Speaka de Ingleesh?

One of the best things about going on holiday abroad is coming back. Everything's familiar, you understand all the signs, and you can communciate with everyone again - no more phrase books and sign language.

However, I have recently realised that this is not the case if you live or work in London. I had the sudden realisation the other day that hardly anyone I encounter during the day, apart from about 80% of my work colleagues, actually speaks English to any degree of comprehension.

Now, before I go on, don't take this as some racist 'they should all bugger off home' rant. It's not. I absolutely love the diversity in London, and it really is one of the key characteristics that makes it such a great city. Nor is it a rant about the change on our language - languages change all the time, and ours is no exception. It's just that it's becoming increasingly difficult to communicate with anyone in any kind of service position in central London.

From the moment I get to the station for my commute to work, the platform announcements and driver announcements are more often than not in some incomprehensible dialect of English. Ordering food at lunch is a trial, and you have to explain everything twice, and still the orders regularly come back wrong. Any restaurant, shop, or bar is almost exclusively run by non-English speakers. I popped into a newsagent the other day and asked if he had a Telegraph. "Of course, my friend," he said, and pointed me towards chewing gum.

Communicating in a foreign language is tiring - and that's effectively what we're having to do nowadays. But when each accent and dialect differs from the last, it's absolutely exhausting trying to keep up.

On a similar note, A Bangladeshi man who runs a small Post Office recently hit the headlines for insisting that all his customers communicate in English - despite it not being his first language, or theirs. When asked why he was insisting on this, he simply replied "Because we are living in England and the common language is English". If only it was that simple.