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I was born in Newcastle under Lyme in Staffordshire, England. It gets confused with Newcastle upon Tyne but that's further north and bigger. It's in an area known as the Potteries or the Five Towns; Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, all those have their kilns here.
Arnold Bennett wrote about us. If you like humour, find his book, 'The Card' about an enterprising young lad from the Five Towns who goes from rags to riches in his own way.
The Five Towns doesn't include Newcastle though; we're separate and proud of it.In the seventies we celebrated our octocentenary; 800 years since John O Gaunt gave us our charter and we became a town. New Castle; the ruins are not even recognisable but they're still there in the form of stone fragments.
Or football team is Stoke City (and I suppose Port Vale but we don't talk about them, heh). Stoke were once big; they're one of the oldest football teams in the country, but they're languishing of late. Ah, well.
We're also famous for our oatcakes. From a web site;
"The Oatcake is a regional delicacy, which is little known outside North Staffordshire. As far back as 1776 James Boswell recorded his first impression of the Oatcake when he accompanied his friend Dr Samuel Johnson on a visit to Lichfield. He compared them to his native variety as he duly reported ""Oatcakes not hard as in Scotland, but soft like Yorkshire cake, served with breakfast"
They're like crepes but tougher, you lie them flat under the grill(broiler) with slices of cheese on them and maybe mushrooms, wait until the cheese melts, squirt a blob of tomato ketchup on them, roll them up and serve with bacon, eggs, baked beans...or you can have them with jam instead of savoury.
They're made for you in little oatcake shops,in the middle of a row of terrace houses, open just a few hours a week. You walk in and they pour the batter onto the counter, cooking them in fron tof you on a slab of metal. Then you get six in a bag, and maybe some pikelets, little thicker pancakes with raisins in.
I've seen oatcakes in southern supermarkets but by and large, you just get them in a twenty mile radius of Newcastle. When my parents visit, they bring four packets, frozen, in their hold luggage. By the time they get from Newcastle to Ontario, they're still frozen. Amazing.
We have a dialect, second oldest in the country, dying out now. I never really spoke it but even so when I started going out with David, I had lots of stick from his friends in Monmouth ( posh little town, a mile into Wales). In Canada everyone thinks my accent is cute. In the UK, anything other than BBC English marks you down. Having a stubborn streak, I refused to change one little bit and I remeber impassioned arguments about why it's a 'book' not a 'buck'. It's sobering to think that Monmouth is 100 miles from Newcastle and they would have had trouble understanding me if I had spoken Potteries. In fact, when I started uni, my room mate came from Walsall, about 30 miles from me and I really did have to keep asking her to repeat things. For a small country, we're diverse.
Here's a bit about the dialect:
North Staffordshire dialect has many similarities to the language of Chaucer and the earlier Anglo-Saxon and so has a more complex set of rules of grammar than modern English. Some examples of this follow:
"Cost remember me tellin' thee abite that greet big ginger mare wot was frittened with that steym-injin an' welly kilt me?" said Jabez. "Well, ar was thinkin' abite that mare th'other dee an' ar remembered as 'er once brok a bloke's leg an' then seeved 'is leyfe.
That's home. Potteries, pits, steel works...and some beautiful countryside. I miss it but it's been a long time since I lived there now; I left in 1990. Going back as a vistor just isn't the same.
Arnold Bennett wrote about us. If you like humour, find his book, 'The Card' about an enterprising young lad from the Five Towns who goes from rags to riches in his own way.
The Five Towns doesn't include Newcastle though; we're separate and proud of it.In the seventies we celebrated our octocentenary; 800 years since John O Gaunt gave us our charter and we became a town. New Castle; the ruins are not even recognisable but they're still there in the form of stone fragments.
Or football team is Stoke City (and I suppose Port Vale but we don't talk about them, heh). Stoke were once big; they're one of the oldest football teams in the country, but they're languishing of late. Ah, well.
We're also famous for our oatcakes. From a web site;
"The Oatcake is a regional delicacy, which is little known outside North Staffordshire. As far back as 1776 James Boswell recorded his first impression of the Oatcake when he accompanied his friend Dr Samuel Johnson on a visit to Lichfield. He compared them to his native variety as he duly reported ""Oatcakes not hard as in Scotland, but soft like Yorkshire cake, served with breakfast"
They're like crepes but tougher, you lie them flat under the grill(broiler) with slices of cheese on them and maybe mushrooms, wait until the cheese melts, squirt a blob of tomato ketchup on them, roll them up and serve with bacon, eggs, baked beans...or you can have them with jam instead of savoury.
They're made for you in little oatcake shops,in the middle of a row of terrace houses, open just a few hours a week. You walk in and they pour the batter onto the counter, cooking them in fron tof you on a slab of metal. Then you get six in a bag, and maybe some pikelets, little thicker pancakes with raisins in.
I've seen oatcakes in southern supermarkets but by and large, you just get them in a twenty mile radius of Newcastle. When my parents visit, they bring four packets, frozen, in their hold luggage. By the time they get from Newcastle to Ontario, they're still frozen. Amazing.
We have a dialect, second oldest in the country, dying out now. I never really spoke it but even so when I started going out with David, I had lots of stick from his friends in Monmouth ( posh little town, a mile into Wales). In Canada everyone thinks my accent is cute. In the UK, anything other than BBC English marks you down. Having a stubborn streak, I refused to change one little bit and I remeber impassioned arguments about why it's a 'book' not a 'buck'. It's sobering to think that Monmouth is 100 miles from Newcastle and they would have had trouble understanding me if I had spoken Potteries. In fact, when I started uni, my room mate came from Walsall, about 30 miles from me and I really did have to keep asking her to repeat things. For a small country, we're diverse.
Here's a bit about the dialect:
North Staffordshire dialect has many similarities to the language of Chaucer and the earlier Anglo-Saxon and so has a more complex set of rules of grammar than modern English. Some examples of this follow:
"Cost remember me tellin' thee abite that greet big ginger mare wot was frittened with that steym-injin an' welly kilt me?" said Jabez. "Well, ar was thinkin' abite that mare th'other dee an' ar remembered as 'er once brok a bloke's leg an' then seeved 'is leyfe.
That's home. Potteries, pits, steel works...and some beautiful countryside. I miss it but it's been a long time since I lived there now; I left in 1990. Going back as a vistor just isn't the same.