Another sunny Monday has come around. Mine started a little earlier than planned as I was woken by a phone call at some ungodly hour: my daughter with a family emergency. Could I collect the small girl from school this afternoon and take her home. The little chap is being taken to the doctors by his daddy. I’m not sure why he can’t take the little chap on the bus in his buggy to collect the little girl. Big sister, who loves to collect the little girl from school, is working. Big brother is presumably in college but in any case he’s not a named possible pick-up person - the school has a list of people who are designated pick-up people so children don’t wander off with random strangers or, I suppose, estranged parents. Parenting is so complicated these days. Anyway, that’s my afternoon arranged for me! But it IS a lovely, sunny day for going on a bus ride with a small girl.
Yesterday I listened to Rita Tushingham on Desert Island Discs. She’s 80 years old ow, like her fellow Liverpudlian Paul McCartney. Apparently she lived more or less round the corner from George Harrison in her childhood. He used to do deliveries for her father’s butcher’s shop. As a small girl, she revealed, she used to lock herself in the loo, sing songs pretending she was on stage and then flush the loo at the end of each song because ‘it sounds just like applause. I’ll take her word for it.
She has no discernible Liverpool accent, apart from when she did an impression of George Harrison. Her childhood accent has been smoothed away. I also heard Dame Aileen Atkins on This Cultural Life, on Saturday I think. She has no discernible accent either, in her case Clapton and Tottenham. Her London accent (not Cockney, her mother apparently insisted) was smoothed out through elocution lessons. When Eileen was three, a gypsy woman came to their door selling lucky heather and clothes pegs. She saw little Eileen and told her mother that her daughter would be a famous dancer. Her mother promptly enrolled her in a dance class.
Eileen Atkins’ mother was clearly a woman after my own mother’s heart. She too, fearing the evil eye they might put on her, would buy “lucky” heather from those gypsies who used to come round knocking at the door. She also believed any predictions they might offer her, sometimes leading to worries about her mother, the “little old lady” the gypsies expressed concerns about. They never predicted anything to do with my future or that of my siblings!
Anyway, these were two famous women whose original accents had disappeared. Now, recently I heard someone on the radio saying that regional accents no longer matter. However, recent studies suggest that “accentism” is still alive and kicking and the British Academy is going to carry put a large scale project exploring prejudice against northern English accents and their speakers. Apparently “People do think that speakers in the north of England are less intelligent, less ambitious, less educated and so on, solely from the way they speak. On the other hand, people in the south are thought to be more ambitious, more intelligent.” Thus spoke Dr Robert McKenzie of Northumbria University. He went on, “This is the prejudice that can dare speak its name. We are not allowed to be biased in terms of gender, we are not allowed to be biased in terms of sexual orientation.”
So, even though the BBC might employ people with a range of accents, the prejudice remains!
As a teacher of foreign languages, I found that a strong regional accent sometimes got in the way of learning to pronounce foreign words authentically. However I did have a student with a delightful Scots accent which transferred into her spoken French but did not stop her achieving an excellent mark in her spoken examination. Interesting stuff.
To finish off today, here are a few examples of some a Michael Rosen rhyming comments on current events:
“Grant Shapps
craps
when he thinks how a strike
might win workers a pay hike.”
“Carrie
the woman he'd marry
was offered a job
worth quite a few bob.
(allegedly)”
“This is the story
that we haven't seen
that Boris said, 'No!' to
that the Times wrote
about the job
that Boris offered
to the woman in the office
that his mates said, 'Don't' to
that he didn't offer
that we don't have to worry about
because it's all ethical.”
That’s all folks!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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