h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Have you ever found yoursel looking into the bathroom mirror and thinking,

"That's not me anymore?"

I have. Then I realised that my eyes had missed the mirror and were actually gazing at the image of the painting we have next to the mirror. I'd wandered how I'd grown a rather fine beard and turned up in a lakeside scene...

Happens to me all the time, my friend. Happens to me all the time.

I'll never forget the time I woke up and thought I'd turned into an Alsatian Dog sitting next to a Fire Hydrant in a New York cityscape. It took me half a day to realise I wasn't in Manhattan and was, in actual fact, still in my Grandparents house in Bedford.

Ah, those were the good old nights ...

You might have been in Bedford but were you still an Alsatian next to a fire hydrant?

Mirrors?

Yes, once I was a podgy, rotund lad of 5,6 ft with rosy cheeks and piggy face and overly long dark hair and now I'm 6,2- tall and skinny with a beard and I still think I'm looking into someone else's window.

Though- it's my voice I can't get around, nothing has changed, slight deepening but ever still the same tone it always has been- accentless, well spoken and until I open my mouth I'm regarded as a lowlife wanderer and then out comes a snobby Terry Thomas moment, I can't get over that and I say sometimes that is not my voice.

Something like that.

I look absolutely nothing like I once did. I'm a very pale person - That hasn't changed - But otherwise I look an almost completely different visage to what I did - ohhh - 10 years ago. For example.

I look rather more like my father these days. Except I'm not quite as old as he is. And I actually have hair on my head.

It's rather a matter of prespective, isn't it? I mean, being accentless. If you live in Manchester and have a Mancunian accent, then you can claim to be accentless. Yet if you live in Outer Mongolia and have a Mancunian accent, you can't really claim to be accentless anymore.

True but id you have grown up in an area all of your life you will pick up an accent wherever that is, Scottish, Irish, Geordie, Cockney all from the people you meet you take on the pronounciation of those speeches and say that I have lived in a house in rural Norfolk where my mother was from Derbyshire and my father's a Yorkshire man, you would at least have picked up something?

If people notice your accent, they know where you are from, people who meet me believe I'm well bred from the aristocracy line purely because I don't sound tough or anything despite knowing others who pick up their roots quickly. My neigbours kids have been around as long as I have and through that time they've picked up Norfolk despite their Parents being from Luton.

I do feel constrained when I'm out, I have to dull my voice down, assume another just to fit in or else I get a few strange looks! Particularly in pubs!

Funnily enough, I know exactly what you mean. Erm ... I think.

My own family is rather an odd one - My father was originally from Cornwall, my mother from Scotland and I grew up in Kent. I have therefore picked up what many people describe as an "odd accent" - I don't really sound like I'm from anywhere in particular, while sounding very much like this dialect or that dialect at the same time. Far from being accentless, I seem to have several, mixed together and baked as a cake (as Sylvester McCoy might have said, had he been even slightly interested in this conversation).

Confused? You will be!

I also make an effort to change my voice to fit certain situations as well - I pronounce words differently to pretty much the rest of my entire immediate family. My change was brought on by Schooling, I'm afraid - Other kids used to pick on me for the way I sounded, so I changed it. The brutality of the schooling system, eh kids?

Incredible, that is incredible Lance.

SNAP! that is I believe, the correct vernacular present.

Being brainwashed into etiquette society of mannerisms and rules od private schools made me a charming well-spoken boy but my next school was worse off, here kids from all areas either rich or just plain weirdos orchestrated chrusses of 'Hello Mr posh GIT!' when my voice changed I was the POSH one around, infact once when I got crosswires on the phone someone thought that I was the butler!

So these days I adopt a predatory stanse and try to act as tough as all the other faceless thugs out there but it's only when you open your mouth that they know that you're diffrent-

'Some posh git trying to buy friends, thinking they're better than us?'- They don't know what they're saying half the time.

When Andrew has asked via messenger if he wants a vocal conversation, I might not have mike plugged in but I do wonder what he'll make of my voice?
Born with a sugar spoon in my mouth, my last year at college someone kept calling me Cuthbert!!!!

Ah, if only to live in a classless society, one where it doesn't matter if you're upper crust or lower brow, as long as you're human it's all that matters!

But then ... if everybody was equal, then we'd have not a Democracy but Socialism. I think that's how it works?

How about a non-violent apocalypse where suddenly the end of the world had come and then gone and we were all left to pick up the pieces?

No social restraints there I think- plus the country could re-begin its origins and thus we could all live together with no trouble at all- well that wouldn't last long.

Though if we could remove that part of the instinct then we could all get on, going into pubs with die-hard skinheads wouldn't be a problem, no one would get picked on at school and then there'd be paradise...

And then an ancient evil would arrive on the scene or something?

Well, probably?

But to live in the World like that- without the ancient evil would be wonderful- though what dreams may come?

Sorry, to be philisophical then but I wanted to finish this post on a message of hope