Top Ten English Place Names

The roast cream of old England

Having spent some 15 hours or so as a passenger in a car on English roads this weekend (including two hours at Markham Moor (northbound) services on the A1 awaiting recovery by the AA), I have had more time than usual to reflect on the wonderful variety and velvety richness of our English place names.

Rejoice, sons and daughters of merrie Englande, in the inventive dexterity of your mother tongue.

Rejoice also, for no matter how much modernity - or post-modernity or whatever shit era it is we currently live in – would iron out every crease and rumple of history into a smooth, shiny, ECHR-compliant, sensitivity-trained monotony, the powers that be ain’t never going to be able to change these names for something more reflective of the way we live today.

If they try, however, I am going take out a trademark on “Diversity Good Community” – which is surely some people’s dream future name for London.  

Before I begin to sound too much like the comments section on a Telegraph blog page and make reference to “ZaNU-Labour”, let me explain the methodology.

1. While I like smut as much as the next man, I am ruling out places like Bell End, Cocking and the many places that begin with “Gay” on grounds of being clichéd. You will see innuendo below, but I hope it will at least be relatively virgin innuendo.
2. This is not intended to be a complete or fair list. It’s pretty obviously focused in certain areas. If you have better suggestions, put them in the Comments section below like a good boy/girl.
3. In no way do I vouch for any of these places being actually funny, interesting or unusual. I don’t think I’ve actually been to any of them – I have just seen their names on road signs or on maps. I have no doubt that if I went to any of them and saw a Nisa Local alongside a prestigious new development of David Wilson Homes, or a high street with a Primark, a JD Sports and a load of charity shops, I would find them just as dreary and depressing as almost everywhere else in this country. If you want villages that are actually weird in the sense of interesting as opposed to weird in the sense of creepy, I refer you to the fiction section.

So, without further ado, let the listing commence!

Tydd Gote, Lincolnshire

As previously discussed, I love goats and so a village named after them AND spelled wrong has got to be on the list. Tydd Gote is deep in the Fens, where Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire not so much collide as seep into one another.

There are a whole host of Tydd-prefixed villages around there. Most of them are named after boring saints (not even good ones, like Botolph or Guthlac) – but you’ve got to love the Gote.

Barnoldswick and Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire

I can’t even say these words without pulling a Wallace and Gromit face. I would like also to give an honourable mention to Birtwistle Standroyd Bungalows in Colne, as delivering the ultimate Lancashire hit.

Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire

Roll that one around your palate, savour the earthy taste of Yorkshire phonemes and contrast with the above. That is the difference between chewing a white red and a red rose for you.

Lumbertubs, Northamptonshire

This whole area looks like a dreary modern suburb, but that name reaches straight out of the Middle Ages and grabs you in its hairy, calloused grip.

Donkey Town, Surrey

We used to live just a few miles from Donkey Town and yet we never went there. How amazing would a town of donkeys be? Probably about as amazing as Dewsbury.

Blubberhouses, North Yorkshire

That is a name that speaks for itself in all its Anglo-Saxon glory.

Lickfold, West Sussex

I promised you smut. Lickfold is very near to the almost as ridiculously-named Lurgashall, in what can only have been intended as an early public health warning.

Burton Coggles, Lincolnshire

Or, to give it its full name, Byrton-en-les-Coggles. Don’t let the sun go down on you here unless you know the secret of man’s red fire.

Hampole, South Yorkshire

Just off the A1, near to the city of Donk. Never fails to raise a smile.

Clenchwarton, Norfolk

Not far from Tydd Gote lies my favourite-named place in the whole country. Regular readers of the Comments section will know my fascination with the word “clench”, and here it is seared into the very land.

Say it out loud and you can taste the piece of grass in your mouth, feel the clay hat dribbling down your head and the rough canvas smock tickling you on the clenchwarton. If there is a more English place - nay WORD - out there than this, I have yet to hear it.

The Illusion of Safety

If it is remotely possible, I am not going to go within one hundred miles of London during the Olympics.

That’s not as a result of a curmudgeonly refusal to join in the spirit of things. I do quite enjoy watching the Olympics. When else do you get to see women’s weightlifting and doubles table tennis in the same day?

Anyone who watched the Beijing Modern Pentathlon show jumping event in 2008 – complete with untrained race horses charging headlong into the fences – will know that there will be some great stuff buried away on the red button coverage.

No, I will definitely watch some of the Olympics – but on TV. I once went to a live sporting event (the 1995 Oxford-Cambridge boat race) and it was crap. Never again. You can’t see properly, there’s no commentary to explain what’s going on, you can’t go to the toilet (in peace, at any rate...) and there are too many people.   

The reason I will not be going anywhere near London if I can help it because if I wanted to live under martial law in a place where the interests of the native population are subordinated to impressing visiting dignitaries, I would go to China or Bahrain. 

As the government installs missile batteries on the tops of buildings in London, one has to wonder exactly whose benefit they are doing this for. Because – and if any counter-terrorism experts or military brass are reading this, please feel free to correct me - if you shot down a hijacked airliner over any part of London, bits of flaming wreckage are almost certainly going to fall into heavily populated areas, aren’t they?

Apparently, some 19,000 military personnel are going to be deployed in London to make sure that foreign investors...I mean sports fans...are kept safe. More than are currently in Afghanistan.

Which brings me on – in my mind, at any rate – to this “little” device I was recently given on opening a new bank account.

I put in my card, type in my PIN and it gives me an access code which I can use to log in to internet banking.

If I don’t have it with me though (or if I have broken it my attempting to put it into my wallet and then sitting on it), I can log in using a number they sent me...in a letter.

So as well as being too big to carry around with me other than in a large bag, the machine is actually pointless because the security it offers is hopelessly undermined by the “back door” Nationwide have kindly provided.

Both the rooftop stingers and Nationwide’s calculator (which doesn’t even do maths) are designed to give the illusion of safety. In fact they create more risk by encouraging complacency about real threats.

100 posts...and for what?

So, this is the hundredth post I have written here on Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.

Let’s take a look back over the highlights.

...

Errr

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In March last year, I posted a picture of Peppa Pig, which was a HUGE HIT.

That’s it.

Did you enjoy it?

Ooh, you are lawful

Every aspect of popular culture is very keen to tell us how interesting and exciting the legal profession is. The books and films of John Grisham and others and endless TV series – like Elvira’s favourite “The Good Wife” – all paint a picture of lawyers as Ubermenschen.

They’re cleverer than you and me, they’re richer than you and me, they’re harder-working than you or me, and they’re either more ethical than you or me or more ruthless than you or me. Sometimes both. 

Because sometimes, doing the right thing demands a lack of ruth.

Ordinary people (like you or me) are mere cattle to these soaring beings. Only they can protect us, save us or vindicate us, poor victims that we are – only they can enter the Holy of Holies and look The Law straight in the eye.

Which is why every encounter I have ever had with the legal profession has been such a crushing disappointment.

When I did jury service last year, the barristers were very well spoken but they were utterly pedestrian in questioning witnesses and presenting their cases. It was extremely unsexy.

Nevertheless, some of my fellow jurors were not disabused of their preconceptions of these titans walking among us. To them, the sheer impressiveness of these bewigged posh boys was utterly convincing, notwithstanding what they actually said. They were thrown into confusion by the fact that one said one thing, while the other contradicted it. Fortunately, there was a nice, posh, old man in an even bigger wig who told us what to do.

But at least that bore some resemblance in outward form to the mental picture of the legal profession we have all built up.

I await eagerly John Grisham’s upcoming “The Conveyancer”.

As previously mentioned, the Sicilies are moving house. After Stamp Duty, legal fees make up the second largest expense of the average house-mover.

Has anyone ever met a conveyancing solicitor? I haven’t. In all of my house moves, I have never once seen face-to-face the person who I paid to do this work.  

And what does this work consist of? Sending me letters asking me to get things for them, waiting a few days, and then passing those things on to another solicitor, who will write a letter to the other party (after a few days), as far as I can tell. Being a conveyancer must be much like being a personal trainer, insofar as it involves getting paid to make the person paying you work.

On one occasion, this involved Elvira and I driving from Woking to Oxford on a weekend to put some paperwork through the letterbox of a locked and closed solicitor's office - just to make sure they had it on Monday morning. 

If you pop down to WH Smith, you can pick up a DIY Last Will and Testament kit for a few quid. Go back 20 years or so and if you wanted a will, you had to get a lawyer to do it for you – no doubt at the cost of several hundred pounds.

Today, most conveyancing seems to get done in glorified call centres by unqualified or semi-qualified legal executives, overseen – on paper at least – by an actual solicitor.

And it can, because much like making a will, conveyancing appears to be a semi-skilled bit of administrative work which has been mystified by the self-interest of the legal caste into yet another tax on getting anything done.  Godspeed the day when you can print a DIY conveyancing kit off the internet and this professional closed shop is broken up.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s really just like it is on TV. But somehow, I doubt it.

I know that my own line of work is little better than the fleas that plague the vultures feeding on the rotting carcass of late capitalism, but if a tree fell on the whole legal profession and no one was there to see it, would anyone care?