And the more languages you speak, the more flexible you are, especially since you would miss some important messages (or don’t get them out as in your case) if you would not speak them, and in particular because you don’t depend on others when you want to communicate with others.

The latter is rather important if you want to advance with certain projects. When things just depend on you – because you have all necessary language skills – then you can push forward much quicker. And there is nothing better than getting things done!

So in this case, reducing yourself to English in a unified Europe is nice but not sufficient to advance. If British and Irish start to understand this, their desire to learn languages will come back quite quickly.

I’d like to think that I am inspired to some extent to learn languages (I take a few beginners’ classes) but I don’t have the natural gift for them, and little time to practice. It’s really something that has to be emphasised at school. For my (extremely limited) German, I can practically only read and (to a lesser extent) write, and I wish I had been forced to speak it more at school so I would be more confident to try it out. That said, it does make me feel a lot more at home in Germany than most other member states (even Britain, for some reason).