Is "having my tea" a northern thing?

[Queenoftheblitz]

I'm a working class southerner. The only tea I have is in a cup with milk and sugar.
On mn a lot of posts talk about their evening meal as"tea", "what shall i make for tea" etc.
Do any southeners call it tea?

queenoftheblitz LMAO i agree if anyone offers or ask me what i want for a sweet i always think of sweeties ie jelly babies / fudge / boiled sweets .

Born and lived all my life in Yorkshire.

We have breakfast, lunch, dinner.

Tea is either the drink or afternoon tea.

Breakfast, lunch, kids tea and supper. You go out for dinner, or invite others round. Although you may have people round for an informal supper - more of a lasagne and salad type thing.

Safe to say OP that the north/south divide is an indicator but not really that conclusive. As a common southerner I eat my dinner in the evening, so anything is possible!

Dinner = midday meal
Tea = Evening meal

From Devon here and DP says the same. He's from South Yorkshire.

Breakfast - dinner - tea. Working class East Anglia.

The PP listing meals could add their dockey - the portable meal eaten at work in the middle of a shift, during unpaid time when their wages were docked - as opposed to coming home for a cooked meal in your dinner hour.

Dinner = lunch
Tea = dinner in our house.

Working class, transplanted east coast Scotland (now in the central belt of Scotland)

Rural southern here.

Even more rules and variation round here.

Breakfast - lunch - supper. Kitchen supper is usually a meal at a friends where you eat at the kitchen table.

Supper is what you eat at home. Even if you are invited for an evening meal which will be at a dining table and fairly formal it's "come round for supper" - and you're supposed to know because it's marginally later than kitchen supper and may be "8 for 8.30"). However it will be known as a dinner party but for some reason "dinner" is rarely used on its own.

Came from a southern family where it was breakfast-lunch-tea-supper (slice of bread and dripping with a cup of tea before bed).

I think a lot of it's diverging because people eat earlier if they work nearby/get up at sparrowsfart/use a lot of energy in their job. Commuters often eat later - say Reading to London for 10-6 job, back home 7.30, eat at 8pm.

Do people still eat supper? We always ate our tea at about 5 for my manual worker dad who worked 7 to 4. We sometimes snacked on fruit during the evening. And then we ate supper at about 9: crackers and cheese, toast, omelet, potato fritters, something tasty and savoury like that. Very occasionally something from the chippy. We were all slim though.

None of my kids have ever eaten supper. And snacks in front of a movie are a lot less healthy.

I'm from yorkshire

Breakfast
Lunch
Tea

The majority of my colleagues also refer to it as tea (a lot of our conversations are food related)

Never had the issue of someone mistaking it for a drink.

Dinner is your main cooked meal. If you eat your main meal in the middle of the day (cooked school dinner) or if you have a cooked dinner in the evening.

Lunch is a smaller midday meal, tea is a light early evening meal, supper is a light snack very late in the evening.

That's how it should be anyway imo because it makes sense.

Grew up in the West Country and have always said lunch and tea!
Occasionally dinner as in going out for dinner but otherwise if at home it's tea.

Breakfast = breakfast
Lunch = midday meal
Tea = either afternoon tea and scones etc at about 4pm OR what I would use to describe a meal I would give to the children at 5-6pm
Supper = informal evening meal (main course and maybe pudding)
Dinner = formal evening meal, usually with multiple courses
Bedtime snack = raiding the fridge after evening meal

I’m from the south. My husband is northern and sometimes refers to our supper as tea, which makes my teeth itch.

So if you include supper, are most people eating 4 meals a day?

Lunchtime supervisors supervise at lunch time (the whole time period, including the eating of packed lunches and probably some playground time). Dinner ladies used to slop luke warm made from power mashed potato and grey sausages onto your plate, followed by "traffic lights" with pink custard, and shout about starving children in Africa if you failed to clear your plate.

I live on the south coast, dinner and tea are somewhat interchangeable.

Queen it's not necessary to eat each meal every day just because the words have different meanings.

Airbiscuits completely agree with your list of meals.

I don't have a problem with calling a meal tea, but I think it has to be a meal that you would happily accompany with a drink of tea. Otherwise it doesn't make sense.

Its "tea" in Norfolk.

Def. a northern thing. I'm a southerner born and bred, so tea was always a cup of, maybe with sandwiches and cake if you were lucky.

Personally I like regional variations - how boring if we were all the same. Northern friends call what I call fairy cakes, buns, too. There must be lots of others.

Traffic lights?!

I'm as North as it gets (Cumbria)

Breakfast, dinner and tea!

I hate people who call lunch dinner and dinner tea. Wtf it's breakfast lunch and dinner.

I don't mind breakfast lunch and tea but lunch should never be called dinner!

Airbiscuits like a massive jam tart to serve a multitude, in stripes of red, orange and green "jam" - rock hard pastry, weird sticky yet nearly solid "jam". Maybe that's a northern thing, or just a late 70s/ early 80s thing... Certainly one of my prominent primary school memories. Many a wobbly tooth was lost in the traffic lights...