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The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland only
dates from 1922 and from 1801 to 1921 was the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland. Although "united", it is still obvious through the various dialects
that it was originally four separate kingdoms and that England itself was
settled by a number of different groups with accents varying widely from Georgie
(around Newcastle), through Yorkshire, Cockney (in parts of London) to Cornish
in the south-west of England. These variations in dialect are reflected in the
variety of local culture too. |
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For instance in London you get a 'party culture'. Also,
because of the Tube (the underground railway system there) it's
much more common for people to rely on public transport to get
around which essentially confines them to the city with
consequent knock-on effects on aspects of the local culture. The
pay is a good deal higher there too than elsewhere in the country
which obviously affects things, sometimes in rather peculiar ways.
Because of the much higher cost of housing you get the situation
where streets of terrace housing are populated by people driving
BMW's and Mercedes which is something that would never happen in
Northern Ireland: if you can afford a BMW here you just don't
live in a terrace house! Generally speaking pubs (bars, it's
short for 'public house') are mostly filled by I suppose what we'd
call the 'working class' drinking beer and the like (I don't go
to pubs so don't rely entirely on this!) as opposed to the 'wine
bars' which is where you'd find the 'middle class' drinking, yes,
wine (and fancy drinks too). Probably because it's a big city,
people aren't as friendly on the street as they are in less
populated areas although they generally aren't as rude as in
places like New York. They're OK when you get to know them (remember
I work quite closely with our London office and have several
relations living there) but they tend to 'keep to themselves'.
For instance, when we went to Newbury (outside London) one time
to look up a relation the people living next door to him didn't
even know his name. As it's something of an international city
too you get people either from, or descended from, just about
every nationality you could imagine and that affects the culture
a good deal too. If you check your map you'll see that it's
towards the south of England which affects the climate a whole
lot more than I would have thought myself so that the summers are
much warmer. Warm enough to allow the cafes and bars to have
tables out on the street. It's also quite close to France and, in
general, it has a more continental feel to it than cities
elsewhere in the country. Oh, and because it takes so long for
people to travel to and from work they tend to do some work along
the way (so there are lots of mobile phones around) and eat their
evening meal much later (anything from 7pm).
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So why did I say so much about the culture in London? Well, it's
the UK capital and that combined with the large proportion of the
total population living there (about 20%) mean that it has a
significant influence on culture in the rest of the country. So,
almost all examples of a British accent you (and we) hear are
actually London accents. If something happens in London it
appears on the news everywhere else in the country but if the
same thing had happened in, say, Edinburgh you might never hear
about it.
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So what's it like here? Northern Ireland is largely
agricultural with just two big cities and they're not that large
either. There's Belfast with about 500,000 people in it and
Londonderry (or Derry) with less. Belfast is pretty compact and,
if you miss the rush hours, it would take less than 30 minutes to
get into the country from anywhere in it. We can get to our house
in the country in 20 minutes if there aren't any traffic jams. We
don't have an underground system or trolleys or anything like
that so public transport basically means the bus (or train, but
not within the city). In practice though I think most people get
around by car: certainly almost everyone seems to have a car
these days. For some reason, that I can't understand, when
married people go out in the car it is ALWAYS the husband who
does the driving but. It gets really silly at times like when the
wife keeps the car during the day and drops her husband off to
work first... the husband drives to work with the wife then they
both get out so she can drive off which is a really stupid thing
to do in rush hour traffic, but it's always what happens! |
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