Plate me up something vernacular

I've recently returned from a most excellent holiday piloting a narrowboat at sub-walking speeds up and down a small sliver of Yorkshire, before continuing North by road as far as Newcastle.  About as far from sci-fi as it's possible to get.

One small disappointment was that this did not constitute the first step in my proposed 'offal tour of the North'.  It's long been my plan to sample traditional bovine or porcine innards served up by plain women with ham hock arms and flat vowels in their proper place - partly as a gastronomic mission, but mainly as a way of scaring the kids.

I'm sure just a few years ago you could sample the tripe at market stalls (maybe I was hallucinating myself into an LS Lowry painting?) but, a stottie cake in Newcastle apart, I discovered the cuisine was almost exactly the same as down south.  I did try hard at a baker's stall in Halifax, asking what she had that I wouldn't find outside Yorkshire, but she just looked at me as though I'd asked her to check the structural calcs on the first elements of the International Space Station replacement before it gets blasted up there.  I immediately changed my order to a Danish, the irony striking home a moment later, like the pain after you've hit your thumb with a hammer.

I find it sad.  We're losing a granularity that made for a rich variety, a tapestry of different accents, foodstuffs, architectures, dress styles, proverbs, ways of doing business.  Wind the clock back five hundred years and every English town, every Welsh valley, every Scottish glen would have had something that set it apart, even if it was just a preference for pie crust or a way of calling your neighbour an idiot.

But now, the heterogeneous has become homogeneous, and I'm not even sure how well differentiated the UK is from the USA or many other English-speaking (imposed homogeneity again!) parts of the planet.  Competition gives winners scale and scale gives winners dominance and then we all find ourselves wearing Nike on our feet and eating Big Macs because there's no other choice.

But back up a bit there!  There's a flaw in this argument.  

Five hundred years ago you wouldn't have found yourself casually travelling from one corner of the country to the other.  You probably wouldn't have made it very far out of your English town or Welsh valley or Scottish glen.  Unless you went to war, you would have spent your life around the same accents, foodstuffs, architectures, dress styles and proverbs.  You probably wouldn't have realised that there was any other way of doing business.  You would have replaced your clogs with identical clogs from the one clog maker within walking distance, and bought your offal and bread from the never-changing village monopolies.

What we have is a problem of scale.  I'm not seeing any less vernacular than I would have seen centuries ago; I'm just seeing less differentiation spread over a vastly larger area.

We'll, that's okay, isn't it?

Unfortunately not, methinks, because life's rich tapestry is woven on a frame that's limited by the size of the planet.  There's only so much room (about 500 million square kilometres, since you ask) to display all the colours of the rainbow of human culture.  And we're turning a life-affirming mosaic into grubby dentist's waiting room wall of pastel ordinariness - pink or pale green, with a few smutty bon mots biro-ed on to break up the monotony.

Until we find ourselves in a sci-fi future where we flit from planet to planet, from alien culture to alien culture (I'll lay my cards on the table: ain't never gonna happen), which will provide a bigger loom onto which to weave our myriad differences, we're going to have to accept that we're turning Earth greige.  We've explored every corner of the world; there's nothing new to see.  And pretty soon we'll have put a McDonald's and a Starbucks there too.