I’m posh, apparently. From what I now understand, if you speak properly - that is, sound your‘t’, refer to ‘so and so and I’ rather than ‘me and so and so’ – you are posh. There’s no hiding it. You can put down your Times and your cup of Ecuadorian fair trade coffee and join me. Us posh kids should stick together, right? Up until now I was under the impression that Boris Johnson was the definition of posh. Prince Charles. Anyone who went to Eton. Anyone who starts a sentence, “The third time I travelled in Bali…” These people are posh. They can’t boil an egg, they think Sub Dub is something the navy are trained to do and they don’t find Curb Your Enthusiasm funny because they find themselves in those awkward situations all the time.
Before I went to secondary school I had the dirtiest South London accent you can imagine, you know waddaye mean? Safe safe. Somehow, over the course of a few years at my school, my accent changed into something new. No one in my family talks like me, so I can only blame the school and the public speaking competitions I regularly partook in. When I first moved to Leeds I was slightly self-conscious of my accent, so I found myself reverting back to old-style Dixon, who formerly only came out when I was pissed, angry, or both. Old style Dixon is coarse, intimidating and excruciating to listen to. Listening to her motor on about ‘fings’ and ‘finking’ would set your teeth on edge. You would want to leap forward and pinch her tongue between thumb and fore finger. If she says ‘free’ instead of ‘three’ one more time you will rip the damn thing out.
I come from a village in South West London called Claygate. Note how I refer to it as South West London and not Surrey, where it truly lies. I got so irritated by people making assumptions about my life when they heard the word ‘Surrey’ that I erased it from my credentials. Notable events that happened in Claygate included Cliff Richard turning on the village Christmas lights each year. Sometimes they filmed The Bill in nearest town, Kingston. This lush Greater London utopia was somewhat blighted by a rapist that attacked girls in the woods for several years, so we couldn’t play there and had to hang out in town and torpedo Lambrini instead. Not a royal upbringing, but not a bad one either.
As I have become more comfortable in Leeds, I have let ‘posh Dixon’ out in little bursts. Since earning the moniker of ‘poshest person I have ever met’ from a friend from Newcastle, I have noticed myself playing up to it. I’m not ashamed of speaking well, or wanting people to respect my intellect more than my body. Plus, for the last two years I have been living with one of the ‘poshest’ people that I have ever met. This is a guy who can slip the word ‘rambunctious’ into conversation and have no one bat an eye lid. He is ‘posh’ in the best sense of the word. He is polite, well spoken and intelligent. The kind of person your parents would lock in the basement for fear of some other girl snaring this prime marriage material. He is not spoilt, pretentious or particularly wealthy – characteristics I would previously have thought denoted poshness.
Our culture is determined to label and compartmentalise people. We have to fit a band into a musical genre and if a band is described to us that does not fit into our favoured genres, we dismiss them. The irony of this type of pigeonholing is never clearer to me than in the punk scene. I can’t even count the number of punks I know that work child care and mental health. Is that what you were expecting? Human beings can be the most surprising of animals. I get a real kick out of toying with peoples’ expectations, making them think twice about the hippy, punk, feminist, whatever, box they have put me in. Why don’t you? Assimilation is boring.
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