How to make me even angrier than I’d be if you just stuck at stealing my friends

New Kid Katie finds me immensely amusing. She keeps looking at Tana when I speak and biting her lip like she’s repressing hysterical giggles, and Tana does the same, and then they both look at me all wide-eyed and innocent.

“She went to a singin lesson last – look, what’s the o-so-funny joke here?”

“Nothing.”

“So stop laughin. She went to a singin lesson last week an came back an said there’d not bin a – what es your problem?”

“Tana, did she -?”

“Yeah.” And they giggle.

“What?”

“Why d’you keep talking in a Welsh accent for?”

“I don’t.”

“Yeah she does,” Tana says, like I can’t hear her.

“You’re not Welsh?”

“No.”

“So, why d’you -?”

“I am not puttin on an accent an I am not Welsh an you are not funny.”

“Do you hate the Welsh, then?” she asks seriously.

I stomp off to cool my head. Whenever I catch myself saying a guttural and soundly South African ‘ach mun’ she starts laughing, too. I guess it’s out of context, given she doesn’t know I’ve been brought up round my South African family so much it’s habit, but… but yeah. Hmm. Like it says on the can, that’s how to make me even angrier than I’d be if you just stuck at stealing my friends: mocking my speech. Don’t even go there. That’s my job.

The dictionary says I’m not Welsh

I felt like writing but I think something’s clogging the place where inspiration usually flows from. So what I did, I opened my dictionary and took the first word as a topic. Like in public speaking – ten minutes to prepare your speech on ‘The Devil’s Own Work’, kind of thing.

 

And what did I get? Well, first I got ‘solenoid’, which is a physics thing (whoo!), and I did my last ever Physics exam this Wednesday, and I don’t think even I can spend a few hundred words reinterpreting ‘a coil of wire which becomes magnetised when an electric current is passed through it’ – and even if I could I wouldn’t want to. So. Ever onwards, I suppose. And thankfully, ‘solenoid’ was directly followed by ‘accent’. Phew…