Yorkshire Day

Today, August 1st is Yorkshire Day.

"Is it ?" we all cry, even those of us lucky enough to be born within the broad county's borders, for Yorkshire Day is a media invention unknown to anyone outside of the offices of BBC North.

Tonight on Look North we will have one small news item shoved somewhere at the back of the programme which will go something like...

"...and finally, today was Yorkshire Day and here in City Square Leeds, this one man, who is really an actor employed by the BBC just for this spot, wore a flat cap, walked his whippet around for a bit and then sat down to a meal consisting entirely of Yorkshire pudding before saying eee bah gum that wor grand, and now back to the studio..."

And thats about the sum total of the celebration of this fine county and whilst no-one who is Yorkshire born would ever utter the words "ee bah gum", that is the phrase that is most commonly uttered by us according to the BBC - ask any of those soft southern nancies what their first thought is when the word "Yorkshire" is mentioned and they will immediately say "ee bah gum" followed closely by "whippet" and then "flat cap".

I'd like at this point to enter into the record that I have never, in my life, stood within hearing of any Yorkshireman and heard the phrase "ee bah gum", nor have I ever aquainted myself with anyone who owned a whippet or a flat cap.

Well ok, I know someone with a flat cap.

Yes its me, I have a flat cap, but it doesn't fit me and it was bought during the 1988 fashion craze for flat caps when the whole country went flat cap crazy for two weeks until everyone realised that it just wasn't fashionable even if the soft southern nancies who write the fashion articles in newspapers said it was.

I think I threw the flat cap away actually.

So there we have it - your preconceptions of Yorkshire folk are just not true, we do not say "ee bah gum" at the end of every sentence, we do not all keep whippets and most of us do not have flat caps save for brief fashion errors.

We also do not keep coal in our baths, we do not scrub the front doorstep every morning, we do not work in a mill and we do not have to doff 'cap at mill owner, we don't all live in a small teraced house which has a pub at one corner and a shop at the other, we are no more tight with our money than your average scot, and we do not care for ferret keeping or pigeon racing.

We do however use the English language in a unique manner, for instance...

Love... You are very likely to be called "love" if you speak to a Yorkshire person, even if that Yorkshire person is a man and you are also a man, for instance "how is tha love ?" is an enquiry into ones health and male visitors new to Yorkshire must not be mislead into thinking that we are all homosexuals up here, we are not, not that there is anything wrong with homosexuality, its just that there are non in Yorkshire for our dads beat it out of us when we are little boys, all except Carl Wilde's dad who encouraged him in his flower arranging when he wor nobbut a lad and the result is there for all to see - by the way I think he's lovely and if I were homosexual then I'd like Carl Wilde to be my wife and do flowers for me all day long.

Any road...

Any road ... is a Yorkshire expresion meaning "too much personal detail".

Us ... means what it means all over the English speaking world but in Yorkshire it is most commonly used when referring to third party inanimate objects, as in "lets get us coats" or "is that us bus", the word "our" is very rarely used in Yorkshire.

Sen or Sel ... are unique Yorkshire part-words usually prefixed by "thi" or "thee" as in the phrase "get thi-sen owwer 'ere" or "Ow is thee-sel ?" ("come over here" and "How are you"), sen or sel therefore referring to the second party person.

Si-thee ... familiarised by Fred Trueman at the end of his popular low budget 1970's "Indoor League" pub games tv programme, "ah'll si-thee" the most common use of which is "goodbye" although "I'll si-thee down chip 'ole" (I will meet you at the fish and chip shop) is also acceptable.

Laik ... "is tha laik-ing cricket our Arthur" a question asked of Arthur, not to see if he "likes" cricket, a common misconception, oh no, "laik" is the noun for "to play" and in the question the Yorkshireman is asking Arthur if he is playing cricket, a rather pointless question as Arthur was wearing whites and standing in front of a wicket wearing pads and carrying a bat at the time, but still...

While ... always used in preference to "until", "I'll wait here while us bus comes"

The ... a word completely lost from the language, its use is forbidden by bye-law within the Yorkshire boundaries, for instance "ah'm going pub" this is the most common use of the Yorkshire dialect by those soft southern nancies when they are taking the piss, they should try it though, it works and saves on energy and in these green and enlightened times then we need to save energy - drop useless words, start with "the", drop it from your language for one day onYorkshire day and see how much your soft southern nancy friends admire you.

Dunt ... again, an energy saving device for instructing in the negative, "dunt do that our Arthur", "dunt pick yer nose yer dutty bugger"

And from the above examples you can see that the name Arthur is in common use in Yorkshire, most males are christened Arthur in Yorkshire, I myself am an Arthur and so is my wife but she is a Geordie and so does not count. All females born within the great county are called Doreen.

Other Yorkshire customs include ...

When marrying the happy Yorkshire couple are compelled to ride from the church to the ham tea reception in the public rooms above the co-op in a Triumph motorbike and sidecar.

It is compulsory for all males to spend a minimum of one day per month fishing at the local canal

When interviewed on national TV the provided brown raincoat and flat cap must be worn and a demenour of gormlessness displayed, failure to do so will result in written warning and then eviction from the county, probably to down south somewhere.

Fuss will not be made of anything, this is best exampled by the chapter in James Herriots "All Creatures Great and Small" when the vit'nary James Herriot struggles through eight foot snow drifts and fierce blizzards all day on foot after having abandoned his car to reach a farm way up on the moors, greeting the farmer with "its a shocking day isn't it Mr Shadrack" the correct reponse from the farmer is to look skywards as if he's noticing the blizzard for the first time and reply "Aye, its a bit plain".


So there you have it - how to be a faux Yorkshire man in just a few paragraphs - a faux Yorkshireman because of course if you weren't fortunate enough to be born here then you will never be one, but you can aspire to be one and you can visit our county* from time to time to admire us before returning to your soft southern nancy new towns (please leave the county boundaries before 9pm) to dream of being Yorkshire on Yorkshire Day.


*Offer does not apply to Lancastrians.

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.