Anyone who has ever worked with me, would probably not hesitate to tell you that I have no problem speaking! And possibly lots of people who use the local store may well agree to, as I like chatting to other customers and the people at the check out, and the people who are always asking if they can help you. Makes the day a little bit more pleasant I hope for them, and it does for me. Especially children, who without exception always make me smile.
I've also had some funny moments in that grocery store and in various other stores, when I have asked for something in English English and no one has a clue about what I am talking! And generally they go to great length to understand me.
I remember two words in particular when I first moved to California, which one confounded two of us and the other had people I worked in total laughter.
The first involved z. Now in the UK we speak it "zed", and I could not understand how the information operator could not understand this letter, and couldn't think how to explain it. since I thought we shared all 26 letters of the alphabet. Of course, zebra did not occur to me. After a few long minutes, I finally said "it's the last letter of the alphabet". Zee, was the response.
The other involved my calling out of my office (rude in the first place) if anyone had a rubber! I could not understand why this was that funny. I did shortly.
I have an English friend who continued with his English English to a degree, where he refused to ask any to please hold the elevator, but used lift instead. I decided that that would lead to the lift leaving without me.
As I seek to get better at my watercolor/watercolour painting, I am also searching for what I can do (other than the current very tedious task of selling my many CDs) to earn some money, and being unable anymore to be in an office full of other people, I thought back to the recordings a friend made of my voice and me. Recorded some years ago, and on finding a good copy, rather than a rough mix, where I am laughing and correcting myself, which is all I could find, I decided to send mp3's to a few people.
The lovely factor about Facebook, is that I can be back in contact with people I really liked when I was still in the music business and this morning I emailed a good man, Bill Green, who I think I first met over 30 years ago. He came back to me with great suggestions, one of which was to include the fact that I would like to do voice overs in one of my blogs.
I'd particularly like to be able to read children's books and children's animation.
And my lovely sister in law, Becky, emailed me a great critique from one of the people she knows through the company that she manages, who reps people who do voice overs.
Anyone reading this, just bear in mind that if you need someone to read children's books I am up for it.
I have read for the Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic (I just had to google that and realize that I spelled it incorrectly when I replied to Bill!) who provide audio books for teaching purposes. And I enjoyed doing so. It was interesting to learn how to describe a diagram, or a footnote (there are prescribed ways to do so, to achieve the goal) and fortunately did not have to read any maths text books! I often wondered how people would listening to a book reacted to an English voice in the middle of American accents, as there was rarely enough time to read an entire book.
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