On Being Judgemental

There is something vaguely satisfying and completely un-PC about being judgemental when you e-spy a chavvy wedding about to take place.

(For those of colonial extraction think “redneck” for “chav”)

I regarded a chavvy wedding in the centre of Leeds yesterday, my attention being drawn to four of the guests as they walked across the road in front of my car while I waited at the traffic lights outside Leeds’ magnificent Victorian edifice that is our Cuthbert Broderick designed Town Hall.

Having just delivered one of my daughters into the city centre for her days work at the fashion accessory shop and racing home to deliver another daughter unto her Saturday job  at a dry cleaning establishment (yes, we send the kinder out to work, I recommend all parents do the same at as early an age as possible, say, around five years, it was good enough for the Rev Charles Kingsley), I sat waiting for the lights to change when an apparition of sheer chav-ness appeared in front of me.

Let me mention here that at 9.30am in the centre of Leeds it is not unusual to spot revellers making their way back to their hotel rooms after a Friday night roaming the nightspots of Leeds, many bars have late licences and its possible to make merry all through the night – I spot many a half naked woman staggering around the streets at 9.30am clutching the remnants of a cheap Pomagne bottle and with streamers in their hair  – its why I run my Dads Taxi Service into Leeds at that unearthly hour of a Saturday morning.

But these four were different, they didn’t look as though they had spent all night on the lash in some dreary nightclub, and yet they were dressed in their best, or as “best” as a chav can look – the two young men in their only  suit, the one they wear for their court appearances, and the two women in half a dress each.

The two men were nothing to write home about save to say “chav”, you will immediately bring to mind a thin rat-faced pock-marked visage, tattoos creeping above the starched white collar line up to chin level, and with an air of violence simmering two degrees below boiling point, an anger at a world that forces them to attend juvenile court every Monday morning for shop-lifting yet another shell suit (why don’t Adidas just give them away as an act of social responsibility for surely no-one buys the bloody things anymore ?)

Nay, it was the two womenfolk  who attracted the attention.

I want you now to bring to mind your own choice of  Morning TV programme, the likes of GMTV or whatever the equivalent is in your neck of the woods, and focus on the “Showbiz” reports section. bring to mind the last film premiere that they reported on and specifically the Hollywood starlet who walked down the red carpet wearing a few strands of gossamer and silk, naked young, slim torso barely covered by the slivers of cloth that some well known designer had knocked up in ten minutes and charged half a million dollars for…

OK, got that image ?

Right, take that body clad barely in strategically placed slivers of glistening cloth, and inflate said body by a couple of hundred pounds whilst at the same time not increasing the clothing sizes exponentially – then multiply the effect by twofold for there was two of them crossing the road right in front of my car, well, tottering across the road actually for the heels on their shoes were as high as is physically possible without making its wearer walk on the very tips of their toes.

Huge women, huge, clad in backless, almost frontless, dresses, dresses so short as to be not worth wearing, frankly it wasn’t worth the few seconds that it must have taken to clad themselves in such a flimsy display of clothing. Huge folds of blubber hung out on all sides of the attire, bare white blubber most of which was adorned by tattoos, home made tattoos, the sort that state to the world “I Heart Darren Dave D-wayen”, the good fortune being that there was enough blubber left to list at least four or five months worth of random partners.

The two womens faces were those of your archetypal chav-ess, still young, perhaps not yet into their third decade they bore the pointed evil rat-faces of their men equivalents, softened only by several pounds and folds of excess chin-fat and a small star tattoo on one cheek, and yet despite the padding out of the facial features by means of Greggs-inspired lard, there were even now the unmistakable signs of premature ageing around mouth and eyes as a result of their 60-a-day Rothmans habit – these women would be wrinkled harridans and role models to several small children, all named after their seperate fathers, before the age of 25.

I stifled a snigger, had to cover my mouth as if sneezing to stifle a guffaw, muttered a “Jesus-Ker-rist” behind my palm as they crossed a few feet from my view, hoped that they wouldn’t glance to their right and notice the bloke in the car smirking at them all.

No chance of them spotting me though for their attentions were drawn to the show in front of the Town Hall.

Our city fathers have taken advantage of the relaxing of the civil marriage licensing laws and now rent out our magnificent civic buildings for the purpose of marrying those of little imagination, and there on the tiered steps of our unique Town Hall were several dozen be-suited ratty people, all named after some derivation of “Wayne”, all awaiting the wedding of one of their kind – a more tasteless display of humanity you could not wish to observe, I’m surprised that the University didn’t send down some anthropologists for study purposes.

Of course there were stretched limousines, three of them, white, with blue neon a-plenty, for what is a chavvy wedding without the bride and her guests tumbling already drunk and shreaking with laughter from the back of a white and blue neon stretched limo ?

Married on the Town Hall steps at 9.30am on a Saturday morning the rest of the day no doubt frittered away in Wetherspoons with a burger wedding breakfast and a best mans speech interrupted by a fight, the whole wedding party finding themselves in the Leeds Bridewell by 2am the following morning, the perfect end to a perfect day – next week the divorce celebrations and then we get to do it all over again the following Saturday with a different Darren.

Hey, I just observe and report…