Magpies and grey wolves

My husband sat down, leaned across the table and said “I couldn’t get the grey wolf in with the handcart”. I looked around the cafe conspiratorially. “Is that code?” He looked confused. I told him what I heard, which obviously wasn’t what he’d said. Once we stopped laughing, I asked what he’d actually said. He couldn’t remember. Welcome to old age.

We were in Le Petit Choux before the Newcastle United-Cardiff match, having decided that we’d have coffee and cake rather than a pint in the pub (another sure sign that we’ve entered our dotage). We’d secured an extra season ticket from a friend who was out of town and went our separate ways to seats in the Gallowgate end of St James’ Park. Even if you’re not a football fan, if you want to experience the true energy and passion of Newcastle, this noisy end of the park is where it is demonstrated most keenly.

It doesn’t matter than I’m an American woman in a shocking pink parka – when the team come out onto the field I feel tribal to my very core. I’ve even been known to get teary after a particularly tragic loss or a stress headache after a tense match. Having said that, I don’t join in the chants that NUFC fans are famous for, mostly because I haven’t a clue what the words are but also because they really should be belted out in a Geordie accent.

For those of you unfamiliar with Geordie, it’s not just an accent but a regional dialect of Anglo-Saxon origin. With words like gan (go) and bairn (child) still in common use, it’s not just a heavily accented version of English. And though it is an attractive, it can be rather impenetrable.  When I first arrived in Newcastle my first job was as a temp at an architectural firm in Jesmond. One of my duties was to man reception. It wasn’t long before I was taken off intercom duty as I just buzzed everyone in off the street as couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

It’s not just Geordie. A couple of weeks after moving to the UK we were watching what I thought was a foreign football manager being interviewed on the television. It went on for a while and I asked my husband why there were no subtitles. It was Kenny Dalglish. Enough said.

If you want to hear proper Geordie, go to a NUFC match. Not only do you hear Geordie in the chants and songs (Blaydon Races gets sung every match), but you’re surrounded by people speaking it unapologetically. In a world that’s becoming increasingly homogenised, there’s no effort to soften the regional way of speaking in the stands. For me, it’s lyrical and absolutely magic.

The language in the stands isn’t all bairn-friendly. On Saturday, there was an empty seat (one of the few) between me and a white bearded gentleman who looked a bit like Santa in a Newcastle United woolly hat. He watched the match, resting his chin on his cane, seemingly unperturbed by the excitement of the first half. Then a Cardiff player came to our end of the field to take a corner. In a rare lull in the crowd noise, Santa stood up into a low stoop, still leaning on his cane and shouted at the top of his lungs “you f*cking pr*ck!”, before sitting back down and resuming his deceptive friendly-old-man demeanour. The meaning of that was pretty clear, despite the accent.

After the match (which we won), we thawed ourselves out in front of the fire with a bottle of red wine and a couple of episodes of Poldark (mostly for my benefit). I glance at my husband, wine glass in hand and cat on his lap and thought that life is pretty good, even if he does say some crazy stuff sometimes.