The Queen's English

I stood stock still in the street yesterday as a woman walked past pushing her baby along in a pram. I was rooted to the ground (and disconcerting the woman as I stared) because I realised I couldn't think of the American word for pram. It took a few hours before it came to me: stroller or buggy.

An ex-girlfriend, who is German, used to say when she went back to Germany after an extended stint in the Anglophone world she couldn't speak German properly for about a week - forgetting even rather elementary words and phrases. It is sort of like that for me; British English has become my mother tongue. And because I write for a UK magazine, I spell British, throwing in those unnecessary 'u's and replacing 'z's with 's's. I even think in British; when I was writing that sentence I was thinking 'zeds' not 'zees'.

It was a slow process - which I started dropping words and phrases into my speech ironically, almost with quotation marks: 'Fancy' another round, pal? Gradually, I dropped the quotation marks and now it has become second nature. There were practical aspects as well with pronunciation; such as saying 'chew-na' for tuna when I lived in Scotland because no one at any sandwich place seemed to be able to understand my American accent.

When I go back to America friends take the piss - or give me shit, rather - for both my accent and words I use (incidentally - the British take piss, the Americans give shit - indicative of the national characters? There's a phd thesis in there somewhere). And I find myself feeling uncomfortable using American slang. 'Bucks', for example, just sounds wrong and when I say it, I do so with quotation marks.

Perhaps I was affected so much when I saw the woman with the pram, because I realised I am no longer really American. But I'm not British, either. I do have an Irish passport as well, but have never lived there so saying I'm Irish would be something of an affectation. So what am I then? Stranger in a strange land, man without a country, rootless, homeless.