"Don't know about the Dicky Dirt, Trev"

We have lived outside the UK, well actually England, since 1985 and on occasion some people ask how English I feel and such things like that. Well the answer is a tough one as whilst I still have the same English voice that I have always had, we have lived essentially in a North American environment for nearly 35 years. So I like (a lot) and am used to lots of things that North Americans take for granted. Stuff like driving big cars, pancakes with maple syrup, great steak restaurants, fantastic cocktail bars, big houses, tall ceilings, wide and long parking spaces, yes even tall buildings, but not bacon or sausages I'm afraid. English are still the best there. Chocolate too.

So mixed feelings is I guess the answer.

What about politics? Please don't ask me that! It is only the current Brexit mess that has forced me to even know the names of current British politicians. And armed with that knowledge I now regret even that as I don't think many of them have covered themselves in glory and seem to have succeeded only in ruining a previously very good reputation for a parliamentary system that whilst quirky had stood the test of time and sort of kind of worked. But I do know the American politicians and system reasonably well. Canadian too. All I will say there is that seemingly no leader anywhere is currently giving a great impression of being a statesman. Everyone is too busy taking care of themselves and their re-election prospects even as the (whichever) country is at risk of going to the dogs.

Politics isn't the theme of this blog though, rather it is the question of Englishness. Great word that. The French with all their Academie Francaise hubris don't have a word for it. They'd probably use 7 or 8 words along the lines of 'le coeur et l'âme d'être français' and that still doesn't mean the same thing.

I just returned from England where I watched a couple of Tottenham Hotspur games, one Premier League and the other Champions League, and rediscovered (I did need reminding) what a great city London is. Huge, busy, so many different languages on the street, so many different ethnic restaurants. Even one of those really annoying advertisements you get which end in a voice speaking really fast telling you what the ghastly side effects of this new wonder drug is, was a French girl. Speaking English very fast and with great articulation. Made me really sad to think that this could all go soon.

Some things don't change though.

It was at the first football match which was the first game at the new Tottenham stadium. Great stadium, lots of fanfare, completely inexplicable opening ceremony which had a rapper and a gospel singer duetting something for some reason that eluded me. Great seats, wonderful view, good facilities inside for the fan and the really neat thing that I liked was that whilst it was built along the lines of a US NFL stadium (as it plans to host NFL games too), there is absolutely zero parking. The stadium is right in the middle of Tottenham, so houses and little shops and pubs across the street and all around. The local co-op is just around the corner. Walking out of the train station, the stadium was right there in your face and well so was the rest of Tottenham.  (An aside here: I do hope my reader understands that Tottenham is nowhere near the centre of London. It is 30 minutes by overground from Liverpool Street Station. Miles away in fact. Tottenham Court Road is in central London and I suspect its name reference is pure accident).

It was at the other end that things of course fell apart and sometimes you do wonder. The stadium build overran by 6-7 months and it is clear that the club is hurrying to get it open so at least some games in the 2018/19 season can be played at the new home. I don't want to think that that is a money reason, but it obviously could be. Most things are.

Opening night for the stadium

So the station is half built and on coming out at the end it was clear that nobody had mentioned to the train/tube people (it isn't London Transport any more, it has another name that I don't remember) that around 10 pm over 60,000 people would be coming out of the ground looking for a way to get home. Stuff like this is something I definitely do think the English (OK British. Why just diss the English on this?) do not do well. In the USA/Canada, this would have been thought through and dealt with so that within 30 minutes everyone would be gone. It took ages but as Tottenham won 2-0, all were in good humor.

Great view of the match

Credit where it is due though for by the second game, this had been resolved. Sort of. For someone had hand written a time table of trains heading back into London so that at least we all knew what the situation was even though we still had to wait. And as a subsequent follow up, I just received a notice that the club is now putting on free shuttles from the ground to 4 or 5 different public transport hubs around so at least this issue has been recognized. It would have been better or course to consider this in advance rather than have to scramble around for bandaid solutions.

Now that I have exposed myself as a football fan, I will get to the point. Having returned to Penang I found myself staying up half the night watching Tottenham games and by association other games that have an impact on the final league standings. So I don't know how I ended up watching a West Ham game a few days ago. But I did. These days there's always at least two commentators for every sporting event, the primary one and then the analyst. I missed the names for this game but the analyst was clearly a West Ham fan and potentially an ex-player so the primary commentator spent a lot of time making general clarifying comments for the audience as the analyst was getting quite worked up as it was a really close game.

The camera panned round into the crowd and found a familiar face, someone I immediately recognized as one of the greatest footballers of the time that I was growing up and familiar with when I was living in England, namely Trevor (or rather Sir Trevor) Brooking. The analyst picked up on this fact and waxed lyrical about him before coming up with THE line of the day:

"Oooh, don't know about the Dicky Dirt, Trev".

Now my home town is Southend-on-Sea, only some 20 miles down the road from West Ham and our local patois is not entirely dissimilar to cockney, which was what the analyst was. It is curious for only a couple of days previously I had had dinner in Penang with someone from Streatham in South London and to the untrained ear, the accent is the same. Sort of what is these days called 'Estuary English'. But it isn't. South London is quite different from Estuary and very different from Cockney and indeed my own Essex whine (which I keep only for special occasions and school friends). But I understand them all intuitively so as soon as these words were uttered I almost wet myself laughing.

This would have been fine at any other time but unfortunately I was drinking a cup of tea and my laughing made me ingest the tea which went down the wrong way, sparking a mass of coughing and spluttering, gulping for air, more laughing and culminating in the spectacle of my tea making a reappearance out of my nose. From where it ran down onto my shirt. Sorry Viv!

What made things funnier I think was the realization that I was probably one of only 5 or 6 people in the whole world who actually understood what had been said for this was the Premier League's own feed so it would have not been sold in England, only outside. In England, the Premier League rights are owned by Sky and BT Sport only. It occurred to me then and now that it would be almost impossible for any non-native English speaker to have a clue what had been said. It wasn't rude although I was waiting for the rest of the program for the analyst to make the ruder follow on comment, say, about Trevor Brooking's neighbor, referring to him as a 'friend of Trev' -- which is!

Confused yet?