Across the next few weeks, I'll be mixing this blog up a bit with the help of Geordie friend and fellow author, Gary Davison. That's Gary lounging in his garden chair.
Gary (author of Fat Tuesday, Streakers and the first section of A Tale Of Two Halves) and I both had our first books published in the PaperBooks imprint of Legend Press within cooee of each other. What we'll be doing on our respective blogs (see Gary's at www.gary-davison.com) is sharing a few posts about a similar subject and seeing where it takes us. Should be fun and maybe a tad wacky at times.
I suspect it's just as well that we're confining this to the blogs though. I think the Geordie accent is a superb accent, but I find it hard to interpret at times (unless I've had a couple of bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale or Newky Brun, the drinking of which is a bit like sticking a babel fish in the ear, I guess).
When I moved to Australia 20 years ago, I was working in a plumbing warehouse in Adelaide - loading toilets, baths, shower basins, hot water services and the like onto trucks - and on my third or fourth day was introduced to one of the truck drivers. He was from Newcastle, I was told - a Geordie - and had emigrated about 10 years previously, but I didn't understand a word he said.
His accent had remained so broad, he might have been speaking to me in a rare dialect of Inuit. I did a bit of nodding and shaking of my head - measuring each moment carefully so that I didn't inadvertently insult him or agree to something I might regret - and probably tossed in the phrase Newky Brun for good measure, which would've gone down a treat, but I quit the job a couple of weeks later and never saw him again.
Gary's books capture the flavour of the Geordie accent in some of his characters, but they're not written in eye dialect, thank goodness, or I might not have understood a word. Fat Tuesday and Streakers are both fast-paced stories with lots of action and thrills and you can buy them here.
8 comments:
Hence the reason I don't do book readings! Looking forward to this, should be great fun.
Or, if you do, provide everyone with a bottle of Newcastle Brown :-)
As I think you both already know -- Gary certainly does -- I live just down the road from Newcastle in Middlesbrough, but, as a kid, often found myself visiting Geordie-land for doctor-visits and, at one point, a couple of hospital stays. The hospital experiences were a true education! Who'd have thunk two places so close geographically could have, as it so often seemed, such completely different languages!
Needless to say, I returned home after my longest hospital stay (nine weeks in the Freeman Hospital) a changed young man -- uttering such linguistic gems as "why, just hoy it over here, man" and "why, aye, pet"... oh, and, of course, I was often "gannin' doon the road and roond the roonaboot". For a while, parents and teachers alike were somewhat concerned. ;-)
Oh dear - I sense trouble brewing!
Gary M: Now you've got me thinking that there must have beeen Newky Brun in the intravenous drips or on the hospital breakfast menu...
Apart from early exposure to a bottle of the stout stuff, my only other contact with the Geordie dialect was through watching 'When The Boat Comes In.' Thank goodness for this program. However inaccurate it might have been, it extended my vocabulary by several words, and enabled me to sing 'Who will have a fishie on a little dishy...' whenever I'd slurped one too many bottles of NBA.
Jane: Nah, we don't want no trouble. Honest, missus.
I read books usually.
books are our best friends.
work from home
Stela: Books - and the stories we tell through them - have certainly beeen an important part of my life. Thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment.
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