The Landlady
Muddle East
During my seven years as a Landlady to foreign students, I have had lodgers from just about every country in the world – even some that I’d never previously heard of, like Mauritania. With them, the students bring their array of perplexing customs, traditions and most confusingly, their own idea of the English language.
“I spent my whole time in Spain telling everyone I was a ‘church’ rather than an English person“
As I’ve said many times before, most of them fall into the trap of hanging out with fellow language students and spend their entire visit living in a subset of England, which very definitely is nothing like England at all and more like Euro-Disco-On-Sea.Very often, the language in which they end up communicating is barely comprehensible to the average English person.
Usually, we all manage to get by as I speak four foreign languages. More luckily still, I speak my foreign languages in a similar manner to the way that the foreign students speak English. For example, I spent my whole time in Spain recently telling everyone that I was a ‘church’, rather than an ‘English person’. This is one of the reasons why I will be studying Spanish AS level next term, as my Spanish has dipped to appalling levels. I am also planning on finally learning Arabic, a language I’ve wanted to learn for years and, given the state of the foreign student who arrived on Sunday, I wish I’d started sooner, rather than later…
I was aware that I had a Libyan student arriving on Sunday, but as usual, no further details had been provided. Previous experience has taught me that you are lucky to be told that a student is arriving at all, let alone minor details like age, sex, and arrival time. This is highly inconvenient, as my doorbell has not worked for two years, so I spend the entire day perpetually looking out of the window awaiting the arrival of the mystery person.
Anyway, due to a rather rabid preceding Saturday night, I woke up late and had a missed call on my mobile. The call was from airport immigration, who had left a message claiming they were very worried about a Libyan visitor who was coming to my house. Thinking that he perhaps had been in possession of exploding Nikes, I called them back, only to be put on hold.
Well, not even on hold, the phone was merely laid on the desk and, for ten minutes I was treated to overheard conversations about suspected criminals and previous convictions, names and all. Talk about security breaches! I even heard them put a tannoy call out for me at the airport, which was pretty silly being as I was sitting in bed in Brighton.
I then got a call from the train company, telling me that my student had been put on a train and would be arriving in approximately one hour. One hour later, me and my hangover were hovering in the front window, when a very small boy arrived – somewhat miraculously – in a taxi.
If you can know you like a person without understanding a word they say, then I know I like him very much, but all I know about him is:
1. He is a boy
2. He is from Tripoli (although I’m not 100 per cent convinced he is)
3. He might be 16-years-old
4. He can’t speak Italian (as many Libyans can)
More confusingly still, he arrived on the first day of Ramadan and (I think) is Muslim. AAAArrrrrggggg!
