In my head

I first came to London eleven years ago, hitchhiking from Poland, via Dublin. I took an instant dislike to a city where even taxi drivers got lost. After spending my usual weekly budget on a one day off-peak travelcard, a Tesco Value sandwich and three pints in a pub, I swore to God, the Queen and myself that I would never set foot in this devilish city again.

But it’s not like we can plan our lives, really. We certainly can’t if we’re prepared to act on the spur of the moment. Six years later I came back to London and have stayed for nearly five years. Perhaps I will stay here forever.

I left behind friends that meant the world to me, parents that I loved, a flat where I felt right at home. I sold my car, rehomed my aquarium and took with me nothing but my dog. More importantly, I had to leave behind something essential to who I had been, the only skill I could perform to a decent level: my writing abilities, a proficient knowledge of my very own language.

I had never imagined before how lonely you can feel when left without the only tool you have ever mastered. And how badly misunderstood: by your fellow immigrants who happily settle for the command of English that allows them to get through a visit to the doctor’s surgery and receive a more or less relevant medicine for their ailment, and by English people alike, for the vast majority of whom learning any foreign language is unthinkable.

People’s intelligence and education are judged by the way they express themselves but, once we start using another language fluently, most of us rarely think about how the same rule applies to other languages as well. On entering a foreign land, you leave behind the outspoken for the merely communicative, and witty banter for flawless conversation. You feel you have achieved something when you haven’t had to ask your native friend to proofread your letter of complaint to the council. People praise your extensive vocabulary, but they fail to see how your identity has been slowly taken away from you with every phrase you have forgotten in your native language and with every new one you have learned but are hesitant to use in case you miss the context.

You learn to build your life around other things, secretly hoping that one day something will change (at the end of the day Samuel Beckett, an Irishman, was writing in French, wasn’t he?), but for now you distance yourself from words, phrases and utterances. Besides, you know you’ll always retain a bit of a funny accent, which doesn’t improve your self-confidence.

So you read, watch, listen, talk and occasionally write, swearing all the way at phrasal verbs and articles. But in the meantime you notice the world full of wonders entirely detached from the language. Perhaps you find out you can draw. Or that you have an exceptional eye for photography. Maybe you learn martial arts or get surprisingly proficient at car racing. Or cooking. Or street dancing. Or, like me, in understanding the non-verbal communication of dogs and other canids. Perhaps you will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become someone else. And there is nothing more exciting than that.