traveller’s tales

So - she’s on her way home.  It’s a long journey - she won’t be back in the UK until midday tomorrow.  She’ll have lots to tell me - some I’ll get - and some will pass me by.  Traveller’s tales, like cheap wine and humour, do not always travel well.  What made someone laugh/cry/ drop their jaw is often met with a blank stare at the re-telling.  Sometimes you just have to be there.  It doesn’t stop us from telling them though ……

… I was in China one time in the course of my work.  I had a day off and did the obligatory visit to the Great Wall.  It is a wall - and it is great.  Jaw-droppingly so.

I’m on my own and climbing the many steep steps up to the ramparts.  Coming down towards me are three men; I stop to catch my breath and they stop to say hello.  They then ask me two questions in perfect English - and in rapid succession;
“Are you English?”
“Do you support Charlton Athletic?” 

I fluster a ‘yes’ to the first and ‘no’ to the second.  Charlton Athletic?  In the middle of the Great Wall of China?  Why?

They turn out to be Mongolian telecoms engineers on holiday.  At this I stifle a laugh at the thought of three descendants of the very people the wall was built to keep out, re-appearing as tourists.

(When I eventually return home I’m laughing as I tell Anniemay.  She goes to make tea. I think it's the football league thing.)

Later on I meet a video crew making an English language programme.  Once they realise I’m English I’m invited to read their script so they can capture some ‘authentic native speech’.  They ask if I can do regional accents.  My attempts at Geordie fail to impress;  “Can you do Scottish?”  This time I bring a smile to their faces.

English language teaching is/was big business in China.  Back in 2005 the Chinese government set a target for all primary schools to teach some of their curriculum in the English language by 2010.  There are around 10,000,000 primary school teachers in China.  UK and Australian Universities were falling over themselves to sell teaching materials. 

I don’t know if they met their target but I hope my modest attempts went some way to help.  Somewhere in a remote village, I imagine a teacher sitting at a computer with headphones on practicing, when prompted, the phrase “it wasnae me”. 


ps. I've just noticed that the thumbnail says it all