Wuss that I am I'll admit it doesn't take much these days to send me spiralling into some sort of hand-wringing, self-examining angst. Indicative of my propensity for making mountains out of molehills is a single throwaway comment I thought I'd share with the four or so of you reading this, because it's been forcing its way into my brain ever since.
It was simply this: I was in the Chaplaincy Office, generally getting in the way under the guise of being "useful" and an American bloke I'd never met before asked me where I was from. When I asked what he meant, he said "Well, I'm guessing you're not from Britain." I asked him why not, and he said "Well, you don't sound like you are."

I told him I was from Yorkshire, sort of, and when I'd elaborated a bit on that he gave me a sort of look perhaps tinged with pity that seemed to say "Ah. That explains it."
But, as I said, I've done a good deal of fretting since this little remark. Inadvertantly, he'd thoroughly dressed me down: if I'm being honest, I don't actually belong anywhere. There's nowhere I can go back to and nostalgically call "home", because I've lived just about everywhere. As for my accent, I wasn't aware I had one - though a student of mine from Bolton asures me that I have.

I've written in my profile I "sound a bit Northen when pissed", which kind of sums it up. In actual fact, I speak a sort of fake RP which gives itself away in every sentance with flat "a"s and occasionally exaggerated consonants (I've been told I over-pronounce the "t" in the word "eighty".) If I'm with my dad, or in fact any of his family, or mates or students from somewhere vaguely north of Birmingham, it all gets a bit exaggerated. Ernest scholars of language call this "Linguistic Accommodation", and one day it's going to get me beaten shitless. Apparently everybody does it to a certain extent - a friend of mine says someone she knows, who's from Kiddeminster, slips into a German accent when talking to his Munich-born girlfriend, which makes me look fairly acceptable, and another friend was actually threatened with violence when a Somerset shopkeeper thought he was ripping the piss (to be fair, though, he probably was.)
I've become very conscious of this recently, though. I've got a cassette hidden away somewhere which will probably surface in the best man's speech at my wedding, of me as a three-year-old child, living as I then was in Clitheroe, and singing a hymn (predictable, I know) into my new Fisher Price tape recorder. I've not got the facilities to transcribe it phonetically, but the result was something like "I'm very glad of God. His loov teks cur of me." You get the picture. This all contrasts rather with my secondary schooling in Guernsey, where I recall being mimicked for the way I pronounced certain words ("love" was one, I seem to remember.) So I made a conscious effort to "talk properly", under some sort of misconception that as the only things I was any good at were English and singing I ought to follow the standard pronunciation.
And then a few years later, I said something about being middle class, and a friend (in jest. I think...) laughed and said there was no such thing as "middle class" with a hard "a", but only "middle clarrss". (I stand by the fact that there's no "r" in that word, by the way, which makes me right and the rest of you wrong.) People make assumptions. I have a 1st in English, I've had a book published, but feel free to pat me on the head, eccentric little thing that I am.

The wider thing, though, that stems from all this, is the fact that my accent, lack thereof or whatever is indicative of the fact I don't really belong. Anywhere. Ever. My students must think I'm a compulsive liar, as every British student who comes in pretty much goes away with the notion that I've lived near them. Because I have. "Wherearebouts in Somerset/Yorkshire/Lancashire/The Channel Islands/London are you from?" is a standard ice-breaking question.

And it's all true. These days I go home to Yorkshire to see my family and my cousin exclaims in awe "you sound so posh!" while F frowns at my Northern accent and says "you don't talk like that!" It's a different story when I go to Guernsey, when I just sound to them mildly common, and when I'm watching the Mighty Bradford you'd think I'd lived all my years in Cleckheaton. Were I an actor, my resume would include "Standard Northern" in the accents section. (Yeah, I know. I asked a student of mine from Surrey exactly which Northen accent he could do and he just looked confused.)

And if you do ask me where I'm from the answer you'll get will probably depend on you you are any why you're asking. If you're making ill-informed comments about Guernsey involving words like "collaborator" I'll defend Guernsey to the death, but I wouldn't move back if you paid me; when I'm doing talks at college I'm to all intents and purposes Non-Specific Home Counties; if you're a football fan I'll bore you to death with facts about Dean Windass and those two years we were in the Premiership; otherwise I'll probably say Lancashire and immediately apologise, for reasons I haven't discovered yet - it's kind of a compulsion. In the meantime I'm too working class for many I've stumbled across at King's and pretty much everyone I went to sixth form with, practically aristocracy by my dad's family's standards, belonging more to my dad's side to my mother's side of the family, and a constant mystery to the transient people in between.

Or maybe, as well as being a legal fiction, I'm actually just a fraud. A drifting one, desperately trying to grab hold of some sort of legitimising lifeline and missing out every time.