It Is Time.

Spring Break in England is awesome. Of course, it's no Cancun, but it's a month long. I get yelled at by my Limey friends for calling it Spring Break, and not Easter Holiday, but we all know that Easter does not take up an entire month. Besides, American habits die hard. The fact that it's a month long give me lots of time to do things like work on papers, catch up on Chinese vocabulary, and see Lauren. There is one more endeavor that I think it is time to pursue.

Not so long ago I was watching Marshall Bowen talk about the history of the Mary Washington Geography Department. It goes without saying that Marshall can talk about anything and make it interesting. He is one of those people that should be on television but isn't. Well, he's on YouTube. Which got me thinking about the one thing the discipline of geography really needs. Good public relations. Any geographer reading this surely knows the deficit of geographical awareness in America. I don't trust statistics, but when I'm told that large portions of the American population cannot find Iraq on a world map, I'm inclined to believe it.

The University of Mary Washington Geography Department has more than done its part in alleviating this blight of geographical neglect. But plenty of others in the field of geography can't be bothered to share and explain the benefits of geographical understanding to others. (There's a few professors here at Nottingham that certainly fall into this category.) To be fair, geography as a discipline has an identity crisis that rivals that of John Nash. I think a lot of geographers become casualties of this. (Personally I think that geographers are better off embracing the expansive anarchy of geography than wasting their wit on trying to give the discipline that which it lacks most: discipline.)

So, I'm going to begin my own public relations campaign for geography. I'm going to do it via YouTube. I do this hoping that I might make geography a little more interesting. Hopefully a few people will watch and make at least a small step towards geographic edification. Either way, I plan to have some fun doing it. My first video should be out in the next few weeks.

There's also one other thing I wish to talk about.

The North-South Divide in England.

It's generally accepted anywhere I go in England that Scottish people are barking mad. And the Irish... well, the're Irish. 'Nuff said. But the most obvious divide is the one between the North and the South.

In America there's the "Mason-Dixon Line." It supposedly divides America's rude, intellectual and industrial north from the sweet tea-drinking, NASCAR-loving, tobacco-growing, bigoted south. Anyone that has spent more than 5 minutes in either of these "demarcated" regions knows that these stereotypes are hogswash. Having lived my entire life south of the Mason-Dixon I don't put sugar in my tea, I think NASCAR is damn boring, I've never once grown tobacco, and my only bigotry is towards West Virginian and Maryland drivers regardless of creed or color. I will say that the south has risen again, but I say that from an economical standpoint, not as part of a lunatic separatist minority.

To be honest, it's easier to take the piss out of individual states. There ain't too much I can make fun of my Connecticut brethren for. (Way to have covered bridges. Those are soooo two centuries ago.) It's far easier to antagonize those from New Jersey. I mean, the show Jersey Shore speaks for itself. On the other foot, (or tar-coated heel as the case may be...) how do you make fun of North Carolinians? Way to have several esteemed universities and a growing banking industry? I hear your pine is more sappy than up north? Mississippi on the other hand... well. About the only things you can't poke fun at in that state are the blues, the catfish and the Jim Henson museum.

And so our own regional divide is not so concrete as some people would have you think. With England it's a little more intense and evident. The North is full of hard-headed, not-too-bright, out-of-work steel workers who can't speak proper English and have a propensity towards violence. Or so I'm told. The south is full of rich, snobbish, pony-riding fops and dandies that can't survive hardship and would be nowhere if not for hardworking northerners. They cannot speak proper English as well. I don't spend much time in the south, although I've met my fair share of southern Brits. My northern friends assure me that whatever I see is superficial. They're all apparently fops and fopettes under the surface.

The only real constant in the North-South English stereotypes that seems to apply is the fact that few in this country can actually speak English. I think the purporters of that stereotype on both sides hit that nail wham-bam-thankyouma'am smack dab on the head.

And while the divide certainly isn't serious enough to lead to a civil war, there seems to be far more antagonism between northerners and southerners in this country. It's almost as much of a point of division as social class is, but I'm not gonna poke that turd today. Let's just all agree to hope that NASCAR doesn't catch on over here...

That's the end of it.

It's raining here in England like a cow pissin' on a flat rock.

So if you're here, wear your galoshes. If not, have a pleasant tomorrow.

- Jonathan "Real Geography Has No Boundaries" Trenary