[West Ender]

I love accents and, particularly, dialect. My favourite accent is the North East. I lived in Durham City for 3 years and the accent there, not quite as "raw" as Geordie, is very attractive. You have fabulous expressions like "Howay". My son when aged about 9 would say to me, when exasperated , "Howay man, mum" and then there's "canny", which can mean anything from clever and cute to being a know-all, depending on the context of the conversation and the tone of voice. And everybody is referred to as "pet", except men to men when it's "marra".

I now live quite near Warrington which, though now in Cheshire, was in Lancashire until 1974. The Warrington accent is not at all attractive, a sort of mixture of Lancs and Manchester, but it's odd words that always make me stop and think. An example is the word "bonny". All my life I've used bonny to mean good-looking, pretty etc. In Warrington it means fat. Never tell a Warrington lady she's a bonny girl or she'll be mortally offended. They also tend to miss out the word "to", as in "I'm goin' work".

Oh, and don't let Southerners tell you they have no accent or that theirs is superior. They all spoke pretty much like Lancastrians until about the 17th century when the "London" accent began to become fashionable - that's all it was, a fashion.