The grass is always greener

Everyone's eyeing up someone else's lawn, but why?

“Your trouble,” said Sam, my wife, “is that you’re not northern enough.”

“What do you mean, not northern enough?” I barked back, with a fair level of indignation thrown in to season my reply.

We were talking about podcasters, and comedians, and actors, and writers, and… she had a point.

Perhaps, I thought, that’s been the halfway, in my maybe?

Pic: Danylo Supran

Had my voice been more interesting, and exotic, not anchored firmly in what we call the home counties of England, or the Shires, my expression may have registered more in the, ‘he’s got something funny, or odd, or interesting to say’ department, rather than the other kind of department more likely to hire you to voice an advert for the latest government’s ‘pay your tax on time’ campaign.

Your voice, how you use it, and where you use it, fascinates me.

This will be a bit UK-centric for a moment, but every nation will have, I’m sure, similar vocal nuances, so you’ll not be left behind.

Where I sit in the UK, we generally speak in a fairly flatline way, although I don’t entirely mean in terms of intonation.

Slightly south and a few footsteps east from where I grew up, the Essex accent grabs you by the wotsits, and you essentially become a London cabbie who has an issue with the other side of the River Thames.

“I’m not goin’ soooooooufff of the river mate, not nooooow.”

I find it hard to determine where Essex becomes proper London, and where my attempts at accents start to make everyone sound like an East End gangster from the 60s.

“I come ‘ere for a proper shoot ouuut with proper men.”

But we also had accents not far from our door, where country twang took over, and only an hour and a half north and a few steps to the west, you get close enough to the Midlands that saying “I’d like a chicken Korai,” is less like something off the actual menu, and more like you’re fluent in Black Country parlance.

We have a comedian in the UK called Peter Kay from Bolton near Manchester, who has, I think, funny bones in his voice, if that’s at all possible.

If I say the words, garlic bread, it’s not funny in the slightest. When he says it, it’s a vocal doorway to comedy gold. He’ll build a complete set out of saying those words.

The Big Yin, from Scotland, Billy Connolly, is another good case in point. If he were in the witness box to support the argument Sam is making, your jury wouldn’t even need to consult.

Partly it’s the rhythm of Glasgow speech itself, it has a natural musicality and directness that lends itself perfectly to comedy. Billy will drop into really broad Glaswegian at exactly the right moment for emphasis, or to land a punchline, and then pull back again. He also has that thing where the voice goes up at the end of a sentence in a way that makes everything sound slightly incredulous, like the world is constantly surprising him and he can’t quite believe what he’s witnessing, and you’re along with him, on the ride.

There’s equally something about Scottish swearing that just sounds funnier than English swearing, it has more texture to it somehow. Billy is a genius, and to think he could have spent a lifetime building ships instead.

Of course we do have southerners that buck the trend, like internationally renowned Jimmy Carr, but then he has an exotic odd laugh, and that kind of rescues him, certainly from making adverts about paying your tax on time, though for those who remember, that’s probably not a gig he’s ever likely to get.

Of course once upon a time, standard southern English or received pronunciation was considered ‘talking proper like,’ and you almost needed no other credentials.

Take it back to the 40s and 50s, and you have Pathé news reels, where the announcer was contractually obliged to always have a plum in his mouth and make everything sound rather jolly even when it wasn’t.

“There’s Mr Turnley Hooper, the Little Puddlington-on-Sniff grocer, polishing his ‘Closing Down’ sign as though it were just another splendid bargain!”

My friend Mali sent me something yesterday I’d not seen before. It was for an event called Spit Nights, which sounds like the sort of place Mr Turnley Hooper might hang out in with his conservative club mates, but no, this is poetry, open mic poetry.

Let me explain. It’s half poetry, half organised chaos sometimes, brilliantly so, and you’ll hear voices from every corner going at it with rhythm and bite; suddenly the bloke who sounds like he’s stepped out of Newcastle steals the room from someone speaking perfectly polished Queen’s English.

It turns out a bit of an accent gives the words some grit, and the idea of music noodling in the background makes it even better.

But I noticed something, accents were melding, north, south, east and west, beginning to coexist in the same sentence. The Essex folk were purloining the fine accent from Bolton, pouring in a dab of West Country, then finding further roots in a country they’d probably only ever seen in travel posts.

But it worked, and I was hooked, and I now want to go to a Spit Night, which still sounds like the sort of thing that Mr Turnley Hooper would go to at the Little Puddlington-on-Sniff conservative club, Tuesday nights only.

That phrase the grass is always greener is suggestive of a rather finite way of being or existing. You’re on one side with your metaphorical hardened grass tufts, dandelions and patches of mud where the dog has a wee every day, and there’s Mr Turnley Hooper with his fine green baize that’s won Little Puddlington-on-Sniff’s best village lawn three years in a row.

And then you remember he’s shutting his grocery store because the big MegaMart Hyper Barn has opened on the A34, with its 3000 free parking spaces and as many free refills of caramel and coffee as your kidneys can take. His grass is not necessarily greener.

So perhaps the Spit Night’s parade of pro poets and first timers on stage have got it right. Perhaps being slightly more chameleon with your thoughts and approach is a kindlier way to feel about you, your life and your outlook.

And maybe that’s what we miss, while we’re busy staring at everyone else’s lawn too.

Mr Turnley Hooper is back there in Little Puddlington-on-Sniff, polishing his closing-down sign, looking out at the A34 and wondering what it must be like to have three thousand parking spaces and as many coffee refills as your kidneys can stand. He doesn’t hear the bell on his door the way you do when you walk in. He doesn’t see what you see.

We spend an enormous amount of time, years probably, if you added it up, convinced that the more interesting version of things is happening just over there. A bit further north. A different postcode. Someone else’s medium, someone else’s approach, someone else’s way of saying garlic bread.

And all the while, someone is looking at your patch of dandelions and dog-worn mud and thinking, privately, that they’d rather have that than the award-winning baize they’re forever having to maintain.

Whatever metaphorical grass you’re admiring on the other side of whatever kind of fence, be that creative, sporting, a job that involves the wearing of a suit; there’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from spending too long trying to be a different version of yourself. Let’s not get all dramatic, darling, I mean the low-level kind, the sort that accumulates in the background while you’re getting on with everything else, but it’s still there.

Most of us, I would imagine, do it for years without really noticing. Convinced that somewhere out there is a better frequency to be broadcasting on, if we could just find the dial.

And the pertinent thing, when you eventually stop fiddling with it, if you’ll pardon an awkward pun that may have piqued Mr Turnley Hooper’s curiosity, is that the signal was pretty decent all along. You just had the volume down.