You cannot be a Northerner and a Londoner. A Northern Londoner does not exist. Your entire London experience may be shaped by the fact you are a Northerner (the prices! the nice voices! the talking about different things happening in the world!) and yet you aren’t a Northerner. The minute you move down here, that’s you cast out of Northernness forever.
This is the paradox that sprung to mind as I tossed handfuls of notes at the festive treat that is Winter Wonderland, spending at a rate of roughly £10 per minute. What shocked me was not the expense but how well I was taking the expense. Part of this was about the experience of bringing joy to my eight year old daughter, who was lost in a blizzard of cream, chocolate flakes and soft toys, along with the Christmassy spirit that is sparked in any Northerner by lights (gasp!), music (ooh!) and gatherings of people that don’t involve someone getting their head kicked in at the centre (aww!). Yet I also recognised that the years have gradually degraded my upset at London prices. It’s not that my salary had grown enough to adjust, far from it, it’s that I’ve been so pulverised by them every day for so long, that, like a dog beaten by its owner, I’ve come to expect the punishment, quietly assent, and even like it a bit if it’s not as bad as expected.
At the time I thought this was the moment when the last vestiges of Northern died in me. However, in truth they were gone within seconds of coming to London. It’s the Northern Londoner Paradox. Although in my first weeks here I cowered in bookshops because of the noise, my life became defined by my accent not being right — too thick for London, yet suddenly too posh for the North — the reality was, when I first moved into a house down here, accepting the rent, I was no longer a Northerner.
That first year, I took a break to go back home to East Yorkshire, and on a Friday night out was talking to a girl in a pub, showing off my new big city confidence (i.e. could look her in the eye every few minutes). When she asked where I lived and I said I lived in London, she looked at me differently, with what I first took to be a burgeoning, uncontrollable lust for my sophisticated manner. But rather than express a breathless interest as to whether I was, in fact, a pretty big deal in the capital’s world-beating media industry, she simply said one word, “Pretentious,” and walked off. I nearly dropped my crème de menthe.
The more you try to retain your Northernness, the more it slips away
Fair enough though. She was right to walk away, because I was no longer valid as a person up there, I was not just a slightly weird normal bloke, but a slightly weird total prick who thinks he’s better than everyone else when he’s not.
The worst thing about it is that with the Northern Londoner Paradox is that the more you try to retain your Northernness, the more it slips away. Drinking bitter worked for a while, until bitter became recast as "craft beer" and turned into the most poncey load of pretentious London shite pseudo-cool you can imagine. Most often though, you’re left keeping an ear out for any Northern inflection in the office or social gatherings before descending into a "credentials contest" with your new Northern friend/rival, much to the tedium of anyone else in the vicinity. You start playing a part, a Python-esque parody, “I used to get up half an hour before I went to bed,” and all that.
In grasping for your disappearing Northernness you also start forgetting that you hated being a Northerner until the very moment you moved away. Years spent in Wimpy’s and bus stops, walking around with shit hair in BHS jeans, wishing you were somewhere where every single person doesn’t know your mum and that you once shat your pants on a bus.
Last weekend, a week after Wonderland, I went back up "home" and found I was now thoroughly accepting that I wasn’t a Northerner anymore. My accent was too posh, my coat too big, my hair too long, and I was wearing a scarf for pity’s sake…I didn’t fit in. I’m a Londoner! And perfectly comfortable with that. When I was in the pub and the barman served literally everyone at the bar before me, was inviting people in off the street so he could serve them before me, I was fine with it. Finally with a pint in hand, I told my dad that even though we had fights in London, with the added risk of actual death through stabbing, I always felt I was much more likely to get my head kicked in by the people up here. He laughed and nodded his head with pride. I wasn’t the one he was proud of.
But I was fine with it, much as I was fine at Winter Wonderland, tossing money around like confetti, keeping an eye out for knives, half-worrying about playing the Elizabeth Line roulette (“Home in 20 minutes or 12 hours, place your bets, place your bets…”), but mostly enjoying being with my daughter, that sweet mix of Northern and Iranian and Lewisham, a lovely little Londoner, with all the multitudinous identity and expansive possibility that suggests. Why cling so tight to what has gone before us, I thought, as I gently made her finish her pint of bitter.
