During a heated (but polite) discussion my friends and I were having with an audience member at a stand-up comedy show that was both stupid and racist (we called them out on both counts; it may be said we heckled them), the white woman we were arguing with, apropos of nothing, turned to me and said, “I love your accent.”

And my first reaction was to think she was being sarcastic, as a way of re-performing and possibly deconstructing the racism of the performer (whose first shtick had been faking (and badly) a Spanish accent because sometimes she gets mistaken for her daughter’s nanny, and who then followed with something about suicide bombers, but by then we were yelling so loudly that we were missing the punchlines, which were so flat I’m pretty sure the audience only laughed because they were family, which they were). I thought she was referring to the fobness of my accent, and how it complimented the fobness of my skin and nosering.

But no, she was so genuinely in love with my British accent (which I thought I’d lost nine years ago) that she felt compelled to suddenly remark on it. She was so unconscious of all the ironies operating simultaneously at that moment that my brain shut off, and I went into autopilot. I was polite where I should have been biting, and so, like the good brown colonised subject that my mother raised me to be, I said, in the Queen’s English, “Thank you.”

Surreal.