It’s grim up north.

Which river are we talking here Nick, the Trent? 🤔😉

I'm a child of the Midlands but Mrs Crockpot is from County Durham. She considers the Sheffield area to be South!
We go up to the Durham/Newcastle area as often as we can and I find the people to be a refreshing change to the me-me-me types we see more and more around here.

In for the duration, should be a great read.

this far and this has not been mentioned

Anyone born South of the Tweed is essentially French.

Born approx. latitude 35^o45' south. Now resident 45^o20' south. British/Norse heritage all the way. Def not French.

One day I’m gunna pay to have your DNA and ancestry done in the hope you come back as the direct descendant of a Norman lord 😂

northernpowerhouse.gov.uk/about/

Hope the link works! This is the official Government Northern Powerhouse (joke) map. So it must be true.

As a kid I was always told that anything south of Preston was the South and they either drunk flat beer or shandy down there:)

I work with quite a few "southern" people and they always comment, the further North you go the friendlier it gets

Well as this has proved so popular, I suppose I’d best chronicle the next instalment.
I suppose that should be why I left the north in the first place.

I left when I was about 19/20 I think. I’d been through university in Sheffield after going through 6th form locally, and decided that was a bit of a waste of time as it didn’t set me up for any type of job I’d want to do (I’m a hands-on sort of person and it was all theoretical, basically although titled as an automotive engineering course it was lean how to use solidworks and autocad and not much else)

I’d also been doing a bit of machining for money, a sort of summer job for a family friend with an engineering business.
I was making nylon rollers for food production machinery- load the bar into the lathe, shut the door, push the button and it cut 3 of em, wait for it to turn off, collect the cut parts from the tray, deburr them and box em up, reload the bar and go again.
It was boring as f-k but taught me a lot. Indeed the only time something interesting or exciting happened was the first time I pressed the button. The guy who had programmed it set the origin incorrectly and instead of it running the cutting head holding a 1” drill bit out to centre then feeding it in straight it ran it diagonally, smashed the bit into the side of a 80mm bar of nylon spinning at 10,000rpm and shattered it into many pieces. Luckily I’d paid close attention to step two (shut the door before pressing go) as it took the bullet proof glass in the door with it as well! There was literally half a 1” drill bit sticking through it! Not to mention shutting down the entire plant… but after than it was weeks of boring(lol) repetitive work.

I quickly learned the difference between the organ grinder and the monkey, and realised I’d never get anywhere or do anything enjoyable in such an industry working for anyone else. There were guys who’’d been there 30 years who where still doing the same donkey work. After I’d finished that job and he offered me more work I made my excuses.
But like a say, a good learning experience.

The problem was, this was the turn-of-the-millennium, ex-industrial towns, ‘North of England’ that I was living in, back before it reinvented itself. The area was still smarting from the miners strikes and the shutdown of (most) of the steel plants. It WAS grim, it was deprived, and it was suffering a glut of labour in industrial sectors. There were machinists, welders, etc. everywhere looking for work or getting paid f-k all for their skills. Even as a teenager I could see this wasn’t a conducive environment to employment. The institutions literally everyone left school to go and work for had collapsed, (my dad had seen the writing on the wall, taken the redundancy package whist it was still offered and had left the pit and his rear steer license had got him into construction) so the options were to take what you can, where you can and hope the particular industry you’re in survives (many didn’t as they were tertiary to the pits or steelworks) or to get out.

Being young and mobile, I chose the latter.

At this time, I was making money by breaking cars- mostly aircooled VWs, and working on them a bit too. The parts selling was easy, it was generally all sold online via forums and eBay, and most of it was posted (to people down south with a better disposable income). Local sales were pretty limited compared to the amount i was posting out and the fact it was southerners who were spending most money did not go unnoticed.

As a result of spending a lot of time on forums I ended up meeting a girl from Ipswich on one of them. We hit it off, her parents liked me and they offered us their ‘spare’ house to go live in if I wanted to move down to Suffolk. (i later found out their motives were not exactly altruistic) but seeing this as a great deal loaded with opportunity, I threw caution to the wind, loaded everything up and moved to Suffolk.