Road users are ruthless, not reckless

When you get on to the roads of the North East you will notice that the drivers here are ruthless. When I say ruthless, I mean that like many aspects of North East life there are no prisoners taken. It's not particularly dangerous (it's not dangerous at all when you've got used to it) but all the courtesy has been taken out of driving.

I've driven in the South East and on the roads of London and there are some drivers there that I would call reckless rather than ruthless. Some London and South East drivers see every part of the road as a race or contest and will cut you up, undertake you and throw whatever abuse at you think will get themselves to their destination 20 seconds earlier. Every roundabout, every set of lights becomes a duel if you let them get to you. But with that there is sometimes a strange courtesy of not blocking road ends, letting people through and saying thanks with a smile and a wave.

Back to the North East and these things don't exist. As a recent arrival to this part of the World I don't know if these courtesies used to happen and have died out or never happened at all. My thoughts are that it never happened at all. For example, the road end thing really got me when I first moved up here. It happens when you're travelling along a main road where the traffic is slow and frequently stopping. You pass other, smaller roads that have to give way to get into your slow main road. The traffic comes to a half and the car in front of you stops just past the smaller side road. Do you-

A - Stop before the smaller road, leaving a gap so that card can get in and out if the smaller road

B - Stop over the smaller road to ensure that no one gets out of the road in front of you and putting you further back in the queue

Now I can't claim to have driven extensively in all parts of the UK but my experience tells me that if you chose option A then you are a driver from the South East and if you chose option B then you are a driver from the North East.

I'm not here to judge which way is correct or tell people how to drive - I've made it my role to offer guidance to a visitor to the North East from Outer Space. And being pre-warned about any aspects of life here is useful for a visitor.

It's symptomatic of the wider role that courtesy has in our society. I don't think that people from the North East are generally any more spiteful to each other than in any other part of the country. It's just the way of life here. Covering the end of the road, pulling out on someone, not letting people pass through a small gap first are hardly ever followed with the sounding of the horn, tempered voices, swear words and raised fists. It's just accepted that the other person was acting within the rules of the road and was just a bit more ruthless this time.

As an observer from outside the area, I find a lot of this interesting and amusing. As I've said, once you get used to it the danger mostly falls by the wayside - not to say that there's never any dangerous drivers or never any accidents. It's more to say that the initiated can see what's coming.

And I think that this get on with it and accept what others do on the road feels like a healthier attitude than making every road trip a stressful and competitive trial where the most ruthless wins.

But the figures don't really back that up. The only road traffic accident casualty figures I can find that actually break down the figures by Region are these from the BBC website-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15975720

The figures show deaths on the road in each local authority from 1999-2010. The closest local authorities from North East and South East I can find are Barking & Dagenham and Stockton-on-Tees, with the two being only a couple of thousand residents apart. In the years covered by the figures, Barking & Dagenham had 68 casualties and Stockton-on-Tees had 71. Looking at larger local authorities, there isn't much difference in terms of population size between Lewisham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There isn't much difference in road casualties either, with Lewisham showing 79 for the period and Newcastle-upon-Tyne showing 80.

It all goes to show that maybe the North East England driving style isn't any safer or more dangerous but it feels a lot more relaxed.

My next blog edition will be our next week and I'll take a look at another aspect of North East England life that will be useful for a visitor from Outer Space,

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.