think this was planned this way, if you ever do anything with your life which involves leaving Skem, you instantly get run over because you've never learnt how to cross a fucking road. For fucks sake. Last bit of Skem trivia - we have a cult/sect thing there too, the members of which are affectionately (ish) nicknamed the domeheads. The 'Maharishi European Sidhaland Peace and Enlightenment Community' live in a bit of a village with a big dome in the middle, I don�t know bugger all about them except that they were on 'Granada Tonight' once doing yogic flying, and they�re all hippies who eat lentils. Skem has a really wank website called Skelmersdale-Online! (that�s their exclamation mark, not mine). It has that thing where stupid fucking phrases run along the bottom of the screen, like �Make someone happy today! Smile!� It�s fucking fucked up. |
| Some shit cult |
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| They�re trippy, but ultimately, yeah, I have to admit, they�re just shite. As far as I know there are three up to now: the first one was a big cuboid tower thing, and the top of it lights up, I think it can do green, red and blue, what a selection! And I�ve heard a rumour that you can vote online for what colour you want. Wow. The second was a big metal daffodil, like, 15ft tall. The last one I know of was a fucking huge circular thing with massive pictures of skem folk on, ugly kids and spotty glue-sniffing teenagers and other such eye candy. |
| Big black cuboid - wonderfully pointless |
| Ages ago, like, when roads were made out of mud instead of tarmac, and 4 year olds didn�t get Samsung T100�s for Chrsitmas, there was a little town called Skelmersdale. |
| Skem has a absurd amount of round-a-abouts, and also has got the biggest round-a-about in the world ever. Actually I think it might be the �second biggest in Europe� but you know. And since I buggered off to Manchester, the council have been busy giving all the round-a-abouts thier own names (i think one is called Toby, that's quite cute) and now they're building all manner of shite on them, and I don�t mean useful shit like, a shop, or whatever, I mean fucking weird sculpture efforts. |