Neither Nowt Nor Summat : In search of the meaning of Yorkshire Paperback / softback

I’m going to define the essence of this sprawling place as best I can.

I’m going to start here, in this village, and radiate out like a ripple in a pond.

I don’t want to go to the obvious places, either; I want to be like a bus driver on my first morning on the job, getting gloriously lost, turning up where I shouldn’t.

I’m going to confirm or deny the clichés, holding them up to see where the light gets in.

Yorkshire people are tight. Yorkshire people are arrogant. Yorkshire people eat a Yorkshire pudding before every meal.

Yorkshire people solder a t’ before every word they use...

If there were such a thing as a professional Yorkshireman, Ian McMillan would be it.

He’s regularly consulted as a home-grown expert, and southerners comment archly on his ‘fruity Yorkshire brogue’.

But he has been keeping a secret. His dad was from Lanarkshire, Scotland, making him, as he puts it, only ‘half tyke’.

So Ian is worried; is he Yorkshire enough?To try to understand what this means Ian embarks on a journey around the county, starting in the village has lived in his entire life.

With contributions from the Cudworth Probus Club, a kazoo playing train guard, Mad Geoff the barber and four Saddleworth council workers looking for a mattress, Ian tries to discover what lies at the heart of Britain’s most distinct county and its people, as well as finding out whether the Yorkshire Pudding is worthy of becoming a UNESCO Intangible Heritage Site, if Harrogate is really, really, in Yorkshire and, of course, who knocks up the knocker up?