Miles Salter enjoys some entertaining ruminations on the reality of the North/South divide.

THERE are so many differences, real or imagined, between life in the North of England and life in the south, that it's hard to know where to begin. The north is colder but the people are friendlier: the south is a little warmer but the people are colder, more aloof. The cliches, such as "soft southerner", and "it's grim up north", are universally known and regularly trotted out.

It's a debate that Stuart Maconie, the popular journalist and broadcaster, has joined in with gusto in his latest book, cheekily entitled Pies and Prejudice.

Part travelogue, part autobiography, part social commentary, the book comprises Maconie's musings about contrasting lifestyles and behaviour in the North and South of England. It is, he says, a search for the North of England.

Maconie, who is from Wigan, grew up in a town, where, in the 1960s and 1970s, "everybody got up at the same time in the morning and they all went to the cotton mill together". He's seen both sides of the argument. He understands northern culture intimately, but rubs shoulders with celebrities and media types in the south on aregular basis.

His book has plenty to say on the subject of Nnorthern culture, not least the stereotypical "tough" image. He writes: "We eat the hottest curries, we drink the strongest beer, we take the most potent drugs..." Is that really how northern people see themselves ?

"I don't want to be one of those butch people in pubs who say "Go on, punch me in the stomach mate..." or something stupid like that," he responds.

"But I do think the northern psyche is about people who come from somewhere colder, darker, deeper, craggier.

It does bring you up with a slightly different outlook than if you'd grown up in the flat and semi-Mediterranean south-east of Britain."

Maconie also tackles the old adage that northerners are friendlier, and a little quicker with a joke, than their southern counterparts. "I do think that's true", he says, "and I think that might be to do with the fact that London has a very transient population and hectic high-pressure life, whereas in the North- East you've got more traditional communities, and they are based around communities fostered by being a mining town or a fishing town, even if those industries have been in decline. I think people in the north seem to be more engaged, and in contact with other people.

That means we're less reserved and less insular, and less buttoned-up."

Pies and Prejudices makes a number of very witty and pithy observations.

These include the starting place of the north: "...at the RAC Traffic centre on the M6 just at the point where the road surface changes from tarmac to cobbles".

There's also his observation that Hebden Bridge is the lesbian capital of England, and the telling comment that the BBC has no South of England correspondent. Working, as he does, as a Broadcaster for BBC Radio 2, this seems particularly relevant.

"All the BBC's correspondents are South of England correspondents," says Maconie.

"They live and work in London and they sit in an office in London. The news agenda on a daily basis is set in Westminster.

It is rather amusing that a massive swathe of the country, including its best music, its best football teams, its biggest cities, is covered by one guy in a parka with a moustache."

Maconie was born in Lancashire in 1960, and before he joined the media circus as assistant editor of the NME in the 1980s, he worked as a teacher at Skelmersdale College. The town was immortalised in the heavily ironic song I Love This Town, written by Clive Gregson for Nanci Griffith, but Maconie declares that it was "the most rock n' roll job I've done". When he began broadcasting in the mid-1990s, he was taken aback by the way his accent was perceived by some of his colleagues.

"When I first worked in radio, people would have a laugh at my accent, and they thought I had a quaint way of speaking," he says, barely masking his incredulity. "There were comments about the way I pronounced "bath" or "path" - ridiculous things like that. If you did that with someone who was Jamaican or Irish, you'd never get away with it. It's still a bit like that - if you listen to Radio 4 comedies, the default position in comedies is to have somebody with a northern accent."

Although Maconie now resides in Birmingham, where he presents a show on Radio 2, the book shows more than a little of his "soft spot" for the north.

He ends with a note that shows a return to his common-sense upbringing: "It's about appreciating that an afternoon's snow is an excuse for sledging, not a state of emergency. It's about realising that the best place to drive a Range Rover is Cumbria, not Islington. It's about embracing that life is short and work is hard and that London is not the answer to everything. I love us being smart and aspirational but I hate the idea that we might turn into the Home Counties."