I’m walking along the Grand Union Canal that runs behind the estate where my father-in-law lives. It’s a glorious evening and I’m on a video call with Katie who is away on the south coast this week with Lily and their uncle and aunt. I walk past four or five narrow boats. On the last boat in the row, a modest white and blue steel boat, a man is standing. I have the phone up, so he thinks I’m filming him or taking his photograph. He gives me a big smile and says something. But I’m talking to Katie, so there’s some confusion. He then realises that I’m not taking his picture and I realise that he’s talking to me. More than that, I hear his Irish accent and he hears mine.

“Where are you from?” he asks. “Kildare,” I reply. “Ah, a Lillywhite,” he says and I know immediately that I am firm ground. Despite his Dublin accent, he tells me he’s from Dungarvan in Co. Waterford. “The husband of one of my best friends is from Dungarvan,” I tell him. I tell Katie I’ll call her later because I have a feeling I might be chatting here for a while.

Sean and I chat for an hour, me standing on the grassy tow-path, he on the open deck of his narrow boat, the air cooled engine exposed to the evening air. We discover we have people and places in common. He pootled a narrow boat up to the harbour in Edenderry in the late 1960s and remembered going for a drink at The Harbour House. That was my uncle Tom’s favourite haunt, owned by Mary O’Connor, my Irish teacher, and her family. I was only in The Harbour House once, for a pint of Guinness with Tom back in the early 1990s. It was everything you would expect of a small Irish pub, all the old men lined up at the bar. It was renowned for its music and for Mary being as strict behind the bar as she was in the classroom.

Sean tells me about his job at Shannon airport and about people from Edenderry he knew there and at Ardnacrusha power station. I mention people I know who he might have known and we laugh when we get a bit tangled in Johns and Seans and who was who.

I tell him I had been a sailor and we talk about the joys of my Westerly Conway. He wonders how a girl from the Bog of Allen and a boy from the housing estate 20 metres from here could have ended up living on a boat and sailing to the places we did. He tells me of his adventures as a sea sailor and as a narrow boat owner and about his sustainable, no-cost approach to life.

At 80 years of age, he is only a few years younger that Daddy would have been. The Cuban Missile Crisis comes up in conversation (he makes me promise not to tell anyone why) and he shares his reminiscences of those few days in 1962 and I tell him what Daddy told me of his memories and fears of those days.

He explains how he has come to have that Dublin accent but says his heart remains firmly rooted in Dungarvan. He already owns a plot in Dungarvan graveyard where he wishes to be buried when his time comes.

“I had a half pint at the Cape of Good Hope a while ago,” he tells me, referring to the pub just a couple of hundred metres away. “When I went to the bar, I heard two men behind me. A Mayo man and a Galway man. Sure, I had to talk to them. The Mayo man was a bull man.”

“A bull man?” I ask, perplexed. “Ah, you’re too young,” he says. He explains what a ‘bull man’ is and realisation dawns. “Ah,” I say, “You mean the AI man. That’s what we call it where I come from.” He laughs and says how funny that we had that in Ireland where the Catholic church didn’t allow such things for humans. AI, for those of you not in the know, means, artificial insemination, and the Bull man or the AI man was, and remains, an integral part of our dairy and beef industries.

My daughters always tease me when I speak to other Irish people, accusing me of changing the way I talk and the way I hold myself. They’re not wrong. But I don’t do it on purpose. When I’m with other Irish people I become the version of myself that is the oldest part of me. I speak in the way I learned to speak as a baby, in the first accent I ever heard from the people and the place where I grew up. It is the accent, grammar, syntax and vocabulary that I am most comfortable with. There’s no modulation, no register change, no code switching. I am me at my most comfortable.

We all change our registers in different contexts. For instance, the way we speak to small children is not the same as the way we speak in the corporate office. The way we speak in church is not the same as on the terraces of the football stadium. But changing accents is something different. Over the years, I have modulated not only my accent, but the words I use when in conversation and the order in which I say them. Why? Well, for two reasons – one that I am comfortable with, the other less so.

For most of my life, I have chosen to live among people for whom English is not a first language. Therefore, to make myself understood among English speakers in Japan, Nunavut, Spain, and elsewhere, I slow down, speak carefully, use very standardized words and phrases to be understood and to make the person I am speaking to feel more comfortable. That is now second nature to me.

The other reason is that, over the years, I have been very aware of people making fun of my Irish accent – people laughing and repeating my pronunciation, my use of certain phrases or my Hiberno-English sentence structures. In order to reduce the feeling of discomfort (and anger) that this fun-making and ridicule causes in me, I modulate and change register. It’s just easier. I don’t like it, but it is how it is. That too is now second nature to me when I am around native English speakers who are not Irish.

But, when I speak to other Irish people, I can feel my body physically relax. I don’t have to think of an alternative phrase or word for ‘give out’, ‘press’, my use of bring/take, my pronunciation of H and th, or a thousand other usages of words and phrases. I’m not going to be laughed at for calling my parents Mammy and Daddy. I can throw in a reference to the GAA or to Eamon Casey or to the Angelus or to a million other things, and no further explanation is required. I can just be.

All migrants, no matter what their language or their circumstances, experience this distance from their first voice. Some people are happy to leave that first voice behind. I am privileged to have had so many opportunities to travel in my life. I have learned so many wonderful ways to speak and to see the world through the eyes of others. But speaking in the way that is oldest to my being is like relaxing into a large warm bath.

Sean is stuck along this stretch of the canal for the time being, as he waits for a lock gate farther along to be repaired. I tell him that if he’s still there the next time I walk that way, I’ll invite him down to the Cape of Good Hope for a beer. Who knows? Maybe the AI man will be there.