I hereby announce the retirement of the word ‘chav’ from CINB. In an effort to be a better person – don’t laugh – I am going to try to stop saying it, and to certainly stop writing it down. It may be a lazy word and borderline racist, but that won’t stop me from missing it terribly; I defy anyone to find a better accompaniment to the word ‘bastard’.

‘Chav’ does need to go out with a bang, however, and what better subject to give it a proper send-off with than an account of my first visit to Goose Fair? LeftLion had been bugging me to do a Goose Fair piece for years, but I could never bring myself to go. Goose Fair? Are you nuts? That’s the belly of the beast, man! Chav HQ. Trackie Central, Hoodie Ground Zero.

Here’s the thing; in my home town, we have a little thing called the Calgary Stampede. Maybe you’ve heard of it? The Greatest Outdoor Show On Earth, dahling. We know our fairgrounds, yeah? And ours are almost completely chav-free. OK, so the redneck count is a tad high, but what are you gonna do? It’s a giant rodeo. In comparison to that, Goose Fair was bound to be awful. Hordes of little chavlettes, tweaking their tits off on mini-doughnuts and smacking the crap out of each other with plastic LED swords. Fat mom-chavs using their eighteen-kid prams as battering rams. Young hoodies knifing each other over 50p candy apples.

Bottom line: Goose Fair was going to make me hate fairgrounds, and I didn’t want that to happen. I love the Calgary Stampede; I didn’t want anything to tarnish the warm memories of scoffing watered-down beer and puking through the metal cage of the Sizzler. But it was time. I’d managed to wiggle my way out of it for four years, and I could wiggle no longer. I was to come face-to-face with my biggest Nottingham nightmare whether I liked it or not.

Sure enough, I encountered my first chav family as soon as I stepped foot off the bus. There were about twenty of them, pushing each other and dropping c-bombs like it was going out of style. Six teeth between the lot of them. After a few minutes of playing Guess The Dad, I leaned across to my longsuffering CINB excursion mate, Owen, and said;
‘Christ, here we go.’ In fact, that should be Goose Fair’s slogan. Goose Fair: Christ, Here We Go.

The first thing to greet us at the gate was the freakshow. Dead animals with two heads,
a half crow-half rabbit and, naturally, Mr Big Mouth from Hull. I scoffed at Owen. ‘Oh yeah, we used have these back home. Like in 1926. HA. HA. HA.’ each ‘ha’ followed by a sarcastic clap. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure, the freak trailer is a basically a line of things in glass boxes so blanketed in dust as to render them unrecognisable. And it stinks. Cost to view the freakshow: £1.50. Admission to Nottingham Contemporary: £0. This is the world in which we live. One could also point out that the real freakshow was the Chavpocalypse happening in the men’s toilets, but that would be mean.

We walked a bit further and saw an enormous sign advertising ‘COCKS ON STICKS’. “HA. HA. HA. Bra-vo!” I scoffed again (more sarcastic clapping). “You see that, Owen? Do you see that? What else would a chav buy? A candy rooster on a stick so they can say ‘Suck my cock’ and not get in trouble. So typical. So utterly predictable”. But that’s where the food predictability ended. Mushy peas with mint sauce? On its own? The noodle bar seemed about as rational at a fairground as a Megadeth poster at Anne Frank’s house, but even bowls of Yaki Udon made more sense than the whole coconuts for sale. I’m sorry, Nottingham, but there only three states of fairground food: 1) deep fried 2) candied or 3) flossed. You can’t argue with that, it’s science. A couple of goes on the Crazy Shake and it will be moving in the reverse direction anyway. If you can’t throw a wooden ball at it, a coconut has no business at a fairground. Health Schmelth – it’s the one day of the year it’s OK to be bulimic, you may as well go for it. Spend the other 364 days of the year worrying about your BMI.

(And I’m sorry to go on, but how in God’s name are you supposed to eat a coconut, anyway? I picked one up thinking it must be some sort of trick – like maybe it was a chocolate coconut filled with nougat dipped in batter. Nope, it was real. A real, whole coconut. It wasn’t even cracked – you were somehow expected to open it yourself. The coconut proprietor and I stared at each other for a few awkward moments before I put it back on the pile and walked on without a word.)

I will give Goose Fair one thing: health and safety is happily lacking. The Calgary Stampede has always prided itself on being lawless, unhinged and non-PC. Cowboy hats, animal abuse, Wrangler ball-huggers… this is the Wild West we’re talking about! Two things you will not see at the Calgary Stampede fairground, however, are children barely old enough to walk brandishing full-sized bow and arrows, and grown men throwing baseballs at beer bottles. The guy manning the beer bottle smash game looked positively bored as shards of broken glass rained down on him. I’ve never seen a man face a sliced jugular so calmly; he should be in MI6. He looked entirely capable of yawning his way through a waterboarding session.

Not only that, but once you made your way into Goose Fair proper, you could see that it had some serious rides. Stargate, The Turbo Booster, the inverted bungee jump…and the fact that the bungee looked like it could snap at any minute only added to the appeal. And I know that moaning about the prices of rides at Goose Fair is the national pastime of Nottingham, but believe it or not, they’re actually cheap. The inverted bungee at the Calgary Stampede costs fifty dollars to ride. Fifty bucks!

Goose Fair wasn’t the chav hellhole I expected. Don’t get me wrong, they were there in numbers, but there were also other people there. Non-chavs. Kids dressed head-to-toe in Baby Gap with balloons and some sort of (hopefully) food-based substance on their faces, their mothers sipping cappuccinos. And they seemed to be having fun. ‘What the hell is this?’ I asked Owen. ‘What do you mean?’ he replied. ‘This!’ I said, pointing. “Middle class people! What the hell are they doing here?’

But it wasn’t just the middle class people and the chavs; everyone was there. St Ann’s thugs, West Bridgford preps, Games Workshop dorks, townie drunks, Market Square goths. What I assumed would be a big outdoor borstal was actually nothing short of the perfect cross-section of the Nottingham populace, all getting along with each other. By ‘getting along’ I mean ‘giving each other as wide a berth as possible while being wedged into a field’, but still.

All I need to do now is work out the ‘Goose’ element. I imagine, like everything else in this country, it’s some sort of horrifying myth that has to do with the Plague; some evil, diseased goose waddled from house to house infecting the town’s residents by crapping into their sleeping mouths, and the only way to appease it was to have a fair in its honour. Who knows? Whatever it is, it seems to unite the residents of Nottingham in a way nothing else in this town does, and that can only be a good thing. So this year, don’t ignore it – embrace it. Just don’t embrace anyone while you’re there – they’re probably covered in sticky chunks of candied cock, broken glass and coconut milk.

I am officially bored of news. When I turn on the TV, news. On the radio, more news. It’s around the corner, it’s under my bed, it’s in my ice cube trays and in between my toes.

When I started writing this column on the phone-hacking scandal, it was just going to be a little piss-take about how the sight of Rupert Murdoch in the back of a limo in short pants, legs akimbo made me physically choke on my left lung and how Rebekah Brooks looks a bit like a pasty, pissed-off ginger she-squirrel. But news just kept on happening. They’re hacking dead soldiers phones! They’re hacking 9/11 families phones! They’re paying off cops! Whistleblowers are dying! They hacked a dead girl’s phone? I mean…come on. It stopped being funny pretty quick. This is not a political column; my articles are puff pieces, cutesy pie pokes at British life through the eyes of a whinging expat. How am I supposed to write with all this news hanging about?

I always knew news in this country was nuts. One of my very first experiences with British “newspapers” happened just before my first visit to ol’ Blighty. I was working my last day before setting off to visit my English girlfriend (now wife) when a co-worker said, “Dude, make sure you pick up a copy of the Daily Sport while you’re over there.” He didn’t say “Make sure you see Big Ben” or “Westminster Abbey is pretty cool” – no, his one piece of British travel advice was to pick up a newspaper on British sport. We’d known each other for years and he knew I cared as much about British sport as I do about the eating habits of the Australian brush-turkey (I care about sport slightly more now, but even as a half-Brit, the thought of thumbing through an entire paper devoted to cricket and snooker literally makes my balls whimper, but anyway). He answered my perplexed look with a laugh. “Just buy one. It’s amazing”.

Wandering around Nottingham in a haze of jet-lag and culture shock (their potatoes wear jackets over here?), my girlfriend (now wife) and I passed a newsagents and I told her that I had to pick up some sports magazine thing for my buddy back home. Scanning the racks full of news, the first thing I noticed was the tits. Tits everywhere. Tits on the front covers, tits on the back covers, tits in the middle, tits, tits, tits. And that was just the newspapers. There was another shelf above it with magazines (more tits) and another shelf above that with magazines wrapped in foil so you couldn’t see the covers. If they were displaying all these tits so frivolously on the fronts of newspapers, how freaky did something have to be to get wrapped in foil? Llamas in bondage peeing on each other? Who knows.

Moving past the tits, I spotted the sport magazine section. Ah yes, it must be over here; the covers of these ones have football guys on; FourFourTwo, When Saturday Comes, World Soccer…ah yes, here it is! The Daily Sport. I picked it up triumphantly and declared to my girlfriend (now wife), Aha! This is the one!

Guess what? Tits on the front cover, tits on the back cover, tits in the middle and tits on every page. Tits, tits, tits. I think there were some footy scores in there somewhere near the back, but I could be mistaken. This can’t be it, I said nervously, my buddy’s laughter ringing in my ears. This is just full of tits. Flick flick, look here, more tits. And here! Flick flick. My girlfriend watched me with a look that one would give a dog who’d just dragged his shitting dog-bum across the carpet; one part disappointment and two parts pity.

My second clue that perhaps the British media wasn’t brilliant was in the last election when The Sun declared its support for the Tories on its front page. I thought, “Hang on – can they actually do that?” All newspapers have their political slant, but I’d never seen one declare its party affiliation so blatantly. It wasn’t just the crazy papers like the Sun and the Mail, either; the Guardian, The Times and the Telegraph all unabashedly declared their party support. I’d never seen anything like it. Even Murdoch’s deranged tabloid news channel on the other side of the pond pretends it’s impartial.

Having said that, I still didn’t think British news was as low-rent as Fox News. Fox News darlings Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck have made gaybashing xenophobia the must-have personality trait for the discerning American conservative. No amount of tits or celebrity goss would out-evil that. But then the News of the World/Milly Dowler thing was revealed. Not even wacky old Bill O’Reilly would hack a dead girl’s phone. The dead girl could have been a lesbian, Obama-supporting Greenpeace hippy and Bill would’ve probably left her alone for the most part. Andy Coulson makes Bill O’Reilly look like a little fluffy bunny who blows candy kisses and farts rainbows.

What exactly is Rupert Murdoch’s modus operandi? What goes on in a News Corp meeting? Is “Destroying Every Living Human Being’s Life On Planet Earth” part of the agenda? I’ve never been to a News Corp meeting, but I think I can say with certainty that it involves beating children to death with bats and drowning kittens.

Now anyone with half a brain already hated News of the World because, frankly, it was crap. I don’t like to judge, but if you were a regular News of the World reader, you are a moron. I hate to break it to you, but your parents are brother and sister. Or at least first cousins. The only people who miss the News of the World are the ones who you see around town in velour tracksuits eating chips for breakfast and chewing gum with open mouths. I’m surprised these people could turn the pages without taking their eye out.

But it’s not just the crap Murdoch papers that have screwed up royally; no, the lefty papers are junk as well. The Guardian, drunk on the blood of its now defunct rivals, published a story stating that the NOTW had obtained information that Gordon Brown’s kid had cystic fibrosis illegally when in fact it didn’t. Even my favourite paper The Independent was proved to be bent when it was discovered that their preachy little doughball columnist Johann Hari was madly plagiarising quotes in his interviews. But that kind of just went away, didn’t it? I bet little Johann is sitting in a quiet London suburb somewhere drinking milkshakes and thanking his dark lord Satan that the whole NOTW schmozzle happened when it did.

The British media are like a pack of hyperactive goldfish Jimmy Swaggarts (Google him, youngsters). Zero short term memory, banging their heads against the bowl, pointing their fins angrily one minute, crying and asking for forgiveness the next. I didn’t mean it baby, really I didn’t. Hey look over there! Someone else is doing something dodgy, and THEY’VE GOT THEIR TITS OUT.

Forget it, I’ve had it with the lot of em. I’m throwing my TV in the bin, chucking my radio in a skip and burning down my local CostCutter. From now on, I’m getting my news strictly from twitter. It’s so free and untainted. It helped wikileaks break their stories and was first to show us Wayne Rooney’s hair plugs. That’s all I need really, why, according to the twitter news today #whitepeoplehobbies include “Falling down running in horror movies” and “Walking they kids with leashes”. Hahaha, it’s so true.

Ah, it’s that time of year again, British Summertime. Or as people in other countries call it, ‘spring’.

British summertime is the three weeks or so in this country when short pants, patios and white beer suddenly make sense. You never see a convertible all year, and then April comes around and they’re everywhere – usually driven by some penis in a pair of aviators with his collar up. Yeah mate, you’re super-cool with your top down (to show everyone you like to party) and windows up (because it’s still nippy, and you need to protect your pretty bouffant – you don’t want to look like you’re having too much fun).

Summer – like everything else in this country – is all about being careful. You drive your convertible with its windows up to the beach, then you erect a weird little canvas fort to keep the sand away. Then you put out some sandwiches on a picnic table (no open flames to cook on, of course), and play a game of ‘spin the family around the table so the sun isn’t on anyone’s neck for too long’. Preparation for the outdoors in the British summertime is an afternoon’s activity in itself; it usually entails a two-hour conversation on what to bring. “Shorts? Check. Jeans? Check. Hat? Check. Fleece? Check. Should we take a bottle of wine? Have you seen my Mac? Should I make an egg salad? Sun cream? Have we got enough sun cream? It’s only factor 15? Are you crazy? We’ll be killed! Oh, what’s the point?”

And then there is the British barbecue. I’m actually surprised that barbecues are even allowed over here, to be honest. Fire and coal? Outside? You could burn someone’s face off! It’s only a matter of time before the health and safety people force a luminescent vest on the barbecuer and have the grill itself surrounded by traffic cones and police tape.

Because it only happens once or twice a year, you Brits don’t know what to do; you get all giddy and throw just about anything on there. Sausages. Chicken. Courgettes? Cheese? Sliced courgette on a barbecue is bad enough, but cheese has as much place on a barbecue as chocolate does on a harmonica. It’s not even nice cheese you put on there either, like maybe a slice of Stilton on top of a burger; no, it’s that horrible halloumi stuff, and you put it right on the grill. That horrible squeaking it does on your teeth – yargh! I’m rubbing my own teeth right now just thinking about it. It’s like eating salty styrofoam.

I know the cheese is on there to appease the veggies in the crowd, but seriously: what is a veggie doing at a barbecue in the first place? Can’t they have their own, I dunno… casserole party or something? My wife is one of these veggies. She’s not a real veggie, thank God; she at least eats fish. Fake veggies like her annoy the proper ones even more than us animal murderers do. At a barbecue once, a Real Veggie gave my wife grief for eating fish and calling herself a vegetarian, “People who eat fish and call themselves vegetarians make it hard for us proper vegetarians when we eat out!” I was going to remind her that she was at a freakin’ BARBECUE and not an Animal Liberation Front rally, but I resisted. I’m too passive-aggressive for that sort of thing. So I just squeezed some sausage juice on her halloumi kebab when she wasn’t looking.

I didn’t realise barbecuing was a big Canadian stereotype until I moved over here. There aren’t many proper Canadian stereotypes that apply to me; I’ve never chopped a tree down, I’ve never met Michael Bublé and there are few things I despise more than maple syrup. Maybe it’s because people here assume that Canadians don’t actually have kitchens in their log cabins, but no matter; they think I know what I’m talking about (unless an Aussie is around, of course; then I’m pretty much ignored). I’ve been to a few British barbecues and been given a pre-emptive apology that it will not be up to ‘Canadian standards’. I have absolutely no idea what ‘Canadian standards’ are, but Leonard Cohen wouldn’t tolerate frigging squeaky cheese on his grill, I can tell you that.

British barbecue activities are interesting as well. This is the only country where I’ve seen outdoor badminton played with a racquet in one hand and an umbrella in the other. Not for the rain of course, but for the sun. Sunbrellas! Jesus. When I was a kid in Canada, we played lawn darts. ‘Dart’ is a tad misleading; ‘mini-javelin’ would be more apt. It’s basically a foot-long, heavy metal projectile that you toss into the air (underhand) toward a circle in the grass about twenty feet away. Of course, Grandma would want a go after a couple sherries and take the dog’s eye out, but that’s the price you pay for a little Canadian fun. At the last British barbecue I was at, people rolled some balls on the grass and played a game called ‘Pulse’ which basically consisted of sitting down quietly and holding hands. How you people won all those wars, I will never know.

So, in conclusion, it’s safe to say the sun makes you people a bit like me when the cricket’s on – all smiley, yet massively confused. Roll on July, I say, so we can all go back to hiding in pubs out of the drizzle, eating heavy Sunday lunches and drinking even heavier beers. After all, that’s what the British summer is really all about.