A Filipina I have been working with has just come back from Greece. She was delighted by the food and the sunshine, and regrets that only one of them can be brought back here.
Inevitably we started aQ long discussion about what strange and foreign things we would like to import back to Britain. It used to be the case that the British, what with the Empire and all, wanted everything to be done our way.
Nowadays it’s more likely to be the other way round – with our love of Italian cuisine, clothes inspired by Paris, our coffee categorised in the American way, not to mention the EU scuffling on without much bothering with what we want.
We may like Chinese food without approving of its system, and drink New Zealand sauvignon without knowing anything much about the country except that they filmed The Hobbit there.
What we know or remember can be quite different from what we expect. I remember that once in Finland I used to see a friendly schoolteacher who took me through the grammar of her language and mine while feeding me. I don’t remember, 50 years later, anything much of the grammar, but I still eat blue cheese on digestive biscuits.
I suppose more things happen in places we don’t expect them to: my most recent example of that concerns a book my husband Gavin Lyall wrote that centred on an Englishman going back to carry out research in the parts of France where he had helped the resistance.
His agent has just sold the translation rights to, of all people, the Japanese.
What do you think? Have your say below
