Gypsy

When people ask me where I’m from I never know what to say. I have to figure out what they’re really asking – where is my accent from? where did I grow up? what’s my ethnicity? where’s home? At this point, I’ve spent more time living in the US than I ever did the UK, but I feel equally at home in both countries.

The short version is: British-American with European roots, and my accent is English.

Read on if you want the long version…

I was born in London to British parents but can only really describe myself as having been based in London. Although I attended high school and university in the UK, I’ve lived in and been to school in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Washington D.C., Assissi, Italy and Marbella, Spain.

My mother has lived in Spain for over 20 years, and Andalucia is home for me. My father has lived in Los Angeles, Toulouse and Vienna, but his current home is Sofia, Bulgaria. As an adult, I have lived in Madrid, Paris, London – and New York. Twice. I travel a lot…

The short answer I used to give to the question, Where are you from? was ‘Europe’. But that invited exclamations of But you sound English! I once quipped Yes, I sound English when I speak English; Spanish, when I speak Spanish, and French when I speak French but I think it came out wrong, so I’ve never repeated it. The tongue-in-cheek ‘Eurotrash’ tends to confuse my fellow Americans: their protests tell me the joke a little too dry, the humour a little too unfamiliar.

The best response is for those who think I’m Australian – a phenomenon I’ve only ever experienced only on U.S. soil – and that is to give an unsolicited demonstration which compares the Australian and British accents because it seems to make people crack up.

It seems that wherever I go now, I’m a foreigner. I’m too emotional to be English; too reserved to be Spanish; too eccentric to be American. Hey, I’m embracing it.