The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain

Being a foreigner in this city, I frequently get the question where I am from. Almost without exception my answer triggers an unbelieving "really? I wouldn't have guessed" type of reaction.

Londoners are quite used to hearing all sorts of foreign accents. The city is full of French, Russians, Poles, Italians, Indians and so on. You name it, they've got it. All these nationalities have a tendency to flavour the English language their own peculiar way, the Dutch being no exception to this. The thing about me is, I don't really sound very Dutch. In itself this would of course not be such a bad thing if it wasn't for that pesky little line that usually follows: "But you sound so...American"! Now there are plenty of reasons why this is not something I care to be mistaken for.

It has made me think about how this could have come to be. It surely can not be because I have spent a lot of time in the US. I have only ever been there once in my life and I was 10 at the time. I have had formal training in English since I was about 7 years old or so. In total I am guessing I will probably have had about four different English language teachers. Each and every single one of them was a fervent advocate of good old-fashioned Oxford English. Also my spelling is completely British. I don't write 'color' but 'colour' and I'll spell 'centre' rather than 'center'. So if I have been trained to sound like a stiff Brit, how on earth did I end up sounding like a swaggering American? There is only one explanation I can plausibly come up with and it is an embarrassing one. I must have been watching too much Friends and not enough Morse!

Living in the UK, I am now desperately trying to clean up my act and transform into a modern day Eliza Doolittle. I am getting completely tongue-tied changing my pronunciation from "vaitamins" to "vittamins" and from "tomehtoes" to "tomahtoes". I no longer go shopping for a pair of pants but I will buy trousers instead, of course only while walking on the pavement, never on the sidewalk. If despite all of my best efforts at the end of the day I still can not manage to convince, I can of course always try to throw in the odd "Jolly good" or two. It sure can not get any more British than that. Cheerio!