The people of Wiltshire have their own quirks. Not everything on this page is going to be absolutely unique to this county alone, but there are ways of doing and saying things that certainly don’t occur in London. The list may be short but it is growing, so please be patient!

1. Shortening names.

So your parents bestowed on you the name Gary. It’s not exactly long, but your mates may well decide that it still needs shortening and you end up as Gaz. Now sure, Gaz is pretty punchy, but that’s still a bit too long for these parts. In Wiltshire, don’t be surprised to have your name shortened right down to Gaa. Pronunciation is a difficult one to get across; I can’t rhyme it with another word for the simple reason that it is not a word itself, just a sound. The ‘a’ is like the ‘a’ in ‘cat’, but slightly drawn out and rounded. Imagine someone gargling a short, sharp ‘aaaaaa’ and you’re probably quite close. The same rule, of course, applies not just to Garys but to Barrys, Larrys etc. Harry is especially good because the ‘H’ is inevitably dropped, meaning the entire name is boiled down to a throaty ‘Aa’ sound.

2. Complain about being stuck behind the horse and cart in town.

This one is specific to Devizes, a market town slap bang in the centre of Wiltshire. Local brewer Wadworth is one of only a handful of the UK’s breweries to still use shire horses for local deliveries, and when they’re making their way through town they are painfully slow. So those of us who get caught in traffic behind them love to complain as publicly as possible about the fact that we got stuck behind an actual, genuine horse and cart going through an actual, genuine town, preferably on Facebook, where people who live elsewhere will see it. We do it in a manner that looks like we’re just getting out our frustrations, but really we’re showing off the fact that something as backward as this still operates here. We love how rustic it makes us sound, and it’s a huge pointscorer in the never-ending games of ‘we’re more rural than you’, self-deprecating one-upmanship that go on against other provincial regions. Speaking of which…

3. Negatively compete to be the most rural.

This is both inter-personal and inter-regional. A real life example of the former that springs to mind is the occasion on which I once heard a farming friend confessing (“confessing”) that he hadn’t ventured over the hills near the village in months, and the approval-laced laughter with which he was met. The latter is more a case of doing things like number 2, but directing it at people who live in other countryside counties. It’s quite difficult to put a finger on the root of all this, not least because the competitions are never entered into with a boast, more a ‘complaint’ about the area or a ‘shameful admission’ about your own lack of cosmopolitan verve. But however backhanded the delivery, the intent is always the same: to prove yourself or your home the most rural of all. Why? Well it’s simple: by doing this you aren’t really putting yourself down but in fact taking active steps to distance yourself from those London types and reaffirm yourself as the true countryside dweller that you are.