Spoke Like A Silsoner
This deck was printed privately in an edition of just 100 decks as a gift for a select group of family and old village friends. All copies of the deck have now been allocated. I've included it on this site purely for anyone else who's interested in local English dialects!
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Please note that this deck is not available for commercial sale
I was brought up in Silverstone in Northamptonshire - what was during my childhood a small village where much of the same families had lived for several hundred years. The earliest of my own ancestors I've traced as living in the village stretch back to the 15th century. While I myself left at the age of eighteen, many of my immediate family still live there and I'm there at least every few weeks.
In my lifetime, Silverstone (always known by the locals as Silson) has changed beyond all recognition. It is now on its way to becoming a small dormitory town, rather than the village it was throughout my childhood. Particularly one the past twenty years, several new developments have been built, and many of the old families who used to feature so strongly in village life have quietly disappeared or moved away. Traditional industries - particularly farming and forestry, which provided the majority of employment - no longer feature within local life as they once did, many more people now working at the nearby Formula One circuit or commuting to London.
It's not just the geography of the village that's dramatically different. Its unique dialect and vocabulary, often virtually unintelligible to outsiders (and locally infamous for the fact), that was for many generations an integral part of its character has also gradually slipped out of use. Its likely that my own generation will be the last to remember the time when all words and expressions included on these cads were spoken on an everyday basis. I therefore created this deck especially for old Silsoners in order to preserve and celebrate the village dialect as it once was.
Neil Lovell