French Basques From Bayonne.

Recently, I bumped into a French couple in a street in Spain who could not find their way to a particular market. They spoke only French.
Mrs Blogger and I were going in the same direction, so we accompanied them.
Theirs was a good French - clear and easy to follow and so we chatted merrily for a while.
The gentleman had worked out that I was obviously not French and so concluded that I must be Belgian.
I think that this must be the finest compliment ever afforded to my oh-so-rusty skills in the French language. He was certainly shocked to discover that I was English.