Both are based on Saxon tongues heavy influenced by Norse, hh, but I'm worried for both your ears and brain if you are unable to detect that a major difference between them lies in pitch: Edinburgh doesn't in general possess the rising inflexions inherent in Geordie.

Several people in the last 3 or 4 years have thought, based on my accent, that I was Scottish ('an Edinburgh public schoolboy', as one woman who I work with put it ... and she's from Aberdeen!).

Apparently I sound more like a Scot who's lost his accent than an Oldhamer who's lost his accent.

But my best friend at university was an Edinburgh ex-choirboy, and I guess he may well have had a fairly big influence on me just at the time when I'd first moved away from home and was losing my Lancashire accent (though it was never all that strong in the first place).

Um, I think I know that one...

Most people are under the misapprehension that I speak RP.  My accent is certainly fairly close to it, but not quite.  Only one person - an old acquaintance from university, with whom I've now lost touch -has ever spontaneously detected any "northernness" in my accent (and it wasn't even one of the people I studied phonetics with).

As far as I'm aware, there's only one vowel in my speech which betrays the fact that I am not originally a southerner, and that is the first vowel of the word "southerner".

My mum spent her formative years in Bedfordshire and Berkshire, and most of her adult life oop north. One contributory factor she cites for her recent move back to Berks is the fact that after thirty years in Durham, strangers still said "You're not from round here, are you?" (even though she now has a lot more of the North in her accent than I have).

I love the fact that in London people rarely take any notice of each other's accents.

Sussex has quite a distinctive, rather guttural accent, but you normally only hear older people using it - certainly here in Brighton, which is a city of incomers.

My father, who hails from Chester-le-Street, has only the slightest trace of a Durham accent.  What often gives him away as a non-Southerner is the occasional turn of phrase, a way of using words that doesn't quite fit in with the North London vernacular!

As a suvvener (Sarf Essex) living in Brum I have on more than one occasion been asked if I'm an Australian!

My brother has lived here for even longer than me and neither of us has picked up much of the local accents (Brum or Black Country, which are still quite distinct) whereas other people seem to acquire new accents quite quickly. It always makes me laugh when people ask: You're not from round here are you?

There isn't 'a' London accent anyway, as I'm sure Mary knows: the 'Cockney' accent is the clichéd one which everyone recognises and attempts to copy, but Sarf Lunnon, particular Sarfeast has a recognisably different tone - satirised by Monty Python's Mrs Cutout, and North and South have subtly different vowel sounds. the whole of the South East is homogenising under the capital's influence anyway: Reading had a completely separate accent - an accurate, though faded, version of it can be heard in David Brent from The Office: it sounds half-way between London and Wlitshire, which is exactly what to expect, given its location. But you only really hear it now in older folk: most Reading teenagers sound as if they're two-thirds of the way closer to London than they did when I was that age.

There was an interesting remark made by someone in education in Cornwall that once 'Grange Hill' appeared on TV, children's Cornish sounds were audibly modified very quickly: the increasingly common rirsng inflection at the end of non-interrogative statements has been traced back to the arrival of Australian Soap operas. Accents have always been aspirational - classic drama is full of characters who attempt the tones of those higher up the social scale - but since the fifties, the imitation has moved downwards rather than up. Once the kitchen-sink era of drama had arrived, actors with suave cut-glass tones were ghettoised overnight, and the ripple from that have spread outwards through society to the point where media figures often find it advantageous to rough their accents up. Nigel Kennedy is a wonderful example of this: clips of him as a ten year old reveal an SRP accent: that's not how he sounds now. The Royal Family has made conscious efforts this way too: Andrew sounds quite different to his older brother Charles, and William and Harry have lost even more of the mouth-plums. Blair's accent mutated to mtach his surroundings, though not always convincingly....