I was chattering away animatedly to a colleague when he produced from under the desk his new gizmo, a Dictaphone on which he has been recording me.  That this was state-of-the-art at the time, gives you an idea of how many decades ago I was a girl in my first job, first hearing my own voice recorded, as he played it back to me, grinning.

The shock!  A high-pitched gabble of speech, so unlike the sound inside my head, the voice I thought I had.  So shocked in fact, it was days before I spoke again.

When I did, it was in the sultry drawl of Lauren Bacall, so much slower and lower than my natural voice, the one I have been faking ever since.

Since then, as my own voice has naturally darkened and deepened with age, learning to sing now means losing all the fakery, the long-ingrained habits of tension in the throat, the chest, the mouth that caused my catastrophic loss of voice a couple of years back as I began to sing more. It was an accident waiting to happen, an explosive haemorrhage in the tender vocal folds which produce the voice, leaving a slow-healing nodule preventing the folds from closing and vibrating properly, leaving the voice cracking and uncontrollable