It’s grim up north.

This is, to some extent, going to be a thread about doing up an old house.

It is also going to include some family history, personal identity, and just give me a place to write down some things I’ve not got anywhere else to do so. Sorry to say for all you southerners it’s also going to end up as a bit of a love letter to the north, but how it took me years to realise that’s how I really felt.

Now, let’s set the scene.
I grew up in a not particularly affluent area of the north in the late 80s and early 90s. For those familiar with the don valley area, it will need no introduction.
For everyone else, it runs from the steelworks on the industrial fringes of Sheffield and Rotherham, out to where it literally disappears into a swamp out past the isle of axholme, in the carrland (peat moors). It’s a rural area typified at the time by pit villages and coal mining, quarrying, peat extraction and agriculture.
It’s an area that although constantly lumped in with it, often had little to do with Doncaster (it’s administrative town) on a day to day basis. Retford, Gainsborough and Worksop are all just as close, and often favoured as the local ‘town’ by residents.
I didn’t really appreciate it in my youth, and although it’s a landscape heavily scarred by industry, it still manages to be beautiful, historic, and fairly tranquil in a lot of areas.

I’ve got a lot of strings to pull together before we get onto the house itself, so in the meantime make a brew, don your flat cap and slippers, and maybe watch a few episodes of last of the summer wine (the writer lived in my village for quite a few years), the league of gentlemen, or phoenix nights (set wrong side of t’pennies, but SO period correct) to get you in the mood. Those programmes should show you that looking back, growing up on the right side of the Pennines back then really could not be taken seriously 😂

In the meantime, yes that is where the thread title came from. I feel the breakdown at the end where it slides into Jerusalem is me kinda coming of age and realising that the north really is the best end of the country, although it took me a good few years in the south to realise it.