my posh piece of Sheffield was not dirty

wWhen I arrived at a university full of posh southerners in the early Nineties and told people I was from Sheffield, some of them would involuntarily check me for coal dust and smut. “The Full Monty“, they cried. The more enlightened would refer to Jarvis Cocker. Once someone simply said, “Poor you.” It was a shock at first because where I came from I it was elegant. When a friend at school let it slip my mother drank from a teacup with a saucer, I was bullied for weeks. Other people seemed offended by me, as if I might be lying: “No sound as if you were from Sheffield.”

It was the same when I moved to London, so I ended up playing