Forgotten Lands and Disputed Territories

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Well, I've done it again: cooked myself something - Jane wanted something different, anyway - and then decided it would be better left overnight to eat tomorrow. As it is a chicken and tomato curry - jazz, naturally; no recipe for this one - I'm probably right in letting it steep in its juices overnight, anyway. And so it was a very fine cheese & ham toastie for me.  Earlier today for some random reason, I was pondering on the definition and scope of The Black Country: that amorphous expanse of geopolitical/economic/demography sat plonk in the middle of the UK mainland.

Now, I, like my dwindling cohort of peers, was born a Brummie. And one thing is absolutely for certain: we were not born or raised in the Black Country, as Brummagem ay in it, despite the contemporary characterisation that The Black Country extends from somewhere just north of the Watford gap to Stoke-on-Trent; that ay true, my friend. Although, to be fair, I'm misappropriating ay as the contraction of is not: as a Brummie, born & bred [and specifically from Winson Green: the Shadowland between Brum and Smethwick], the normal currency would be 'ain't' with a suitably strangled diphthong at its heart.

When I was around ten or so, my dad took us on a Sunday drive for a tour of The Black Country in a car he'd just bought - can't exactly remember which one, but I suspect it was the Riley 1.5, our second motor car - pointing out exactly which bits of the Midlands, in his view, were parts of The Black Country, and which bits were most definitely not. The thing is that even among those born and raised in The Black Country proper - and dad took the view passed down to him by his mom, that Smethwick was not in The Black Country - there is no firm agreement as to this mythical land's scope and boundaries.

Suffice it to say, Brummagem ay, and Rowley Regis be. Smethwick? Hard to say, but I ain't arguin' with either me dad or me nan on this one, God rest 'em both... 

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