Rosaleen Lynch

My English teacher counted my ‘you knows’ during a debate and the soft ‘th’ that made ‘dis’ out of ‘this’ and ‘dat’ out of ‘that’, that not even elocution lessons purged but now I don’t mind if ‘we three’ sounds like ‘we tree’ or that when I say the letter ‘r’ I think pirate, and I’m OK um-ing and ah-ing, because I don’t have to have a BBC accent when I speak up for justice in a debate, or march for peace on the street, when I take the witness stand, the truth is just the same with a soft ‘th’. 

Rosaleen Lynch, an Irish community worker and writer in the East End of London, loves stories: conversational, literary, and performed. She has words in lots of lovely places and can be found on Twitter @quotes_52 and the web: 52Quotes.blogspot.com.