Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  Auden, largely single-handledly, reintroduced the Anglo-Saxon metre into English verse and he employed it in 'In Praise Of Limestone', with the following chilly lines, among my favourites in modern poetry:

  An older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:

  I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;

  That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;

  There are only the various envies, all of them sad

  The oceanic whisper, eh? He was good, wasn't he? Later in life, the whey-faced Brideshead features hardened. Maybe it was the fags but he grew to look more northern, craggier, wrinkled as a walnut. His face famously was described as 'a cake left out in the rain', a phrase that Jimmy Webb borrowed for 'MacArthur Park'. One of my colleagues in the English department at Skelmersdale College, Val, once looked at a picture of him on the back of his collected poems and said, 'Good God, if that was his face, what must his testicles have been like?'

  Skelmersdale, as we shall learn later, is a Viking name and up north we are proud of our Viking lineage. Now, I'm with Muriel Gray on the subject of facial hair - 'Why bother growing a moustache? You could just write "I Am A Dickhead" on your top lip' – but if all thoughts of common sense and aesthetics desert me and I grow a beard, it will turn out to be ginger. Gingerish, anyway. I used to be embarrassed about this when I looked enviously at the dark if bum-fluffish sidies of my teenage mates but now I'm rather proud. My auburn whiskers I take as proof of my lineage right back to Eric Bloodaxe and evidence of the fact that my true calling is drinking from a giant horn at the prow of a longboat heading for a spot of pillage in Iceland. The country, not the discount freezer store, obviously.

  Actually, the Vikings have had rather a bad press. True, they were not the gentle agrarians that some apologists say – The Book of Common Prayer had a bit in it about 'deliver us from the North Man' and for the 200 years up to the ninth century they were always popping over, helping themselves to local treasure, women and livestock – but they did do as much trading as raiding and eventually became absorbed into the racial mix, which is where my beard comes in. Their legacy is there as well as in all the dales and thwaites and leys in the region.

  All of this makes us different, we think; harder, flintier, steelier. We are the ones who turn the air-conditioning down in the meeting room, who want to sit outside the pub in October, who order the hottest curries, the strongest beer, the most powerful drugs. We like to think we're different, and we cherish our prejudices.

  But we can overcome these prejudices. When the resolutely northern pop group The Housemartins transformed themselves in the mid-eighties, they chose the new name The Beautiful South. Pretty much everyone thought this was a heavily ironic choice, to be said with a sneer. The Sunday Times simply assumed that it was 'a sarcastic dig at England's north-south divide'. In fact, singer Paul Heaton chose the name because 'it sounded nice, like a film'. And there are lots of things about the south of England that sound nice to me. There's the music of Vaughan Williams, with its heady scents of warm Gloucestershire afternoons, or The Clash, whose music is full of the even headier scents found beneath flyovers in west London. There's Powell and Pressburger's dreamlike films such as A Canterbury Tale, where Kent becomes a mythic Avalon. I like Cornish pasties and M. R. James ghost stories and Dorset Blue Vinny cheese.

  But none of these things say 'the south' in the same way that certain things, good or bad, true or false, whippet or flat cap, say 'the north'. What would that mythical BBC South of England Correspondent be like? Bertie Wooster? Wurzel Gummidge? Mike 'Runaround' Reid? Prince Charles? What would he wear? A straw boater? Jodhpurs? A sheepskin jacket? Beefeater garb?

  The BBC does have a North of England Correspondent and he conforms very much to type. He – and it is always he – is one of their more 'lived-in' presenters; a stocky man in his early fifties with jowls, a florid complexion and bullishly hetero moustache. He looks tough but somehow defeated, maybe an old rugby league pro with a messy, financially punishing divorce behind him and the beginnings of a drink problem (I suspect there may be a quarter of Bell's in the pocket of that Gore-Tex anorak). Fiona in the nice warm London studio will 'go over live' to him and he'll inevitably be found looking tense outside a courtroom in Bolton at the conclusion of a major drugs trial or by a burned-out Mondeo on a Yorkshire sink estate where some sort of armed siege is occurring. He never gets the heartwarming story about the unlikely friendship between the Doberman Pinscher and the hamster.

  Where exactly is he? To many a south-based viewer, I guess he's in that vague but colourful region, 'Up North'. 'Up North' is a long way away. You wouldn't want to go there. It's a long trip, as in 'West Ham face a long trip to Hartlepool for the third-round tie'. Note it's never the other way round. It's OK too to be blithely approximate about northern geography. Some years ago, we northerners chortled when Des Lynam suavely announced on Final Score: 'Chesterfield 0, Chester 0. So no goals there in the local derby.'

  A few years ago, I actually rang up Sky News frothing at the mouth to complain about a spectacularly half-arsed item they'd done on Rochdale, whose football team were enjoying a good Cup run and had drawn a big club in a glamour tie. A fresh-faced reporter had been despatched to the town. From his amused anthropological tone, you might have thought that he'd been sent to Burkina Faso rather than the second largest metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester with a population of more than 200,000. He ended his report, and I am not making this up, by saying, 'If the team win tomorrow, they will have put little Rochdale on the map.' No, I think you'll find the pioneers of the international co-operative movement did that back in 1844 when they changed the course of world history. News obviously hasn't reached the Sky centre in Hounslow yet, though. Perhaps I have a chip on my shoulder, but at least it's a proper chip, properly fried and served with gravy and mushy peas.

  But let's not get too steamed up and tipsy on righteous indignation. If southerners do sometimes think it should read 'Here Be Dragons' on the map once you're past Watford, then we in the north can be just as sketchy about the south. What, for instance, does the south mean to me personally?

  I am attractively vague about Suffolk, Sussex and Surrey. I routinely confuse them all though if I stop and think for a moment I can place Suffolk. As the name suggests, it's south of Norfolk. On one of my few trips to the area, the late John Peel picked me up at the station in his battered Mercedes. I couldn't get into the passenger seat, which was taken up with shopping or some such, so I sat in the back, taxi-style. As we moved through the decidedly staid and sweet environs of the town, Peel turned and over his shoulder said in broadest Manhattan cabbie-ese, 'So, how ya doin', bud? First time in Stowmarket?' We went to the village pub for steak pie (he and Sheila had the veggie lasagne) and it was all rather darling and slightly Terry and June. I've never been back to Suffolk; there's never been any need to. I guess that's precisely what Peelie loved about it.

  Norfolk is a closed book to me. A closed book that has got some bad, rather sniggering reviews: Alan Partridge, Bernard Matthews, Sale of the Century and Delia Smith have conjoined like unlucky stars to make it a bit of a joke, a new shorthand for the rural sticks, sort of Crinkley Bottom goes Deliverance. I'm ashamed to say I have never been to Norwich though I'm told it's delightful. Even the supporters of Ipswich Town, though – hardly Los Angeles itself – mock Norwich folk for their yokelism in what is perhaps my favourite football chant, sung to the tune of The Addams Family.

  Your sister is your mother

  Your father is your brother

  You all shag one another, the Norwich family

  Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire are merely a gentle fog of airports and weddings. Middlesex conjures up only cricket and Russell Grant, the roly-poly astrologer who has campaigned tirelessly to get Middlesex reinstated as a county or made administrative capital of Europe or something.

  Essex I do know a little about as I lived there briefly in the 1980s, courtesy of a girlfriend's hospitality at a
time when Margaret Thatcher was trying her hand at starving her enemies (students, miners, old people, children) into submission. My girlfriend lived in a place called Chadwell Heath; chiefly famous, if at all, for being the place where West Ham United train. Indeed, if Billy Bonds or Julian Dicks ever go out for an evening there, they will never have to put their hand in their pocket.

  I went for several nights out there. I had to put my hand in my pocket an awful lot, it seemed to me. 'Southern prices,' we'd grizzle, after handing over most of our dole money for a pint of gaseous, urine-coloured but strangely tasteless liquid with an unconvincing cod-Hungarian name. Most of these nights out are etched in my mind and bring forth an involuntary shudder. This was the mid-1980s, after all, when a night out in Romford was a nightmarish blur of white stilettos, fun pubs and hair-gelled lotharios with earrings and plastic slip-ons who could turn nasty at any moment. Nights out soundtracked by Wham! and Luther Vandross, the banshee wail of car alarms and the whirring rotors of a police helicopter, girls cackling, fruit machines exploding with shrapnel and the mournful cry of 'Leave it, Gaz, he's not worth it'. Maybe it's still like that. I'm certainly not going back to find out.

  It could be that my desperate emotional state has coloured my view of Essex. I met some lovely people there. Billy Bragg for one. But what struck me most, perhaps parochially, were the slight but powerful cultural differences. There was the happy hour, during which office workers in Top Man suits would neck cheap Löwenbrau and spritzers before falling asleep on the train and ending up in Southend with drool on their lapels and numb faces. Now I'd been brought up on a strict and manly regime of daily pub-going but this seemed wrong, immoral, against some natural law. Drinking at half past five? Everyone knew that you went straight home after work, fell asleep in front of Blockbusters with Bob Holness, had a Findus crispy pancake and a shower and met up again at half seven. It took me a while to realise that the happy hour, which had begun in Manhattan and migrated to Essex, fitted perfectly the drinking community it served, i.e. people who went to work in a suit or at least in regular clothes and thus would feel comfortable perched on a barstool with an overpriced lager. The thought of going straight out on the town (and possibly the pull) if you were black-faced with engine grease, wearing overalls and clutching an oily rag was less attractive. This was the north-south divide writ large via the licensed victualler trade.

  Heading west, Wiltshire means little beyond maverick musician Julian Cope, who moved there to be nearer the ancient barrows, mounds and stone circles that he's frankly nuts about. I've visited him there a couple of times and once, while on the train back, I saw Princess Anne at Swindon station shouting about car parking. She was wearing a khaki body warmer, sporting that horrid hairstyle (clearly the royal family haven't heard of conditioner) and flanked by a huge vicious-looking dog and an armed guard. Now, she's a pillar of the community and Copey's the freak. But from where I was standing, it was hard to tell. What with the barking and braying.

  Hampshire says practically nothing to me. I once spent several freezing hours at the impossibly grim Southsea terminal waiting for a ferry and, er, that's about it. Those Needles look great, though, rising from the Solent like dragons' teeth. And I do remember defence secretary Geoff Hoon using Hants as a reference during the early days of the invasion of Iraq when British soldiers were patrolling the city of Umm Qasr. 'Umm Qasr is a city similar to Southampton,' he informed the Commons, prompting one British squaddie to reply to an interviewer, 'He's either never been to Southampton, or he's never been to Umm Qasr. There's no beer, no prostitutes and people are shooting at us. It's more like Portsmouth.'

  Dorset is a wild night out in Bournemouth with Blur's Alex James, a native of the once genteel, now almost lawless (according to the Daily Mail) seaside town. Weymouth is known as the Naples of Dorset. But is Naples the Weymouth of Italy? From my brief experience of Naples, it was violent, squalid, Mafia-run and at the time home to the world's best footballer. Perhaps Weymouth is actually like this, but I think not since the local newspaper for the day on which I write reads, and I quote, 'Pensioners book early to beat the rush for free bus passes.' I fancy they won't be remaking The Godfather there any day soon. Oh, and of course there's Thomas Hardy and some nice people I know called Wilf and Trish, who run a great little pub. The pub's in Cumbria, though.

  Bristol is the gateway to cider and cliches. Rolling hills, seagull-haunted cliffs and long, long vowel sounds. I went on holiday to Minehead in Somerset frequently as a child but apart from a trip to Cheddar Gorge, this was spent in the confines of the Butlins holiday camp and, like airports and Hard Rock Cafes, Butlins is the same wherever you go – and reassuringly so to its many fans, an international language of donkey derbies, crazy golf and disco-dancing contests, at least in 1976. It had Britain's first – and therefore 'biggest and best' – dry ski slope. Despite this, Somerset's skiers have underachieved badly at the Winter Olympics.

  In my desultory mental sketchbook, Devon is clotted cream, the Lib Dem heartland of the English Riviera and little cottages. On a recent trip to Plymouth, though, I saw at first hand in their native habitat that relatively new British social group, the urban yokel, or if you prefer, rural chavs – fifteen pimply youths in Burberry caps and Henri Lloyd jackets, racing their Golf GTIs at high speed round a deserted multi-storey car park in a mildly threatening manner. Once you get to Cornwall, it really is a foreign country and all the better for it, more Brittany than Britain, strange and remote, with names taken from witches' spells like Zennor and Mevagissey. Sadly, even this Arthurian land is not untouched by twenty-first-century malaises. If you visit Land's End, and well worth it it is, too, you can pay three quid to park your car and be ushered into 'a range of award-winning undercover exhibitions and attractions' or you can walk half a mile to the actual Land's End, get wet and blown about, look down at the churning waves (resisting that odd compulsion to leap off) and throw bits of sandwich to the gulls. On the day of my visit, every other car was unloading its visitors into the various Land's End 'experiences'.

  That's about it for me and the south, then. Every generation, the people of the northern diaspora fan out across southern Britain, like the arrows at the start of Dad's Army, in search of work and the like, but unless we put down very deep and gnarly roots most of us never really get the hang of it and are always prone to Des-style mix-ups between Chippenham and Chipping Norton, Canning Town and Camden Town, Hertfordshire and Herefordshire.

  There's one part of the south, however, that northerners do know, and are both simultaneously drawn to and repelled by like moths in cloth caps. It's a place they hate to love and love to hate. They may work there, play there, spend their lives there, but they are never really from there; their heart is in the misty north, as they will tell you in their flat and honest vowels, tears in their eyes, after a third rose-petal bellini at the Groucho Club.

  Like Doctor Who, Doctor Fox and Miami Sound Machine's Doctor Beat, Doctor Johnson was not a real doctor. He'd have been no good with your plague, scurvy or ague though he would have undoubtedly been top of eighteenth-century medical league tables when it came to elegant aphorisms. One of his most famous is: 'When a man is tired of London he is tired of life.'

  Not necessarily true, though, is it? Yes, you may be tired of life but you may just be tired of the Northern Line, the shit drivers, the overpriced paninis, the guns, the congestion charge, the automated ticket barriers, the Hanger Lane gyratory and Chelski.

  Wordsworth famously said of the view from Westminster Bridge that 'earth has not anything to show more fair'. This is mental, particularly from someone who lived in the Lake District, where there is something more fair around every hummock. I mean, it's all right. There's a big, greasy-looking river and some tugs and the odd dredger. There's the London Eye, a piece of London that is forever Blackpool, and there's the rather handsome old GLC building. On the other side there's a couple of flash office blocks and Big Ben, of course. So, all in all, you know, pretty good but
'earth has not anything to show more fair'? Mental. And Wordsworth was the one who wasn't doing all the drugs. His mate Thomas De Quincey, who was whacked off his gourd on opium most of the time and didn't care who knew it, put it rather differently: 'A duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.' Another Lake poet chum, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was even harsher: 'Hell is a city much like London.' I wouldn't go that far but I, like most northerners, maintain a cordial suspicion of 'the Smoke', even though I must have spent months of my life there since my first visit, which was on Saturday 28 April 1973.

  Amazing powers of recall? Tragic hoarder of youthful diaries? Neither. Many northerners, maybe most, can tell you the date of their first trip to the capital. They can tell you what they were wearing as well – probably some multicoloured scarf, bobble hat, daft wig or replica shirt ensemble – because for most of us our first time is for the football. Up Wembley Way to the Twin Towers and thence inside a really quite crap football stadium.