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- 1ST YORKSHIREMAN: Very passable, I say, very passable. - ALL: Aye, Right. - 3RD YORKSHIREMAN: Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah? - 4th YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, You're right there, Obadiah. - 2ND: Aye. - 2ND YORKSHIREMAN: Who would’ve thought, thirty years ago, we'd all be sittin’ here drinkin’ Château de Chasselas, eh? - ALL: Nah. - 1ST: In them days we were glad to have the price of a cup of tea. - 4TH: A cup of cold tea. - 2ND: Without milk or sugar. - 1ST: Or tea! - 4TH: In a cracked cup, an’ all. - 2ND: Oh, we never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled-up newspaper. - 3RD: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth! - 1ST: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor. - 4TH: Because we were poor. My old dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't bring you happiness, son." - 2ND: He was right. - 1ST: Aye. - 2ND: I was happier then and I had nothing! We used to live in this tiny, old, tumbled-down house with great big holes in the roof. - 3RD: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, half the floor was missing, and we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling. - 4TH: Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in the corridor! - 1ST: Oh, we used to dream of livin’ in a corridor! Would've been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh. - 2ND: Well, when I say 'house' it was just a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us! - 3RD: We were evicted from our hole in the ground; we had to go live in a lake! - 4TH: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred-and-fifty of us livin’ in a shoebox in the middle of the road! - 1ST: Cardboard box? - 4TH: Aye. - 1ST: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank. We used to have to get up every morning at six o'clock, clean the newspaper, go to work down the mill: fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt! - 3RD: Luxury! We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky! - 4TH: Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night, and lick the road clean with our tongues! We had to eat half a handful of freezing-cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at that mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home ... our dad would slice us in two with a bread knife. - 2ND: Right ... I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down the mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home ... our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah." - 1ST: And you try to tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you. - ALL: No, they won't.
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What is it with expiry dates these days? And why is there an expiry date on sour cream anyway? I don’t remember ever seeing an expiry date on anything when I was a kid. Anyway, having had enough of delaying the inedible, I went to town to buy some food that won't expire before I do.
And while in town, I met up again with an old friend for a cup of coffee that already had my name on it. Unlike the four Yorkshiremen, it was only the two of us and we didn't wear dinner jackets or bow ties, but we almost sounded the same, he in Viennese and I in my Prussian German.
After an hour of 'one-downmanship' and 'out-destituting' each other, we shook hands with cries of "But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor" and "You try to tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you" and then, in unison, "No, they won't".
