It’s Yorkshire Day on Sunday and we’ll obviously be celebrating at Mortimer Chadwick Gray with lashings of Yorkshire Tea, Yorkshire pudding, parkin, balti, rhubarb and Tetley’s bitter.

We have plenty to be proud of in Yorkshire, but then the same could be said of many counties in the UK each with their own identity, traditions, regional specialities and sites of historical interest. So why do so few of them have a county day? Just Yorkshire and Lancashire according to my research, but they only wanted one because we had one first.

I consider myself to have dual-county belonging these days: I was born and raised in Essex but I moved to Yorkshire and married a Yorkshire-man (I mean a real one – he is related to Joshua Tetley no less – his dad has Tetley as a middle name) 13 years ago now. So I know a bit about county stereotypes thank you very much. Each morning I clean my white stilettos before packing my children, Chardonnay and Wayne, off to school in my Escort Ghia. I usually find time to sleep with a couple of barrow-boys on the way home before cooking up a nourishing evening meal of eels.

And yet if I lived just down the M1 in Nottinghamshire and had been born and bred next door in Suffolk would there be quite so much to guess about me? I think it’s really intriguing how some places have a real sense of their own identity and are known across the country for one thing or another whilst others don’t really register in the national consciousness for anything definite. I take my hat off to counties like Yorkshire and Essex that know what they’re about. The stereotypes may not tell the whole story but who would want to go un-noticed – and it’s fun to go against type don’t you think?

Yorkshire Day may have been created by the Yorkshire Ridings Society in 1975 to protest about changes to local Government reorganisation, but the day was already celebrated by the Yorkshire regiment, the Light Infantry as Minden Day, celebrating a famous battle in 1759, with the wearing of white Minden roses.

This year Yorkshire Day will be celebrated across the county with events ranging from Leeds Pride to brass band recitals and parades celebrating the old Lammas Day harvest celebration, also on 1 August. It’s not what you would call a massive cultural event, but I’ll be picking a couple of white roses from the hedgerow above the Holme Valley and taking a good long look at the view before I head home to clean the Escort and arrange my ankle chains by carat weight.