BY JIM WEBSTER

Our esteemed editor turned up here. He wasn’t eaten by the dog, outran the bull and generally fitted in pretty well. He even likes Gregg’s sausage rolls with Brown Sauce. But then you listen to his life story, throw away lines about banking, rugby played under strange stars, and you ask yourself how somebody ends up a countryman (or countrywoman, or for those who have yet to decide, country-entity).

It’s a tricky one. I have no choice, I was born here, live here and am unemployable by any organisation that has HR or HSE policies. But our editor had a grown-up life and a proper job.

So, I got to thinking. There are other cases where people in the past have happily and successfully adopted identities that ‘weren’t really theirs’. In the ancient world, being Greek, or being a Hellene, was similar. Take the Greek city of Ai-Khanoum (we don’t know its Greek name) situated in the Afghan province of Takhar on the border with Tajikistan. Founded between 300 and 290 BC, at one point Klearchos, a citizen of the city, travelled to Delphi in Greece. There he copied the first 145 maxims and inscribed them on a stele in his home city, so his fellow Greeks, (the offspring of mercenaries from throughout the Hellenistic world and local girls) knew what they aspired to.

Indeed, in the ‘Greek’ city of Oxyrhynchos in Egypt (The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish) we have the papyri records of Greek families. Greek families where the first generation was born in Greece (or thereabouts) but who married local girls, so that by the fourth generation, they had Egyptian (as well as Greek) names and wrote in Coptic as well as Greek. Being Greek was about aspiring to be Greek, speaking the language, living the life, and loving the culture.

And to come back to where I started off, it strikes me that being a country-entity in England is pretty similar. If you aspire to be a country-entity, speak the language, live the life and love the culture.

And I think loving the culture is most important. Last week, due to a strange and hopefully not repeated combination of circumstances I stayed in Dalkeith and Bellingham. Now wandering the streets of Dalkeith, just talking to people, they’re both friendly and are fond of the area. At the moment there is a ridiculous amount of house building going on in the area. Apparently some of it is ‘Edinburgh overspill’. Talk to the good folk of Dalkeith and they’re torn. Yes it is bringing prosperity, it’s creating work and when folk move in to these new houses they’ll create more work. But will they love Dalkeith, or merely sleep there and go on being denizens of Edinburg? Will they buy in to the love of Dalkeith?

And then I was in Bellingham. I walked up the path to the Hareshaw Linn Waterfall (well worth doing). It’s an hour to the waterfall, (and doubtless an hour back) but I didn’t want to retrace my steps. So, as I made my way back down I spotted the path I expected to be there. At the top of the path there was even a gate telling me the bridge was down. (Which bridge I don’t know.) I then contoured east to avoid the waterfall and struck out for a crag which looked to be the highest thing locally. On the top I leaned against the cairn which kept a chill north wind off me, listened to the army training Ukrainian artillerymen in the distance, and just surveyed the world over my lunch. As a matter of record, the butcher next to the opticians in Dalkeith makes a truly excellent steak pie.

Looking out from the cairn I had that top of the world feeling you sometimes get in Northumberland. Everything spread out for miles, the North Tyne valley twisting away to the west, the Pennines in the far distance. I’ve always been fond of Northumberland. Hard land, tough people, but decent with it. But it was as I crossed back into Cumbria I realised the difference. Yes I’m fond of Northumberland, but the counties of Westmoreland and Furness are indeed God’s own country.

And I suspect that of the three ways to being a country entity, speak the language, live the life and love the culture, the most important of these is the love.

Far too many people are driven by hate. Indeed, they even attach labels to people so you can hate them in a more socially acceptable way. It’s not enough that they disagree with you, to hate them properly you have to label them, to take away their humanity, to convert them from people into Nazis, Fascists, Commies, the metropolitan elite, and other such undesirables.

So, some people we come across will never be country-entities because they don’t love the countryside, so much as they hate ‘toffs’ or ‘meat eaters’ or ‘landowners’ or whatever.

Luckily, as somebody told us about 2000 years ago, love conquers hate.

Jim Webster farms at the bottom end of South Cumbria. Jim was encouraged to collect together into a book some blog posts he’d written because of their insight into Cumbrian farming and rural life (rain, sheep, quad-bikes and dogs) It’s available here.