Going native

Another full day spent on the White City Estate teaching people in our film how to sing their solos. We started with Frank, then moved on to Mostafah and finished with Danny. In between there was a lunch of omelette and apple pie at Glad's Cafe on the estate and a brief sojourn at the BBC Starbucks to see how the other half live. More cries for soy chi latte mocka chocka do-dahs with extra cream and a side of foam. In Glad's cafe the currency is tea, plain tea, and everyone is greeted like an old friend rather than with suspicion by a sour-faced Pole!

We also managed to fit in a visit to Shepherd's Bush Market to location hunt and buy a portable speaker system because my expensive one from PC World, which has never worked properly is now truly broken. I also bought a new suitcase. £20. Not bad. The old one had a hole in the bottom, so anything I put inside was likely to get scuffed and scratched, which is not good. 

I've been accompanied all day by the lovely Michelle; a fabulous Cypriot women with Lebanese heritage who used to be a teacher at Ackland Burghley; she was probably the coolest teacher in London!

She pointed out that I'm a different person with everyone I talk to, swinging from posh to cockney and formal to potty-mouthed, depending on who I'm talking to. I guess I'm aware that this is something I do. My accent, and even the pitch of my voice has changed so dramatically over the course of my life that I don't really know what its natural state is. I think we all change the way we speak depending on who we're with. Fiona's accent goes a little American when she talks to her Texan husband, I have friends with London accents who talk to their parents in broad Scots, and Danny, who we were with today, has a London accent but received a call from an elderly Jamaican relative and immediately spun off into patois! Surely the differences in my voice are not this marked?