Newport

I went to Newport on Saturday, to visit my good friend and fellow geek Dr Tubb. Time spent together was spent discussing how bad chart music is, tenuous links to celebrities, the trend for cheerleaders in pop videos, exciting geek experiments, pronouncing 'Linux' correctly (I aim to educate the masses: it's Lynne-ucks, not Line-ucks), and, more than any other subject, the massive Chav population of Newport.

Newport has more white trash than any other place I've been.

Walking through the centre of Newport and virtually everyone is the same. Burberry is present on caps, handbags, hair scrunchies, shirts - virtually anything that can have a beige pseudo-tartan applied to it has it. The male occupants typically have heavy chains and sportswear, tracky bottoms often in socks. The female ones typically have a Croydon Facelift, earrings that double as hula hoops for Savannah/Storm/whatever name the unfortunate sprog in the buggy has ended up with, pink tracky bottoms with a slogan across the ass, and those shoes. You know the sort I mean. The ones they wear if they're not wearing those boots (and you know what those are like as well). There's actually a shop in the shopping centre dedicated to Chavette footwear.

Newport also has large sections of horrendous 60s, 70s and 80s architecture. You just know that some Victorian building were torn down in the name of progress, concrete and asbestos. It shows everywhere. To try and distract attention from the ugliness, the council have put up massive statues around the place, and these are not only ugly but also just plain wrong. There's a 10ft Angel of Death stood, looming forward, in the pelvis of something with crows on its arms - seriously. I'd have taken a photo but I get the impression it would've posessed my camera.

But I did take some photos - oh yes! And here they are.

This is the Riverfront Centre, a new arts centre. It's not open yet, and won't be for a little while, but back in March it was voted the second ugliest building in Wales. It's quite awful.

This vent is on the side of a Chinese restaurant that greets you as you enter Newport city centre. They recently painted over the black muck that had dribbled down from it, but you can see it developing again - and it's all over the vent covering, which seems to have melted some time ago. It looks a vent on a smoker's lung.

This is a genius piece of town planning. They've seperated the pavement on this bridge into a footpath and cyclepath. Unlike normal examples, it just suddenly stops. Why? No idea. Also brilliant is the fact that the street sign you can see on the other side of the river is right in the middle of the cycle lane. As my father might say, that takes a special kind of stupid.

Finally, the piece of graffiti that inspired the song "Your Mother's Got A Penis" by Goldie Lookin' Chain, the Chav-mocking rap collective. It also appears in the background of their video for "Half Man Half Machine".

So there you go. Newport. Making Pontypridd look like Milan.