Pies and Prejudice: Part Deux

 I've been reading Stuart Maconie's "Pies and Prejudice", his attempt to investigate what it means to be a Northerner in the early part of the 21st Century (the book was written in 2007). I've read it before but I don't recall being quite so annoyed with it. In part, it's his voice: chippy, pedantic, arms folded and not-having-it. He has the peculiar stylistic tic of scattering pot-shots in passing, as though only the things he holds dear have worth, and everything outside that narrow ribbon of approval is palpably ludicrous. 

Looking quite Northern, there. 

Then there's the first forty pages of the book. Maconie is tribalist and reductive with it, so his first attempt to describe what the North is is to define what it isn't, and that's The South. The South is the baddie in this book. It's a black Top Hat versus a white flat cap. I grew up in the south but I don't really recognise the land mapped out here: "There Be Dragoons of Interior Designers". Maconie's South consists mainly of Guildford and Highgate. The people there are unfriendly, and don't talk to each other on public transport or in the Post Office queue. His south is populated by Chelsea Pensioners and Pearly Kings and East end gangsters and all of them love the Queen in a pious and unquestioning way, something that could never happen in the North. They feast on quail's eggs and granola and sneer at the honest decency of the working North, while riding a unicycle through Shoreditch, dressed as someone from the Commedia Dell'arte. 

Now. 

I lived in London for 15 years and never met a Chelsea Pensioner or a Pearly King, though Maconie has them Lambeth-walking with cockney flower sellers down Carnaby Street like an Austin Powers credit sequence. I lived in the South of England for 25 years before that, but none of the places I knew, or the people I knew, feature in his world-view: Basingstoke, Winchester, Farnham, Reading, Portslade, Mile Oak. Only Brighton gets a passing mention - a haven for "dance instructors and resting actors" apparently. Defensively he calls his home town a "hick town" before going on to list its civic and sporting achievements, and a list of famous people from there. Nevertheless, it doesn't stop people from "Guildford" laughing at it. Wigan is a byword for pokey provincialism, he claims. 

It isn't, Stuart. No one is laughing at Wigan. Why would they? You want a byword for a shitty hometown? I'm from Basingstoke, mate - you have nothing. We were the lazy butt of every joke in the 80's and beyond. You expound at length about the history of your home-town, I can't do that. It doesn't have one. When I arrived there in 1984 it was a twenty year old shopping centre, built into a car park, built into a series or roundabouts. The town centre was a flyblown concrete concourse full of shoe shops and travel agents and smelt of chlorine from the gigantic cigarette shaped chimney next to the sports centre and the Wimpy bar. We were a New Town, born to be razed and re-built, a physical palimpsest scribbled over and over again, as though the town planning were done on an etch-a-sketch. It's not much like Highgate. Most of the south is made up of places like this: desperate, failing conurbations, adjacent to lush green hills owned by rich people you don't know. 

I love the North. The more time I spend there, the more I like it. The landscape is incredible. It isn't always raining. The people are nice. The beer's great. And culturally too, I love the North. Almost all my touchstones are from there: The League of Gentlemen, Alan Bennett, Victoria Wood, Rising Damp, John Shuttleworth. There's often a strange softness to the comedy. It's conversational, rich with the scarcity of the mundane. It's human, gossipy, precise, it draws you in. It allows you in, even if you're  Southern. The music I grew up with was all from the North too. I always hated those London punks and it wasn't until Suede turned up that I could unequivocally like a band which had an accent like mine (unless you count The Wurzels). I've lived a long time in the company of Northerners, and I've felt the traditional Southerner's envy of not being where it's at. The south feels like a cultural desert at times. Standing in our benighted shire looking on to the buzz and energy of the city and feeling you'll never be as vital and energetic, never as real as those swaggering toughs from Manchester. Where I lived we were jealous of Reading. Bands from Basingstoke claimed to be from there. For the kudos of being from Reading. Imagine it. 

Maconie even trots out the whiskery canard that the softness of Southerners is reflected in our grassy, chalky landscape as opposed to the tough limestone of the North or the volcanic rock of the lake district, an idea I last heard espoused in a Fry and Laurie sketch about twatty businessmen in the 1980's. 

Even the colour of his beard is used as proof of his Northern exceptionalism: he has a ginger beard and this ties him to the Scandinavian place names that litter the North. He is of salt-flecked, seafaring stock. I suspect the fact that his name is Stuart Maconie might have something more to do with his gingery-ness. *

The writer describes the bad food he ate growing up in the North as character building and unusual,  as if poor people in the South were dining nightly on swan. Swan Vesta, perhaps. There's been a food revolution in this country and it's relatively recent. Everyone ate terrible food all the time - it was what there was. The British were known for it and we still are. Look at all those those pink tattooed chaps tucking into a Full English in Benidorm cafes. Our national cuisine is still offal and salt based. I love food, but I didn't really learn to cook until my thirties. My mum hated cooking and it showed. But there wasn't a culture of food then - it was fuel. It was a necessary evil. It was house keeping money and the washing up - there was never a sense that it was meant to be a pleasure. It was calorific stop-gap to ward off death. Some rich people went to restaurants and ate unpronounceable gourmandises, but I was over-joyed with the occasional Findus Crispy Pancake. Butterscotch Angel Delight might be the most amazing thing I'd ever tasted. Maconie's ten years older than me. That's an extra ten years in the trenches without a pannini to call his own. He may have been nearly forty before he ate a decent meal. He may well be institutionalised. He can't even deal with olives. That's a gateway food, Stuart. 

This book is nearly twenty years old. A lot's changed and it's not Maconie's fault. He couldn't have seen the Jimmy Saville stuff, or that bloke who used to jump around on weather maps on This Morning. I'm assuming his continued praise of Morrissey causes him to wince a bit now. He thought at the time that the pan-English hysteria that met the death of Princess Diana was a blip, though it now seems to be our permanent setting. And he couldn't have foreseen Brexit, which must have really crushed his certainties about the innate decency of the Northern people. Brexit has proved we're all as bad as each other.

Or so I thought. I looked up the reviews for the book to see if I was the only one who felt this way, and the reviews ran the gamut. There are a lot of five star reviews - this on Amazon, btw, the great democracy - but there are a lot of one star reviews as well. Obviously, I'm interested in the one star reviews - it's not a one star book - but I'm interested in people's criticisms. Oh dear. I thought people might be miffed with his latent definition of the North being, ultimately, "not the South". No. 

Some of them thought he was smug. Some thought he was "up himself" for using "big words". Some wrote long essays declaring he wasn't funny in ways that proved he was infinitely funnier that his critics. A tiny minority were pissed off with his characterisation of the south being just posh people or "that London". But the vast majority of them complained about his political views. It's the same old "can't you just keep politics out of it" crew who have colonised every public space, with their chat about "wokeness" and "libtardery". I felt betrayed. The left wing bits I liked. You can't keep politics out of it if you're talking about a North/South divide. If you're talking about the Industrial Revolution. If you're talking about money from the slave trade. If you're talking about Victorian Industrialists and the slums they built. It's inherently political. The cultural life of the North of England is all informed by being over-looked, marginalised, fobbed off. The art and culture comes exactly from this space. It wasn't just Southerners saying this either - a lot of the reviews started "Well, I'm from the North but..." It was grim to watch North and South united in calling out Maconie's socialism. 

I liked it. It was all the bits reducing me and all my friends to a cockney-knees up-toff-off-his-face-on-avocado-toast-and-squatting-in-my-rotting-mansion-in-Stepney-cum-Hamstead-never-talking-to-my-neighbour-on-the-red-London-bus that put me off. The stuff about the birth of Communism and the Peterloo massacre was great.      

I know a lot of really nice people from the South, Stuart. I know a lot of nice people from the North. I now live in a different country and know nice people from here too. And I know this is a book about the North, but it doesn't mean you get to invent the South as the perfect foil, your best enemy. The South already is that - you don't have to say we're all Tory voting Pearly Kings choking on our jellied eels while simultaneously being Russian Oligarchs and the landed gentry. You know it's not true.  You're better than that, Stuart. I know we are. 

*I was assuming that Maconie was a Scottish or Irish name, but when I looked up the etymology I can't find anything for it all. There are hardly any Maconies out there. Could it be a corruption of Mackenzie? He might be French for all I know. He's not a Viking, I know that much. Higgins means "Viking". In Irish. We know our own.