Strewth

Reto and I were at the pub playing darts last weekend (I'd like to say I was winning, but I wasn't. There seems to be a time between half and one glass of beer when I am really, really bad at darts, and Reto is really quite good. Happily, though, due to the bizarre and annoying rules we play by, we switched scores at the last minute and then I won) and the bartender came and said hello to us. We made a bit of small talk, and he asked us where we were from (this is the english pub, so it was all in the lingua franca, aka english). I said I was from Australia and then we had a short and peculiar conversation about cricket (I don't think I or the bartender knew what we were talking about). Then the bartender asked Reto if he was Australian too. Reto said that he was from Switzerland. The bartender suggested that maybe he (Reto) has just been spending too much time with me.

Call me biased, but Reto doesn't sound Australian at all. When we first met I thought he sounded like he had a bit of an American accent when he spoke english (as did numerous other Australians who met him subsequently), but I would never have thought he was a native english speaker (he has too many weird ways of expressing himself in english to pass himself off as a non-ESL person). On several occasions over the last few years, though, people have assumed he is Australian after having a conversation with him. Probably because I am Australian, yes, but really. In my opinion, it only takes about 2 seconds of listening to him to realise that he has some bizarre European accent, and this is made all the more obvious when he tries to be an Australian. I tried to teach him to say "ya flamin' galah" the other day, with endearing and predictably bad results.