Boxing the compass

[shewhomust]

A Wee Home from Home is at Northern Stage, which is celebrating its 40th birthday with a season of meditations on northernness. The theatre has actually been known as Northern Stage since it reopened in 2006: for most of those forty years it was either the University Theatre or the Playhouse. Ambivalent, moi? You bet. I don't think my feelings about northernness will fit into their interactive questionnaire.

For a start, how often do I think of myself as northern? Not often, and mostly when I'm visiting family and friends in London. I admit I had a twinge the other morning, lying in bed listening to someone on the radio how the French region of Nord-Pas de Calais were promoting themselves as the south of the south of England, and would love to involve themselves in the 2012 Olympics. "They're welcome," I thought. "Anyway, they're closer to London than we are." Yet when I'm in the north of France, I'm more likely to think how northern it feels than how southern: the red-brick terraces, the post-industrial, post-mining communities, the beer...

Mostly, though, when I'm in Durham, I don't think of myself as being from the north, I'm from here, the centre of the compass. I'm more likely to tell people I'm an Essex girl (another partial truth) than claim to be northern. By inclination, I'm as likely to holiday further north as further south: but I'd hardly tell a Shetlander or an Icelander that I'm northern, would I? (Not that Iceland is as far north as I thought. In Norway I have been within the Arctic Circle, but to cross that line in Iceland I would have had to take the ferry to one small island; the country as a whole is further south and further west than I thought).

At the post-play discussion, the host asked Frank McConnell whether he regarded himself as northern. He replied that he came originally from Glasgow, but now lived much of the time on - Uist, I think it was; one of the Western Isles, anyway. He was, in other words, tactful about not choosing the word 'northern' to describe himself to someone who did lay claim to the term, despite being based well to the south of him. On the other hand, looked at from within Scotland, Glasgow is part of the great southern conurbation.

It's all relative, in other words. Newcastle, at 55° north, is in the north of England, which lies to the south of Scotland, but further north than anywhere in the US except Alaska (that's hard to take in: in my mind if we fly due west across the Atlantic, we land in New York, or maybe Boston. I know this isn't so, but I have to keep reminding myself). But we want to be northern, because there's a virtue in it - and that's a whole other can of worms.

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I feel very northern, born in Staffordshire with roots in Newcastle, Aberdeen, Hawick and Lincolnshire. I wonder whether there is a genetic difference between the Vikings, the Saxons and the Celts. Sometimes I think it is about hardship and the industrial revolution and the satanic mills. Certainly here in Henley on Thames I feel very much like an outsider with no common heritage.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I can imagine that Henley would bring out the northerner in anyone; but I wonder whether feeling like an outsider is something to which some of us are naturally disposed?

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

There's a wonderful exchange in an early Professionals episode where Cowley is interrogating a minor villain trying to get at the names of the people behind what appears to be a terrorist attack. The villain says they are from the North. Cowley starts demanding which country, and the villain looks at him with total contempt and says, something like, "Not Arctic North, North of England North!"

Which sums it up really. North is a state of mind.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

North is a state of mind.

As in "Lots of planets have a north!" Yes, I think that's the thing...

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

This was a fascinating post for many reasons, some likely obvious. Seeing Brits evaluate each other by their place of birth/upbringing (heck, especially by their speech patterns) is really interesting to a person who came from the outside.

Americans might have similar prejudices at the extremes (someone from Texas would be expected to be a certain way, someone from the deep south another, a Californian would be stereotyped, as would a New Englander) but I can't say that Americans habitually judge each other as harshly or minutely, IME. And IME we don't judge as harshly wrt speech patterns or accents with the US. Maybe because it's hard to judge someone as 'them' when there are so many 'thems' and rarely are there many of 'us'. We're a melting pot, or a tossed salad, after all. But people are people and we will find ways to classify and look for patterns.

I do remember experiencing what UK southerners thought of Northerners (when i lived in Harlow) and vice versa (in Durham). No one was ever kind. And I always, always felt like my being American carried its own value judgment. As did being a readhead/ginger...

Geez, people can be mean. ;-/

I might be rambling...but still I found your post fascinating. And you're correct; you in Durham are a lot further north than most of the US. -)

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Oh, ramble away, that was really interested.

You think Americans are less accent-conscious than we are? That's a surprise, in some ways, because you do have such a rich variety of regional accents. It would explain why someone in a department store in Boston once tried to persuade me to take out a store card, and didn't immediately see why I said, no, we lived too far from any of their stores to find it useful.

There's a related thing, that the US seems to take names from all different sources very much in its stride, while people in the UK will automatically see names as difficult, exotic or foreign...