Phone Sexiness

Sean BeanI admit it, I used to smoke. A bloody silly thing to do, damaging to your health, foul smelling and expensive. See you can tell ex-smokers they’re worse than people who have never smoked at all. It’s probably the feeling that the dreaded cigarettes robbed you of years of activity as you wheezed after strenuous activity. Then there’s the mornings, coughing and spluttering into the bathroom until you cleared the kack from your chest. And perhaps most importantly the money you literally burned. Most packs of 20 are over five quid now, how did I ever afford it?

But there’s one thing I do miss from smoking, and it’s not the nicotine hit of that first drag. It’s the effect it had on my voice. My voice used to be much deeper and more gravely, on the telephone it had an unusual effect on the female of the species.

It was only the ciggies, I didn’t have to go to the extent that Mercedes McCambridge did to voice the part of the possessed Regan in the Exorcist – i.e. drinking raw eggs, smoking goodness knows how many packs a day, drinking to excess and not getting any sleep. Though that does sound like a few debauched weekends I enjoyed when I was younger.

I used to work in a call centre, taking calls from all over the UK. Now to people outside Yorkshire a Yorkshire accent is a Yorkshire accent. Often people from the south of the UK can’t tell whereabouts in Yorkshire you’re from, they even mistake Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Manchester for Yorkshire. So when I picked up the phone and started to talk they immediately decided they were talking to Sean Bean and as Sean had appeared in Lady Chatterley’s lover. You fill in the blanks LOL.

And Suze agrees. If you ask she’ll tell you that having spoken to me on the phone on a number of occasions before meeting face to face she already had a mental image of me that was quite appealing.

It must have been a shock when she saw me for the first time 🙁

However I’m happy to leave the Sean Bean voice behind. The ciggies are too high price to pay even for that. So why, I hear you ask, do I mention it? Well, the voice came back for a few days if only because I had an appalling cold and chest infection.

Even being ill has its benefits. 🙂

I mean, who of us doesn’t like receiving a call from a stranger with a sexy voice?

Tags: Sean Bean, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, accents, telephone voices, The Exorcist, Mercedes McCambridge