What does it mean to speak a language well? If you believe my parents, the ultimate aim is to have ‘no accent’ – to be indistinguishable from a native speaker, because being foreign somehow makes you inferior. Surprise, surprise, I never managed this. I used to hate the way I spoke. I used to stay away from public speaking, avoid acting and debating, just because I sounded so foreign.

It took me years to realise that everyone has an accent – people from Liverpool, Newcastle or Glasgow don’t speak like most BBC commentators. When I tried to explain that to my parents, my explanations still felt like an apology: having an accent is acceptable because everyone has one. Now the trick was to have the right accent.

I have been mistaken for Scandinavian, Dutch and American. Once, another Eastern European person assumed I was British. Those were some of the proudest moments of my life. Recently, I met someone, and though their English was next to perfect, I could instantly tell that their first language was Russian. This changed my perception of them. Despite their sophisticated and nuanced ideas, having a Russian accent meant not being Western European, and, in my mind, was still equated with not being ‘good enough’. I realised that I still had a lot of the internalised xenophobia that I came to this country with – a horrifying thought for a mainstream Cambridge liberal.

Hating on houseboats? Cry me a river…

Living in this country has taught me that you can tell so much about a person just from the way they speak. Any accent tells a story. A foreign accent tells a story of someone being resilient and determined enough to learn an entire language, to read the news in it, to write their diary in it, to listen to BBC podcasts and speak it at a grocery store, at a seminar, at a pub with friends or in the company of a loved one.

I still have a long way to go, but I am starting to accept my accent, because it is an essential part of me, of where I come from, and of what has shaped me. It’s part of my story