P eople in the north of England have long been reconciled to their status as targets for hopelessly outdated southern cliché. Indeed, they embrace it, if only to show what good sports they are at middle-class dinner parties in London and the home counties. They wear with pride their flat caps, clogs and mufflers, dote on their faithful whippets, luxuriate in their tin baths of a Friday night and are carried away on the scent of a Woodbine (packet of five), ignited at the end of a long day down t’mill.
But that toleration for gentle mickey-taking has come under strain after a judge’s ruling suggesting that northerners are particularly foul-mouthed. At least, that is, in the case of the F-word, which Judge Jetinder Shergill claims.