By ’eck lad, one’s got a degree in ecky thump tha knows

Jul 18 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

IT’S hard to take being Northern for granted. There’s always someone pointing out that all space outside the capital is a wasteland of eternal downpour, where crumbly cheese and fruit cake go together like Terry and June, and accents are less comprehensible than the Satanic Verses.

Meanwhile, those living above the invisible line that separates everything south of Birmingham from the nether lands in which we reside, are constantly obliged to defend their territory in a verbal version of the Battle of Powick Bridge.

I am constantly explaining – in e-mails that I hope have the stern but kindly tone of a middle-aged infant teacher, but that are probably undis- guised in their exasperation – that while I’m sure the school fete/trampolining chimpanzee/child that got its head stuck down the toilet in Rutland is a fascinating tale, the “Liverpool” Daily Post does not cover the Midlands.

And on one occasion I was forced to counter the argument that it was a disgrace that a certain world-renowned artist had chosen to exhibit his work outside London, particularly somewhere so far off the radar as Merseyside.

Despite these frustrations, I would expect few people to see the North as a place so distant and exotic that it would be necessary to study a degree on the subject.

Yet this is precisely the opportunity that Leeds Metropolitan University is offering its students – a one-year Master of Arts course in Northern Studies, causing those with a fetish for flat hats or enthusiasm for Eccles cakes to play a celebratory um-pah-pah on their euphonium.

Not since Plymouth University launched its degree in the science of surfing has there been such a public response to a new academic course, with critics joking that it will include modules on whippet keeping and colliery brass bands.

But Professor Tony Collins, of LMU, insists it will have nothing to do with clichés and will instead focus on culture, politics and history, with time given to exploring what gives the North its identity.

What being Northern consists of – other than being born and bred in a particular geographical area – is not something I’ve spent much time pondering, especially as it seems to be mainly based on other people’s assumptions rather than our own.

Few people I know (other than my Dad and our own David Charters) wear flat hats, and you’d have to have a very sour tooth not to appreciate an Eccles cake when it’s served to you with a steaming cup of tea so I – along with most people in the North, I would assume – have never related to those stereotypes.

Degree programmes on sections of the world’s population are nothing new – American Studies and Women’s Studies are now regularly found in university prospectuses – but this is believed to be the first time a course has existed that studies “Northernness”.

Interestingly, the University of Exeter has a long-established course in Cornish Studies – including Pasty Baking for Beginners, the Origins of Clotted Cream, and Arthurian Legend for Dummies perhaps? – and Cardiff University recently launched a department for study of Welsh culture and history in the Americas.

But it’s still strange to imagine lecture theatres filled with students defining what it is to be me or you – actual living people, as if we were the subjects of an anthropological study usually confined to indigenous peoples in far-off places with unpronounceable names, not those living in cities like Leeds or Liverpool, or even in the Cumbrian hills.

And the idea that there is something in our psyches that make us specifically “Northern” – that makes me have more in common with a farmer in Scarborough than my London-born flesh and blood cousins, and makes a Liverpool FC fan and a Manchester United fan part of the same clan – is vaguely uncomfortable.

Then again, in a world where the explosion of the multimedia industry has led to French pop-stars singing with an American accent and Japanese teenagers wearing Westwood, perhaps we have to search a bit harder to find what makes us distinct.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk