Don’t talk like that

Far from me being the one to point the finger, but I did have a woman who worked for a huge corporation in London come to Glasgow to tell me that the people I might be speaking to will not understand my accent as some of them are English. Now had I been of Asian descent that comment would have been considered racist – but because I am white it’s considered just information.

I ignored her comments and decided to speak to these whacky foreign folk from England in my perfectly wonderful Scottish accent, funnily enough they understood every word I said and before long we were interacting like proper English types without the aid of an overhead projector and finger pidgin words to help us.

It does infuriate me when people come to Scotland to work then assume you wont be able to talk to the visitors from London…I am doing a tour of Canada next week and am off to Soho Theatre for my fourth run in their lovely venue. I also do BBC radio 4 ‘Just a Minute’ and we don’t need a diversity course to introduce my dulcet tones to the listeners, we believe they have all heard a Scottish accent before.

I think the woman in question just doesn’t like who I am and picks on the one weakness she believed would play on my insecurities, what she underestimated was my ability to constantly shout ‘FIRE” at her to see if she understood my warning or say funny things about her and watch her reaction. “Oh I didn’t know you could understand me, so I talk about you a lot in this accent thinking you wouldn’t know what I was saying”

I am a comedian and that’s funny, especially in front of the English people she said wouldn’t understand what I was saying in my guttural useless Scottish tongue!

I did during the course of my work that night ask a wee English girl what age she was and she answered ‘six’ and we chatted. Later on a woman from Sheffield said to me “when you say ‘six’ its sounds like ‘sex’ and we all laughed at your accent, whatever did the child think when you repeated her age over the microphone?”

I replied “Erm, I don’t think she knows what the word ‘sex’ is and she nodded when I asked her if was ‘six’ so maybe only you heard the word ‘sex’ when I was talking to a small girl?”

You see I had been through enough that night about my accent and I didn’t know when I said ‘six’ it sounded like ‘sex’ so I have been walking about all day saying ‘would you like sex six times?’ to hear the difference and husband is really happy and he has been walking around behind me saying “Yes”.

Fuck the naysayers – my accent is awesome and the people of New Zealand, Netherlands, New York, Los Angeles and London have always said so.