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In the 70s and 80s there was a fad amongst well-to-do socialites in my country where they would include a working-class northerner on their guest list. Preferably an angry working-class poet or playwright.
*shrugs* showing their progressive streak :p
Total drift here, but I recall this one time (...at band camp, obviously) I went for an interview at Christ Church College, in Canterbury, in the South. It as an open day and interviews for potential new students. I was 17, so this would have been around 1989. Out of the 60 or 70 youngsters at the open day for the School of English, I was one of maybe 5 northerners. I was certainly one of the very few whose parents weren't at least nominally loaded.
I felt like a I had a sudden insight into what it must be like for that one black kid in class, or that one Asian family on the block. The southern kids were asking the most ridiculous questions about 'life in the north'. About what food we ate, and whether or not we had indoor toilets. And it was probably two parts mockery to one part curiosity, but I remember feeling a little like some strange zoo exhibit. Like they were faintly surprised that i didn't wear clogs and work in t'mills. Most of them referenced 'Coronation Street' and wanted to know if that was what our lives were like. They kept asking me to say particular words and then falling about laughing at the sound of them.
They expressed surprise that both my Mother and Father were in work. Angry tv programmes and plays had convinced them that everyone in the North was either unemployed or well on the way to being unemployed.
A very peculiar feeling to find oneself feeling foreign in one's own country.
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