The people of San Francisco have been given some salutary advice about what to do if they start getting big-headed about their famous city.

It's this. Think of Leeds.

The tip, passed on by a Northerner reader in the Bay area, comes from a columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle, famed former home of ace story teller Armistead Maupin. She's called Leah Garchik and she picked up a reference in The Economist to San Francisco being the 'American city equivalent' of Leeds.

The magazine was only talking populations but the comparison jarred. Garchik tells her readers:

Consider that, next time you feel as if we are the center of the world.

I find it heart-warming myself, and am urgently emailing Leah to put her on to the cultural likes of Jorge Luis Borges, whose Yorkshire-born wife of a South American Indian in The Warrior and the Captive Maiden is certainly from Leeds. She likes drinking the warm blood of animals freshly slain by her man, as we do.

Or Jean Giradoux's young castaway girl in Suzanne et le Pacifique who finds the body of a drowned sailor on the beach with a tattoo on his arm saying 'I am a son of happy Leeds.'

Luckily we also have people to speak up for us in the Bay area itself, including the pianist Mike Greensill who emailed Leah to describe how his eyes were opened about Leeds when he came here in fear and trembling as a music student from Gloucestershire in 1968. He says:

Leeds was a wonderful city, fabulous pubs, friendly people and a vibrant arts and music scene. It's also within driving distance of some of England's most marvelous scenery on the Yorkshire moors. I had a great time. Having said that, it was the dirtiest, grimiest, dark and forbidding place I'd ever been to.

Leah notes kindly, and accurately:

Coal dust has since been cleaned off structures, he says.

Well I never. Anyway, they may have a nice bridge, but do they know that Leeds Christmas Lights are the only made-made structure apart from the Great Wall of China which is visible from the moon?

That's what the council told me when I started working here.