Dundee at Night

If you are a true Dundonian, then chances are you’ve been to Londons, Fat Sam’s, Lloyds, Starz, or one of the other centrally located, gaudy, cheap and bright lit cesspits that make treacherous the evening walk home for any non-scum unfortunate enough to have to make the deadly journey across the city. If you are really a typical, Poundland-loving Dundonian, then I can guarantee you’ve thrown back a few WKDs or some other blue or pink drink, on a Friday or Saturday night, and gotten an STI from another scumbag, then gone outside, puked on the pavement and started a fight. Of course, you’ll be friends with the local chav constabulary, the members of which you will have no doubt been drinking and fighting with, and you’ll get driven home and tucked in, while students and decent folks trying to navigate their way across the city will be picked up for no reason except to even out the numbers and make the pigs look good.

A walk to work in the early hours, from the decency and relative civility of the West End, to the centre for reluctant employment, requires walking past the doors of these foul smelling dives, housed in ornate and ostentatious old relics of the city’s days as more than slumsville. The pavements are covered in vomit, there are tacky souvenirs of the previous night’s degrading shenanigans – party hats, balloons, everything pink shaped like penises, bought from places like Poundland – and still all smelling like cheap aftershave and perfume. 

Pure Shite, Like... Musings on the Future of Dundee

Dundee is centre of poverty & ignorance; of abandoned buildings left to rot as homes for junkies and rats, standing as monuments to the city of industry that once stood where now we have only tower blocks, Mecca Bingo and the JobCentre; of diseased, ugly and uncouth people w/ not a shred of care for anything but reality TV and low-brow fuck-wit celebrity culture; of Poundland shoppers waiting for giros & smack & discount clothing stores selling them what they don’t deserve, hanging on to that which they deem life until they’re stabbed and kicked to death in the schemes by someone exactly like them, and all for a mobile phone with two pounds credit & a packet of cigarettes. What a fucking shame. Another scumbag dead on the streets of Dundee. A true tragedy, I’m sure, as rather than roll them into the Tay and watch their rancid corpse float off to Norway, the government intervenes and pays for their funeral from the kitty driven from the pockets of those whose lives are made unbearable by scumfuck jakey Dundonian swine.

The potential for a decent wee city exists in some near hopeless form, and one might conclude from a brief jaunt around the West End of Dundee that it already does exist… When strolling across Magdalen Green or Balgay Park, amid the green finery of man’s concession to nature, or standing unharassed & unaccosted on the Perth Road, under trees and by old houses w/ character and residents that have no desire to shit where they sleep and start wars w/ neighbours… Or perhaps sitting in a pub and not worrying about being glassed, jumped by rivalled football fans, or catching AIDS, syphilis & genital warts from a Burberry clad skank w/ her asscheeks visible below her back fat… Or maybe grabbing a coffee in a coffee shop and not having to eat grease drenched bacon and sausage on the side in some manky, filthy East End eatery… Or walk down the street in a different coloured skin or with a different accent, and not be abused, insulted and beaten half to death by a run-of-the-mill chavvy, neddy fuckass Dundee yob.

Perhaps, as a responsible city, we should collectively grow a set of balls, level the city centre, Stobswell, the Hilltown and all other hideous deformities on the landscape, and then round up the survivors of the brutal demolition process, lock the fuckers away on a giant ship brought into the Tay (paid for by the cancellation of all undeserved giros and the eBay auctioning of mobile phones, tacky bling and Burberry scarves taken from the chavvy swine) and set them to sea until far enough out to sink the ship without any survivors making back to land. Then, we will create a great memorial park where once stood the city centre, and ban all chain-stores, hoodies, mobile phones, Buckfast, heroin and ignorant people. The West End will continue to be a centre of learning and civility, while organic farms and libraries sweep across the wastelands w/ no concern for the toxic dead beneath. 

Choice Moments from a Career at Poundland

I worked at Poundland almost a year, and am in the process of writing a book about it, containing some of the following...

 

Having to use Stanley knives to open boxes, so ending each week with less and less skin

Having police in the store each week to find sex attackers for whom Poundland is their shop of choice

Ignoring shoplifters because there are so many of them

Having to deal with violent customers every single last fucking day of the week

Being understaffed and forced to do two jobs for neither extra pay nor respect

Having a member of staff stabbed by a member management, who is allowed to keep her job and still use a knife

Hearing the manager laugh at the prospect of a non-white person being employed in the store

Hearing a pregnant, single, ignorant, fat bitch began conversations with “You know what I hate about pakis?”

Working a whole week with a broken foot for fear of being fired

Getting punched breaking up a fight between two neds

Junkies lying on the floor and looking at shiny things

The manager’s incompetent brother being promoted against the wishes of every member of staff and management except the two brothers

The manager’s incompetent girlfriend being promoted against the wishes of every member of staff and management except the two ugly lovers

A customer trying to pay for her goods with buttered toast

Junkies screaming abuse at staff for no reason other than it’s Poundland, where junkies rule

A member of staff getting a facial disease from a customer

Not being allowed off the till after cutting my hand open in the counter cache, and being shouted at by customers for not packing their bags

A customer cutting his wrists and bleeding all over the till

Staff being questioned by police for selling a knife to a criminal

An illiterate fuckwit of a manager talking down to educated staff

The manager showing CVs and private letters to other staff

Rotting food in the staff room and no cleaner hired

The manager insulting customers on the shop floor

The manager pretending to cut a child’s throat when the shop is empty

The Flip-Side

Evenings are for rampant drug use and binge drinking, without the needles, fighting and slagging around. Well, at least in Dundee that’s the best way to spend an evening. Maybe somewhere with cafes and civilised nightlife, where the days are possible to fritter away in sun and a pleasant atmosphere, there’s more to life than kill time… But in Dundee, where there’s nothing but toil and shite, the most courageous thing one can do is get trashed enough not to think too hard, and try and not make life worse for anyone else while doing so. Going to the Reading Rooms and collapsing after a few too many cut pills is fuel for banter and an easy way to stay away from the usual bullshit Dundee night out. It doesn’t sound too civilised, but this is what the educated and intelligent of the city do for fun when it becomes abundantly apparent that anything else involves fraternising with people so mind-numbingly retarded that one would rather just about kill oneself than engage the fools in conversation. Double-dunting ketamine is perhaps the closest a West Ender could come to experiencing the ‘plight’ of the voluntary ignorant of the East. Were a West Ender (or real human person) to then sit and watch reality TV, read The Sun, and then believe the prevalent political concerns of the day, while brain-dead on Special K, then they might come close to the sheer kill-me-now, ape-like social incompetence of a typical Dundonian, which would manifest itself physically in a poor-postured, low-browed, sloped-forehead, greasy, gel-haired, spotty, Kappa and Burberry-clad, glazed expression of incomprehensible ignorance and loathing… In other words, it is theoretically possible for a decent and intelligent human being to temporarily become a Dundonian, looking and acting unfathomably unintelligent.

So, to Dundonians I ask: Could you please just stay at home and get the fuck out of the way of the decent folks with the chance of bettering the world, or better yet, jump in the Tay on a cold day and don’t climb back out.

The Twelfth Man: Among the Degenerates

It's not often I watch my football team win and feel bad. The sensation is even less familiar when watching them win a semi-final against their sworn enemies. But walking from the stadium after the match I felt guilt and discomfort that I'd never before felt.

They say that football is the great leveller of men: That the game unites rich and poor, black and white, even men and women. Everyone gets together behind their team and put their differences behind them for ninety minutes of camaraderie. Of course, this is true to the extent that the stand full of people pretend not to loath one another for the length of the match, gritting their teeth and arguing in their own heads… But hell, that's camaraderie for you, the illusion of friendship, the self-imposed hardship of tolerance.

The problem with football is that while it unites all, the majority of supporters are the swinish rabble that raise hell in the ground and outside, the filthy and morally derelict scheme-dwelling minks who should by all rights not be allowed to leave their rank homes until carted out as putrid corpses destined for the crematorium.

These are the vocal fans, the ones most call the true supporters. These are the ones for whom football is getting drunk and abusive and making sure that the other fans in the ground cannot fully enjoy the match, regardless of how much of a success the game is for the team.

These wretched scumbags are the racist, sexist, ignorant filth that occupy eighty percent of the seats in the stadium, buy most of the merchandise, cheer and boo the loudest, and basically fill the club kitty with the most ill-deserved giro-scrounged cash.

And sometimes, they are the ones that win the game.



On the 5th of February I travelled to Tynecastle with my two brothers and my dad to watch Dundee Utd play Aberdeen. We had all been going to the football for years, as well as of course watching on TV, and knew the game inside out, good and bad, pretty and ugly. One thing we weren't generally familiar with until this season, however, was the quality of Dundee Utd – a team who were now the third best in the country and outclassing most opposition.

Having gone to most league matches during the season, it was only fitting we follow Utd to Edinburgh for the semi-final of the CIS League Cup, against the bitterest of enemies, the infamous Sheep-Shaggers of the North.

Atmosphere at games against the Dons is rarely pleasant, but it was only in this match that I realised just how disgraceful our own fans could be. I'd always known my own preferences had biased me against the behaviour of Utd players and fans, but it's easy to ignore in the strange and terrible world of football.


As we walked along Gorgie Street to the stadium, a bus pulled by in heavy traffic, and the filth on board began thumping the glass and screaming like demented and tortured half-beings. They were the Sheep-Shaggers, the lower rungs of the northern regions of society. They were drunk and ignorant and in their thousands, an intimidating sight. The noise they produced from within their motorised cage was terrifying. I felt as though the windows might break at any moment, sending shards of glass and scummy Aberdonians into the street to wreak some kind of mad havoc.

But we persevered and pushed through the crowds to the stadium, past the mounted police and hoards of security. I tried to keep my head down, avoiding eye contact with the Dundonian element – the fans of my own team, whom constituted an unpleasant crowd, but from whose wrath one could be spared by wearing liberal amounts of orange and black.

Into the stadium and up the steep banks of Tynecastle's sharply inclining stands. The four of us took our seats behind a goal, half way up the stand, in fantastic position to see the whole pitch. We were sitting behind two mothers and their two daughters, in what seemed a predominantly family zone.

I saw two men stagger up the stairs in a uniquely Dundonian manner. They were not drunk, as far as I could tell, but so primitive and inbred that they seemed to have trouble navigating such processes as walking, talking and anything not cherished by neds. Both of them swung their arms out wide like primates and Oasis fans, keeping their heads down but eyes up, dull, and darting around full of hate. One wore, predictably, an orange and grey tracksuit, with cheap jeans and expensive boots. His head was shaven and his eyes bulged in a way that betrayed his hideous conception and poor upbringing, and a wilful predilection towards ignorance and violence. His friend looked less inbred and ignorant, but through his eyes came the daggers of hate, aimed every which way. He was greying and more conservatively dressed in a turd brown jersey and more expensive jeans.

I took an immediate loathing to both of these beasts. There was nothing in either of their faces that told me I'd feel sorry to see them tumble back down the stairs and break their necks. In fact, there was nothing in their faces I could see that implied they were truly part of the human race, but rather of that frequently occurring genetic mishap that seems to be sweeping Britain, creating a race of mentally retarded psychopaths, born into football colours and happy-slapping dreams of Buckfast and Burberry. I know from experience that these people have none of the qualities men have for millennia argued separate humans from animals, and that they should be avoided like clichés and the plague.

Predictably, they sat behind us. Instead of walking around the aisles and taking their seats in a civilised manner, they pushed me to the side and jumped over my seat and into theirs, and I knew then that they had such disregard for actual people that they'd spend the rest of the match jumping up and down the stand, walking about purely for the joy of getting in people's way and causing hassle.

The game began and the atmosphere became pleasant, save for the half-wits behind us, chanting the usual stream of moronic abuse whenever one of our players would make what the 'experts' deemed a mistake. Utd dominated the game early, and our keeper was in front of us, reaping our cheers of the crowd.

Out of the blue, Aberdeen scored a goal and half of our supporters cheered Utd on to get one back, while half began booing and hurling abuse aimlessly. The fuckwit inbreds behind us began throwing racial abuse, which was something I hadn't heard at a football game in several years. Of course, a few politically incorrect statements are normal, and I'd say they're not a big deal. But this was different.

"Ya fuckin' fruit pickers, get oot a Scotland! No fuckin' monkeys in Scotland! Fuckin' ching-chong chinkie slanty eyes, ken? Fuck off, like!"

The abuse was ridiculous and almost aimless. There were no non-white players on the Aberdeen side, so I assumed most of the racism was aimed at our own team, which included Polish and African players. Yet no one seemed to take a particular offence to this unnecessary tirade against Dundee Utd.

Certainly there was an unpleasant air of silence in the immediate area around the two ugly delinquents. It seemed as though the other fans could sense the idiotic violence within them and kept quiet so as to avoid trouble. My family and I countered slightly by engaging in indirect argument with the racist degenerates, deliberately cheering Utd on when a mistake was made, making positive counterpoints to the racist putdowns. But we didn't dare insight physical confrontation with the neds.

Even the police and stewards patrolling the stand ignored their moronic banter.


United equalised before half-time through Darren Dods, and regained the upper hand through their superior form. Aberdeen looked sure to lose.

When the second half began, the Aberdeen keeper, Jamie Langfield, took his place in the goals in front of the Utd fans. Before long he was pelted with objects from the crowd and it seemed that myself and my family were the only people in the stand outraged at such behaviour. Even the two stewards below us were laughing as the keeper stood stupidly, showered in chips and cups.

Half the crowd chanted vile abuse at Langfield, who looked utterly terrified, and half the crowd laughed and jeered on the primitives that thought it necessary to jeopardise their own team's match. It was truly sickening to watch, as although the objects were all soft and not liable to cause injury, Langfield was standing in front of thousands of people for whom violence is no big deal, looking like a man facing death, not knowing whether the next object to hit his head will be a cold chip or a glass bottle. Every now and then he turned and looked sheepishly at the crowd, who in unison belted out his name, followed by various threats.

The sharp banks of the stadium meant that the stands rose straight up from the edges of the pitch, so that even a person in the highest seat could feasibly have thrown an object and landed it on the grass. Everyone in the stand was able to look down at the keeper and bark insult from up high.

The referee at one point ran over and picked up a cup of coffee that had missed Langfield's shoulder, and he carried it off the pitch before running back to the halfway line, leaving the frightened goalkeeper to stand on his own, directly below the gallery of malicious scum that were getting more and more enthused by their own barbaric actions and the obvious unwillingness of the referee, the stewards, or the police, to intervene.

It was like walking past a school and seeing a mob of vicious teenagers tormenting a small child. It doesn't matter whether the child gets beaten or not, but rather that the child is so terrified by the prospect that he can barely stand. The humiliation is as painful as any beating.

When Langfield took his first goalkick in front of the rabid crowd, he slipped and fell on his ass, and then proceeded to stand on the edge of the eighteen yard box, too frightened to move any closer to the by-line.

A few minutes later, a defender passed the ball back to the keeper, whose legs were constantly trembling, and Langfield swung and missed and the ball went out for a corner. When the corner was swung in, Langfield, even surrounded by his own defenders, was unable to muster the strength to intervene, and Kalvenes headed the ball in to give Utd the lead.

I cheered and applauded for Utd were the better team, but I knew that even though they would have won on their own terms in the end, the score was 2-1 purely because the fans had intimidated a goalkeeper into a state of utter helplessness.

I watched as more shaven-headed scumbag scheme-dwellers ran down from the upper seats and jumped on the barriers and security fences, endangering their own worthless lives and the lives of others, while the female security staff, looking entirely baffled and overwhelmed by the crazed maniacs before them, stood stupid and smiling and looking around so as to appear not as useless as they in fact were.

With my mind I willed the biggest, ugliest and most drunken of the louts to fall head first over the barrier on which he bounced, down into the stairwell below. The fall probably wouldn't kill him, but you never know… Sometimes we get lucky.

The torrent of abuse from behind continued as the two tinks whom had come to sully my appreciation of the match from the very start, continued to chant their vile racist insults, one of them explaining that "Em'm no racist against a monkey in Utd shirt, but em'm racist against 'em everywhere else." To which the other replied: "Eh dae ken how they let 'em play for us anyhow!"

A big chav with scars across his face walked up the steps towards us, and engaged in mind-numbing nedchat with the pair behind, about a fight in Dundee a few nights before. The new ned was boasting about his scars and how he had needed stitches in his face after fighting someone because they supported a different team. Probably Dundee. As he leaned over to speak closer to his despicable mirror images, his tracksuit touched the side of my face and obscured my view of part of the pitch and I kept shaking my head, getting angrier and angrier, looking loathsomely at the hapless stewards, wishing they'd come remove this filthy piece of shit from my sight. I wanted more than anything to tell him to fuck off, or maybe just grab him and throw him down the stairs to the death he deserve simply for living such a boastfully pathetic and vitriolic existence… But evidently he was a fighter and I wouldn't have lasted more than a few seconds. If I had done, I would have been thrown out and missed the rest of what was to be an epic, though tarnished, victory.

So I sat and stewed in my own rage, willing the fuckers all to be run down by buses on their respective ways home. I still to this day hope at least one of them died at the wheels of a heavy vehicle. Don't try and tell me he wouldn't have deserved it.

So I sat and watched the rest of the match, trying desperately to enjoy the football. The Aberdeen keeper was no longer subject to a barrage of thrown objects, but the chants about his mother and murder continued, culminating in a third goal for Utd.

When Conway bagged the third, the atmosphere in the Utd end became more jubilant and less violent, with the cheers no longer centring around threats against Aberdeen players, but in celebration of the Utd manager and chairman. "There's only one Eddie Thompson!" and "Craig Levein's tangerine army!" being too favourites. I was briefly reminded of the atmosphere in the cup final at Hampden a few years earlier, which had temporarily restored my faith in football fans and Dundonians, after the Utd fans actually cheers their losing team off the pitch for a good effort.

The tracky-tink behind me suddenly jumped out of his seat and onto mine as I got up to celebrate the fourth, a howler by Langfield, and crushed my leg. As he belted down the stairs, I swung my leg out to trip him, hoping he'd go head first and break his fucking rancid neck. Unfortunately, he was too quick, having probably spent most of his life running from police and fights.


After the match we wandered back to the car, near Princes Street. We discussed the reprehensible behaviour of the Utd fans and the magnificent performance of the players, speaking loudly so as to antagonise the swarming mass of putrid inbred neds heading back to the City of Recovery.

The chanting continued as the group marauded towards the transport hubs of the city, kicking over bins and banging on windows. "Tell yer ma, yer ma! Put the champagne on ice! We're going to Hampden twice! Tell yer ma, yer ma!"

Behind us walked two well-spoken Aberdeen fans, saying much the same as us. They lamented the referee's performance, which we had noted earlier in the match as poor and leaning in favour of Aberdeen. "It was like playing against twelve men," one of them said, to which I turned and replied "Thirteen if you count the state of our crowd."

They chastised their own fans for poor behaviour, as it turned out the Aberdeen support had been pelting Lukasz Zaluska with coins and generally behaving like crack-head children. The last thing on their mind was the score-line, which they admitted was deserved through the Dons' lacklustre performance and the excellent Utd form.

In the end, Dundee Utd would be making their way to Hampden at the end of a fantastic season, and no doubt the unpleasantries of Tynecastle's seething pit of hate would be forgotten.

Welcome to Dundee

Welcome to Dundee, friend. The home of jute, jam and journalism ain’t quite what it used to be… Industry once dominated, making the city a powerhouse of the world. Dundonian money fuelled everything from slavery to exploration, but now lies in ruin, a victim of the unstoppable roll of modernisation.
So now we have technology instead, in big shiny buildings, with jobs only possible for the super-qualified. No more do we need the jute mills. Instead they become car parks, student accommodation or derelict relics of Dundee’s past.
Millions flow in for a few, compacted into one small area, and the rest becomes one great mass of sprawling filth and poverty. Of course, Dundonians are scum now and probably always were, but now we have a little core of intelligence and the rest is some mental wasteland, devoid of decency and logic.
The West End is where the university stands and sucks in the technological bounty, training, teaching and making cash that nowhere else in the city could hope to make. Consequently one area of the city is geared towards students, with coffee shops, bars where fights don’t break out every night, little shops not run by great chain stores, parks and trees and gardens, people walking about not wearing tracksuits, sneering at one another and spitting on the ground… The West End, the Perth Road bubble of Dundee, is an area through which one could walk at night unaccosted, not treading in dried vomit, listening to inane gibberish about celebrities and phoney hardships, seeing the bingo crowd, the Londons crowd, the old man pub crowd…
To see these things one would have to venture into the city centre. It’s not exactly a terrible, awful place by Dundee standards, but it’s not pretty. The people there are so stupid that if it were mercifully napalm bombed during peak shopping/ giro-collecting hours, the collective IQ of the city would barely drop a point. The shops are poor, bog-standard chain stores without character, and only an unusually high shoplifting rate to differentiate them from other Scottish cities.
At one end of the high street is the Wellgate, home of Poundland and other shite shops. Poundland is where one might go to thieve, or to part company with only a pound for the pleasure of buying something worth significantly less than label price. Poundland is also unbeatable for low wage, brutal and corrupt management, and a strict policy of racism and intolerance.
At the other end is the Overgate, made up to look nicer than the rest of the centre, but still frequented by the sort of person who should be shot simply for looking so ignorant – the chav, the ned, the mink. Whatever you want to call them, they barely qualify as human, and Dundee is so overrun with these scummy halfwits that no amount of beautification will ever undo their being. The West End figured out a good way to banish neds – Educate the people, civilise the area, and the neds will run like scared, baffled rabbits… Hopefully straight under the wheels of the nearest bus.
But if curiosity takes you and you feel the need to see a real Dundonian without straying into the overcrowded, police-patrolled, bullshit centre of town, then perhaps the outskirts are for you. The lesser known, but visibly and audibly offensive regions of Dundee must be seen to be believed.
One does assume when seeing a ned in town that it’s an act to offend any decent people nearby. But when these swine return to their sties, it becomes apparent that their homelives are as filthy as their public lives. They all look the same, live in the same flats and homes, share the same smack needles and spoons, talk the same, get the same violent buses… They should be eradicated.
From the Hilltown to Stobie to Whitfield and all around the scumbag begging tower block estates of cultural dereliction, no person is redeemable. They are lost souls, too wilfully ignorant to be acknowledged as part of humanity.
The city is theirs. Welcome to Scumdee.