can you mimic people

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I've sometimes suspected that's true of me too.

At school I was notorious for doing comic impressions of the most irritating teachers we had - nobody could do them as well as I could, so it helped my status.

Then I took to singing and seem to have a talent for sounding like certain famous singers - I did a recording of "Imagine" that one guy said sounded (in some places) so much like John Lennon that it was eerie. I'm not as good as Neil Innes though.

I can also do a lot of accents - in fact I lost my original Yorkshire accent because of my obsession with the Beatles, and, without deliberately trying, convinced a janitor in Cornwall that I was from Liverpool - he prided himself on being able to tell where visitors were from. After that I thought I'd best put a brake on my mimicry, as it was leading to awkward questions. But I still find myself picking up the bits of other people's style of speech that I like. My father was also quite adept at this art, and he had a number of Aspie traits too.

It's usually very intuitive, I never study it consciously. But I can't do every accent, and a lot of them I can only say a few words in before I get to a phrase I haven't heard before, and then it breaks down. So I have to be careful not to show off too much.