On first impressions.

It’s been disconcerting not to have the British weather to talk about over the last few months. ‘Bit grey again’ isn’t much of a conversation starter after the first few thousand times. So the extremely strong winds came as a pleasant surprise really, particularly as they enlivened teaching practice on Thursday by sending the aerials and [...]

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On words or phrases that will be banned come the revolution, part 1.

The other thing about spending all your time in a multi-lingual, multi-cultural environment where English is the working language is that you end up avoiding the more extreme idiomatic phrases at your disposal, eschewing slang altogether and generally speaking what you’ve always thought of as International English.
There is a limit, after all, to the number of [...]

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On apple pie.

You’ve now spent over ten years working in a business where everyone around you has an accent.
Except you, of course. 
In Russia, it wasn’t just the students and general inhabitants with their Russian accent but also your colleagues, who hailed from every country where English is a first language and a few where it isn’t as well. [...]

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On deja vu.

“Could you just take one of these,” you found yourself saying on Sunday in the somewhat impersonal, majestically firm and wholly blighting tone of voice you reserve for Giving Instructions to Students, “and pass the rest along?”
The ‘please’ which followed was, as ever, a bit of an afterthought.
And then reality came rushing back in and you realised you [...]

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