A few years ago Mel (dragged me? Forced me??) and I went to Colombia Road in Shoreditch, early on a Sunday morning for the flower market. If you have to get out of bed that early (and apparently I did) it is in fact a wonderful place. Filled with chrysanthemums and… roses… hydrangeas… and… errr… flowers. And they’re cheap. As the stall holders shaaart aaaart at passers-by regarding their floral offerings. They would ‘shout’ but they’re Cockneys, so they’re not allowed to enunciate nicely and are actually banned from using that final ‘t’. Ever!!! There was a ‘Pearly King & Queen’ in attendance that day, presumably to enforce the linguistic laws and ensure that anyone speaking in anything approaching ‘Received Pronunciation’ is arrested. Ok, they were there doing charity stuff, as they always do. Wearing jackets so laden down with buttons I have no idea how they could even get them on. I chatted to them and learned that in fact this defining couple of East London’s proudest, these emblems of true Cockneydom in fact came from Hertfordshire. Weren’t true Cockneys at all. Way less so than me, in fact, who was born at the Southern End of Hackney, just about within the sound of the Bow Bells, if you have really good hearing and there’s no traffic noise. My mum and dad were both born within a mile of those bells, I’m ‘proud’ to say.

And now they want to redefine ‘Cockneys’. Make it more ‘inclusive’. Spread it out a bit. Like, anywhere within the M25. What??? You mean… even… SOUTH London????? Even as far north as Tottenham!! Just so we can make an excuse for Adele to keep strangling her vowels when she speaks. She sings in total beauty yet speaks like Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Dick van Dyck in Mary Poppins (pass the bucket, please) or Paul Merson any time. So to re-classify ‘cockney’ as they wish to do as ‘non-posh Londoners’ is just a pathetic way to excuse educators within a 60 mile radius of Trafalgar Square from making children adopt a decent mode of speech. We’re condemned to speaking with people who adopt speech patterns which are lazy, hard to understand and often jarring to hear.

And I’d just like to mention Frank Lampard (Jnr) at this point, as a case in point. He was born in Romford, which is definitely ‘non-posh London’, even though it was formerly just ‘Essex’. But he went to a very good, fee-paying school where they would have smoothed out his vowels, beaten the last glottal stop out of him with wooden canes and forced him to use every ‘H’ available and every final ‘T’ that he spoke. Yet when he went into football, within 3 weeks he’d reverted to ‘total scumbag illiterate-sounding Cockney filth’. It was a ‘lifestyle choice’. One of many very bad ones he made. Like playing for Chelsea.

I’m no snob, nor really do I judge people by their speech (NOT FUCKING MUCH!!!!) but this just encourages loads more people to speak in the horrible way that some of us grew up hearing at school every day.

One must aspire to self-improvement in every way. Or just fuck orf and be praaaaard to be a Cockney!!! From Hampshire. Tossers.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx