Prejudice based on where someone comes from is, of course, a dangerous nonsense. I’ve written a tongue in cheek piece based on my own experience plus a little imaginative extrapolation that hopefully illustrates the point. It should be read aloud in a strong Devonshire accent, which I can provide on request…
“I was born in Plymouth and lived the first 20 years of my life in a cul-de-sac. It was a tight, friendly community, we looked out for one another in that street, it was great.
Two streets ran parallel with ours on either side. It was a well-known fact that the people on one side couldn’t be trusted and the people on the other didn’t have two brain cells to rub together. Needless to say we never went in either street if we could avoid it.
The area of Plymouth we lived in is known as Peverell. You can tell by the sound of the name that it had class, the people of Peverell were a cut above the rest of Plymouth.
Of course, Plymouth is the jewel of Devon, there’s nowhere else quite like it. You only have to drive out to Tavistock, not to mention Princetown, near the prison, to realise that Plymothians really are in a class of their own. You hear a lot about Exeter but, seriously, with a football team that can’t even kick the ball straight?!
I have to say though, with some pride, Devon is a beautiful county. It’s the best county in the whole of England. The only problem we’ve got are the neighbours! Cornwall to the south and Somerset to the north. Pirates to the left of us and yokels to the right! It’s a pity we can’t physically move the whole county somewhere else.
But who would want to leave the West Country? Why would anyone want to leave a part of the world that has it all? Sun, sea, amazing countryside, culture, friendly people and the sweetest accent you can find anywhere, the only accent in England worth having. Cockney you say? That’s not an accent, it’s a disease!!
But it’s great to live in England. I’m so glad I was born there, God’s own nation, the home of William Shakespeare. I can feel my heart bursting with pride and relief too that I’m not Welsh or Scottish or Irish
When I travel abroad which I’m afraid I sometimes have to do, it’s great to have a British passport! I was so glad when we left the European Union, that we got our proper blue passports back. It made me feel real proud and special, uncontaminated somehow. Whenever I’m flying back from some God forsaken part of the globe I always breathe a sigh of relief when I’m heading home across the channel. The British Isles are the best set of islands on the planet!
I’m about to travel further afield now though. Ever since ‘they’ made contact, with their interstellar travel and IQs that are off the scale! So much for Einstein then. They come swanning into the solar system with their ‘Oh, you’re in our part of the Galaxy and we’re going to lift you to our level’. Bloody galactic do-gooders with their eight legs and what’s this about us being in quarantine because of our wars and inability to get on with life forms that are different! We’ll show them. We’re the people of Earth! We’ve got the best planet with the best sentient bi-pedal lifeforms in the whole galaxy!!”
Thinking Aloud 