At a London party some time ago, I was approached by an attractive female acquaintance who was divorcing a Notting Hill-based, Warrington-born film producer and was in a bit of a tizzy over what had gone wrong. “You know how it is,” she said, sympathy-seeking. “When you’ve been brought up differently from your partner, you have different aspirations and beliefs.” How had my marriage survived, she wanted to know. Hadn’t we encountered any tricky cultural differences during our occasionally tempestuous domestic tenure? Hadn’t our matrimonial bliss been sometimes blighted by a clash of tastes, parental disputes, traditions?

Presuming that she was making a tacit reference to the fact that I was a British Wasp of Viking complexion and my Asian wife had Indian parentage, I started on an answer. Well, yes, my wife’s father is a Muslim, but she was brought up in central London and feels more British than Indian . . . Then I noticed my friend looking at me blankly. “Oh, I don’t mean Yasmin,” she said flatly. “I meant you. How did she come to terms with the fact that she is from London and you are from, you know” – dramatic pause – “up there . . . from the north?”

Well, I was quite taken aback. Right mithered, I was. Thraiped, even. It transpired that her husband’s light, inoffensive northernness had been the deal-breaker. She couldn’t cope with the shame of his ecky-thump accent (albeit eclipsed by privately educated nasal estuary) and the raw quality of his muck’n’brass parentage. She had divorced him for, among other things, the heinous crime of being Lancastrian.

Poor woman. If only she had steeled her southern softie self and waited a couple of years, she would have been at the very centre of the fashionable-relationship zeitgeist. You see, right now, having a northern boyfriend or husband is quite the glamorous thing.

The beautiful, crop-headed model du jour, Agyness Deyn, recently announced that she had moved to Hull, my home town, to live with her boyfriend, Josh Hubbard, the guitarist in the Paddingtons. It’s a brave relocation that must be some sort of first. Hull is the kind of place that you are from and not the kind of place you choose to live. Certainly, you’ll never overhear a yuppie in a Soho sushi bar saying, “Didn’t you hear? She got headhunted by a firm in Hull . . .” Ergo, this Paddingtons fella must be a veritable northern love god. Another first for the gateway to Humberside.

He's not the only one, either. Here's the Russian model-turned-actress Milla Jovovich waxing lyrical over the joys of Greggs cheese-and-onion pasties as an essential element of her regular jaunts to the northeast to visit her film-director boyfriend, Paul Anderson. “I have often said I would like to be the face of Greggs,” says Jovovich, currently the face of L’Oréal.

The people of Headingley, in Leeds, meanwhile, have grown used to the sight of a pram-pushing Liv Tyler on their streets since she married the Yorkshire-born Royston Langdon, formerly of the rock band Spacehog, now upping the northern ante by calling his new band Arckid (“Our Kid”, geddit?). Tyler and her son Milo enjoy jaunts to Headingley’s British Legion and Bettys Café Tea Rooms in Ilkley. “Everyone’s so sweet and polite,” she says of the Yorkshire folk. But it is Liv’s description of her husband that really made me smile. She once said that her Roy was, wait for it, “beautiful and from Leeds”.

“Northern men are sexy to southerners and superstars,” says Stuart Maconie, the Wigan-born radio DJ and author of the northern odyssey Pies and Prejudice. “It’s because they tend to be more real, passionate, warm, funny, straightforward. We’re saturnine, brooding types – sort of macho Morrisseys, if you like.”

He points out that northern men are more relaxed about expressing their feminine side. “We can actually be quite camp without being effeminate. We are not repressed like southerners: we don’t shy away from physical contact; we are not afraid to show affection. Where I come from, it is perfectly acceptable for men to call each other ‘love’, not in a showbiz way but in a genuinely friendly way.”

“The accent is very sexy,” says the TV presenter Tess Daly, married to the Bolton-born Vernon Kay. “I dated men from all over the world before I met my husband, but as soon as he spoke to me, I felt like I’d come home. Northern men are attractive because they’re not prissy.

They are capable and dependable and don’t have delusions of grandeur.”

That said, there are a few irreconcilable, cultural and conversational differences. A la-di-da female friend dating a Hartlepool actor said she couldn’t understand why her boyfriend kept going on about doing “chores”. He was actually talking about “shows”. And Liv shouldn’t get too excited if her Royston happens to talk about being “hard on”. It means “fast asleep” where we Yorkshire lads come from.

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