Northern humour

Using East Midlands Trains as often as I do - I am getting good at imitating a sardine for my journey home from work.

But my journey yesterday was probably the most crowded yet due to a fire on another line which caused hundreds of distraught travellers to pile onto our already crowded trains in a desperate bid to get home.

I was one of the lucky ones as I bagged a seat by one of the doors in the vestibule area, elbowing past an old woman and kicking a small child out the way en route (joke).

Unusually though as the journey got underway and after everybody had familiarised themselves with their neighbour's armpit, people actually started talking.

And the ones doing all the talking were the northerners.

It was a highly entertaining journey - some of those poor people were going to take eight hours to get home - but they all made light of the situation. Inevitably the conversation turned to the north/south divide.

I was shocked to learn that to a true Northerner, anything south of Leeds is not considered North, although my London friends would argue anything North of Watford qualifies.

It was funny to watch some of my fellow 'southern softie' commuters trying to pretend there were no conversations going on, maintaining that stiff upper lip of silence that many of them prefer to travel in, but even they could not resist the Northern charm for the whole journey home. By the end of my journey, everyone in my crowded part of the train were laughing and joking at the ridiculousness of the situation.

Give me chatty northerners in a miserable situation any day, rather than the unfriendly, only look down southerners that populate London-bound commuter trains every day.