Our friends in the north
Published 26 February 2007
Pies and Prejudice: in search of the north
Stuart Maconie Ebury, 338pp, £11.99
ISBN 0091910226
It's impossible not to envy northerners when you're from the Midlands. The Midlands are neither here nor there (well, apart from being in the middle), not north, not south, and Midlanders have no reason to raise fists in anger except to ask God why we couldn't have been born somewhere more exciting. Stuart Maconie, the former NME journalist whose wonderful Lancastrian accent now makes Radio 2 worth listening to, lives in my native West Midlands - perhaps because it gives equal access to Broadcasting House and his beloved Lakes - but his second book is a self-proclaimed love letter to the place that formed him.
On the understanding that his voice is at least one part of his appeal as a DJ, Maconie is literally a professional northerner. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to have been his chief motivation for devoting a whole book to the north country - which, to him, begins at Crewe. No: Pies and Prejudice is a spirited, spirit-lifting defence of northern England against southern snobs, written with enough partisan fire to make everyone but churls and Michael Winner buy a one-way ticket out of Euston.
Winner, he guesses, spouted his opinion that "anything north of Oxford Street is just ridiculous" while his mouth was "full of a rare and cruel pâté made from otters". That's a bit rich coming from someone whose love for black pudding leads him to buy several rings' worth of the congealed blood delicacy from Bury market. But Maconie's writing has the effect of making anyone who reads this book, wherever they're from, feel like an honorary northerner. You are tempted to say: "Ha! Take that, you fool!" to any Clarkson-esque spam-brain who ever dared proclaim the supremacy of the Home Counties over the home of England's beating heart.
The north, states Maconie, is where you'll find true warmth: partly because the rain and cold require northern bodies to make their own central heating (he finds himself battling the elem ents many months after southerners have wheeled out the barbecue), but mainly because its people have been through so much that they've a hard grip on the fundamentals of life. The chapter devoted to Manchester - the city that, in the words of its own sons The Smiths, has "so much to answer for" - feels covered in the literal and moral muck of the industrial revolution, while Maconie's ambivalent appraisal of Liverpool comes down cautiously on the side of its proud, if sentimental, citizens.
That he dwells so much on other people's savage dismissals of the city is possibly in order to balance his self-professed Beatles devotion. He almost, kind of, sort of, agreed with Boris Johnson when the allegedly honourable member claimed that Liverpudlians see "themselves wherever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it". Despite Maconie's rightful antipathy towards Militant and Derek Hatton's grievance-driven leadership of Liverpool council, he can't quite bring himself to cheer the blond buffoon, but that's probably because Johnson is from the south. I don't mind such partisanship: fierce pride is what has kept Scousers going through their city's decades of decline and ridicule.
Maconie's writing is never florid, and if it falls back too often on the kind of pat puns and punchlines that once constituted the NME's house style, it's just as ready to cause uncontrollable snirfling on public transport. I nearly spat Evian (the drink of the accidental southerner) over the person in front of me upon working out how Maconie's friend mispronounced the name of the Lancashire town Clitheroe.
On his travels, he gets called "luv" by hard men in Leeds - although they probably call you "luv" when they're glassing you at closing time - and "sweetheart" more times than he can remember. He also burns the roof of his mouth with the volcanic yolk of an egg oven-bottom muffin, another northern speciality. The role of food in the cultural life of northerners is one of Maconie's favourite subjects. It's not to be laughed at. He elevates pasties and pies, as well as the aforementioned blood pudding, to their correct status as the soul food of the north. He won't let anyone call the latter boudin noir unless they're French.
Maconie's journey through the north is in many ways uneventful, but he packs his book with such telling minutiae that you're left with an impression of the north that's richer and more sustaining than a lifetime of Sunday teatime dramas set in the Dales. (Heartbeat's his mum's favourite, along with Last of the Summer Wine.) He doesn't speak to many people, giving his book the feel of a long and picaresque daydream in which hills roll greenly and mountains jut between quality butchers and branches of Greggs. If you're not a northerner, it'll make you want to be one. In fact, I used to work at Greggs: does that count?
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