Jerrychicken MA (Northern Studies)

Now here is a Master of Arts degree that I'd like to study if someone wants to sponsor me...Northern Studies.

Leeds Met is offering the MA course to study - the North - and what makes us what we are and why we are sooooo superior to those soft southern nancies who don't talk proper.

Stuff such as our mill heritage, cotton to the west as it was imported via the New Worlds across the Atlantic into Liverpool and Manchester, and wool to the east, Gods County, Yorkshire, home of the finest woollen worsted cloths in the world.

And with the mills came the brass bands, mention brass bands and mills come to mind with famous names such as Black Dyke, Hammond Sauce Works, and of course Grimethorpe Colliery which is not a mill but rather obviously, a coal mine.

So coal mines will be on the prospectus too, right across the north we're riddled with old coal mine workings and it came as no suprise to me when purchasing this house that I had to pay the princely sum of £5 for a geological map search for mine workings underneath my dwelling - there are none - but I knew that anyway.

All of these heavy industrial workplaces brought tight knit communities, tight knit because the houses were built packed together on the smallest plots of land available and so we see another Northern feature, the terraced rows of hundreds and thousands of small dwellings, two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs, a small back yard with an outside toilet and your front door right on the street, Coronation Street is not a myth it exists in every village, town and city in the North.

And in Leeds we did things even smaller, not content with terraced houses we built back to back houses, terraced dwellings with no back yards but the row of houses in the street behind attached to the back of yours so that neither had a back to their house at all, just a frontage - in this manner we crammed twice as many dwellings per acre and the city of Leeds grew to the size it is very quickly.

Not only the cloth industry, nor mining but heavy engineering too, the first steam railway in the world was built for Middleton Colliery in Leeds and its location south of the river spawned a massive area of heavy engineering works with the Fowler Engine Works, the Hunslet Engine Works, Monkbridge Foundry and many others providing heavy manufacturing machinery that was exported all over the world - the Monkbridge Forge made famous because my Uncle Sid worked there and actually made the engine turbines for rolls royce jet engines - my Uncle Sid worked for many years on The Concorde engine blades and the stories he told of their exploits on the night shift made me promise myself to never fly on an airliner that used any of his blades.

The tightness of the dwelling houses made for tight communities, places where you didn't knock on your neighbours door before you walked in, places where you were all either skint or flush depending on whether the mill was on short time or overtime, for the whole community worked for the same employer and this tight knit community made for our Northern reputation for openess and friendlyness, you won't get ignored oop north like you will in that there London which in all honesty is a shit city.

Which brings us to accents - there is a belief among the soft southern nancies that we speak all wrong up here, that we don't pronounce words properly or that we miss words out of sentences completely and that "the Queens English" as is spoken by said nancies is the correct way that English should be spoken -is it bollacks - the Queen isn't even English, she's from a German family and her offspring are German/Greek mongrels, speaking "Queens English" is a buggeration of the English language spoken only by those with malformed, immobile jawlines - proper original English is spoken up north.

For instance the word "bath", the practice of bathing, a vessel for bathing in, its pronounced "bath", one syllable, the principle sound being the second letter, pronounced in the same way as the "a" in "apple" - "bath", say it one more time, "bath".

The soft southern nancies among you will be struggling to incorporate an "a" for "apple" into that word, you'll be trying to pronounce the word, wrongly, as "baarth" with the "a" pronounced as "car", an elongated sound that has no place in the word "bath", you're wrong, blame the Queen and her German/Greek family.

Likewise us northerners can lay claim to the authentic method of swearing, swear words just sound right when spaketh with a northern accent and if you don't believe me then I refer you to an Eddie Izzard monologue, a southern nancie himself but one who is prepared to admit that he can't swear properly unles he does it with a northern accent - the word "bastard" is the best example, it should be pronounced "BAS-tad" with the emphasis on the first syllable not gentrified into "baaarstard" as The Queen suggests, yes she uses that word all he time, so would you with a house full of corgis shitting all over the expensive carpets.

And finally I'm sitting here tonight listening on the radio to the Radio Leeds rugby league commentary from Wigan, (vs Leeds) - the only true and pure form of rugby, just stop arguing, you know I'm right really.