He ponders, he quests (he wonders if that's correct verb usage)

Word of the day: flange
Corporate claptrapism of the day: push the envelope (yawn)

No SPS today (again) so i started pondering:
I’ve lived here all of my life and yet I still don’t really know where it is. To people in the South we’re the gritty North and yet to anyone living in Sheffield and upwards we are most definitely Southern puffs. Quite where our borders are remain a mystery yet everyone has heard of us. I’m talking of course about The Midlands.

According to Wikipedia (“so it must be true”, ‘The Sun’) the Midlands goes as far east as Skegness, as far north as Chesterfield, includes part of the Peak District, has a southerly point somewhere near Northampton, heads west beyond Telford over to the Welsh border and corresponds roughly to the outline of the ancient Kingdom of Mercia.

I’m not sure these borders are correct though. Certainly the BBC don’t think so. To them the East Midlands seems to be the little triangle at whose points lie Derby, Nottingham and Leicester - they do mention Lincolnshire from time to time but it’s purely tokenism - and the West Midlands is basically Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stoke where it is apparently compulsory to talk in a reeelly strainge waiy.

In any case we have no true identity. If the south stops and the north begins at Watford Gap where the hell do we fit in?

More to the point. Why do people in Corby sound like wannabe Londoners? How can seaside towns be included in something named ‘The Midlands’? And perhaps most importantly, does anybody care?

Whether you do or you don’t, I’m going to find out. From time to time I will head boldly and randomly out into the middleish wilderness to bring you wonderful insights into what is after all, my own local area, and of which I probably know very little. I will photograph and document my travels and when I run short of ideas and need a few words to fill a page I shall google wherever I am and make it look like I know what I’m talking about. And it'll give me something else to blog about and yet another reason to do as little work as possible.

So tomorrow I begin my voyage of discovery. Remember the old adage that charity begins at home? Well this isn’t a charity so I’m going to start in Derby.