Dinner's at twelve o'clock, tea's at five, no messing around

One of the first things that occurred as something really different to me when I moved to the North East was meals and mealtimes. There is a strict regime at play here and you should be very aware of it if you ever invite guests over or make plans that involve meal times (phrases such as "meet you at tea time" have never been so close to getting you into trouble.) The North East meal times are generally set in stone and woe betide anyone who doesn't follow this.

The meal in the middle part of the day is called dinner and is eaten at Midday on the dot.

The meal later in the day is called tea and is eaten at five pm, without fail.

From someone who emigrated here from the South East of the country and was used to eating lunch and dinner it actually took quite some getting used to. Also the rest of the world has a far more flexible set of timings for meals. When I go to Spain I can tell what time the locals eat by when the restaurants get busy. Unfortunately it's usually at around half past ten at night, which is when my children are more than ready to go to bed. But in the North East the meal times are more of a home thing. These meal times are when things happen in the home and how the day is structured around this. Because of the early "tea" the evenings pub visit and beer drinking starts at around six o'clock and is often over before half past nine. See how this compares to the Spanish day!

I think that Gary Neville hits the nail on the head in this YouTube clip from Monday Night Football -

The fact of the matter is that these times are an important part of the way of life up here and I am interested to see how this distinction has developed. From my preliminary investigations, I have read that the word "dinner" relates to the main meal of the day, irrespective of the time of day that this meal is eaten. But from the times when men worked in the pits, they would have been working on shifts and would not have eaten cooked or heavy food during or just before working in the pit. The crouched position in which the men had to work causes heartburn if the stomach is full. Nothing fried was eaten down in the pit or just before going down to the pit.

With so many of the men working on shift, where does this North East certainty of naming these meal times come from?

This blog and commentary sheds some dim light onto the subject and attempts to look at the younger North Easterners and their changing attitudes to the words and the meals-

https://scranshums.wordpress.com/tag/north-east-england/

But if you talk to those of an older generation (I'm talking probably anyone over 50 here) then it's ingrained as dinner and tea and the times are set in stone - especially for those that are retired. This is where the distinction starts to really take hold and develop into the ideas that Gary Neville quotes as "dinner's at twelve o'clock, tea's at five, no messing around." 

It's my parents and grandparents that have had this structure built around their home life particularly from perhaps when they were young and people didn't have as many pressures on their time as the current  lives.

It's ingrained in the psyche in the area about how the day is structured around food and meals. It's a large part of the North East and it's just one of the things I've found different in my time here. I'll look at more differences in future blogs.