My long-standing hair dresser has a new apprentice. Young, blonde and shameless, a recent five-minutes at the sink in her hair-washing company did not help with my inevitable post-birthday misery:

Her (bopping around, waving the shampoo bottle over my head): ‘Do you like Girls Aloud? This song is so great… (starts singing) Jump, Jump for my love…Jump in…‘

Me (cautiously): ‘Er, they’re ok… they have some good tunes.’

Her (finally getting around to introducing the shampoo to my hair): ‘Yeah, some of these old groups have really good songs, don’t they?’

Me (nostalgically): ‘Yes, I used to like The Pointer Sisters. We had to do aerobics to this song at school…’

Her (baffled, stops massaging my head and waves her soapy fingers distractingly over my face): ‘Who??’

Me (equally baffled): ‘The Pointer Sisters, the 70s/80s girl group. This is a cover of their song ‘Jump’, isn’t it?’

Her (still in soapy suspended animation): ‘This is a cover from the 80s?!’

Me (bemused and wishing she’d just get on with it): ‘Yes, I’m sure it is. From around 1984.’

Her (enthusiastically dousing me in luke-warm water): ‘Wow, I like old music. All my friends think I’m weird though – but I say you can listen to anything you like, even old stuff. You know another really old band I like? Shakespeare’s Sister!’

(Well, I wasn’t expecting that)

Her (continuing along merrily with the conditioner now): ‘They must be from your time… Hey, you look like them! Just like them!!’

(No, I bloody well don’t)

Her (taking the idea and running with it): ‘Yes! Yes, you do! You look like Shakespeare’s Sister! Some of those really old bands are good aren’t they? You’re vintage, y’ know…!’

Me (thinking): ‘You’re definitely not getting a tip.’

Despite Christmas being ‘a season of joy’ my family were in morbid mood over December. The hot topic of conversation was what music people wanted played at their funeral. We like to plan ahead you see.

Grandma: some obtuse serenade I can’t remember the name of (that’s Mums job)
Mum: Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ (we know, she’s been reminding us of this for 20 years at least)
Dad: doesn’t care, he’ll be dead (I’m threatening him with something I like then. Possibly this.)
Mr C: ‘The Blue Room’ by The Orb (lets hope he’s joking)

And me? Well, I’m leaning towards ‘Theme from A Summer Place’ by Percy Faith at the moment. However, that could all change by tomorrow obviously.

So how’s your funeral music planning going?*

* Anyone who offers up ‘Stairway to Heaven’ will be duly ignored.

1. Tokyo makes me feel like I’m from a country of criminals. OK, putting aside the fact that this is to some extent true, I left feeling somewhat ashamed by the culture I live in. Example 1: people use the luggage racks on the Tokyo Underground for putting their brief cases, bags and handbags on. Example 2: people leave their bikes unchained in the streets. Would you ever do either in Britain or Australia? No, because they would be nicked. Clearly, the good citizens of Tokyo do not assume that everyone else in their city is a miserable conniving thief until proven otherwise.
2. The Australian language gets worse with every visit. Australia has long had a propensity for super-sized swearing, slang and casualised language but well, there is nothing like being away to realise just how ubiquitous it is. I mean I grew up with buying chockies from the servo and plonk from the bottle-o in the arvo, but in recent years I’ve noticed words like ‘ambo’, ‘journo’ , ‘pollie’ and ‘firey’ creeping into previously formal news programmes. I estimate that within just 50 years Australians won’t be able to understand any word unless it ends in ‘o’ or ‘ie’.
3. Monthly music magazines are like National Geographics. i.e. widely available, much hoarded and rarely re-read. Upon arriving at my parents place, they pointed out – for the 2000th time – that I still have a box or two of my magazine collection occupying a corner of their garage. This time, however, instead of defending their emotional importance, historical worth and potential resale value in 100 years time, I chucked half them out.  I have finally realised that I do not need a collection of Q and Mojo magazines from the 90s – not when they are freely available on ebay anyway for bugger all money. I am still not parting with the NMEs though.
4. Paul Kelly really is pretty good. Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly is little known outside Australia. In fact, up until relatively recently he seemed to be little known within Australia unless you were of a certain age and musical disposition. But suddenly he seems to have become a national treasure of some kind and even my Grandmother has heard of him. How did this happen? Anyway, this is one of our favourites:

For I am off on a deliciously long holiday tomorrow and, assuming the weather approves and lets us actually leave the country, a month in Japan and Australia is beckoning. It hasn’t been the best of years for me, and for some of you too I suspect, so I feel as though I’m well deserving of a relaxing break. Heck, we’re all deserving of one!

So Merry Christmas/Winterthing/Winterval/Festivus to you all and see you on the other side. Here’s to 2011. Chin chin.

Following a recent trip away with an old friend to the tourist trap town of Bath, I have been reading a short book about Roman Britain. The average life expectancy during this time it tells me, was 37.

Apart from the mild shock of realising that if I was living around 150AD I’d be at pensionable age, it got me wondering what society would actually be like if it was run by people in their 20s and 30s – which effectively it would have been back then.

There would be a positive side of course – lots of fresh, new ideas with people more open to risk taking and change -  but really, the idea fills me with horror. I’d like to think that with age comes wisdom (I’m patiently waiting for it to hit me at some point), experience and a more thoughtful, less black & white approach to life. Theoretically, older people should have a longer-term and just more sensible view of things.

Or perhaps not. These fledgling thoughts were easily dashed this morning by a quick listen to Radio 4 and a flick through the papers. North Korea,  a country ostensibly run by a dead person (Kim Il-Sung) and a 70 year old (Kim Jong Il) is threatening South Korea and therefore my holiday to the region next week. Old age = wisdom? Pah!

One of the miracles of the modern age is being able to track down dimly remembered novelty tunes on Youtube – like this one by Julie Brown.

Written way back in the 80s when school shootings were merely fantasised about rather than actually undertaken, ’The Homecoming Queen’s got a Gun’ parodies the 80s Valley Girl life that I was only familiar with through trash teen novels and Frank Zappa songs. Still, the song and its accompanying video captured my imagination and despite not hearing it in years until this week, I’ve never forgotten winning couplets like:

God, my best friend’s on a shooting spree
Stop it, Debbie, you’re embarrassing me

and

Debbie’s really having a blast
She’s wasting half of the class

Ah, they don’t write parody songs like they used to. And what’s Weird Al Jankovic up to these days…

Keen to broaden my knowledge of classical music beyond ‘populist muck’ opera and ’tiresome’ minimalism, I have been taking an evening class on ‘music appreciation’ on and off throughout the past year. Because it’s been by and large, a nice group of people involved, on more than one occasion we have found ourselves down the pub after.

So what’s the most obvious conversation subject in such a situation? Music. Fine with me.  And what’s the question that’s inevitably going to be asked at some point? What’s the question that I, as both a lifelong music fan and a dedicated Radio 4 listener, should have well and truly prepared for?

Yes, it’s ‘What are your desert island discs?’

The answers flowed forth with certainty from everyone else around the table: ‘Mahler’s 7th’, ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’, ‘Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4′, ‘Miserere mei, Deus’, ‘Good Vibrations’, etc. etc. But not from me – for I was embarrassingly unprepared,  dumb struck by choice, overwhelmed by having to nail my colours to the mast with only eight songs.

Eight songs! I could think of dozens of songs I love and couldn’t live without. ‘Be ruthless’ I was told sternly.

Hmmm, ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Hot Burrito No. 2′ by the Flying Burrito Brothers, Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. 5, John Coltrane’s version of ’My Favourite Things’, Benny Goodman’s ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’, ‘More Love’ by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, The Go-Betweens ‘Streets of Your Town’,  ‘Eleanor’ by The Turtles, Acts I and II from La Boheme… all of West Side Story… and Forever Changes… and I still haven’t included anything by George Gershwin… or The Beatles…

So dear reader, could you have faired any better? Have you prepared for the moment when you are asked the ultimate question?

Some time ago (ok, about 20 years ago), I was an exchange student in Japan. One of the many gifts I received on my visit was a cute, stuffed, smiling green creature called Totoro.* At the time I was only dimly aware what this Totoro was. My host sister had told me that he was the star of some anime film for kids called My Neighbour Totoro which had come out a year or two before – but since it wasn’t available in English, I filed this piece of trivia away alongside various other useless facts. Like you do.

Despite the lack of background information, I always liked my Totoro. He accompanied me to university, sat quietly in the background in various shared houses and is now residing with me in our place in London. Totoro was always been an unknown, but familiar part of the furniture.

Until one day I saw that the man behind the still unseen My Neighbour Totoro had made a film called Spirited Away. So I made a point of seeing it – because that’s all it takes to pique my curiosity and get me to the cinema.

And thank heavens I did because it was love at first sight. Spirited Away’s exotic other-worldliness and quite frankly bizarre storyline (young girl is forced to work in a Japanese bathhouse, whose main clientele happens to be spirits,  in order to save her parents who have turned into pigs) appealed immensely. The artwork in the film was also quite frankly, beautiful – painterly and detailed, like nothing else I’d seen in an animation since early Disney.

I’ve been addicted to the work of the director of those two films, Hayao Miyazaki, and his production company Studio Ghibli ever since. Ok, they have their ups and downs like anyone else but everything they release is, without doubt, interesting – and considerably better than most of the dross that passes for ‘filmed entertainment’ these days. I own much of the studio’s output on DVD and even though the films are aimed at people… well, 25 years younger than I am**, I’m not ashamed to say that I still find them enchanting.

So bearing all this in mind, you will understand how ecstatic I was to get tickets to the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo this week. The studio really want to make you work for a visit to the Museum – you need to apply at least a month in advance, supply them with various unnecessary details and then once your allocated day arrives, you have to catch a suburban train 25 minutes into the commuter land of Tokyo and trek for another 20 minutes to the museum. Only then is the lifesize model of the My Neighbour Totoro CatBus and the giant robot soldier from Laputa yours.

And as Nu Shooz once sang, ‘I can’t wait!’. Roll on December.

* This was an entirely acceptable gift to give a 16 year old in Japan.
** And if you’re reading this and happen to have any children under 10 who’ve not yet experiencd Studio Ghibli make them, make them now!

As a long time listener to The Moth podcast (‘true stories told live on stage – without notes!’), I was delighted that London’s equivalent was exactly as I expected when I finally ventured there last week.

People (in this case a broadcaster, an author, a musician, an actress and a school head master aka Trevor Dann, Meg Rosoff, Boo Hewerdine, Maggie Steed and Paul Moriarty) simply sharing stories live on a stage, alone with a mic, and indeed, without any notes.  It was touching, amusing, sad, strange, emotional, moving, enthralling and funny. And all upstairs for free in a poxy Islington pub.

Go now.

How do you feel about caricatures? I have been asking folk this very question for the past week – for work research purposes rather than for ‘fun’, you understand. The responses have been clearly divided. Essentially, people either love them or hate them. There is no in-between.

I can understand this. I hate them myself.

I subscribe to two magazines – The Word and New Humanist. As many of you will know, both of these magazines have unashamedly thrown themselves into the world of caricatured covers. Boy, do I hate them. I hate them so much that I have to keep both magazines face down when I’m not reading them – just so to reduce the risk of me flipping and ripping the offending cover art. Thank heavens I don’t judge magazines by their covers otherwise I would have banished both from the house in a fit of fury.

Yes, I know caricature has a long and illustrious history of satire and political comment. And I know that it’s a real talent and skill, but there’s just something… irksome about them. How does drawing someone with a big head and questionably proportioned features suddenly make an artwork more intrinsically amusing and/or interesting? It certainly doesn’t make it more aesthetically pleasing.

So as far as I can help it, we won’t be having any caricatures in my workplace thank you. Would you have them in yours?*

* David Hepworth, Mark Ellen and Casper Melville need not reply.

Something  seemed a little amiss when I entered the changing room at my gym this morning.  Puddles of wet towels lay all over the floor, make-up soiled tissues littered the tops of the vanity areas, a sink was clogged with hair and paper hand towels. It was really quite disgusting.

As I was picking my way through to a locker, one of the gym staff frantically rushed in to put the place back together again. She apologised, explaining that the usual changing room cleaner was sick and hadn’t been able to make it in today.

The minute she said that I realised what I was looking at - the results of one hour of people in a changing room without a cleaner to pick up after them. 

This was almost 12 hours ago and I’m still disgusted about what it says about my fellow gym-users. Grrr.

Back home after another annoying day at work, I’m alone and consoling myself with a copy of 70s K-Tel compilation Mindbender (key tunes: ‘When will I see you again?’ by Prince Charles’ favourite band The Three Degrees, ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ by Carl Douglas and the ever-morbid  ‘Santa Never Made it into Darwin’ by Bill and Boyd) when I’m reminded of the innovation to end all innovations right there on the back of the LP cover.

Yes folks, it’s the K-Tel Record Selector.

The Record Selector isn’t just a cheap looking contraption that holds 24 of your precious LPs in a flimsy piece of plastic. It is ‘the modern method of storing and selecting your favourite music’. You simply ‘place your albums in the Record Selector, move the first one forward and the others follow automatically. When the Selector reaches the album you wish to play, you simply remove it and return the rest to their starting positions’. It’s got ‘finger touch starting’! It is the future!!

I’ve never had the privilege of experiencing the wondrous K-Tel Record Selector for myself (beyond the record player, my family’s embracing of music technology was sadly limited to ‘the shelf’) but perhaps you did? Or was it just an Australian thing? I do hope not.

It’s been a quite a while since the last song of the week, so long that I can’t actually remember what it was. Oh yes… Five Thirty? Hmmm… Anyway, I can explain this absence by saying that not only have I not been listening to much music, but when I have its mostly been 1. nasty populist opera* 2. Bruce Springsteen 3. Bobby Vee and 4. nothing much else. So you’ll understand why I wasn’t going to take you there.

This week, however, is different. For this week I am being plagued by a ridiculously catchy song called ‘Jungle Animal’ by the stupidly named Pomplamoose. ‘Music pundit’ Bob Lefsetz recommended this track on his blog some time ago and it’s only now that have I fallen prey to its fey charms.

What’s interesting about ‘Jungle Animal’ is that it was written by songwriter Allee Willis**, the woman behind the wonderful ‘September’ by Earth, Wind and Fire and ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This? by the Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield (and also the somewhat less fabulous theme tune to Friends).

Allee Willis doesn’t quite rescue Pomplamoose from the land of twee, but it’s a damn fine attempt.

* see earlier post re. the snob woman who helped me back to health
** Bored at work? Check out her Museum of Kitsch. It does what it says on the tin.

One of the ‘seminal’ moments of my youth was the day that my mother allowed me and a friend to go to the local cinema by ourselves to see ‘latest sensation’ Kevin Bacon in Footloose. It was 1984. I was 9. God, it was exciting.

I don’t remember thinking that it was exactly the best film ever, but I could certainly relate to Footloose. For one thing, it was set in a country town like mine with wide open spaces and horrible adults, and secondly (and even more like where I grew up) the likes of Foreigner, Johnny Cougar and Bonnie Tyler seemed be on perpetually in the background. And what a story – the town was trying to ban music and dancing! An outrage! How I hoped that the lovely Kevin would make them all see sense.

Flash forward 26 years and I’ve just recently watched Footloose for only the second time in my life. It seems less 1984, more 1955 now. Teen pic clichés abound and the whole truck/playing chicken scene is clearly ripped off Rebel without a Cause. The idea of a local preacher banning music and dancing from any town on the grounds that they encourage sin is faintly ludicrous. I wonder now how Footloose ever got made and whether anyone over the age of 9 actually took it seriously. The story was clearly out-of-date in 1984.

But what’s this! This morning I discover that some studio nonk has decided to remake the film with Dennis Quaid and Andie MacDowell. If there is one thing worse than foolishly re-visiting your own childhood film memories, then it’s someone else mucking about with them. Obviously like the re-make of The Karate Kid I’ll be avoiding the film like the plague, but still the very idea hurts. What next? A re-make of bloody Flashdance?

My, how time flies when you’re not having fun. Since I last logged into these pages, I’ve been shocked to the core by two serious family illnesses, descended to hell and back at work, enjoyed a lovely holiday in Scotland, completely missed my third blogging birthday and accumulated 152 spam emails.

But really, I just haven’t felt like writing. Or even communicating with anyone for that matter. I’ve got an inbox of unanswered emails (sorry, if it includes yours), a list of people I really should contact and stuff to sort out for an upcoming trip to Australia. But have I felt like dealing with any of this? No, of course not – I’ve had other things to worry about.

Not the least that in the aftermath of my life’s recent woes, I’ve felt my own personality slightly slipping away from me. I haven’t been listening to much music, I haven’t been out much, but perhaps even more distressingly I haven’t been able to formulate even vague opinions about anything, I’ve just been ‘going with the flow’.

It all came to a head last week when I found myself at English National Opera watching the jarringly modernist opera The Makropulos Case and reading The Spectator. I’d come across both randomly and in the spirit of the month had just shrugged my shoulders and thought ‘why not?’.  But now, with the light of sudden self-awareness dawning on me all I could ask myself was ‘what has happened? I’ve just paid to see something by a composer I don’t like and now I’m sitting here reading  a conservative weekly.’

Still, I shrugged. It’s good to try new things sometimes.

Then it happened. Filling time in the foyer, I was reading an article by Melanie Phillips about how true liberal values are being eroded by anti-Western, secular ideologies such as feminism, multiculturalism and environmentalism and how the country is now run by the thought police, when I ran into a particular music obsessed acquaintance and professional snob who I usually actively try to avoid. ‘Isn’t this opera fantastic?’ she gushed ‘I love Janacek. It really is proper music, so much better than that… populist stuff they keep putting on by Puccini and Mozart.’

I stared blankly at her and made some noncommittal sounds before explaining that I needed to visit the Ladies quite urgently. Because inside, a familiar feeling was emerging. I was incensed, absolutely incensed. Fucking Melanie Phillips, the whinging cow, so oppressed by the thought police that she manages to get on Question Time all the sodding time. And I wish the bloody thought police would get you too, you patronising music snob, because liking music with an actual tune is just so lame and low-brow isn’t it… 

So I slung my copy of the The Spectator in the bin and went home and listened to ABBA. And yes, I feel better now thank you.

A story in this week’s episode of the radio programme/podcast This American Life tackles that age old conundrum: Which superpower would you prefer – the power of flight or the power of invisibility?

The reporter behind the story, John Hodgman, seems to have spent a not inconsiderable amount of time examining this very question. He’s researched the issue over many years and has now compiled a vital analysis of people’s responses.

His findings reveal that most people know instantly which superpower they would choose, almost as though they have been pondering it all their lives. This rings true with me. As soon as he mentioned the options I knew that I wanted to fly.

He then goes on to point out that absolutely no one actually wants to use their superpower for fighting crime and saving people from collapsing buildings as superheroes are supposed to. No, mostly they want to use them to spy on ex’s and work colleagues, perve at other people, nick stuff and get to pub quickly. Exactly. I want to fly because I want to feel the cool wind rushing through my hair, enjoy the view below me and never have to encounter mustard and banana loving commuters ever again.

So what about you – flying or invisibility? And what are you going to use it for?*

*Analysis of people’s decisions also suggests that choice of superpower says a lot about your personality. Allegedly. But lets not go there. Just because I dream of the power of flight doesn’t mean that I’ve got some kind of guileless, show off, hero complex alright.

Some time ago I developed an unnatural interest in those vacuous celebrities of the 1920s known as the Bright Young People. I watched documentaries about professionally posh prats like Brian Howard and Nancy Mitford, poured over their portraits by Cecil Beaton, read Evelyn Waugh’s mirth-making Vile Bodies again and revelled in the salacious details of Circus Parties* and Bath and Bottle Parties** in DJ Taylor’s book, Bright Young People.

All that remained was to see Terence Rattigan’s ‘lost’ play about the period called After the Dance.

Happily it’s now showing at the National Theatre.

So I took myself along to see it.

After the Dance is very good (and not just because it stars the lovely Benedict Cumberbatch). A sharp, witty look at inter-generational conflict, it also examines what happens when people try to hang on to their youth for too long. It’s not pretty.

But the most impressive / horrific (I can’t quite make up my mind) thing about it is the drinking. The play starts with most of the main characters being hung-over and continues with them enjoying post-breakfast drinks, pre-lunch drinks, afternoon drinks and well, any-other-time drinks. They are never away from the drinks cabinet and the cocktail shaker. This is the kind of lifestyle you can only maintain if you have a butler named Williams, shamelessly use the words ‘drinky-poo’ and your sole occupation is drunkenly dictating a pointless biography of ‘King Bomba of Naples’ to the hired help at 5am in the morning. Still, I’m kind of jealous.

The sad practicalities of life demand that I limit myself to a tiresomely small number of cocktails each week. I’m pleased to say, however, that I have managed to locate a new favourite recently. It is called the ‘Fiesta’. They probably didn’t drink it in the 20s but hey, its the closest I’ll get to Bright Young Person style exuberance these days.

Fiesta
- dash lime juice
- dash grenadine
- 3/4 oz Noilly Prat
- 3/4 oz Calvados
- 3/4 oz white rum

Stir over ice cubes and strain into chilled cocktail glasses.

* Come dressed as a trapeze artist or lion tamer
** at St George’s Swimming Baths, Buckingham Palace Road. Guests were required to wear at Bathing Suit and bring a towel and a Bottle. It was simply divine.

You may remember that some months ago I encountered a big fan of the humble banana on a train journey. Well, yesterday I had the (mis)fortune to meet his evil twin.

Again, I had innocently boarded the tube and settled in for a quiet journey in the company of a book. There was only one other person in the carriage. He was sitting diagonally opposite me with a plastic supermarket carrier bag on his lap and a bread knife in his hand.

Needless to say, my interest was piqued.

My fellow tube traveller reached into his bag and casually pulled out a slice of loose white bread and a jar of Colman’s English Mustard. Evenly, thickly and smoothly, he carefully spread the mustard across the bread before proceeding to eat this mustardy morsel in a couple of happy bites.

Not being a huge fan of mustard myself, I struggled to stay immersed in my book. I desperately tried to ignore him as he smacked his lips and reached into the bag for another slice. But try as I might, my nose wrinkled and my stomach clenched as he smothered an even thicker layer of mustard onto this next piece of bread.

As the carriage filled though, fortunately so did his belly. After two more slices of mustard bread and a quick lick of the mustardy knife, he put the remains of the Colman’s jar back into the carrier bag, got off the train, and left me in mustard-free peace.

So this really begs two questions:

1. Is the solo mustard sandwich a frequent occurrence that I just haven’t met until now?
2. Why do these things happen to me?

A scammer attempted to scam me today. It was quite amusing.

He called the office this morning and attempted to convince me that the free listing our organisation had been enjoying in something called City Map which was now sadly coming to an end. To confirm that we didn’t want to continue with this generous offer in a ‘well known’ publication I’ve never actually heard of, I just had to sign and fax back a form that he was sending over right now.

So the fax duly arrives. It is a poorly laid out sheet of A4 utilising three different font types in eight (count them!) sizes and contains a proof of ‘our ad’. Our logo is wrong and our company information incorrect in both content and spelling.

The fax includes some humorous instructions like ‘The advertising will materialise after the placing of the order’ and other contractual information which is clearly made up. It also includes some crafty clauses indicating that if you sign this form you’re not actually cancelling the free listing that you’re not aware that you have, but ordering £1,697 of display advertising which you can’t cancel for two years instead.

But, small print aside, who would fall for this scam? This is people working in marketing and communications that they are targeting – vacuous people like me who judge things entirely by how many font sizes and spelling mistakes there are. Such a poorly executed scam deserves to fail. Put some effort in scammers!!!

A funny thing happened to me on the way home this evening… something that I’ve only ever seen happen ‘abroad’.

You see, a woman rushed up to me at my local suburban train station tonight as I was approaching the escalators. She explained in a peculiar mixture of frantic embarrassment that she had too much luggage to take by herself, that she was kind of scared she might fall down the escalator and could I help her until her husband arrived. So I took a suitcase and a bag, and once at the foot of the escalator, I assisted her in stacking a somewhat formidable pile of luggage while we waited for her husband to come down with their baby. I then pointed them in the direction of central London, they thanked me and we went off our separate ways.

The odd thing was that this all happened in French.

As much as I’ve cringed at some of my fellow English speaking natives shameless usage  of the  ‘loud and slow’ dialect in other countries, I don’t think anyone has ever just randomly started speaking to me in another language whilst in the UK or Australia.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I don’t know whether I’m more surprised that I could communicate with her (especially considering my poor relationship with my French classes over the past year) or the fact that she just assumed that everyone at the station spoke French and wasn’t in the faintest bit taken aback that I did. Perhaps some people think higher of the foreign language speaking skills of this country than we do. Either that, or fear of the escalator conquers all.