I READ with interest the letter from Janet Hall of Aldbrough St John (D&S Times) about Middlesbrough’s place in Yorkshire, and it seems we have much in common.

The point she makes about the River Tees being the boundary between Durham and North Yorkshire is very valid, though I believe somewhere somebody has decreed that the current county and metropolitan boundaries cannot be breached. I have a great deal of empathy with what she says.

I was born in Redcar, where I mainly grew up and was educated. My father’s family came from Eston, my mother’s from Thornaby, and I grew up fully in the belief I was a Yorkshire lad.

True, there was sometimes a Christmas visit to Stockton, but this was regarded as being just across the Victoria Bridge from Thornaby.

My father was an officer in the North Riding Police and retired when stationed at Guisborough, as well as, for example, at one stage being posted to North Yorkshire’s Whitby. I was educated in North Riding schools.

When the football results are coming through my main interest even now is to look for the “Boro”, and I feel the obsession of local television stations with the two Premier League sides approximately 50 miles to the north is literally “out of this world”.

To crown it all, your writer Harry Mead and I were in the same class at Sir William Turner’s School, Redcar, as teenagers, and we are both now very well rooted in North Yorkshire.

Michael Heseltine, Scorton