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| Image courtesy of James Longhorn |
It’s Yorkshire day - the day that the Mail, the BBC, Buzzfeed and all the other bastions of marketo-media bullshit take the opportunity to bombard us with pictures of flat caps, whippets and other relics of a Yorkshire culture that was last relevant before your grandparents were born.
See I hate Yorkshire day, I hate Yorkshire day because Yorkshire actually feels pretty good to me right now. After several years of my own personal post-recession hurt – having been on the dole, without any aims, longing for a life outside the post-industrial Leeds shitscape – I finally feel like things are on the up.
There’s no denying that the north was battered by the recession – jobless, skint, flagging behind the south in recovery – reverting to the “grim up north” archetype that it seemed 90s regeneration had done away with. But it’s over now, or at least it’s coming to an end.
Right now Yorkshire is buzzing. High off sunshine, cycler’s latex and pint after pint after pint. We’re heading into August off the back of one of the biggest cross-county raves in years – Tour de France, Tramlines, the Sculpture Park. The eyes of the world are on us.
The nostalgic 'parkin and Emmerdale' view of Yorkshire life that Yorkshire Day represents is a denial of this. A denial of these current realities of life in the county. It’s a mixmash of ee-bah-gum stereotypes and stuff that never happened. It says nothing to nobody about most peoples’ lives in the county.
If you took the assumptions the hype around Yorkshire Day at face value you’d think that the life of anyone under 35 consisted of drinking John Smith to bonk remixes of Ilkley Moor Bah'tat, before stumbling home to chips and gravy. It’s a marketer’s wet dream of Yorkshire. But it’s self-perpetuated.
It’d be nice to think of Yorkshire Day as having been dreamt up in the south, but the truth is that whilst Buzzfeed might be running their quizzes asking, "How northern are you?" from their London postcode, it’s you and your northern mates sharing the shitty copy.
Why?
If there’s one stereotype of Yorkshire people that rings true, it’s the understated mentality. A ‘best not to brag’, self-deprecating way of thinking which ensures Yorkshire stills appears from the outside to be the world of Billy Liar – a world where success still means moving away, a world where ‘elsewhere’ is the place we aspire to go and home represents a continued, dull existence.
If Yorkshire is to move forward we need to break away from this mentality, we need to stop clinging to and perpetuating an archaic ‘Yorkshire Day’ identity. An identity born out of self-deprecation, us choosing to laugh at ourselves- pretending we’re all “ey’up”s and Yorkshire pudding, rather than the inhabitants of the banging northern metropolises we are.
Yes. It’s grim up north, it’s grim that you keep chatting this same boring Yorkshire Day shit.
See I hate Yorkshire day, I hate Yorkshire day because Yorkshire actually feels pretty good to me right now. After several years of my own personal post-recession hurt – having been on the dole, without any aims, longing for a life outside the post-industrial Leeds shitscape – I finally feel like things are on the up.
There’s no denying that the north was battered by the recession – jobless, skint, flagging behind the south in recovery – reverting to the “grim up north” archetype that it seemed 90s regeneration had done away with. But it’s over now, or at least it’s coming to an end.
Right now Yorkshire is buzzing. High off sunshine, cycler’s latex and pint after pint after pint. We’re heading into August off the back of one of the biggest cross-county raves in years – Tour de France, Tramlines, the Sculpture Park. The eyes of the world are on us.
The nostalgic 'parkin and Emmerdale' view of Yorkshire life that Yorkshire Day represents is a denial of this. A denial of these current realities of life in the county. It’s a mixmash of ee-bah-gum stereotypes and stuff that never happened. It says nothing to nobody about most peoples’ lives in the county.
If you took the assumptions the hype around Yorkshire Day at face value you’d think that the life of anyone under 35 consisted of drinking John Smith to bonk remixes of Ilkley Moor Bah'tat, before stumbling home to chips and gravy. It’s a marketer’s wet dream of Yorkshire. But it’s self-perpetuated.
It’d be nice to think of Yorkshire Day as having been dreamt up in the south, but the truth is that whilst Buzzfeed might be running their quizzes asking, "How northern are you?" from their London postcode, it’s you and your northern mates sharing the shitty copy.
Why?
If there’s one stereotype of Yorkshire people that rings true, it’s the understated mentality. A ‘best not to brag’, self-deprecating way of thinking which ensures Yorkshire stills appears from the outside to be the world of Billy Liar – a world where success still means moving away, a world where ‘elsewhere’ is the place we aspire to go and home represents a continued, dull existence.
If Yorkshire is to move forward we need to break away from this mentality, we need to stop clinging to and perpetuating an archaic ‘Yorkshire Day’ identity. An identity born out of self-deprecation, us choosing to laugh at ourselves- pretending we’re all “ey’up”s and Yorkshire pudding, rather than the inhabitants of the banging northern metropolises we are.
Yes. It’s grim up north, it’s grim that you keep chatting this same boring Yorkshire Day shit.
