by D.H. Lawrence

When you hear it languishing

and hooing and cooing, and sidling through the front teeth,

the Oxford voice

or worse still

the would-be Oxford voice

you don’t even laugh any more, you can’t.

For every blooming bird is an Oxford cuckoo nowadays,

you can’t sit on a bus nor in the tube

but it breathes gently and languishingly in the back of

your neck.

And oh, so seductively superior, so seductively

self-effacingly

deprecatingly

superior.

We wouldn’t insist on it for a moment

but we are

we are

you admit we are

superior.