Rareza

Looking the way I do, I've grown used to instantly being spoken to in the local language whenever I go to southern Europe, and then enjoying the inevitable look of surprise when I reply in a broad south London accent, but for some bizarre reason, a similar thing has started happening regularly in my home town. The amount of people who've asked me if I'm Spanish over the previous couple of months is well into double figures, the best occurrence being when someone told me that I'd really lost my accent, which given that my accent is fairly pronounced to say the least*, threw me a little. I obviously looked quite confused at this, and so they went on to ask (and I knew it was coming after my temporary state of perplexity had passed) "oh, aren't you Spanish?", and they seemed genuinely shocked that I'm a Londoner. I mean, Spain is one of my favourite places on Earth (as you may have gathered), and one of the very few places I would choose to live in** apart from London, but I had no idea that I'd absorbed, via cultural osmosis, enough essence of Spain for it to start oozing out of my pores causing people who don't know me from Adam to assume that I come from there. Not that it's a bad thing, just slightly weird.

*The bit of London I come from has a glottal stop so hard that the CIA use recordings of certain London accents to familiarise people learning Arabic and various other languages which feature said glottal stop with the sound in a familiar language. Seriously, I'm not having you on.

**I could definitely get used to living in Palma - even though my Catalan/Mallorquin is shit compared to my Castillian - although I'd probably end up dying from a boquerone and red wine overdose. Seville wouldn't be so bad either.