NORTHUMBERLANDIA: Um…

By Nicola Owen on September 3, 2012 in Art & Design, Society

It’s summer, it’s raining, you’re bored. There are only so many times you can toggle between YouTube videos of a captive Orca using it’s trainer as a squeaky chew toy and Torstein’s X Games XV triple cork before life starts to lose its glossy, prancing, you’re-worth-it sheen. Well this may be the last year you’re ever stuck in that denigrating cycle of digital destruction because coming soon to a Shotton slag heap near you is the sculptured form of a gigantic unclothed earth goddess called … NORTHUMBERLANDIA!

(Shotton is near Cramlington BTW and that’s apparently just near that big long road that takes you to Edinburgh one way and France the other.)

Northumberlandia’s luscious lady lumps will be finished in 2013 and you will be able to marvel at her primal perfection from a surrounding park where she reclines, a bit like Elisa Day, among flowing willows and tranquil lakes. You can even have picnics on her naughty bits.

What a strange thing to do with a slag heap. I like to imagine the initial pitch going something like this.

Mine Owning Tory: Well, Mr Jencks, we’re thinking we can revert the slag, sorry my bad, surplus land to agricultural use now that we’ve finished excavating the hallowed North East landscape for profit. Although we’ve just found a couple of million squids in loose change down the back of the sofa and we were just wondering if there’s anything potentially more culturally enriching for the local area and tax avoidance for us than say, for example, growing Weetabix or grazing cows that we could do with it.

American Boffin: Yes, your Lordship, as it happens right here with me I have the blueprints for a Colossal Naked Woman. With 100 Foot High Boobies. As long as we call her a goddess it’s totally legit erotic art which people will come and dally upon in a back-to-nature kind of fashion and it is not at all in any way a dubious, titillacious exploitation of ancient matriarchal might and if people do say that we’ll just pooh-pooh it in a haughty, abstract kind of way. And charge for parking and helicopter rides. We’ll be rich beyond wor, sorry our, wildest dreams. RIIIIIICCCCCH AS KKIIIIINNNGS!

Mine Owning Tory: Congratulations, Charles. Here, have a knighthood on me.

American Boffin: Sweeeeet, your Lord Dudeship.

Mine Owning Tory: That’s the banger right there, bro. We oozing steeze, yah.

Okay, so that went a bit weird, but I strongly suspect the seminal Seann William Scott movie Role Models had a huge influence on Harvard architecturator Jencks dreaming this up. Particularly the scene where Wheeler begins to train priapic dwarf Ronnie Scott in the art of covert knocker spotting by using nearby hills as examples. Definitely that and a well perused classic 1970s Playboy, y’know, just to get the pose absolutely right. Don’t forget that this experienced architecturator is the same man who brought us the mind blending Garden of Cosmic Speculation and chin fingering Rail Garden of Scottish Worthies and whose stated mission is ‘to see the world in a grain of sand.’ Also presumably to see his capo d’opera appear in that much loved international journal of scientific and artistic merit Big Jugs.

According to one report ‘locals in Northumberland in the far northeast of England’ pronounced it the ‘Goddess Of The North’ and another less tractable set of yokels brushed it off cursorily as ‘Slag Alice.’ Oh well, you know what they say about pleasing everyone all of the time.

Amazingly, for a naked bird themed story, the national-but-not-quality press has already latched on to this. A hilariously, intensely Slytherin article from the Daily Mail describes how the ‘thrilled and lively’ 85 year old Tory voting, pit owning Viscount Ridley described plans for the landscaping of Lovely Landy to a visiting Austrian dignitary,

‘You see, that’s her face, those are her breasts and that’s her arse,’ he explains.

‘Her hip, Lord Ridley,’ interjects an engineer diplomatically.

That tells you all you need to know about the project in a nutshell as well as giving you full faith in the peerage, doesn’t it? Who knows to what strange, undream’d of horizons the fusion of high brow erotica and rich, pervy old men will take us next?

On a selfish level it’s hard for me to appreciate why anyone would hoy £2.5 million at a slightly risqué mudcastle rather than investing in, ooh, off the top of my head, a North East indoor real snow slope within a radius of ten miles of my doorstep with regular discounted freshtrax sessions and park nights, but nevermind, beggars cannit be choosers.

There have already been some polarised opinions proffered on Miss ‘Landia. It appears a random selection of bampots were rounded up by a sheep-pig for quotes. According to one report ‘locals in Northumberland in the far northeast of England’ pronounced it the ‘Goddess Of The North’ and another less tractable set of yokels brushed it off cursorily as ‘Slag Alice.’ Oh well, you know what they say about pleasing everyone all of the time.

Others supposedly worry dreadfully about the effect the sudden, unexpected appearance of massive mammary mimicking mounds will have on passing motorists on the A1. Presumably nothing a bracing rear end shunt and tearful calls to an unsympathetic insurance company won’t cure in a jiffy. Maybe they should invent a warning sign. But then again maybe that would cause collisions in itself. Forget that then, just spitballing. I expect this is all hype, hyperbole and pure BS anyway but I may be wrong.

Northumberlandia might be the largest human form to be sculpted into the land in the world. A celebrity, a one off, a freak. Maybe Gok Wan could come in and make her ten years younger when she eventually begins to subside. Heaven knows, it happens to us all as we get older and wiser. Nothing a good quality push-up bra can’t fix, though. You should probably visit when she goes live in 2013 even if just in a sisterly fashion to ponder upon the power, wonder and fascination the female form wields over us. Or take cheeky pics. Whatever floats your boat, I’m not judging.

Plus, if anything it’s nice to know that as a region we do things far more tastefully than others. I mean, almost anything’s preferable to a chalk nude dude with an undisguised erection and tiny, tiny head brandishing a knobbly club. Isn’t it, Dorset?