Starter for Dix

I am not a sociable person. Just because I can handle audiences with a degree of confidence and authority doesn’t mean that I can deal with social situations the same way; I get very nervous and constantly have my eye on a potential escape route. But I was sitting in the Old Red Lion Pub on High Holborn having a nerve-calmer and tonic and already planning my ‘leave early’ – or even my ‘not turn up at all’ – excuses when I just thought ‘sod it’, downed my drink in one gulp and strode across the road and into the pub quiz.
I like a good pub quiz but preferably with people I know and almost certainly in a language I have some flair for, but this was neither. Because of my family’s continuing reluctance to speak French with me at home I am now reduced to joining social language groups in an effort to improve, ironically in London, and speaking with total strangers, something I never do. This group was holding a celebratory bilingual pub quiz and it seemed, at least it did so when I signed up for it a week earlier, a good ice-breaking idea. The fact that it was also taking place in a Wetherspoon’s pub also added to my nerves. I don’t like Wetherspoon’s pubs. The idea, when they first started, was a strong one: No music, no fruit machines, cheaper drink and cheaper pub food, but the result is that cheaper beer always attracts a ‘cheaper beer’ clientele and they are frankly places that I avoid, not having a wardrobe that includes the jogging pants and slip on shoes mix. I once sat in a Wetherspoon’s in Peterborough reading a book and some old bloke came over to my table, poked the cover of my book with a bony, nicotine stained finger and said, “Reading eh? What are you? Some kind of ****?”
This one though, being in Central London, was different to your smaller metropolitan branches and had a different atmosphere, but it was heaving.
“I know!” said Chad apologetically as he introduced himself as founder and chief organiser of the group; his American accent struggling to be heard above the din. “It’s so busy! There’s a rival language group in here tonight...” I didn’t catch the end of what he said, not necessarily because of the noise but the idea that there was a ‘rival’ language group, I imagined them plotting in a dark corner somewhere and that before the night was out there’d be some violent ‘conjugation-off’ and there’d be some pretty salty vocabulary bandied about.
I was one of the first to arrive and deliberately so, that way I wouldn’t feel intimidated walking into a large group and probably just turn around and slink off after a couple of introductions, but the numbers soon swelled to around 40 people which delighted Chad no end, “I’ll bet the other group don’t have this many!” he beamed. The idea of the group is that it’s a mix of French and English speakers, so that both groups have the chance to improve the language that they’re learning, the French could meet English people and vice versa; I have no idea if it was roughly half and half English-French or not but the group within the group that I spent the evening with were mostly French which suited me. Of course they were there to practice their English but they seemed equally happy just to be speaking French with other French people and so I got to speak quite a lot of French right from the start.
Part of my social reticence is down to what I do, this isn’t false modesty I’m a naturally shy person anyway but I’m also aware that I am quite ‘exotic’. Stand up comedy is a fascination for lots of people, it’s an unusual job and folk are quite often curious about what kind of people do it and how it works. As such, once I’ve told people what I do for a living it tends to dominate the conversation, and other people get drawn in on the back of, “Ooh, have you met Ian? He’s a comedian...”, until you’re surrounded and it’s practically a gig, you then start worrying that people will think you’re just showing off. This is exactly what happened here so it was a relief when we were divided up into teams and the quiz began.
There were five in our team, three men and two women, all, and this applied to at least 90% of the group as a whole as far as I could make out, a lot younger than me. There was Gilles, a Frenchman, Roberto, an Italian who spoke five languages and was just ‘brushing the cobwebs from his Français’ he said with dispiriting accent-less eloquence, and Margot and Lucie from Paris who were in London for a year just, enviably, ‘for fun’.
The trust has gone from the pub quiz, smartphones have taken the innocence of the exercise away and so a couple of ‘organisers’ patrolled the tables making sure that nothing underhand was going on but they needn’t have worried. The quiz itself was almost secondary to the evening and provided a springboard for enthusiastic bilingual, sometimes pidgin, communication. No-one was taking the quiz that seriously, except for one bloke.
Look, I have a competitive streak okay. I don’t like to lose, my granddad always said ‘you can only do your best’ but my dad also said that there’s ‘no point in doing anything if you’re going to come second’ and that’s the one that’s stuck with me. My fellow teammates found out pretty early on in proceedings that this was no jolly, this wasn’t something to be taken lightly and that I was, if needs be, prepared to argue my case strongly if I felt we were about to give the wrong answer. Fifteen minutes I spent trying to persuade Margot the folly of her ways and that I did indeed know the correct ingredients for a Mont Blanc though she got her revenge when I said I’d never heard of ‘Durdle’s Door’ in Dorset and doubted that it even existed. We lost the quiz by one point and she subsequently blamed me and my poor Dorset knowledge for the defeat.
Frankly I think the rest of the team were a bit relieved when the quiz was over and we could just get back to socialising. I was definitely having the better evening in terms of language in that the vast majority of conversation at our table was in French so I was learning and practicing a great deal. Inevitably the conversation was largely about my job and, with the wine flowing, I began to get more loquacious, even treating it like a gig, shamelessly throwing in jokes and observations. Showing off basically.
“So Gilles,” Lucie asked, probably to cover the silence after one of my failed bilingual jokes, “what do you do for a living in London?”
A slightly sheepish look came over his face.
“I’m a biologist,” Gilles replied, “working on a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease.”
Now you see, that really is showing off.


For more on my mono-lingual shame my book, A la Mod, published by Summersdale, is available on download, audiobook and good, old-fashioned paper. Click this link http://amzn.to/16iXFkI