"Scuse me, boss, iz you fish and chips?""Er, sorry?
"Iz you fish and chips? It's what we call people who were born in the UK, innit."
"OK, er, yeah."
It was a Saturday evening and I was minding my own business sipping fruit juice in a local cafe whilst watching Barcelona hammer someone in La Liga. Suddenly I found myself randomly embroiled in a group discussion about identity, led by a young Somali.
The guy was around 21 but despite his ultra-urban London twang was actually born in Germany and had lived there until the age of 11. I was now surrounded by a group of four others - two British-born Pakistanis, a British-born Moroccan and her partner, whose roots were in Yemen. I know, it sounds like the start of a bad joke.
"Shit, so we only need a Chinese person and we've got the whole Unaarted Nations, innit?" he laughed. If I've ever had a more surreal conversation in my life I can't recall it.
"So, boss, where in the UK iz you from?"
...and it was all going so well. I get asked that a lot, and especially did during a recent spell working in Howden, East Yorkshire. The truth is I struggle for a definitive answer. In most cases I'm lazy and just say London; my life has been based there for more than a decade now and the Howden experience made me realise I do largely feel at home. Then again, a guy in Sheffield said "You dorrrn't sound like you're from Looondon," a while back and I guess it's true. I can't speak Ali G, nor am I capable of calling random people 'geezers' and 'muppets' without laughing.
My other default response is Northampton as I lived there for five years during my teens, obviously a hugely influential chunk of my life with GCSEs and A-Levels on the menu, and I still have family and friends there. I never picked up the accent, though, which is quite an achievement as it's surprisingly strong and rural for a decent-sized town in the middle of the country. In fact, it's downright weird; imagine someone pissed up doing a very bad impression of a West Country accent and you're not far off. Or to put it another way, if Petula Clark had been born in Northampton, her big hit would have been called 'Deyn Teyn'. Overhearing someone giving directions to go 'reynd the reyndabeyt' was quite amusing. I remember my first day at middle school and a classmate straight away realised I wasn't from reyned these parts (sorry, that's the last one). "You sound well posh," she said.
Not that I'm whinging as I wasn't the only one; there was another guy in our year who was from Northampton but didn't speak with any kind of local accent either, so he got the same treatment.
Uni was a welcome distraction because a sample of the nation effectively came together and no-one really cared about backgrounds anymore. Instead we just spent Fresher's Week taking the piss out of each other and arguing about pronunciation and what things were called."What are you eating?"
"A crumpet."
"No, it's a pikelet."
"It's a crumpet, end of."
"It's called a bloody pikelet!"
Etc, etc. Back then the internet was still being powered by a hamster and sites like Wikipedia were well in the distance. The whole ‘posh’ tag thing did resurface afterwards - I failed to absorb any Nottingham twang either - but thankfully my sense of humour bypass worked and at times I've almost adopted it as a persona, particularly when I played Sunday League football in Watford.
In one game I was playing in my usual position of left-midfield but was switched to the right in the second half as the kid who had played there in the first half threw up at half-time and our management duo, a Glaswegian called Crawford and a west Londoner called Martin, who were on the touchline nearest him, wanted to keep an eye on him. I'm guessing we didn't have any subs that day. So I ran across to the opposite side again where our right-back Keith Hopping (known as 'Hoppy') now stood. I'd never played alongside him before.
"I'm playing in front of you this half, which guy am I picking up?" I asked.
"I didn't understand a word of that. What the fuck are you on about? Speak fucking English," he laughed.
Hoppy was the dressing room joker and wind-up merchant every team needs and I became his new banter target after that and almost a cult figure at the club (in a good way; I actually won ‘Sportsman of the Year’ one season, which only usually ever went to one of the veterans).
"I say, Kris, what a marvellous performance," Hoppy yelled in the changing room after one victory, much to everyone's amusement.
"Wonderful, old chap," I grinned. “You were shit, though.” More laughter.
I’d learned how to give it back by then, even if I was still a Sunday League swearing novice, something that Crawford and Martin particularly loved about me.
"For fuck’s sake!" I shouted on one occasion as I attempted to chip the ball into the path of one of our strikers, only to slice it for a throw-in. Rather than bollocking me they both laughed.
"Oi, watch ye language, Krassy," Crawford sniggered.
I should point out that I actually really like accents, and uncannily since I started writing this blog BBC Breakfast had a feature on ‘standard’ English and how some Essex primary schools were starting to introduce elocution lessons. The Essex accent isn’t the most attractive, admittedly, but really? Every accent has its own idiosyncracies – Yorkshire’s reluctance to use the word ‘the’ and Geordies’ endless struggle to find a simile (joke courtesy of Milton Jones; annoyingly I can't find a YouTube clip), for example – so who’s to decide what a definitive take on English is?
Mind you, women love a 'standard' English accent, don’t they? Particularly those from abroad ('Mmm, you sound soooooo English', etc) who have that cringeworthy romanticised view of Middle England that the likes of Four Weddings... attempt to portray. So yeah, I've played on it. Pronouncing the 't' in 'water' when singing 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' at karaoke nights has had its successes. And obviously there have been some generic Hugh Grant impressions - you know, random bumbling, the flicking of a centre parting and saying 'crikey' a lot. I've done fairly well out of it.
Not that I'd actually consider myself to be particularly English. Half of my family isn't for a start. I support England in sport but I'm not really fussed otherwise. What else is there, anyway? Tea and scones, grumbling about the weather and queueing? No wonder St George's Day is a non-event.
Technically you could argue I'm actually a northerner as I was born in Grimsby and lived there for the first 10 years of my life - so my spell in Howden was the closest I've been to returning to my 'roots'. It did bring back some nice memories, like being able to say good morning to people you don't know, or thanking the bus driver, neither of which happens in London, but other than that the whole culture of East Yorkshire seemed completely alien to me and I was happy to return down south.
Thing is, though, do I actually give a shit where I’m from? Of course not. It’s much more interesting that way. Actually, this topic always reminds me of early 90s music, which stopped being fun for a while due to chinstrokers in the industry deciding that pop music was dead and that everything had to be categorised in the wankiest way possible from then on. Suddenly we had acid house, acid jazz, grunge, europop, trip hop, Britpop, epileptic folk, etc. Rejecting bandwagons has always been one of my strengths.
Ultimately I don’t want my life to be pigeon-holed; it’s great dipping in and out of various crowds and cultures and just being an observer. That said, the ‘fish and chips’ tag is brilliant and I’m happy to settle for that. Mind you, with Indian food now the most popular UK delicacy, maybe the Somali community in Cricklewood need an update. In which case, I iz now chicken jalfrezi with pilau rice. Innit.
Photos by The Food Pornographer and Soccerprint Blog