What Northerners hate about the South

Northerners do not like upbeat, happy people - they find them depressing. Which is why, perhaps, we don't much like Jamie Oliver. It seems that the adverts for Sainsbury's featuring the glottal-stop cockney cook are turning off shoppers in the North; for while business in the South is going very well for the supermarket chain, the chain's northern stores are flat.

According to Philip Dorgan, a retail analyst at investment bank West LB Panmure: "All those poncy Jamie Oliver ads do is reinforce the idea in the North that people in London are cocky, have too much money to spend, and too much time on their hands."

As a northerner, I'm not surprised. Jamie Oliver's persona might have been designed explicitly to wind up people north of Watford. We do not like people who tamper with the basic concept of a bacon sandwich. (Jamie, of course, likes his bacon cut lengthways instead of across as normal.) We like to know where we are with people and Jamie is a slippery fish. On the one hand, there's all that "roasted sweet garlic, thyme and mascarpone risotto with toasted almonds and breadcrumbs"; on the other, he's drinking beer from a bottle. To northerners, it's a strange, strained amalgam, probably worked up by a committee of PRs in Covent Garden with the aim of producing one end product: money.

But Jamie can take comfort that he is not alone in being a product of the South hated by the North. Here are a few others:

The Tube

Northerners are suspicious and fearful of the Underground. They can't understand the cockney drivers' announcements - "Vis is a Mowden train" - and their incomprehension of the system is not helped by the way young Londoners dutifully place blobs of chewing gum over the "you are here" parts of all the relevant maps.

Northerners also resent the appropriation of the sacred "N" word for the Northern Line. There is, after all, nothing remotely northern about it.

Posh totty

Tamara Beckwith, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson ... They might be nice looking in a scrawny, stressed-out, southern sort of way, but how can you go out with a lass whose name you can't even punctuate? And many of their names seem to approximate to "tara", the northern word for " goodbye", which is very appropriate.

The Krays

"They was a pair of diamond geezers, and their old mum, heart of gold she had. They did loads for charity and, you know what, they only ever harmed their own. Cor, did I ever tell you about the time I met Reg. It was in this little boozer down Bethnal Green - the One-Eyed Butcher it was called ..." Wake us up when you've finished.

Flat beer

Although northerners have flat accents and wear flat caps, and are always flatly refusing to do this or that, they do not like flat beer. The makers of the provocatively named London Pride recognise this by using technology to sparkle up the headless brew when it is served in the North, but if they think that's going to win over a Tetley man, they 're wrong.

Ducking and diving

The appeal of the individual in the rattling van with a ladder on top who can slip you something dodgy for a monkey or a pony, and talks out of the side of his mouth, is lost in the North, where people are used to working or, in hard times, not working, en masse. The sole trader is suspicious on all counts: he never goes on strike ("I'd be cutting me own froat, mate"), he cannot be unemployed, since he has never actually been employed by anyone, and you don't know who his friends are, since he calls everybody "mate".

Bankers

There are no bankers in the North. If there were, perhaps northerners would take to them: they might laugh at their shouted jests as they emerge from wine bars after sealing some new multi-million deal; they might find the bankers' blonde wives, in their intriguingly gigantic four-wheel drives, a fetching sight as they block the streets during the school run; they might appreciate the touch of class bankers bring to their villages as they buy up old rectories and begin roundthe-clock drilling so as to create swimming pools. There again, perhaps not.

Cappuccinos

A good test of bravery would be for a southerner in a suit to walk into an old-school northern cafe and order a cappuccino. For northerners, there is a sort of holy trinity of tea, coffee and cocoa. Rowntree's cocoa. Cappuccino gets in the way by seeming to be an alien mixture of the latter two, at the twice the price of either.

The Home Counties

The appropriation by the South of the virtues implied by the word "home" - an arrogance enshrined in the old name of Radio 4, the "Home Service" - does not go down well in the North. It suggests that all other parts of England are "away". Why shouldn't Northumberland, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria be classified as the Home Counties? They're home to the people who live there, aren't they?

Working-class Tories

In the mind of the northerner, the East End is packed with elderly folk of limited means who sit in little houses and flats stuffed with, fittingly enough, mugs. On these mugs are pictures of members of the Royal Family, whom they admire for being far luckier and wealthier than they are themselves. Many of these people - whose role model was Alf Garnett - have now died out. Their modern cheerleader, Jim Davidson, is unfortunately still a force to be reckoned with.