I'm Out

No. I've not been behind bars. In fact I've not even been in bars. I've been in hospital for my routine kidney stent change. Mind you that was only a small part of my two weeks away. During those two weeks I stayed with a dear friend (with whom I usually stay when in the Glasgow and whom I originally met in New Zealand in 2006 because our two families were friends). As always we did lots of things including seeing Mozart's Requiem at The City Halls, a cinema simultaneous live performance of Mozart's opera Don Giovani from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and we also went to a Scottish Opera  Mozart and The Bard (Burns) workshop.

Glasgow is a wonderful city and very reminiscent of the city of my birth, Liverpool. Both were built on shipbuilding and trade and were, 'in their day', cities of great wealth and centres of culture and homes to a large and varied immigrant population largely used in its building and construction industries. Both have had a renaissance.

One day we went to the West End for coffee in Byers Road. Byers Road is in the centre of 'studentland' being near the University and a large student population. It's always been a great place to explore and eat and I've been very familiar with it since the late 80's when our elder child started University there. I go there often. We had coffee in Café Françoise

It was NOT a day for sitting outside

We'd missed the breakfast rush

Studentland encourages a slightly more 'alternative' approach

Dialects

In his post on 2 March entitled Pinpointing, Yorkshire Pudding drew attention to a survey which claimed to determine where one was brought up (in the British Isles or the USA) from the words one uses and how one pronounces them - one's dialect. It pinpointed YP perfectly.

I was intrigued. I was born and brought up in Liverpool. There is an old joke about Liverpool back in my youth before any people from the Indian sub-continent lived there (they all lived in the mill towns of central Lancashire).  The joke was that if you were a Liverpudlian you were Liverpool Irish, Liverpool Welsh, Liverpool Scottish, Liverpool West Indian, Liverpool Chinese (Liverpool has the oldest ethnic Chinese community in Europe) or Liverpool Jewish. It was rumoured that there were Liverpool English but no-one had ever met one.

After I left home I lived in Cheshire until I came to the Isle of Lewis in the far north west of Scotland 44 years ago. Since then I have usually been taken for someone from the South of England. If you are a Northerner there are few greater insults. Well that's not quite true, as a Lancastrian it's a greater insult to call me a Yorkshireman. 

However I went to a small private prep school and was subjected to elocution by a French lady teacher. My parents didn't have particularly Liverpool accents. Neither do I. I do, however, use many Liverpool words from my childhood.

When I took the first part of the quiz it came up with the following results:

After my full quiz with the additional questions it came up with a slightly more refined result.

 The one thing it definitely shows is that I have no dialectic link to the South of England.

There's a British version of the quiz. Go here. And there's also an American version. Go here.