To speak or not to speak

I’ve got a confession to make. 

I’ve written a few articles before. Delivered a few opinions spliced with some, probably not particularly funny, jokes. And I’ve certainly not been afraid of expressing my views through the medium of words. It’s something I find easy to do. I’m fairly literate, and could quite easily have entered the world of the grizzled hack, writing up some cutting reports over a glass of whiskey in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. Cigarette casually lying in the ashtray as I expose the late night Soho-bar-hopping habits of yet another politician with a seemingly perfect marriage of convenience.

Or maybe I could have been the poet expressing the love and beauty within all the horribleness that surrounds us; eagerly exploring that love and beauty with as many people as my unparalleled vanity could bring. Or I could have been a writer of stories that have us too afraid to take that walk to the toilet in the dark, and then ashamed at the little bit of urine that seeps out while we’re working up the courage to do so. 

But I didn’t. I followed my passion for graphic design. A life more or less in the background, making things look good for a page or developing a brand for a company that helps it ‘star jump’ into the world. I’m lucky that in my career I’m still able to indulge in my love of the written word by developing messages for a new campaign. 

However, although the written world is something that flows easily from my brain, articulating these words orally is somewhat more difficult. And, despite the fact that I am currently entering the middle of my fourth decade of living with all the vigor of a Spurs fan walking down Holloway Road whilst Arsenal are playing at their adopted home (far away from Plumstead Common where they began their humble life), speaking in front of people is something that I find terrifying.

This… well, this is where the confession begins. The reason why the ‘palms go sweaty’ is because since I first learned to speak as a child, I’ve had to continue to learn to speak. It didn’t come naturally to a small me as I had a severe speech impediment that shattered my confidence and made me a shy, reserved, overall introverted person.

But wait, no! Not me! The long-haired egotist with a penchant for telling bad dad jokes and launching into long tirades about Brexit over a drink or two in the ‘local’?

I suspect that most people who know me won’t think of me in this way. Most people would never imagine that I stumble over my words - that as a child, I couldn’t pronounce my sisters’ name. Hell, I couldn’t even pronounce my own surname. Sounds used to emulate from my nose rather than my mouth so saying any words with an ‘s’ often, especially during hayfever season, used to spray some unpleasantries over those who made the mistake of standing too close. Although, to understand what the hell I was trying to say in the first place they had to lean in close, so humiliation was inevitable anyway. 

The letter ‘s’ isn’t the only letter I struggled with - there’s plenty of others. And battling the ‘s’ for top spot in my broken elocution is the letter ‘r’. Jonathan Ross and Roy Hogdson are two of the most famous of those that struggle with this impediment, but one is widely ridiculed for this, while the other made it a trademark that helped him excel in his career. Poor old ‘Woy’. For all his achievements, for all the languages he fluently speaks (five: English, Swedish, French, Italian and German), those with far less impressive linguistic skills mock him for his pronunciation of the letter ‘r’. 

Of course my oldest friends, my mother, sister, and other members of my family remember me trying to splutter out my sentences. But anyone who I’ve met after the age of 14 wouldn't have heard me like this because, after years of speech therapy, many doctors seen, and various devices inserted down my throat and up my nose, I finally, around my oh-so-important teenage years, managed to develop a voice which others can understand. Just in time to be able to embarrass myself with terrible chat-up lines to some unimpressed girls. 

But my formative years were difficult. I was often ridiculed and humiliated at school for the way I spoke. By the teachers, mainly, and not the other kids. My two large front teeth were more of a target for them, rather than the speech… “what's up bugs!”

I was labelled as stupid. Not worth bothering with, except when made to stand in front of the class and read aloud paragraphs from a book when they knew that this was something I couldn't do. They didn’t believe that I could have possibly read it. Despite my reading age being far higher than anyone else in the class, as I was a prolific devourer of books, I would get detention or lines for lying that I’d read a book because I couldn’t even read the passages out to them.

They sniggered and made jokes as I stuttered over my words in front of all my friends. As I said, in general, the other kids weren’t too bad. They had learnt how I spoke and could understand me perfectly(ish). But the teachers. Well, they were a bunch of c…

It didn’t help that I had bad teeth, terrible mum-cut hair, jumble sale clothes, and had to queue for school dinners with a ticket that let everyone else know that I got free school dinners because I was ‘poor’. But that’s a whole new article of woe that I probably won’t write. 

Because of my speech impediment, I was quite withdrawn. I decided that a great school career wasn’t going to be mine to enjoy, so why bother going? Better to stay home and read, draw, write, create, watch a lot of films, listen to a lot of music, and educate myself. I frequently enjoyed solo trips to art galleries and museums where, brilliantly, you were encouraged not to speak but instead just to stand back and enjoy all the creative delights on display. 

This is no hard luck story. I would thank those teachers, if I could, because they enabled me to break away from their preconceived ideas of what a council estate kid should be like, and indulge my passions instead. 

From 14 onwards, and with a lot of hard work, my speech developed as well as my education (I did go back to school, fortunately, and to one where the teachers were far more understanding and encouraging). It got to the point where people wouldn’t know that I talked fast when nervous because it’s easier for me to somehow get words out that way, or that I would sometimes go quiet in conversations because my confidence in my ability to speak coherently would disappear into a black hole of my own design. Normally this happens when I’m with people that I don’t know so well, and I can't allow myself to feel as relaxed and comfortable. 

And speaking in front of a group of people? Damn, that’s difficult. Even at my elder sisters’ wedding, when I was asked to deliver a speech in front of a room of people that had been enjoying a few glasses of festivities and were expecting rollocking jokes, I couldn’t do it. But I couldn’t possibly disappoint my sister on her big day, so instead I asked my poor wife and daughters to film me making a speech to be shown on a large screen at the reception. Delivered like a TV comedy routine, with cutaways to some Photoshopped mocking images, and jokes that work better on the big screen than they do in real life.

Everyone who has a speech impediment, a stutter, a difficulty with certain words and letters, finds workarounds which those who don’t would never understand. Sometimes it can work in our favour. The pre-recorded speech projected to all the wedding gatherers, well, that’s creative showmanship, right? A speech is just a little too boring for someone like me, and not a reflection of my lack of confidence in my ability to not completely freeze up, panic, and embarrass myself more than an Etonian educated Tory politician with a deceased pig.

In a bizarre twist of fate my speech has developed so much that I actually have to do an impression of my old impediment to explain to people how I used to speak. It’s weird that my brain is so determined to correct me, that I even find that difficult to do. 

I do still stumble over words, it’s just that people don’t notice it so much because I correct it quickly. I do still avoid words that I find difficult, but I developed my vocabulary enough to be able to do this. 

My career, though, has not been in the background as much as I thought it might be. I have to present ideas to peers, colleagues, and clients. With not only the work and ideas being critiqued, but the way I explain them, the way I rationalise them, the way I sell them. I do still find this incredibly difficult, but I love a good challenge so I’ve practised key words and phrases that I can use so that I don’t stumble and splutter my way through. 

And in another bizarre twist of fate, for the last year I’ve been doing this over video calls which makes it far easier. I don’t feel like I’m in a room full of people waiting for me to slip up, for the words to become more jumbled than lockdown guidelines. Not that the people I present to are like that, of course. In general everyone I have these meetings with are great and not like the teachers from my younger school days. But those memories and feelings don’t go away, and my own inbuilt protection system is willing me to stay silent and let someone else do the talking. Which I’ve done a lot of over my career and which has, quite possibly, had a large negative effect on it. 

We all love to hear those people that speak with confidence and conviction, even if the words they’re saying are emptier than an old mans’ glass at the local Wetherspoons who’s waiting for a familiar face to walk in and utter the glorious phrase “fancy another drink mate?”

But we're not all that confident in our speech, even though we might have something to say.

The reason for this article, well, it’s because Felicity Baker, a BBC journalist, has made a documentary about having a stammer that she has spent her whole life trying to hide. She even struggles to say her own name. And it resonates because I’ve also spent a large portion of my life trying to hide my own speech problems. Something that I’ve done so well that people don’t really believe me when I have, on occasion, mentioned it. 

But then I do have daughters that have names that, when I was younger, I could never have pronounced. Satori and Ophelia. With a double-barreled surname that has three ‘t’s and two ‘s’s. As I mentioned, I love a challenge.

Just a final word for those of you that have made it this far. This article hasn’t been written to ask for sympathy, but to highlight that there’s still a lack of understanding. To say that sometimes people might need a little bit more patience when listening to them. That they don’t need to be hurried out of frustration, or spoken over and cut off. 

Having a disability shouldn’t result in being ignored, or pitied, or misjudged. 

Just give people a little bit more time, and they might surprise you. 

I Can't Say My Name: Stammering in the Spotlight https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000t27y

Some of those famous people with speech impediments…

1. James Earl Jones - Yes, seriously… Darth Vader had a stutter!
2. Nicole Kidman
3. Bruce Willis
4. Winston Churchill
5. Tiger Woods
6. Alan Turing
7. Jimmy Stewart
8. Christopher Robin Milne
9. Claudius
10. King George VI
11. Samuel L. Jackson
12. Rowan Atkinson
13. Marilyn Monroe
14. Julia Roberts
15. Kylie Minogue
16. Lewis Carroll
17. Noel Gallagher
18. Harvey Keitel
19. Ed Balls
20. Carly Simon

And I could go on…