{"id":8355,"date":"2020-11-04T02:13:33","date_gmt":"2020-11-04T02:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=8355"},"modified":"2020-11-04T02:13:33","modified_gmt":"2020-11-04T02:13:33","slug":"meades-on-the-midlands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2020\/11\/04\/meades-on-the-midlands\/","title":{"rendered":"Meades on the Midlands"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Meades, on the Midlands, in his column in the latest edition of The Critic<\/a><\/em> magazine…<\/p>\n

My uncle, Harry Turner Meades, was Town Clerk of Burton-upon-Trent from the mid-1950s till the early ’70s. He was a committed Midlander, a seldom acknowledged species which does not advertise itself, nor does it travel. […] He loved, could recognise and mimic [the] many [West Midlands] accents, which are routinely mocked. […] He felt at one with [the Shropshire poet] Housman. He longed to hear Shakespeare\u2019s work spoken as it would have been in 1600. <\/p>\n

Being a Midlander is not something you shout about: people will affect not to understand thou<\/em>. His definition of the Midlands and its precise if often redrawn border with the North was adopted with amendments by his nephew in a film about Birmingham 20 years ago. I attempted to delineate the Irony Curtain that stretches across England from roughly Lincoln to round about Chester. Essentially, with the exception of Liverpool, north of the Curtain it\u2019s all “Me, I speak as I find, I do \u2014 I can tell you\u2019re not from hereabouts.” Whilst the Midlands are more, much more<\/em>, nuanced and modest. Black Countrymen\u2019s stoic uncomplaining humour is at their own expense. Reticence and irony are in the blood.<\/p>\n

[… For outsiders, the West Midlands] is a place that\u2019s hurried through, unappreciated, on the way to somewhere else, which reveals itself [to them] by being excitingly self-caricatural, grossly self-parodic. Hence the name of that film: “Heart Bypass”<\/a> [1998]. Even the inhabitants overlook it. They are perhaps not as centrifugal as they were but the ease with which Midland cities can be escaped is [still] held up as a magnet: Cannock [Chase], Malvern, Clent, Kinver, Lickey, Bredon, Clee…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Jonathan Meades, on the Midlands, in his column in the latest edition of The Critic magazine… My uncle, Harry Turner Meades, was Town Clerk of Burton-upon-Trent from the mid-1950s till the early ’70s. He was a committed Midlander, a seldom acknowledged species which does not advertise itself, nor does it travel. […] He loved, could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}