some, no, most days, small ironies creep up behind and pinch me

i'm only fifty-eight, after all; so i haven't lost my malmesbury accent yet

this afternoon, ( whilst back at the office to do some paperwork after the round ), jonida, a very smart & pretty girl whose english is good, & who is probably aged a lot less than 25, & whose fashion sense seems balkan at times, said

"tristan, i've always meant to ask, because of how you talk, are you foreign ?"

... curiously, i suddenly recall first noticing, at about the age of sixteen, the differences between the accents of village girls from little somerford and shipton moyne, villages that lay some three miles distant on opposite sides of the town