Grrrrr

Do you know what makes me really angry?  It’s when people judge you by the way you talk, and specifically by your accent and dialect.  Because you speak in the way you do, you must be the dumb Brummy, the sly Scouser, the hoity toity Londoner.

Picture the scene.  A student house off the Stratford Road in Sparkhill, Birmingham.  Late eighties’ gloom on the streets, the house a relic from Brum’s prosperous, Victorian past. 

The inside of the house was a kaleidoscope of beiges and browns (admittedly, it was a limited kaleidoscope!) and there was the added, interesting feature of a homeless man who living in the back garden; kept out of the house by virtue of the fridge wedged against the lockless back door.

I’d moved there with one of the guys on my course, who vaguely knew the other inhabitants of the house. They were all artists or jobbing actors or other students or ne’er-do-wells. I loved it – convinced at the time that dirty loos and kitchens was bohemian, as opposed to skanky.

The first time I’d gone in to the house, I was met on the stairs by a Prince-like figure with a rose between his teeth.  “Call me Dom”, he’d said and he’d taken the rose from his mouth so he could kiss my hand.  Over the next few months, Dom and his boyfriend, Skelly, would often come in to my room and we’d play chess, whilst listening to the Smiths.

I swapped my only winter coat with Dom for the jacket and beret Lou Reed wore on the front of the Transformer album and spent the whole winter of 1987 looking cool while feeling cold.

The guy on my course had a dog called Katy who was sweet, but had mange; ensuring she often had weeping sores in her lovely, black coat.  She was a tall dog and he’d hoist her on to her back legs so they could dance together – their favourite, shared album being Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

And God, was I a naive thing!  I had no cooking skills to speak of and no money sense at all.  I’d reckoned the grant I’d been given for the whole term was for one week and had spent it on clothes, music and books.  I also thought that the house I was in was so decrepit, I wouldn’t need to pay rent.

I was completely impressed by everyone else in the house. They were all older than me and at eighteen, I was still at an age when older than you seemed better – nowhere near the age yet when you know with certainty, younger than you is always better!

And the anger part of this?  One day, I’d walked in to the front bedroom of the house, occupied by Mark, his girlfriend Hester, and Mr. Zimmerman the cat.  Though it was a bedroom, this was the space we all defaulted to as a living room.  I’d been at lectures all day and was tired with concentration.

The room was littered with half-eaten plates of food (the ubiquitous spag. bol) and full of the sound of Venus in Furs.  Hung on the wall was the Dadaist joke of a plastic, blue, child’s spade with the title, Yellow Fish (oh, how we’d laughed!).

I walked through the door of the room, my bondage jacket artfully unstrapped and greeted Mark and Hester with “Ay up.”

There was an instant pause in their conversation.  A big, gaping hole.  In my memory, even the bloody music stopped and the cat ceased licking its front paw with a gunslinger in a frontier-town bar halt.  Tumbleweed blew.

Then Mark looked at me coldly and said, ‘no one really says ay up.  Not in real life.”

Well I did. I really did.

I didn’t say it again though.  Not after that. Neither did I call anyone ‘duck’, or ever pronounce mauve with the ‘au’ sound in maud rather than the more acceptable ‘au’ sound in grove.  You can still hear my accent and dialect sometimes though when I’m cross (and I’m often cross!).

But in the end, as my Yorkshire granddad used to say, keep thi’ sen calm, it’ll be reyt.