HAVE you noticed how dry is it outside? Fields parched, crops failing, the Ouse down to a trickle?

Me neither - in fact, I'm still drying off after last week's city centre downpour, and Barnitts probably remains a bit damp round the edges, too.

But it just goes to shows how wrong the evidence of one's own experience can be, because as telly, radio and all the national newspapers are falling over themselves to tell us, we are in the middle of the worst drought since... well, since the last time London was a bit stuck for water.

Stand by for standpipes, declares the Daily Mail. Water will be rationed soon, warns the Express; tough curbs on water use as drought hits Britain, says The Times.

Thankfully, not all the papers think a spot of bother in the south-east should be treated as though the entire nation is gripped. Big Bro 3 in a bed! says the Daily Star.

On our TV screens things are not much better, with news programmes poring over every detail of Kent's weather charts, and artists knocking up graphs about empty bore holes near Dover.

In between the science bits, there are Blitz-style reminiscences of when Blighty faced the prospect of standpipes and drought orders before.

The thing is, back in the 1970s, the last time when Londoners couldn't sprinkle the lawn or sponge down the Volvo, they weren't the only ones, so the story truly was of general interest.

(Funnily enough, none of today's newsmen seem to remember that a drought happened oop north rather more recently, in the '90s.)

This episode is just a symptom of a persistent problem with our friends darn sarf, who can't believe anything of interest happens outside the M25.

You only have to cast your mind back to last winter and remember how the nation was paralysed by blizzards - well, at any rate, there was half an inch of snow outside Broadcasting House and they were all a bit worried about how they were going to get home.

Day after day, the same thing happens. Every time some weather chick or other is moving cloud/sun symbols around on her map, she stands right in front of Yorkshire, then never even mentions us during the forecast. And if it's 25 degrees in Surrey, she'll tell us it's scorchio all over, even as we stare glumly at the hail battering the streets outside our northern windows.

When it's the BBC, it's particularly galling. It's bad enough that most of the money raised through the National Lottery seems to go towards ensuring the survival of some southern opera house or other, without us feeling that our licence money is a tax to keep London well-informed.

None of these ruminations makes you feel particularly well-disposed towards the southerners in their hour of need.

And when you look at the Beeb's website to find the bulletin boards full of bright-spark Cockneys demanding a national water grid, so we can ship our northern water down south where it is needed, it really makes you'd wish we'd gone for the devolution option when Westminster held the offer open.

Trouble is, you can't help but suspect the reason we were offered it is so that we'd take ourselves off with our funny northern accents to go and moan somewhere in private, leaving them to discuss the stuff that really matters - that is, what goes on south of Potters Bar.

Updated: 10:57 Wednesday, May 17, 2006