TOPIC OF AN ESSAY I DON'T WANT TO WASTE MY TIME ON... (hokey Northern simplicity is a weapon we use against ourselves...) --- Sorry for bringing up the Capital I will be brief -- it is because so much of Northern writing sets itself against the capital even when the capital goes unnamed -- This is what is happening when the simplicity of Northerners is baselessly insisted upon -- I think of Manchester's longstanding unofficial motto -- "We do things differently here" -- and its implications: that Manchester, self-anointed bastion of Northern English identity, is inherently different from other cities (dubious); that things have been done differently there for some time (?); that Northerners are 'doers', i.e. not like those ponce-philosophers down South -- so, something to denigrate the North so London might appear pedestalled, which gives us a reason to hate it, and so spite from a lowly position becomes cause for a smug sense of superiority. And anyway, as friends from Newcastle and Edinburgh often remind me, Lancashire is not really in the north at all, but rather very much in Britain's middle -- and the South Pennines is, of course, a South of a sort, all murky plateaus and dark cavities at the foot of south-flowing valleys. So where does that leave us?