I wonder if we know what our parents experienced ?
As you get older I have noticed that things I say and do don’t mean anything to younger folk.
Eee bye gum, I think thous getting old !
Now then. I could say, who remembers the Beatles and of course we all would know who John, Paul, George and Ringo were. The kids probably learn about them in’t school ?
Things I couldn’t understand when my parents spoke was a learning experience. Like “feeling out of fettle”. Which meant being in a foul mood.
If someone said “turn up the wireless”, in our house when we we kids, this meant turn the music up in volume terms.
A wireless was the radio and this too doesn’t compute with the vernacular of today. Today my grown up kids will sing along to “Brown Eyed Girl” but have no clue what a transistor radio is or looks like?
OK maybe you do, but Van’s song about having sexual intercourse behind the stadium with his brown eyed girl who he has no clue of a name is also bit “off kilter” these days. But, it’s a great tune in't it?
Now here I am at sixty four and I am getting misunderstood. Misinterpreted.
All the technical stuff, I have done in my life and all them TLAs (three letter acronyms); that I used in my job and still do btw and people still look at me in a funny way sometimes....
I work on a laptop, that I call “the box”. I know now, that I’m just like my parents and recall the experiences of the older people that I met and worked with and how they talked in conversation.
I often think...
‘am I speaking the same language as them?’
I had a text conversation this week with a 'young u'n, which went like this…
Me: Thinking about going to the Cinema this weekend and incorrectly being interpreted again!!
Now it’s a language of tweeting, texting or face-booking and emojis. Where a semi colon is used to represent a winking smile ;) and I am expected to "tweet" in my new job, FFS!!
OMG means, ‘Oh my God’ but I prefer to say out loud ‘fuck a duck’. Or ‘ Fuck my old boots’. Blasphemous phrases were rife in my day and if heard by my Catholic raised parents you would get a clip rount ear. Nowadays, dad would be up for abusing me for clipping me, tha knows, lol, (laugh out loud!).
My dad, or me dah, was from Skipton in North Yorkshire but he never had an accent like my new Yorkshire work colleagues or at least not, when I was growing up,. Maybe he did when he met my mum, or me mam; (as they say in Geordieland, where she was brought up). Perhaps she lost her Geordie twang when she moved to ‘the Smoke’. That was of course the term northerners gave to 'that London', described so, because of the occasional smoke and fog or ‘pea souper’ encountered in London in the 19th to the mid-20th centuries.
Now then, you’ve probably guessed that I’ve got a new job and it’s in Yorkshire. So I am doing a bit of language orientation, watching ‘Dalziel and Pascoe’ and ‘DCI Banks’. They are available on the streaming platform ITVX.
I actually never watched these series when they aired, probably because I was away on a ship around that period of my life and career. But I am glad that I can watch them now. It kills the time between work and going to bed and it’s so interesting to watch the technology changes through the eleven or so series. This one running between 1996 and 2007.
The humour in Dee Eel’s vernacular is now quite dated and probably considered offensive in today’s political correctness world and the series itself is set in late 1990s Yorkshire.
Andrew Dalziel, played by the late Warren Clarke and Peter Pascoe is played by the Scottish actor Colin Buchanan. The chemistry between the two actors is brilliantly cast and the stories created by the author Reginald Hill would have Pascoe mouthing off about something serious about the case in hand, using big words and his University knowledge, and intellect to impress his boss, no sign of a Scot’s accent.
Dalziel would be master of the quick retorts, and won’t just sit back and let Peter have his moment...
Rugby versus Soccer
Pascoe: Soccer is hooligans acting like gentlemen. Rugby Union is gentlemen acting like hooligans. Rugby League is hooligans acting like hooligans.
Dalziel: B*llocks. Men play soccer and Rugby League to make money. Rugby Union is violence for the love of it. Or it was before it got corrupted by sponsors and satellites.
No doubt you might have come across things where people got you on a ‘wild goose chase’. In my engineering world, young recruits were always tested.
Go to the stores and ask for a long weight ?
‘Oh and by the way’ , (btw), get me a can of S h 1 T’
Or "go and ask the store-man for a bubble for the spirit level"
I bet you have some of your own, you could tell me?
My Chiefs, (Chief Petty Officers) who were in charge of me, in the RN, would be just like Dalziel when talking down at me. Always having some analogous quip or comeback which was funny but came out as a b*llicking.
Here’s Dalziel, chastising his young DC…
Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel:
Did you find any drugs?
Young DC Seymour:
No-one mentioned anything about looking for drugs.
Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel:
No-one mentioned anything about Barbary apes, but if you'd seen a couple of them fornicating on the kitchen table, likely you'd have mentioned it.
DCI Banks, written by Vera author Anne Cleeves is of course also set in Yorkshire in and around Leeds and stars Stephen Tompkinson as the glum Yorkshire detective. As one of the papers described the show "There’s nothing shiny or grimy about it, nothing hi-tech nor nothing gritty, just Tompkinson and his disappointed face like a depressed bag of flour shuffling about council estates in Leeds" However, it was another 126 thousand minutes of Yorkshire orientation, like the time spent by us these days on e-learning?
Crime and Doing Time
I remember going to York and Leeds when I was appointed as a licensing officer for the Department of Trade and Industry. I was still a serving RN Warrant Officer, attached to ESB, which stood for Equipment Security Branch.
I traveled up by train with my Army colleague, to visit Gary Hyde at York Guns, that was in 2004.
Gary had requested a visit as he wanted to store thousands of AK47s which he would import from Europe and store away for future clients in his new large warehouse and wanted an opinion about export licensing.
He was sort of semi famous as he had sold the gun which Michael Ryan used in the U.K. Hungerford massacre in 1987, when sixteen people were killed and 15 more were seriously injured but it wasn’t a criminal intentional act for Gary. He just happened to sell it online to the killer. He was a likable chap, an ex special constable and over a cup of tea he was asking for our opinion.
Our opinion was don’t do it you won’t get a licence!
I later read that he requested an export licence in 2008 to deliver automatic rifles to Libya. Obviously our report of our visit was fed back to HM Revenue and Customs. They enforce export control misdemeanors and kept any eye on Hyde, launching an investigation in 2007 into him. Gary Hyde being also a director of Jago Ltd, another York business, in December of 2007, customs officers searched his home, York Guns and Jago Ltd.
However Hyde was arrested in Las Vegas while attending the SHOT Show, a sales event for firearms distributors, hunters and gun enthusiasts. Federal agents detained him accusing him and another man of fabricating the markings on a shipment of 5,760 magazine drums for AK47s where he had taken the shipment from China.
Why did the FBI get involved, you may ask yourself?
He was accused of “fraudulently and knowingly” importing Chinese-made AK-47 rifle drum magazines, in breach of a US ban on arms from China. The indictment also claimed the men failed to accurately state where the parts had come from, and stated that the paperwork provided at the import claimed they originated in Bulgaria. However, because he applied for a licence under U.K. law and followed the rules he didn’t serve time in a US penitentiary.
In 2012, he failed to apply for a licence to take part in another similar deal, fearing it would be refused, maybe remembering our opinion. But poor Gary was attracted by the "enormous profits" to be made, the judge said. He was jailed for seven years.
Gary Hyde jailed over Nigeria arms shipmentBBChttps://www.bbc.com › uk-england-humber-20611395
Whilst I was in Leeds, I visited the Royal Armouries and got to see the ‘black museum’. West Yorkshire is the home of the UK’s national collection of arms and armour and is free to visit.
The Black Museum though is deep in the lower floors and It’s not open to their normal visitors and it claims to have every weapon which has been used in every murder logged by police in this country. They also carry out ballistics forensic for weapons used in UK crimes.
The one gun which is famously shown to people like me who get the privilege (because of who we worked for), and I remember at that time. was the gun which fired six revolver shots and which shattered the Easter Sunday calm of Hampstead in 1955.
The Daily Mail article stated - “The beautiful platinum blonde then stood with her back to the wall and in her hand was the revolver” The revolver that was now being shown to me was a Smith & Wesson which bore the serial number 719573 and was in mint condition, preserved for almost fifty years after the event. The 'platinum blond' was Ruth Ellis who shot her handsome but abusive lover David Blakely with that same .38 Smith and Wesson revolver and she was the last women to be hanged for murder.
Her execution played a major part in the movement to abolish the death penalty, although it took a further decade for the law to be changed.
Back to happier moments and Yorkshire and the Yorkshire accent. It reminds me of the incorrectly named Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch. Its incorrect, because it was actually written for a 1967 show which preceded the infamous and now considered controversial Python.
The characters have been played excellently by John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones, and even Harry Enfield, Rowan Atkinson and Alan Rickman, but it was originally written for the British television comedy series “At Last the 1948 Show” and was co-written by the show's four writer-performers: John Cleese, Graham Chapman Tim Brooke-Taylor, and the late and great Marty Feldman.
The "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch is a parody of nostalgic conversations about humble beginnings or difficult childhoods. These Four Yorkshiremen reminisce about their upbringing, and as the conversation progresses, they try to one-up each other, their accounts of deprived childhoods becoming increasingly outrageous and absurd.
They obviously derived the story from their own education and read the literature of Stephen Leacock, (1869-1944), whose works can be described as a balancing act between cutting satire and sheer absurdity as the famous foursome sketch definitely follows the detail encountered in the Leacock’s ‘Self Made Men’.
With ideas like those who can create fictional characters that we can relate with how brilliant were they?
With motives like those who fall foul of the law like Gary, (Greed) and Ruth, (Love), I often wonder, WTF....
..... and you try telling the kids of today, they won’t believe you!!
Poem
Interpret this...
Where can I get a good glass of Chateau du Chasseur, ey, Josiah?
Can yee get an export licence for mee guns , said the buyer?
Them's days you'd be glad to have the price of a cup o'tea.
Aye. A cuppa' cold tea eh auntie Vi?
Ask our Ruth, she’s was hung out to dry!
My old dad used to say to me: "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son."
As Gary found out, when he got seven in one!
Our Cath, is in the Smoke, she is lucky to have a house that’s a defo plus,
Of course, When I say house? It’s a flat, but it’s a house to us!
Blood Dee Ell, what interpretations I’ve encountered through tha years
Working again, with laughter and tears
Getting mee kicks from Dalziel and Pascoe
get up a'six in’t morning, read da newspaper, eat a crusta stale bread, go to work, what a fiasco!!
Get int shower, put on clean nicks, Keks and sox
Working from home most of time on’t technology box
Well o course we had it tough, like our mam and dah went through
But, Yah, try an tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you...