Learn how the better half live

After Martin Wainwright told me he had asked the publisher to dispatch a copy of his book to the T&A, he added: “I’ll be interested to know what you think of it.”

I am happy to oblige. It’s a good read, Martin – as you might expect from the former T&A journalist who, for the past 20-odd years, has been Northern Editor of The Guardian.

Those fond of his witty and affirmative dispatches – always inclined to look on the bright side in a writing style that predates Bill Bryson’s deprecating drollery – will find more in this northern chronicle.

But the index is rubbish... you won’t find a single reference to the T&A, David Hockney and a lot else. Walt Whitman gets a mention, but not Michael Wharton, the Way Of The World columnist who invented Doreen Bronte, the fourth Bronte sister, and the redoubtable Alderman Foodbotham.

Yet references to both, and much else, abound in the book as the venerable Wainwright wends his way, like a cheerful monk, through the mental and physical landscape of the North, from coast to coast and from Newcastle-on-Tyne to Nottingham (he’s fond of Robin Hood).

Bath and London also come into the chronicle, for Martin scribed in both. But only in the North, I believe, are you likely to come across a story about the wartime bomb shelter made out of blocks of lard, below a chip shop in Birstall.

Frequenters of the arts and business complex at Halifax’s Dean Clough know about the large silver True North sign that greets in-comers from the town centre. It’s as stirring as the landscape which reminds me of El Greco’s grey, green and silvery painting of Toledo.

Conscious of this stirring of the blood, Mr W has subtitled his 300-page excursion – a kind of Michael Portillo train trip or cross-country trek by Alfred W Wainwright – In Praise Of England’s Better Half. If it sounds like the title of a social comedy by Harold Brighouse, that’s because Leeds-born Wainwright, son of the late Colne Valley Liberal MP Richard Wainwright, has a bright-eyed, cultivated preference for the comic over the tragic.

This has been apparent throughout his career. Why else would a T&A news editor of years ago have a ruddy-faced, curly-haired cub reporter typing a weekly column called – wait for it – Happy People?

The famous northern propensity for curmudgeonliness – or being a miserable git – is one of many preconceptions that Martin looks at again in the light of experience, his own and that of other people. Among the latter are Ken Morrison, Arthur Scargill, JB Priestley and Margaret Thatcher.

For example, the idea that life is habitually ‘grim up north’ is embedded in a familiar narrative of the Depression: ragamuffin children gazing forlornly at jobless men leaning on corner street lampposts. Cloggies from Jarrow clumping to Downing Street to ask for a bit of help.

Yes, but that’s not the only truth to tell.

“The children of the self-confident, late Victorian and Edwardian generation faced potentially disastrous reverses: the First World War and the Depression, both on a scale that no one had foreseen or knew how to meet.

“But the upbringing of so many of those involved, in households which had known only a steady improvement in conditions, passed on the gene of positive thinking... the Depression was faced in the north with defiance, imagination and by those who experienced the most dismal and long-lasting of its effects, perseverance.”

Thirty years ago, I might have thought such an observation facile. Since then, the iron-spiked brush of recession has combed the fabric of society three times, ripping out at least 355,000 jobs in mining and manufacturing alone. But defiance, imagination and perseverance remain – in spite of jobsworths, political correctness and EU health and safety edicts.

This is not a chronological history but a themed illustrated ramble. Martin includes a picture of his favourite chip shop in Yeadon, but you won’t find one of him.