When I was growing up in a quiet little town in the south of England, I was always jealous of people with accents. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful” I thought, “to be able to ask for jellied eels, or a sausage barm, without sounding like a ponce. Wouldn’t it be bloody brilliant if the sound of my voice alone communicated a deep-rooted link to the precise location of my upbringing.”

I do, of course, have vocal indicators that identify me as southern English. Many people are even able to place my accent in the south east. But am I from Basildon or from Basingstoke; from Berkshire or from Kent? My part-BBC part-Estuary English style of speech gives few pointers to a precise location. The fact is, millions of people across a large chunk of the country speak in much the same boring way as I do. My voice is a poor compass. It’s hardly surprising, then, that I dreamt of having a real accent.

And I wasn’t the only one. Quite a few of my schoolmates, acutely aware of our shared non-accent, tried to adopt alternatives – with varying degrees of success. Out of my best friends, Mark went Cockney, Dave became Brummie and Pete plumped for Pakistani: a particularly   ill-considered move that did little for his reputation among the local Asian community.

Now in our mid-twenties, I think we’ve all accepted we’ll never have real accents. We’ll always be simply ‘southern’. Yet I remain absolutely fascinated by cities or small regions with a unique style of speech. So when I was given the opportunity to move to Manchester in mid-2008 there was just a single thought that crossed my mind. Mint. Read more…

A couple of months ago, I booked a weekend break with cottages4you – one of the UK’s leading holiday property companies and, incidentally, one of my favourite Red C clients (because they let me write copy like this). Just before I was due to go away, it was suggested  that I write an account of my holiday cottage experience and post it here on this website. Naturally, I started to panic. What if it was a holiday from hell? What if I turned up to find a glorified tool shed decorated throughout with kitten vomit? Luckily for me, I needn’t have worried. Everything about the place was just about perfect… Read more…

I like words. They happify me. In fact, they make me tripudiate with joy. I’m one of those people who take far more pleasure in hearing about a crepuscular splodge than actually seeing one; and would much rather read about a spelunking scrimshanker than go and cheer him on. I get a kick out of the English language and, at the risk of being philodoxical, I think everybody should. Language may be fundamentally a means of communication, in the way that food is fundamentally a means of nutrition, but both offer pleasure far beyond their function. Words should be savoured like a sumptuous steak.

Of course, when I try to convince my chums about the myriad delights of mellifluous language, they call me a ponce. Well, until a few weeks back. All of a sudden, they’re casually dropping obscure words into every conversation. It’s frippet this and proprioception that. And while I love to think it’s down to my strategic nagging, I’m afraid it isn’t. They still think I’m a ponce. But they’ve become huge fans of this website called Wordle. Read more…

It’s not every day you walk into the studio to be greeted by a lingerie-clad lady striding confidently around reception. It wasn’t even that warm, as I recall. Some of the guys in the studio quite liked the idea though. (There you go Steve, Leigh and Lee… told you I wouldn’t mention any names.)

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