Melbourne: Jaywalkin’ without an accent
Fucken jaywalking.
As if it’s a real thing.
I’m not a complete fucktard. I check the road before walking out onto it, I’ve worked out that this is the most effective way of not dying.
That’s what I did yesterday. On Collins St. I’d hit all my favourite pop culture nerd hang outs, had lunch with a mate, fixed my camera and was off to take photos of street art in my city of Melbourne.
But before I could do that I was stopped by a young pretty humourless police officer who wanted to know why I’d jaywalked.
“Did I?”
“Yes, you were the only person to walk before the green man appeared”.
“OK”.
“Well, why did you do it?”
“Probably because no cars were coming and I don’t live in a city where you’re fined for safely crossing a road”.
A month ago had I said this, I would have been fine. A month ago most Australians treated me like I was a Pom. My pronunciation of certain words was pommy enough to convince aussies I wasn’t one of them.
Now it’s a different story. My Australian accent has returned, so much so that this police officer didn’t even believe I’d been living in the UK. Then when I showed her my brand new Australia license (which I just got to hand in for a UK one when I returned to London) she definitely wasn’t buying my shit.
My shit was, rarely for me, completely true.
I now cross the road not completely automatically, but fairly close to it, far more than my Australian friends do. And when traveling with my film crew, which were 2 poms, 2 aussies and myself, you could see the difference as the aussies often hung back.
This isn’t a hard and fast rule, my wife doesn’t cross in the UK, but in Melbourne people seem to cross the street less and less illegally with the thought they can be fined.
I’ve always thought fining people for jaywalking is a stupid thing to do. People who get killed jaywalking are just proving that natural selection works.
I decided on not telling the police officer any of this.
On all three occasions when she asked why I’d done it, I informed her that I’d forgotten it was even a law here, I’d been living in London for years and if I don’t see any cars, I cross the road, as people all across the world do when not under fear of a fine.
You could see she didn’t believe me.
She took my details down so she could send me a fine in the mail, being careful not to say whether I’d been fined or not.
She did say that if the fine were sent, it would go to my Australian address, and I told her it would have to make it by Friday, as after that I’d be back in the UK and unable to pay it.
If I do get a fine for safely crossing a road when no cars were around, it was that comment in my recently refreshed Australian accent that will do it for me.
The english rednecks
Recently Robin Williams called Australians “English Rednecks”, probably because, in many ways, we are.
Instead of people agreeing or laughing this off, Australia’s Prime Minister K-Rudd insulted Alabama.
It was an interesting tactic, especially as Robin Williams is from Chicago, and because it was always going to be taken badly by Albamians.
When K-Rudd had done some stereotyping of his own, Williams realised that people were taking it the wrong way and basically said, “I meant the way they speak, I said this in a Sydney comedy club and everyone laughed.” I saw an Adam Hill gig once where he said the Aussie accent was just a slowed down version of cockney, K-Rudd did not get involved.
Then he offered to take K-Rudd to a strip club, which was the highlight of the whole event. He should have offered to take him to a Alabama strip club.
I mention all this not because of its link to Australians and the English, but because I was supposed to go on Talksport as a token Aussie and talk about it.
Talksport is a national commercial ralk radio station. I’ve never listened to it, but I assume it is 70% football and %30 other stuff.
The idea was I would pre-record my interview and it would be replayed overnight on their current affairs program.
I’m not sure this is really current affairs, but I can talk shit about lots of things, so I was willing to give it a go.
Alas, I fucked up.
Somehow I managed to miss a digit from my mobile, and while the producer was trying to email me I was watching old Law & Order episodes.
Being that it was Good Friday, I didn’t check my emails before I retired for the night.
This was my first chance at being an expert on anything non-cricket related, and I fucked it up.
It wasn’t even the first time I had fucked up, ages ago when I first arrived in London I was given my first “big break” by subbing for some people and going to a major cricket book launch.
Instead I got the time wrong, and was mid vomit when I realised.
Missing the digit of a phone number was far more dignified.
But I am happy with the level of self sabotage I achieved.
I did have one goodish line for the Robin Williams interview, “Let’s face it, you can say whatever you want after you make a masterpiece like flubber”.
the cleaner
For the second time in my life I live in a place with a cleaner.
For the first time in my life I am generally around when the cleaner is here.
There is a special kind of guilt attached to being a working class boy with a cleaner.
It’s not as if she is here all the time, it’s only once a week for 3 hours, but for those 3 hours I usually seem to be here and I don’t think I’ll ever be all that comfortable with it.
I can handle people cleaning around me, my mum is anal retentive, and my father thinks more than a paper on a desk is clutter, so I am used to that.
It is the paying of the woman to come to my house and clean for me that bothers me.
I can try and explain it to myself intellectually, she needs the money, and I am helping her out.
But emotionally it just hurts a little; in a small way I have a servant, not a maid, but someone who walks around the house picking shit up off the floor and wiping up my utter filth.
What makes it worse is she is a lovely woman, I wouldn’t mind a shocking bitch cleaning my toilet, but a friendly polish woman doing it, does bother me a little.
She is also extremely entertaining.
I have never met a more jittery person in all my life; even if she knows you are in the house, if you enter the room she jumps and gasp every fucking time.
Sometimes I have to resist the urge to creep up behind her and yell, although I have on occasion entered a room with stealth and then called out her name just to watch her jump.
When I told her about the burglary she was afraid to be left in the home alone, although almost as afraid to be left in the home with me, or anyone else for that matter.
She also calls me Jerry, every time, even though my name has been written down for her, and I have spelt it out.
We often have long conversations where she understands not a word of my Australian English, and I understand one in three of her Polish words.
Every time I am here she asks me a question, sometimes her 3 hours in the house is not enough time for me to answer it in a way she will understand, but that has never stopped her asking them.
It always starts the same way, “Um Jerry, how you say”….
I know this means I want be working much over the next few hours.
One of her other great traits is not speaking when the guide is in the house. We are not sure if she has a problem with women, dark women, or curly hair, but she only speaks to me, which helps neither of us.
My favourite part of her visit is this though.
Putting the egg rings on the china hen.
Coleist
I have the misfortune to live in a place where the X Factor is shown.
Luckily for me the good part of the X Factor is happening at the moment, you know where the shit people are on.
One of the hosts though is Cheryl Cole, and she is causing me concerns.
I can’t understand her.
Not even a little bit.
When I first heard her speak, I thought she was speaking French with a penguin accent.
And I can understand Geordies, if that’s how you spell it, so its not that.
It’s just her, it’s a whole new language and accent she has acquired.
When she says something generic like, “You guys are great, you’re the best group we have seen today”.
I hear “YoYo’s tire cheap, door the zesty soup beehive to gene bay”.
Now I know this is my problem, it can’t be hers, in her whole life she has been speaking, and I assume people have understood.
Although I do have a theory for this too.
Men can’t understand here, but they don’t care cause she is pretty hot, so they just nod and pass her bite size chocolates.
And women can’t understand her, but they assume she is a bitch because she is pretty hot, and ignore her in general.
So somehow I have found a glitch in the matrix.
You seeing being famous isn’t that hard, you don’t even need to know the language, although we already knew that, George Dubya has taught us.
My only question is what did she really say when the Preacher said, “will you take this footballer to be your husband”, I’m betting she said “Igloo”.
i don’t go UP
Something wonderful happened to me in a conversation about accents.
I was told I don’t go up at the end of every SENTENCE.
Like many Oztrayans DO.
People get very annoyed by THIS.
Quite RIGHTLY.
Sorry.
Apparently in England there used to be 400 odd accents, I have no idea if that is true, and now there is apparently like 40, not sure if that is true either.
Australia doesn’t have many accents.
It’s a good thing i think, in England, you can sort of classify someone based on how they speak, in Australia, that is much harder to do.
North Queensland definitely has the New Texas drawl, so if you hear that you can tune out for a while without missing much.
Adelaide sounds more like New Zealand, or they just say Bro a lot, so you listen to them, but never quite work out what they are saying.
Bogan (Australian for Chav) is an accent, but it doesn’t seem to matter where you come from for that one, but once you speak like a bogan, you are a bogan for life, even if you are a rocket doctor or sumting.
The other accent that is very prevalent to me is the European Australian accent.
People from Greek, Croation, Italian and those type of eurpean type backgrounds have a very special accent.
It doesn’t seem to matter where you were born for this accent, it just matters where your parents or grandparents were born.
The sound of that accent is part Crocodile Dundee and part Deniro in raging bull, and has earned alot of comedians money when they weren’t that funny.
Like the Irish.
I have always wondered why Australians don’t have more accents, but I haven’t thought about it very hard, couldn’t be bothered really.
The accent game
Being from Melbourne understanding accents is part of day to day life.
I can tell what a Vietnamese shop keeper is saying.
My Indian taxi driver is easy to understand.
The African bus driver is a doddle.
So I thought in London the last thing I would have trouble with would be accents.
Wrong.
Eastern European accents are my kryptonite.
I have no idea what they are saying.
In a restaurant the other day I asked for what drinks were available.
I understood one out of a list of 8.
7up.
I don’t even like 7up, but she had been through the list twice already, and I thought a third time might be pushing the friendship.
I will learn the Eastern European accent.
It is imperative over here, well imperative if you want to the waiter to get your order right.
And I do, I really do.
-
Recent Comments
CeCe on It aint no raptor claw, it… Nicole on It aint no raptor claw, it… Chris on It aint no raptor claw, it… pam on It aint no raptor claw, it… Sam on It aint no raptor claw, it…
my latest book
-
My Photos
More Photos
