I’m an Essex boy. Well, I moved there (probably in fact ‘was moved’) when I was 1. From da East End. In those days the East End was the domain of the Krays, of everything dodgy, of slums and workhouses (ok, bit Dickensian but I’m allowed to exaggerate for effect). Nowadays the East End is so hip, trendy and over-developed that I couldn’t afford to live there. And when I meet ‘old mates’, from school, from growing up, from… ‘over there’ it always makes me happy. Generally, Essex people are good people. Funny people. GSOH. But there are two types. Those who speak ‘Essex’ and those wot don’t. A few can oscillate, depending on to whom they is spoken wiv. Generally, those who embrace their inner Essex Boy (whether they live there or not any longer) and like sounding like a barmaid in Eastenders, and those who perhaps never really did fall into that linguistic rabbit hole and decided at some stage to polish a few vowels, strengthen a consonant or two, who basically ‘learned posh’.

The journalist Amol Rajan from the BBC made a programme about it. Being a ‘poor kid’ who managed to get into Cambridge (them’s rare) and move into top journalism jobs on tv and print, he doesn’t sound very BBC. He doesn’t sound Dirty Den exactly either, but almost like a posh bloke who has reversed the aforementioned polishing process and filed away a few spoken edges to sound more… more.. edgy. But his point is that posh kids are more successful. More employable, even with less qualifications, than poor kids. It’s a ‘class’ thing. Which is a British as the Queen, as roast beef, as chicken tikka masala.

The thing is that we all judge books by covers or humans by sounds. Perhaps more so in the UK where speech and accents are so distinctive and carry a world of socio-economic as well as geographical baggage.

And all because my barbecue is running out of gas. Or may be. Or should be. But you just don’t know with those things, until you find yourself eating a raw sausage. So there I was shlepping round a fucking great, 15kg cylinder of Butane, also known as ‘a bomb’ if someone should hit the car, looking for a replacement. The garage where I acquired it informed me that they haven’t sold them for 4 years. Telling me I haven’t barbecued enough. Homebase do them. But the low-class, scummy, unhelpful, quite rude and unfriendly, ‘Estuary’-speaker told me (shouted at me) that they don’t do ‘THAT’ one and a new one would cost 100 quid. I told him, in a much nicer, more genteel accent, that he could just FUCK OFF. So we called a lovely little garden centre in Muswell Hill. And a very posh young lady (not a mere ‘gel’ this one) informed me very politely that they DID sell such things, and they EVEN took my exact one back too.

The process was so smooth, so slick, so easy (just drive over to the ‘collection point’ where Igor will manhandle the monster bastard things in and out of Sir’s car) and just so wonderful that I thought… gimme posh kids any day of the week. Not just because they gave me exactly what I wanted, which The Artful Dodger at Homebase couldn’t, but because the whole process was nicer, easier and filled me with more confidence that they knew what they were doing.

Therefore, I have degenerated from East End scumbag to The World’s Biggest Snob. In just one change of a Butane canister. Cor bloody blimey.

Happy Monday

A xxxx