Cancel the Vikings

A little late in the day, perhaps, it has been pointed out to the intellectual colossi of South Tyneside Council that the Vikings may have been a bit right-of-centre and therefore ripe for a spot of cancelling. There is a statue, you see, of a couple of these marauding Norsemen outside a shopping centre in Jarrow. They are fat, hairy and possessed of aggressive facial expressions. Check out the queue at the nearby Greggs and it is as if that statue had somehow come to life, or a sort of life. The apple hasn’t fallen very far from the tree on Tyneside.

The council, working in conjunction with Northumbria Police, spent an unrevealed amount of money on investigating statues and commemorative plaques in their manor which might possibly cause offence to people with skins thinner than the surface tension of water. The only two they found were an Edwardian statue of Queen Victoria outside the town hall in South Shields and the aforementioned Vikings, knocked up in the 1960s, in Jarrow.