Colourful I love you

Last night I watched Colleen's Real Women, a TV show where Colleen Rooney searches for ordinary girls to go to castings for big brand names.

It's actually quite interesting as very occasionally the brands do veer away from the tall, leggy, and of course skinny, stereotype and plump for someone um, plumper.

Last night a Real Woman did get the job, but she was the skinniest of the lot and the most model like of the three. Now I could get on my soapbox about this but I won’t as I don’t really care about the size zero debate and also because what I really noticed last night while watching the programme was Colleen's accent and how bizarre her lip patterns are.

Now, I pride myself on being able to lipread accents. With the Irish, the lips are almost pulled back into a semi-permanent grin, which affects the vowels – I imagine them to be quite clipped and throaty. With the Scottish accent the lips go the other way, making the vowels rich yet hollow – visually they seem to bounce off the cheeks.

So what of Colleen's accent...

Well if I am honest, it was a bit like trying to lipread someone at the end of a dinner party, when everyone's relaxed and probably warmly drunk on red wine. Seriously, I kept thinking she was going to say, 'I blurry love yur!' at any moment.

I think it's because she's the first Liverpudlian I've spent a long time lipreading that it was so bizarre. The words almost seem to drag her mouth down and it looked like it was an effort to talk. At one point she said the word, ‘girls’ and it lipread to me as yeuch! Go on, try saying ‘girls’ in a Liverpool accent while looking in the mirror, and you’ll see what I mean!

Perhaps the most famous lipreading misunderstanding is ‘colourful’ and ‘I love you’ – but thankfully I have never lipread this one wrong yet. But I think, just to be safe, I’ll wear black on my next date. I mean picture this – Deafinitely Girly meets a guy for a drink wearing a bright pink T-shirt – not unusual for me. He says to me at some point during the date, ‘blah, blah, blah colourful.’

Deafinitely Girly does a runner…

*ponders for a while

Ahhh perhaps this is why I am so perpetually single!