Memories of offshore work in the North Sea, listening to the Fisheries Liaison Officer switching between a strong Aberdonian accent (and on occasion Doric) when chatting on the radio to local vessels, and then moderating his brogue when speaking to the largely Eastern European and English ship and survey crew on the bridge.
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I used to deal with a land-rover parts place in Yorkshire. The woman I dealt with was pretty close to incomprehensible on the phone, so we ended up doing everything by fax. (Which rather dates this story, doesn’t it?)
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Not for Yorkshire it doesn’t.
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Cue inevitable Four Yorkshiremen Sketch
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I don’t know about Northern Ireland but Welsh and Scottish accents vary as much as the English ones as well. For example, North and South Welsh accents are very different. Even places relatively near like Cardiff and Llanelli have very noticeably different accents.
And in Scotland, the Highlands accents are very different to the Lowlands. Et cetera, et cetera.
Yorkshire and Lancashire accents probably ought to be on that list too.
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On the other hand, I was told by someone who had worked on the original HOLMES (UK police computer system for sharing information between forces) that they had for a while been trying for a sort of semantic tokenisation - because the same criminal often uses the same approach, they wanted to be able to trawl all crime reports across the country and match a particular pattern. They quickly realised that this meant they were trying to build an unambiguous language that had to be able to describe anything, and gave it up. But one of the early optimisations was to give “Irish accent” and “Scottish accent” the same token, because English witness reports were generally unable to distinguish.
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To be fair, half of Scotsmen were Irishmen who moved there for work.
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I don’t think I’ve ever failed to spot the difference between Scottish and Irish? That seems odd.
What is really confusing is going to Corby and it feeling like Glasgow
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It’s one of those things that if you know enough to tell them apart, they’re obviously different. If you don’t, they’re pretty close. You see the same thing in descriptions of other things. Someone might see a car and say “large black sedan”, someone with a bit more familiarity says “I think it was a Ford”, and an expert says “Ford Crown Vic, after the '89 facelift, but before the indicators changed in '93.”
It’s also worth noting that most descriptions police get are from people who were under an unusual amount of stress, and probably not concentrating on getting the details right. if someone sticks a gun in your face and says ‘give me your money’, you might not get the accent right. It’s very common for the witnesses to a scene to not agree on all sorts of details, sorting that out is an important part of police work. and describing things is a skill, which lots of people don’t do well, because they have no practice doing it. [1] That’s one of the reason that police ‘sketches’ of suspects were long done with bits of the face that got put together to make a whole image. ("identikit’ and similar systems). Someone who couldn’t describe someone’s beak nose could look at the drawing and say “no, a bit longer”, and the technician could change it, iteratively. Modern system are much the same, just computerized.
[1] a former cop I know has a funny story about interviewing witnesses to a bank robbery, in the days before surveillance cameras. One of the witnesses was unable to describe the suspect at all, but could say with certainty what kind of shoe – brand, style, color, and size – the guy was wearing because he was a shoe salesman, and doing that was a large part of his job.
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There’s also the factor of, sometimes, I’m very good at telling two things apart when they are next to each other, but if I’m only observing one of them in isolation it can be more difficult.
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As a trained barrister, I am very familiar with all of this!! 
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I am slightly terrified by a trained barrister having Judge Dredd as their avatar…
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Well, he is the law
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Note I said TRAINED not PRACTICING! Decided i didn’t want to be one after passing.my Bar exams!!
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So I guess when you found out working within the system doesn’t allow you be judge, jury, and executioner, you went vigilante?
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Rabbit. Fire.
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I’ve just realised that this might be a reference to something that’s only in my brain, which makes it really quite specific.
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I didn’t like being considered a 2nd class barrister because i trained outside of London!
Also got really fed up of sitting in the Law Library reading Hansard’s Law Reports for 12 hours a day!!
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Am I supposed to picture Bugs, Elmer, or Sam wearing a Judge Bucket for this?
Because it’s trivially easy to picture Bugs as MawMaw
Foghorn is clearly chief judge
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I like this idea. But it’s largely because I misheard Stallone in the Bad movie saying ‘Rapid Fire’ to his lawgiver. I thought he was about to launch a bunny onslaught on his foes.
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