meish dot org: life, unfolding

OK, Shauny wants to know what kecks are.

In my family, at least, kecks are trousers, or more usually underwear, depending on the context. I think it’s a scouse thing, or at least a northern thing. My maternal grandfather was scouse, as was my paternal grandmother.

[Tangent: someone asked me the other day how I define my heritage. Well, let’s see. My maternal grandparents were generic northern and scouse, paternal ones were geordie and lancashire. My dad’s from Newcastle, and his entire family have been based in the north-east for yonks, mining and in the church (my brother did an extensive family tree a few years ago, going back thirteen generations to 1647 and so wide it fitted on a scroll thirty sheets across). My mum grew up in nottinghamshire, and her family has roots among the Lancashire sandgrounders, during the last century. Teachers, chemists and fishermen, all. Every single person in my family for the last four generations has been to university, and each to different ones, with only one overlap - my dad and my mum, who met at Cambridge when my dad was directing a production of A man for all seasons, in which my mum played the lead female character, Meg.

The entire family is fairly classically anglo-celtic looking - dark hair, blue or brown eyes, fair skin, tallish, strong bones. The men are built to withstand harsh north winds, and the women have childbearing hips. My heritage is classic northern british shabby intellectual, I’d say. And here I am, breaking the mould daaahn saaarf.

When living in Bolivia, my friend C and I quickly figured out that we had to develop a way of talking that couldn’t be understood by those around us. For the most part, English was fine, but when we met up with a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers in Cochabamba, it became obvious that we’d have to go one better. So we started slipping into a disturbing OTT scouse accent when talking to each other in front of others - running all words together, raising the pitch an octave or so, dropping the beginnings and ends of words (and sometimes even the middles), squeezing the words into a steady scouse stream. There was no need to go sotto voce, since no-one could understand, so we continued at normal volume, a pair of chittering scally banshees, whenever we needed to gossip or exchange private information in public.

This worked fine, until we met up in Liverpool, the year after. Walking down Bold Street one afternoon, we passed a woman teetering on the most ridiculous platform trainers I’d ever seen (bearing in mind that any platform trainers are inherently ridiculous, and that I’d been out of the country for nearly two years) and with hair that looked as if she’d been dragged through a bush backwards, massively teased and sprayed to within an inch of its life.

C, who is from Harrogate, clocked her first, then turned to me, and in a horrified and clearly fake scally screech, declared “Eywillyoulooookatthe’urron’er! Worraslappa!”

Cue outraged and murderous stares from the entire Liverpudlian population in the surrounding area. Oops.

Funny thing is, I can manage passable scouse, scottish (all parts), lanky, derbyshire and manc, but I can’t do geordie at all. There must be a vital chromosone missing from my DNA or something.