Saturday 29th January 2011

"We're gonna have a reet good neet"

"It's not rate funny"

"That's gurt lush"

It's funny how dialects change in different parts of the country. There is one word in each of three sentences above that mean the same thing: "reet", "rate" and "gurt". They all mean 'very'.
In Rotherham and the surrounding areas you can go out for a really good night, in Worksop you might think something is not really funny and in the South West something can be really nice (lush).
Another good example is what people around the country call each other.
In Bristol, and the South West, everyone calls everyone 'mate'. 'Areet mate' is the normal greeting. Unless you are a taxi driver, delivery driver, bus driver or anyone who drives a vehicle for a living. Then you are simply known as 'Drive'. Get of a bus and the most common phrase you will here from all the other disembarking passengers is 'Cheers Drive'.
In the Midlands everyone calls calls everyone else 'Duck'. Men calling other men 'Duck' has never seemed right to me, but there you go. "Ay-up Duck" is a phrase I quite often hear, and when it is a completely uncamp bloke, built like the proverbial out-house saying it, it's is totally wrong.

I baked cakes today, gurt lush they was, reet good, rate tasty. When I say I baked them, I lied. My daughters made them. I offered to buy some of those packs from Tesco, the ones that you just have to add water and maybe an egg, but they refused. We bought flour, eggs, butter and caster sugar and they made them from scratch. I just helped with the weighing and the mixing of the younger daughter's mix. They were very good though. A bit of food colouring went into younger daughters so they were blue sponge cakes with egg-yolk yellow icing. The elder daughters were more traditional, albeit with loads of milk and white chocolate chips in the middle.
They were very good.

We had a roast dinner tonight, elder daughter did a lot of the cooking to help me mum. Mum is waiting for a hip operation, which was supposed to happen today, but that's another story, so elder daughter (who is 12 years old) made the yorkshire puddings, the bread sauce and the stuffing. She must take after me I suppose.

I've just had a ten minute conversation about the shower timings. Who will be using the shower in the morning and at what time. The fact that there are three showers in this house and five people who will want a shower, it shouldn't really be a problem. But somehow it always turns into one.

The anonymous driver turned out to be quite friendly in the end. Well I say in the end, they were not unfriendly in the beginning. I was driven to the exact place I wanted to go, which was nice, and there was no threat of violence whatsoever. Not even a hint of roughness, which was a bit of a shame really, but we got here in the end.
Suppose I'll have to drive home tomorrow, but you can't win them all.
It'll probably be more relaxing than the drive down, I was going to go to sleep but I was too scared.............