Friday, January 22, 2016

Thought for the Day

This is today's BBC Radio Bristol Thought for the Day. If you want to hear how well I did the accents you will need to listen again to Claire Cavanagh from today and about 2 hours 15 minutes in. It will become available around lunchtime today.

I've lived around the Midlands, County Durham and now North Somerset. But at heart I'm a Brummie. I lived in the sort of family where any hints of a regional accent were educated out of me using the parenting tool of pure sarcasm. So you get this slightly adenoidal homeless accent you hear now.

(Brummie) I can put it on if I need to, especially back home you know, oroit, triffic, bostin'.

But moving to the land of ey up me duck where Steve Tilley became Steve Tiller, to the almost Geordie land where our next door neighbour Philip could pronounce the word (Geordie) caterpillar (repeat) without the awkward bother of consonants, I picked up a bit of this and a bit of that.

Only yesterday I lamented that my shoes had all clarts on them and saw that nobody else knew what I meant. It's bits of mud.

My mimicry of Bristolian is not honed yet. I've got the letter O sorted. So as long as I take (accent) - a photo of a potato - all is well. But not the rest.

Does it matter? Well of course our regional accents in this country are a source of pride. We are an unusual nation in that accents and dialect words change every twenty miles or so. When I'm supporting my team, West Brom (sorry City fans), I turn into a yam yam - which, as Nick Day said earlier, is how Black Country sounds to strangers.

But from the perspective of my faith - it doesn't matter. No accent, language, age, gender, sexuality, height or anything else in all creation should separate you from the love of God. So it shouldn't prevent you crossing the threshold of a church either.

(Brummie) See yer next week. Tarrarabit.

The spell-checker hated this one.

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