Tuesday, 28 October 2014

Being and Belonging: The New Beige

Where is home?  Has your mind drifted to a childhood image of safety and security, so beloved of our Yorkshire friends?  Someone from Yorkshire can be living anywhere else in the world for most of their lives and yet, somehow ‘home’ is where they are not.  Is this because Yorkshire grit requires its own to be constantly bearing some hardship, and when all else fails not being in Yorkshire is the ultimate hair shirt?  I don’t mean to poke fun at Yorkshire men and women (a behaviour akin to taking a stick to a lion as in that lovely monologue of my youth ‘Albert and the Lion’) but it is something of a stereotype, perhaps one we all accept as gospel.  Home is childhood, a place to go back to.