It's rather disconcerting to find myself in agreement with the Prime Minister for once - over the alleged regional gulf in Britain.

With the season of goodwill almost here and the new Millennium galloping towards us fast, it's time to bury the hatchet about the North-South divide - a subject which has not appeared too often in this column recently but which was the reason it was begun.

When North of Watford was launched about 15 years ago, it was partly as a reaction to the hopeless misunderstanding there seemed to be in the South of the geography and lifestyle of t'North.

One of the tasks set for this page was to challenge the view that "up here" we all wore flat hats (or headscarves over hairnets and curlers in the style of Ena Sharples and Hilda Ogden), kept pigeons, led whippets around on lengths of rope, strung our washing across the streets and said "'appen" all the time.

It was also felt necessary to make it clear that Bradford was not somehow linked with continuous ribbon development to Hull, and part of a conurbation which also included Liverpool and Newcastle.

North of Watford rose to the challenge, going into battle so enthusiastically on behalf of the North that over the years several southerners living in the T&A circulation area took great exception to what they thought was an attack on the places where they were born and brought up.

Recently, though, I've soft-pedalled on the South - partly because I now spend quite a bit of time there, partly because I've acquired a bit of wisdom. We visit our son and his wife in crowded Camden - a lively enough place to spend a few days and a fine example of a true multi-cultural community, but not somewhere I would want to live. We've visited our daughter-in-law's family in Bath, and toured around the area.

We are just back from spending a few days with relatives in south Buckinghamshire, in the green and leafy Thames Valley, where life is very civilised indeed. We've holidayed in the South-West and the South-East as well as Northumberland and Scotland.

And what we've learned to accept is that, really, there is no major North-South divide in terms of the South being rich and the North being poor - the sort of gulf highlighted in a report last week which pitted a poverty-stricken Glasgow suburb against a posh part of the Home Counties.

In fact there are contrasts everywhere. Glasgow has its grim bits, certainly. But it also has affluence. The Bradford Metropolitan District is much the same. So is Bristol, and Ipswich, and so are many of London's suburbs.

Cornwall, which we tend to think of as affluent because of its holiday image, is in fact a very poor county struggling to keep its economy afloat.

On the Isle of Wight there is crippling unemployment outside the holiday season. In East Anglia there are many run-down towns and villages struggling to cope with the grinding poverty which is blighting so many farming communities these days.

No, the great divide in the UK isn't between the North and the South. It's between the haves and the have nots, and it seems to be growing ever wider all over the country.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.