On Stoke, and a change of heart

Here are two facts about me:

1. I grew up in Newcastle-under-Lyme, a small town right next to Stoke-on-Trent.
2. I used to be ashamed of this first fact.

And a third.

3. I'm no longer ashamed of the first fact, but I am ashamed of the second.

I'm from Stoke. I'm not really a Stokie, nor will I ever be, really, but I'm sick of being embarrassed by my hometown, and I'm angry with myself for having been so in the past. I've had what you might call a minor epiphany, of late, and have realised that a lot of the resentment I held towards Stoke as a city was wrapped up in my own, under-the-surface classism and prejudice, something I'm hoping to rid myself of in the future. Here's hoping this is the start of it.

To provide a bit of history/geography, Stoke-on-Trent is a city in the North West Midlands of the UK, approximately equidistant from Manchester in the North and Birmingham in the South, not far from Crewe and Alton Towers*. 

Look, there it is!

Notable Stokies include the novelist Arnold Bennett; Edward Smith, Captain of the Titanic; footballer Stanley Matthews; Slash from Guns n Roses (for the first five years of his life, anyway); and - of course - Robbie Williams**. It's quite unique in its construction, being a conurbation of six towns - Burslem, Tunstall, Hanley, Fenton, Longton and Stoke*** - which also means it has a complex identity and fragmented sense of self, juxtaposed with a strong sense of local pride.

Historically, it has always been an industrial centre, surrounded by moorlands. Its pottery, mining and steel industries were some of the best in the country, with Wedgewood pottery being its most prominent and impressive export. However, recession and the Conservative government of the 80s led to much of this being closed or downsized - a huge hit for the city's economy. It's never quite recovered.

Perhaps owing to a combination of its faltering industry, lack of 'historic' and stereotypically pleasant architecture and portrayal in the media (as well as other factors), Stoke is often used as a shorthand for non-affluence, dreariness and/or unpleasantness. For example, in Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe, he described a video game which depicted a post-apocalyptic landscape strewn with dead bodies and toxic waste, and likened it to 'living in Stoke'. The amount of times, when telling people I'm from Stoke, I've been greeted with sighs of patronising pity, is really quite ridiculous.

Thing is, I used to buy into it, too. I was embarrassed. Stoke isn't pretty - it's not York or Durham or Cambridge. And it's not a new, thriving urban centre like Manchester or Sheffield. It's stagnant, it's struggling, and it's deprived. It has poor levels of heathcare, a high number of families relying on benefits, and was recently listed as the eighth poorest place in the UK. Football-related violence and BNP support are rife and widely-reported**** in the area. But I've realised that doesn't make it a bad place and doesn't make its people any lesser, nor does it justify a) my being embarrassed by it, or b) people openly mocking it.

I don't claim to be working class - to say would be appropriative and stupid. I may have been mocked by my Southern friends for not trying pesto until I was 18, but I had a middle-class, comfortable upbringing, which is not the case for many people in Stoke. There is an inextricable link between working class origins and violence, low intelligence and laziness, a link perpetuated by the media, and by the inherent classism that many middle class people carry with them. This isn't the place to get into social disenchantment, but the coverage of the London riots displays it perfectly - a generation of people left stranded by their government driven to extremes, yet brushed off with statements about yob culture and poor familial discipline.

It makes me quite disgusted with myself to admit this, but I think my rejection of being from Stoke has a lot to do with my need to detach myself from the city's poor reputation. While I don't think it's the 'working class'-ness specifically that I rejected, the stigma of being from Stoke always annoyed me, and I tried my hardest to disassociate myself. Going to University, the majority of people around you are new and excitingly middle-class, so any opportunity to have a quick laugh at my awful home town was embraced, without me realising that I was perpetuating the horrid stereotypes myself, and adding to the barrage of classism people face day-in, day-out.

Visiting recently has given me a much-needed punch in the face when it comes to my mocking of Stoke. Having read more on classism and prejudice, I realised how awful my own actions were, and how horribly haughty and stuck-up I'd been each time I'd looked down upon people who live in Stoke. I'm absolutely no better than anybody who lives there, and to think otherwise is to have a sense of my own self-importance that is beyond measure. Hideous.

I'm reminded of Jane Austen's Emma, where the eponymous hero mocks the 'tiresome' and lowly Mrs Bates, and is thoroughly chastised by Mr Knightley. 'She should secure your compassion, not your contempt!' Knightley angrily cries, admonishing Emma for thinking herself so above Mrs Bates, who is financially hard-done-by and considered ridiculous by higher society. That's precisely the case with me and Stoke. Stoke has had a bloody hard time of it, and continues to do so. It's not pretty, it's not affluent, and it's not the cultural capital of the country, but mocking it is cruel and unnecessary. It gets a hard enough time as it is - I should be defending it, helping somehow, not tearing it down even further. By speaking poorly of it on such a regular basis, particularly as a native, I'm only perpetuating the awful stereotypes it is associated with, and furthering its poor treatment by the public, a treatment wrapped up in classism and prejudice.

The accent

One of the most salient stigmas I distanced myself from was the accent. I remember being about seven and coming home from school, talking to my mum about a book. The general vowel for the 'oo' in book in the North of England is [ʊ], like the vowel in full; in Stoke, however, it's often pronounced as [u:] like the vowel in cool. When I told my mum about the bewk I'd read, she told me I wasn't to say it like that, that it was wrong, and that I should say buck, luck and cuck. I've said that ever since, and have often cringed when people did otherwise, and have looked down upon the Stoke accent, thinking it common or improper.

I was a fucking idiot, as I have later realised. Many years of linguistic study has made me realise that, no matter how many times people say that there is a correct way to speak (and believe me, people say it A LOT), no accent is intrinsically better than another. They are only judged as 'better' because of the arbitrary associations between location, accent and personal characteristics, and the rise of the Southern 'standard'. I repeat: NO ACCENT IS INTRINSICALLY BETTER AT THE JOB OF COMMUNICATING THAN ANY OTHER. It's that simple. People will say that some accents sound ugly, stupid, or wrong, and they are of course entitled to their opinion, but it's important to understand that such opinions come from years of ingraining prescriptivism into our collective consciousness.

That's why I'm hoping to study the Stoke accent in detail - for a variety with so much idiosyncrasy, connection to identity and stigma attached to it, there's been very little academic linguistic analysis going on. I'm looking at a specific feature for my MA dissertation, and - with a lot of luck and hard work - I hope to use my potential PhD to document, explore and understand the complex relationship between the city's accent, its residents, and the general public.

In my own, quite pathetic way, these projects are like my love letter to Stoke. They're not going to change the world, but I hope that, in a small way, I'll be able to contribute to softening some of the stereotypes people have about Stoke, and I can make amends with the city who, for better or worse, made me who I am.

You're damn right I do.

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*I add in these details because, notoriously, nobody knows where Stoke actually is, and I've had to use some or all of these descriptions when trying to explain its location in the past. It comes from being part of the forgotten, unspecified Midlands, I think, combined with not being a notable visiting/tourist destination. Most people's reaction tends to be 'yeah, I went through the there on the train.'

**Definitely our most famous alumnus, it was originally pretty cool to be associated with Robbie, and to be able to tell people I once served his mum in Boots (claim to fame!!1!). I think we tend to play down the association since 'Do The Rudebox' came out. You understand. I'm listening to Escapology as I finish this post -- why did you fire Guy Chambers, Rob? Whyyyy?

***Bennett's 'Anna of the Five Towns' comes from this - he decided to omit one, because it sounded better with five.

****While the tone of this article is often frustratingly patronising, it accurately sheds light on why the citizens of an ailing city, let down by Labour and staunchly anti-Conservative, often drift towards the far right.

Teacher appreciation LIFE

This post had been kicking around in my drafts for about a week, when yesterday I discovered that today is National Teacher Appreciation day. What serendipity! And so, here is a waffly blog post about teaching, and why teachers are tip-top humans.

'Those who can, do. Those who can't do, teach.' And those who trot out this old adage can get stuffed. Those who give enough of a shit that they devote their lives to enabling others to do, teach. Teachers are heroes, inspiration, the best of people. I know it's clichéd, and I'm sure repeated watchings of Mona Lisa Smile* have given me an even more romantic view of teaching, but I know without a shadow of a doubt that I wouldn't be where I am without the effort, support and general brilliance of several staggeringly excellent teachers. Yeah, I'm passionate about learning, and about linguistics specifically, but if through random happenstance I'd not progressed through my schooling having been taught by the people I was, I'm not entirely sure I would be this excited, this driven, this in love with studying.

**

At my high school, every single student between years seven and nine was terrified of Mr Taylor. He was a force of nature, and everyone knew not to cross him, lest face his wrath. And what a wrath it was - he could stand inches from your face and bellow at you, never faltering, almost sinister in his eloquence. Thankfully, this never happened to me, but I saw it many a time, and that was more than enough to stop me crossing him. Of course, it didn't help that Mr Taylor was also a PE teacher, and thus his yelling was also heard on freezing November afternoons as we did cross-country running (or as it was more commonly known, institutionalised torture). Basically, we were shit-scared of the man.

Then came GCSE English, and Mr Taylor was assigned our set. It was like knowing a different man. Mr Taylor smiled, laughed and joked his way through our lessons, vibrant and hilarious but still with an incomparable command of the class (probably from the residual fear that he'd explode - the man crafted his reputation well). He encouraged critical thought, pushed us to be better, but mainly let us feed off his enjoyment of the subject, of poetry and prose, of literary history.

I remember his teaching of Second World War literature in particular. I can recall his explaining the translation of "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"; needing us to understand the terrible irony of the 'glories of war' was incredibly important to him. And the pause, during Wilfred Owen's Disabled, after he read 'In the old times, before he threw away his knees' -- I've never quite been able to shake the power of that line, and I think the pain in his reading of it is the reason. He cared so much, about history and suffering and the importance of art and literature in allowing a generation who never had to live through it to understand, to appreciate what came before them, and how we're able to live so well now.

As is a pattern with all of these teachers, I was a bit of a pet to Mr Taylor. Not because I was particularly academically adept, but I spoke up in class, and went to him for extra help. He used his lunchbreak to gently dissect a piss-awful poem I wrote and help me to draft another (to this day, I remain a piss-awful poet, but he did help), and another to calm me when I freaked out about reading the bit in Great Expectations where Mrs Havisham catches fire and dies, and to read that section through with me, making sure I was okay after every few lines. We also bonded over being Manchester City fans, and thus started my long career of pretending to know more about football than I actually do. At one parents' evening, as my folks sat down at his desk, he said 'Hannah's doing fine - so, did you see the match last night?' and proceeded to talk to my dad about City for fifteen minutes.

When we left year 11, he wrote the whole class a poem (still pinned to my noticeboard), which contained a line for each of us. He also wrote individual poems for a few of us, and I can remember mine off-by-heart, even now.

Hannah Leach
A blue
Good for you
Stay true
To your calling

Hannah Leach
The beach
Lies across the water
Don't do what you think
Do what you ought to
And the sun lounger will be yours

I hope I never forget that.

We went back to see Mr Taylor a few times after leaving school, but haven't been in over a year now. I hope I get to see him again, but more than that, I hope he knows the lasting effect he had on our class. (I'm realising this is getting a bit Dead Poets Society all up in here. I promise none of these stories end with a classmate shooting themselves and a bunch of us standing on tables.)

To complete the picture, a school-aged Han (who apparently only had one photo-pose)

**

Then came college. In my second year, I studied English Language and Literature with the same teacher - Stewart McNicol. Here again was a a teacher who gave a shit, who was interested and interesting, and a little bit weird. He taught us about diphthongs by talking about hyaenas, schooled us in l337 speak, and littered child language acquisition lessons with anecdotes about teaching his infant son the word 'meteorologist' so he'd look super smart when anybody asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He just enjoyed it.

Stoo also invented McNicol's Gallery of Tedious Anthropomorphism, a new instalment of which greeted us nearly every lesson, and elicited a welcome chuckle.

One of the things I remember most clearly is, when talking about books written for children and their simplified syntax, I spontaneously quoted Black Books without thinking - 'look in the alligator's mouth: it's not there either!' Being met with stony, confused silence from my fellow classmates, Stoo finished the quote - 'we all drank lemonade, the end!' - simultaneously a) making me feel like less of a moron, and b) cementing himself as teacher-type extraordinaire.

Since leaving college, Stoo has been kind enough to help me complete my undergraduate dissertation, giving up his free time for naught more than a bag of Tangfastics. Actually, considering he follows me on Twitter, there's every chance he's reading this sycophantic waffle right now. If so, cheers, Stoo!

**

My lucky streak extended into University, where I was fortunate enough to be taught by some cracking linguists, many of whom had paved the field of linguistics in the first place. (I still get a frisson of excitement when I see a book and think 'the author of that book taught me!') Specifically, I was particularly felicitous to be taught extensively by Kevin Watson. While I loved English Language at A Level, it was my three years at Lancaster University that saw me actually fall head-over-heels in love with Linguistics, and Kevin had a LOT to do with that. Here again was a teacher who radiated enthusiasm for the subject, who took pride in the field, and who was sure of its importance and relevance.

Kevin also supervised me through my dissertation, and the man deserves a MEDAL for putting up with me. One time, having gotten nowhere with an assignment for a course he didn't even teach, he sat quietly by as I cried and waffled about the Turkish noun data in front of me that just didn't make any sense god dammit, and calmly told me that I just needed to read a bit further and think a bit harder, and - lo and behold! - having found the right book in the library, it all finally clicked. He made me feel like I could actually do something in this field, make an impact, and do it well.

Beyond that, he's just a damn good teacher. Eloquent without being confusing, clear without being patronising. And, sharing a common thread with the other brilliant teachers I've mentioned, he gave a shit. He cared.

And a uni-aged Han (no seriously, why do I only have one pose/expression when a camera is pointed at me?)

 **

There have been times where I've felt more of a nuisance than a pupil, and generally discouraged from doing anything innovative, challenging, or left-field. Instead, I've felt encouraged to sit back, take the easy option, to not really try. It happens, and while I don't blame certain teachers for occasionally being this way (teachers have bad moods too!), it can be disheartening.

I've been struggling, lately, feeling a little lost academically. And then last week, I had a brilliant meeting with an MA lecturer, who - yet again - seemed to give a shit, and who encouraged me not to abandon my ideas. Good teachers make me I feel like I can do stuff, and do it well. I now have to actually do the stuff, of course, but the encouragement I've received throughout my academic career has been absolutely invaluable.

Teachers are heroes, and a good teacher can make a cosmos of difference.

*I knowww, it's terrible, but it's so pretty! And their faces! And the clothes!