Given my current location, regional accents have become something of a stock-in-trade joke. The Estuarine English is indeed very common and it's spreading. My 11-year-old goddaughter, brought up in Northamptonshire (better known as "me-duck" country) does lots of somethinks and innits and the loike in her everyday speech and it's driving her parents, who are paying through the nose to send her to a private school, nuts.

But even that pales into insignificance, from the humour point of view, beside people I work with in the Black Country, with Black Country accents so broad you could build a house on them, aping their southron EE-speaking neighbours. The number of times I've had to bite my tongue!

- Pfranz