The Truth

Currently reading this novel by Michael Palin and it made me think of this:



'Unrelated Incidents' - No.3

this is thi
six a clock
news thi
man said n
thi reason
a talk wia
BBC accent
iz coz yi
widny wahnt
mi ti talk
aboot thi
trooth wia
voice lik
wanna yoo
scruff. if
a toktaboot
thi trooth
lik wanna yoo
scruff yi
widny thingk
it wuz troo.
jist wanna yoo
scruff tokn.
thirza right
way ti spell
ana right way
to tok it. this
is me tokn yir
right way a
spellin. this
is ma trooth.
yooz doant no
thi trooth
yirsellz cawz
yi canny talk
right. this is
the six a clock
nyooz. belt up.

by Tom Leonard

Another poem on a previous GCSE syllabus I used to enjoy teaching, provoking some interesting discussion on the power of language and the language of power, attitudes to dialect and accent and poetic form. Somehow, I don't expect it will be on Michael Gove's list of poems for the new GCSE exams!

Talking of which, and of truth, I've been really pi annoyed by the Tory press's coverage of the new GCSE proposals, implying that the teaching of Shakespeare, pre-20 C fiction and poetry is something that hasn't happened before: every English Dept I ever taught in, or visited as a consultan,t over some 30 years, taught all of these things to all their GCSE students even before the National Curriculum made it compulsory in the 1990s, and taught far more of these things than I was ever taught as a Grammar School boy in the so-called golden age of the 1960s.

Rant over! (As you might guess, I haven't got out much today!)

Tom Leonard reads his poem

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