……over the edge

There was a radio report in 1999, which told of a woman who had, thankfully, recovered her speech after suffering a stroke a few months earlier. However, to everyone’s surprise she no longer spoke with the accent of a Yorkshire woman? She now spoke with the beautiful lilt of a French woman, speaking perfect English! She had not studied French at school, and only spent a total of a month in France on two short holidays in the previous ten years.

A Frenchman thought her accent ‘naturalle’. Does our grey matter store everything?

18 days earlier it was reported that an American woman who after emerging from coma, speaks not in the soft tones of a Mississippi Gal but a cockney Londoner? She is even speaking in ‘rhyming slang’ and has never been abroad or knowingly met a Pearly King or Queen, indeed even an English person.

Is our supposedly unused grey matter a vacuum cleaner of events and our environment or perhaps anything our senses are exposed to? Did the Mississippi Gal see a movie or interview with Michael Caine or some other personality clowning about in interview with rhyming slang? That still leaves the question though why did these two brains after suffering trauma, grasp at one section of memory or was it the only memory left?

for my cousin Stuart, who recently went missing because of memory loss.