It depends where you live

Well I hope it's not such a dirty town now janea although it still has areas not so nice,but I believe she came from Hazel Grove and chose her name from Bakewell Road very near to me, where she grew up, and strove to lose her northern accent when she went to Cambridge,However we are trying very hard to lose the image of the cloth caps and the whippets and call mushy peas petit pois puree now.

Sounds like a Brit version of clafoutis - a batter with fruit dropped in it and then cooked.

@trisha - My mother - a Londoner who made wonderful Yorkshire puddings - would often make a sweet version, with dried fruit in it, as a dessert - scrumptious! She also used to make a variant on the bread pudding we all loved, steaming it in a basin, and serving it with butter and caster sugar...
Oh dear - just realising how I miss it!

Alea I think people of Melvyn's era did feel they had to de-accent themselves.
I heard Joan Bakewell, who grew up in Stockport, describe how when she went to Cambridge in the 50's she made the mistake of volunteering to 'do the pots'.
No-one else realised she meant she would do the washing-up, and you would never guess, listening to her now, that she had grown up in my dirty old home town.

When I was in Cornwall in the 60s, the lorry drivers on the harbour at Par would address me, a bearded bloke in his mid twenties, as 'My handsome' or 'My lover'. Sometimes even 'My bird'...

When we first came back from Kenya, we spent 8 months in Devon where ex had a temporary job. Spending evenings at a country pub was like being in another country! When DS1 was born, the midwives addressed me as 'my lover'.

sugar butties oh Yum. We also had Golden Syrup on bread and butter. My dad liked a Yorkshire pudding kept until he had finished his main course and served with Golden Syrup for pudding. He introduced my DCs to this. something they remember to this day.

Here in Devon they say "Me beauty" and a girl is maid and cup of taa very difficult to write down exactly how it sounds but its very broad . When i lived up north it was brew the tea other places it's mash the tea and again seep the tea. when i was little and we came from the north to live in Devon my mother sent my sister and me to elocution lessons to get rid of our accents. But even i have to ask the local country folk to speak slowly or your can't understand them. I say bus but buzz is common too. Really interesting thread

Melwyn Bragg describes the need to get rid of one's Northern accent (I think he was from lancashire) in his book on the English language


Oh dear!!
Melvyn Bragg, he of the hair, is from Carlisle in Cumbria!!

When we lived in Shropshire I used to catch the buzz to town and flipping hard work it was with a double buggy, a toddler and a really unhelpful conductor who tutted the whole time while he watched me struggle.

Re the buzz - I think it was Anne Diamond who said she realised she should modify her accent when when she saw her (presumably Southern) friends' faces at her cry of 'Come on, buzz!'

Oh, those tiny tins of condensed milk! Eaten with a teaspoon. Irresistible. A true childhood treat.

Lifelong Brummie, never heard of a house with a 'vestibule' rather than a hall.
Wondering why the midday meals provided in state schools were, from the beginning, called 'school dinners'. On the other hand I've never heard of 'packed dinners' being brought to school or on school trips!

That was a conny onny butty in our house.

If we had no conny onny we got a sugar butty. Now that was a treat, cos sugar had just come off ration!

@Ana How do you feel about a Condensed Milk Sandwich?

And yes, sand-witch, not sammich or samwich...

@mrsmopp - I had forgotten about blind scouse - sounds almost as bad as Issy Bonn's Shadow Soup - you put a pot of water on to boil, then got a chicken to fly over it - Shadow Soup!

A friend from Liverpool told me how to make Scouse when I was first married.

Her recipe was to put the ingredients from any tins you had, left over veggies etc., into a casserole dish and top it off with red cabbage. It was one of the first meals I made for OH - he loved it.

She did say to use a tin of minced beef but it was optional. It's one of those nourishing meals born from hard times. We need more recipes like this these days.

My mum made an apple sponge using cooking apples and sponge cake mixture. It was really quick to make. She also made a delicious Welsh Rarebit but I've lost the recipe. It involved custard powder and mustard and was absolutely lush (as we say down my way.)

Feetle. There was also blind scouse for when money was short.
The scouse had no meat in it.
It was a staple dish in our house, served with either red cabbage or beetroot separately.
Its great. I still make it!

Dinner- Dinna
Tea- Tea (what ya have oot of a cup)
Sweet- something yer buy at the sweet shop
Pudding- puddn
Going to London- No thanks
Pet- love or lamb
Sandwich- sandwich or butty

DH is from Yorkshire (Bronte country actually) but has lived here in Geordieland for over 40 years. He speaks with a strange Geord-shire accent. He sounds Geordie to the untrained ear but then lets slip with the occasional word. For example he doesn't use the hard "A" as a proppa Geordie and never uses Geordie slang. "Like whot ah dey".

@GrandmaKT - Interesting to see the two terms in our list, lobby and scouse - I believe the original Scandinavian term is 'lobscouse'.

Nelliemoser's "Lobby" is obviously from the same origin.

mrsmopp reminded me that I have friends that say "uzz" whereas I say "us"

Anno that is exactly the same with me. It is generally considered that I don't have a Yorkshire accent, and I can't hear it myself until, like you, I hear our answerphone message. DH is Welsh, but has been away from home for so long that he doesn't have the accent anymore - until he visits his family. Then it surfaces, usually for the duration of the visit and then it goes back in its box! It is not something he does consciously. Most people he meets 'up 'ere' don't consider that he has an accent of any kind - in short, that he is posh because he says paath and baath and never drops his h's!

Isn't there a programme on about Melvyn Bragg this week? I loved his book 'Speak for England'.

I knew someone who called a bus a buzz. "I got the buzz here." Wonder what part of the country says that?