Last updated 05:37, Friday, 08 August 2008

They say we’re an especially talkative lot in the north. At least that’s what the upper-crust Londoner on the radio said the other day.

She should know; she was an expert – who may have seen my phone bill.

“Go to the north of England and Scotland and people are ready to talk to anything that moves or breathes,” she said. “They always have something in their heads and they say it as soon as anyone comes into view.”

She had been billed as a conversation specialist, which struck as something as a misnomer, since she was – in conversation – particularly patronising of naturally chatty northerners.

Sniffy, like. A touch on the offensive side. She was implying only simple, peasant northern folk talked because they knew no different.

Southerners, on the other hand, kept their own counsel on account of better education and more refined manners, sticking out pinkies when drinking mugs of tea.

See? Rude – the way some southerners can be.

This being summer’s silly season, radio tends by necessity still to fill up broadcast time with hardy annual, north-south divide staples: who’s most friendly, who talks more, who eats more pies, who has better manners? You know the sort of stuff – meaningless chit-chat but it doesn’t half get you going on a long car journey.

While motoring, when there’s no-one to, er, talk to, it gives good excuse to shout back or pass scathing comment, judged to be terribly clever because there’s nobody else there to contradict the conclusion.

So, it was around about Penrith way on the M6 that the conversation expert on the radio got me to thinking about what on earth life would be like if northerners were like southerners – ie, too posh to talk unless in analysis of the Booker of Bookers, the richness of Salman Rushdie’s prose or how best to lumber the north of England with the biggest portion of the London Olympics’ bill.

What a horrible prospect. Imagine it. You say hello to someone, in passing and the next you know a personal alarm is splitting your eardrums and you’re being accused of unmentionable perversions.

Speaking to a stranger is a heck of a minefield for a lot of people, apparently. Especially for those in London and the south east where spontaneous conversations still represent scary territory. Nod to a stranger in greeting and you could be inviting anything from knife attack to a suicide bombing.

By contrast, just about anywhere in Cumbria conversations for their own sake are compulsory and probably the first things that strike the offcomer – and visitors – as blessed relief and release from a confining polite silence adopted elsewhere as the well-mannered norm.

“It’s a grand pint in there!”

He was pointing towards the White Lion, the first pub I’d ventured into as a newcomer to Brampton. I’d taken with me a couple of visiting girlfriends, who became so enamoured with the place we’d spent the whole of a long, rainy afternoon chewing over the gossipy things women do, looking like asylum seekers from shopping, washing machines and housework... which, in a sense, we were.

“I know,” I said. “The Brampton Bitter’s my favourite. It’s brewed just up the road. Are you on holiday or...?”

“Not holiday, no. Just off home now to Hallbankgate. I’ve time for one more though, if you fancy.”

Respond in idle chatter to a stranger in the north and you run the risk of spending an afternoon in the pub, with a man in a cap from Hallbankgate, who comes from a long line of sheep farmers but hill farming now isn’t what it was, so when he retired he...

Well, you get my drift. It’s different. Not for a moment did I suspect him of being a suicide bomber – just a nice man in a smart cap, with a bit of a thirst.

A contributor to that radio show occupying my driving time down the M6 made her point about spontaneous conversation very clear.

“If people strike up conversations with me I pretend not to be from here (London). It works very well and I don’t have to be bothered with meaningless, irritating chatter.”

I guess we have to accept, it takes all sorts to make a world – more sorts to make a world of snooty introverts.

If it is true that northern and Scottish people will speak to anyone that moves, anything that shows signs of life, any creature with a pulse, it might even be something we can be proud of.

If it isn’t exactly true, perhaps it’s time to start working on it.

A rare attribute, that sounds like something to call a specifically northern virtue, worth boasting about to southerners and their conversation experts, at every possible opportunity.

That would show them... if only they’d converse long enough to hear about it.