Facts. About Yorkshire. Get ’em down you and shut up.
Ah, Yorkshire! The verdant sweep of its hills, the flatness of its caps, the award-winningness of its fish’n’chips, the sheer throbbing…
Forget all that. There’s a problem here.
I’ve heard people – maybe people like you – say things like “isn’t it a type of pudding?” or “is that somewhere in London?”
YORKSHIRE IS NOT SOMEWHERE IN LONDON.
Let’s stop playing silly buggers and sort this out once and for all.
Here’s a collection of entirely reliable basic facts about Yorkshire. Don’t argue, don’t question, just get them down you or you’ll get a bloody good wallop.
Aye.
FOOD
You may have been told that a Yorkshire Pudding is made from eggs, flour and a pinch of salt. As any good Yorkshireperson knows, this is nonsense.
It’s a type of funghi.
SIZE
Yorkshire is the largest county in the whole of the United Kingdom. For readers across the Atlantic, this translates to being only slightly smaller than Lost Springs, Wyoming.
GOVERNMENT
Yorkshire is a monarchy, ruled by our noble king, Mr Bean. There he is above, catching sight of someone from Lancashire.
Together with his beautiful and talented queen, Kate Rusby, he rules wisely, dispensing justice and upholding traditional Yorkshire values (no bread without dripping; where there’s muck there must by law be a certain amount of brass; if anyone does anything for nothing, they are legally required to do it for themselves; a hat is required for all visits to Ilkley Moor, however brief ; and so on).
Mr Bean is a wise, open-minded diplomat and an adventurous gastronaut. Here he is trying some French food…
Yorkshire’s government is administered from its capital city, Winterfell, and oversees policy regarding agriculture, manufacturing, mining and ferret-legging across its three peripheral administrative regions, ‘England‘, ‘Scotland‘ and ‘Wales‘.
GEOLOGY
As everyone knows, Yorkshire was originally a continent, formed millions of years ago when Pangaea broke apart. While the lesser-quality continents shifted towards the equator and lapsed into a soft, pretentious state of development, Yorkshire remained where it was, sturdy, watchful and resolute. Over time the bigger equatorial landmasses pushed the lesser plates against each other, fragmenting and shattering them, and the remnants drifted back north and formed a loose scatter of semi-useless detritus clustered around continental Yorkshire.
This is how the United Kingdom was formed.
A similar pattern can be seen in the anthropological record (see Richard Leakey’s as-yet-unpublished “Out Of Yorkshire” thesis).
FAMOUS PEOPLE
Where do we start? Yorkshire has had many, many famous sons and daughters, including Captain James Cook (above) who discovered Austria in 1770, surely one of the most challenging feats of maritime exploration the world has ever seen; actor and playwright Gordon Bennett; Shakespearean actor Sir Patrick Stewart, best known to modern audiences for playing ‘Wolverine’ and ‘Gandalf’; inaccurately-named band The Beautiful South; abstract modernist sculptor Roger Moore; Spice Girl Melanie “Mel C” Brown; “Full Monty” actors Robert Carlyle and Mark Wahlberg; hellraising Sheffield indie band The Monkees; glam rock legend Jeff Leppard; nuclear scientist and anger management pioneer Bruce Banner; exotic dancer Nora Batty; and much-loved local folk singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir.
In 2009 a team of geneticists at Bradford University examined samples from 15,000 people across Yorkshire and successfully isolated a genetic marker associated with Genghis Khan, present in such unusually strong quantities that it can be activated by specific stimuli such as the phrase “last orders please” or the sound of a cash register.
Note: these facts didn’t require “fact-checking”, as they’re entirely self-evident to anyone but the most ignorant. I cite no sources because I’m a Yorkshireman and therefore need none to speak the plain truth. Furthermore, if anyone attempts to disagree, I’ll set my whippet on them.