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

I don't like my voice. Never have. I stammer (not all the time, but often enough to annoy me), I have a week R (not quite Jonathan Ross, more Paul Morley) and I sound posher than I'd like to (in my mind's ear I sound distressingly like Derek Nimmo)

Anyway...I guess I was having a good day today. I'd finished a major report that had been stressing me and got great feedback on it. I was leaning gently in to the weekend. I'd just done a rehearsal of my talk for next week in front of colleagues.

I like doing talks. I get relaxed. My voice slows and lowers. And it stayed like that afterwards.

On the way home from work, I called in to the local pharmacy to pick up the wheelbarrow's worth of chemicals that keep me alive and happy every month. The pharmacist there is a TOTAL BABE! One of the assistants came up and I asked for my prescription. The pharmacist looked up from her bench:

"With as sexy voice like that, you should be on the radio."



What a kind lady.

Indeed.

The pharmacist was sampling her wares, I expect..

I'm miffed that I've yet to *hear* that sexy voice.

Well that's something we'll have to sort. I'll not phone you at 3am like I did with JEllen, though. My voice isn't *that* sexy!

Thinking about it, when I give a presentation I get very affected. But in a nice way. For example...during QandAs, I might listen to someone's point, leave a pause, nod pensively and say "...Yeeeaaahhh..." as though I'm really thinking about what's been said. It's all an act, but the laydeez seem to like it. Bless 'em.

Possibly not. Though I get up for work at 4 AM so it wouldn't kill me.

How flattering that would be, though. Stuff like that makes me feel all warm and silly.

Well, the laydeez are quite unaccustomed to men actually *listening* to them, so it's probably a huge turn on.

Oh...and here's one tat's a killer for the chix; While they're speaking, you keep looking right at them, cock your head to one side and nod slowly. You can tune out what they're saying. Gets 'em every time.

To put it in perspective...we men have to use psychology because we haven't got .

Accept it; you're a total stud (or whatever the male equivalent of a total babe is).

I am a tad alarmed to see how much of your charm you repudiate with apparent distaste. Posh voice? Obviously fake. (Why?) Good manners? Obviously a routine. And so on.

I just heard Samantha Leslie interviewed on the radio. http://www.rte.ie/radio1/podcast/podcast_eamondunphy.xml is the podcast address but today's programme doesn't seem to be available yet.

Sam is the owner/manager of Castle Leslie hotel in Co Monaghan http://www.castleleslie.com/ famous as

Dunphy addressed her as "Big-house Anglo-Irish" which would seem justified on the face of it. The Leslies came to Ireland in the seventeenth century.

But Sam repudiated the appellation instantly. Her house was big, but she grew up there in poverty that "wasn't even genteel". Furthermore her father's ancestors had fought against Cromwell, refused a peerage under the Act of Union (1800) and always taken "the Irish side".

I really must write my "40 shades of Anglo-Irish" Entry. I have a shape for it in mind at last. Why do the most obvious candidates refuse the epithet?

And "fought against Cromwell" -- what sort of accolade is that? Cromwell was a Republican. Those who fought him were Royalists. There were no identifiable nationalists at the time.

You seem to suffer a similar discomfort with your background, Ed. Embrace it, I say!

Unfinished sentence above. Castle Leslie is famous as the location for Paul McCartney's wedding. His mother came from Monaghan (which, although in Ulster, is not in Northern Ireland).

Cromwell's a great man if you want to put people's heads in a spin. I've used him to tangle up partisans of every side.

Ain't that the truth!

Sam Leslie was also at pains to point out that "her people" came not from England but from Hungary. That's all right then . . . because it's sufficiently far away . . . not to be tainted with oppression.

Och, you know me, Lying Man. It's that disingenuous irony of mine that you pointed out recently.

But if you want to get into the psychology of it...yes, I 'have issues'. Low self esteem and all that. But at least after all the therapy I'm self-aware enough to fight against that now. Nowadays I can be a right cocky sod.

The posh voice thing, though...I'm the working class boy who got a scholarship to a school with ideas above its station. While my accent wasn't directly belittled, the ethos was that we were to understand that such accents - and the people who spoke in them - were inferior. So there I was having to adopt a false persona, knowing full well that I was an outsider...and being forced to distance myself from my family and community. In England, these are still powerful forces.

But enough about me...

Ah, wisdom is wasted on the mature. I recall the case of the guy in Milngavie who's life ambition was to become a doctor. He reached the age of thirty without qualifications...so he pretended to be seventeen and enrolled in an independent school to do his Highers. A colleague and I were discussing at his retirement party what it would be like to be able to regress like that and start over. The same thought occured to us simultaneously:
"You'd be brilliant at getting into girls' pants."
You'd have no fear!

If you want to have that voice more often... exercise it. Seriously. That's exactly what happened when you gave that talk... you projected your voice for a long period of time, effectively exercising your vocal cords. I sing a lot, and that does the same trick, so long as you do it loud and proud.

True story: I was in the choir in boot camp, as a way to get out of marching up and down the square. We were rehearsing, but it was hot, we were all tired (it being boot camp and all), and there wasn't a soul around, nor did we expect anyone. So when the chief showed up to find a bunch of us napping, he was less than pleased, and sent the lot of us to intensive training (IT) for the evening.

There we did lots of push-ups and other such frivolities for an hour or so, counting out sequentially in loud, projected voices. When it was over, the gentlemen running the IT decided to cash in on an opportunity. They dismissed the rest of the day's screw-ups, summoned us to the front, and bade us perform.

We never sounded so good. It was breath-taking.

Conversely... same place, a few weeks prior... my company commander liked to command the entire company to sing "Anchors Aweigh" at random times and places, and we were commanded to do so at a volume which induced pain. After a little bit of this, the chief who ran the choir was running through a rehearsal with us, got fed up with our performance and started checking on individuals and wondering WTF had happened to everyone. When we all pointed out the spontaneous concerts... well, let's just say he was a chief, and the CC was only a second class, so he put a stop to that nonsense pretty quick.

Moral of that story... just like any exercise, it can be overdone. But I'm sure you've been to enough Slayer concerts to know that.

Anyway... next time you're on your way to see someone you want to impress with your best Barry White impression... put some tunes on in the car on the way there, and sing along without shame or reservation.

That's interesting to know