All my life I’ve been looking for a neurosis. I’ve always felt that having some deeply hidden glitch is just something that everyone has – like an adrenal gland, or a brain. A complex is what motivates you. It’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. And a complex works so neatly, too – like all those long-running TV series that have an overarcing plotline, and everything gets explained in the last episode: “Oh, he wasn’t really a copper in the 1970s – it was a coma all along.” “Oh, her dad was possessed by an evil spirit called Bob, and he killed Laura, wrapped her in plastic and threw her in the lake. I get it.” “Oh, I’m scared to commit and had that awful perm because my father liked to dress in women’s clothing. Now I understand.” It’s such a satisfying narrative conclusion.

Alas, everything you would have thought I could work up into some kind of complex has, by some unfortunate dint, merely worked to my advantage. As a fat working-class girl with seven siblings, a genetic pre-disposition towards severe mental illness, a formal education that ended at the age of 11 and a tendency towards a monobrow, I should, by rights, be an embittered adulterer, with a red-hot horse-slashing habit on the side. However, working in the media, which is squeamish about appearing male, Establishment and “safe”, all those things are a positive boon – a bit like being an albino panda: it makes you of special scientific interest. As a consequence, I have spent my life being relatively well balanced and happy. You can’t imagine how unbalanced and unhappy that has made me feel.

However, last week, it occurred to me that I do have a neurosis, a big one. Because I am from Wolverhampton, and Wolverhampton is in the West Midlands, and the West Midlands – indeed, all of the Midlands – is in a psychological no man’s land. To be born in the Midlands is, in a very real sense, to be born nowhere. For in a country that still defines itself as either North or South – soft, shandy-drinking ponces, or impoverished nut-jobs in wife-beater vests – the children of the Midlands can belong to neither one camp nor the other. Our identity is irrevocably split between the two. We have no natural allies. We are geographically mulatto. Forgive me if I repeatedly punch the air with my fist while shouting: “Woooo yeah!” Consider the limbo in which this places the Midlander. First of all: “Midlander.” “Northerner” is proud, witty, Viking-boned; “Southerner” is urbane and probably drives a recent Beamer. “Midlander”: well, it just sounds as if we can’t make up our minds. As if we were either migrating from the Fens to the Pennines, or vice versa, stopped in Leicester saying “Moi feet are killing moi”, and never got up again.

Let’s face it: there isn’t really such a word as “Midlander”. No one uses it. People just say “I’m a Brummie”, even if they’re not from Birmingham. I’ve called myself a Brummie before now, even though I’m from Wolverhampton, which technically makes me a “Yammy”*. The problem is, though, that no one outside the Midlands uses or knows about Yammy, mainly because no one ever writes epic 12-part dramas about the noble savagery of life in Droitwich, or the manicured lawns and adulterous hypocrisy of Solihull. So Brummie it is, despite it being like people from Leeds saying they’re Scousers because no one had heard of Leeds.

Everything to do with the Midlands has an unintentional, iridescent sheen of hilarity about it. While the North and South have polarising, self-mythologising tracts on their definitive genetic characteristics, the psyche of the Midlands has been left to form on whichever, frankly more rubbish, ones were left over. The result is the Midlands stereotype: a slightly pessimistic, self-deprecating bovoid plodder, potentially thrilled by the sound of a can-opener on a tin of “The Full Monty” baked-beans-breakfast-in-a-can. No film director would ever cast someone with a Midlands accent as a wild-eyed maverick bird-magnet, or an epicurean versed in the arts of Mephistopheles.

This is why, possibly of all the people in the world – even more than Martin Luther King, or Slash from Guns N’ Roses – I admire the TV presenter Adrian Chiles. With an accent as Brummie as a Rotunda made of dead dogs, he rose above all the prejudice, brickbats and closed minds to present the BBC’s business programme Working Lunch. There he would regularly make informed references to the Nasdaq. In a Brummie voice! It’s the modern equivalent of the Garrick being founded by a blackamoor lesbian.

Ultimately, I like the fact that the Midlands is widely lacking in self-mythologisation. I like that our stereotype is just a bit “meh”. It makes Yammies and Brummies morphic, chameleon-like creatures. Shackled neither to the wearying, often punitive clichés of northern realness or southern urbanity, we are free to invent ourselves however we wish. Lovers, fighters, intellectuals, pirates, muses, gallivanters – even French (yes French!), if we so fancy it. But only once we’ve dropped the accent, loike.

*From the evocative Black Country pronunciation of “I am” – as in “Oi yam going to see that Jasper Carrott at the Hippodrome” – hence Yammy.

Kick the habit? It’s time to take it up!

An interesting proposal from the Government, which moots the idea of giving those who wish to quit smoking up to a week off work. This is so that they might have the best chance of kicking the potentially fatal addiction and also not get on their coworkers’ tits by pacing up and down, sweating, swearing and squeezing their stress-reliever ball until it pops and all the sand runs out. I do, however, see a small flaw in this plan. Absolutely giving up smoking, for ever, is, after all, one of those things that one is legendarily apt to do several times – along with falling in love for ever, and discovering the definitive diet. Personally, were I a nonsmoker with an active interest in furthering my scuba-diving skills or my tan on company time, I’d take up smoking now. I would then have a half-dozen heroically failed attempts to quit it in the ensuing year. Start smoking! You know it makes sense.

A very British Hugh

The noted stuttering posh thespian Hugh Grant has been arrested and subsequently bailed for an incident on the doorstep of his Chelsea home. Accosted by a vexatious paparazzo, Grant allegedly threw a Tupperware container of baked beans at him. Is this the most English thing that’s ever happened? I’m struggling to think of anything that could be more redolent of Blighty. Judi Dench, cornered outside Waitrose, spraying Earl Grey over a fractious Morris dancer? Ned Sherrin lobbing a pikelet at a viscount in Tate Britain? Darcey Bussell bombarding a steam-train enthusiast with Werthers? We have reached some manner of apogee.

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