Being a Johnny Foreigner in England is a unique experience. I thought I would have no problems communicating. But then I discovered that you use a whole new set of words which I have finally translated.

Anorak: geek, nerd; named after the anorak which I would merely think of as a humble, though much-maligned, hooded jacket. Of course, no one would ever say: 'has anyone seen my geek?'

Rambler: the name for people who take immense pleasure in walking in large, exhausting circles (often involving climbing up and down some very big hills) and pointlessly ending up exactly where they began.

Trainspotting: an activity that involves spending many adrenaline-fuelled hours tightly gripping your pencil at the train station and excitedly writing down the number of each train you spot.

Builder: a construction worker, who because he is working class, makes sure that he takes twice as long to do any job. This is done so he can work half as hard and squeeze out twice as much money from the pompous bourgeois fools who hired him.

Cowboy builder: not the romantic figure you might imagine. The hard hat made to look like a Stetson, faded Levi's, steel-toed cowboy boots and the staple gun shaped like a six-shooter that is strapped to his side. Rather, he is a builder who takes four times as long, charges eight times as much, and uses substandard material that begins to implode within minutes of the cheque clearing the bank.

Punter: a person, usually male, who thinks that they are so smart that they can effortlessly defy the odds by betting on sporting events.

They do have the occasional win and this blinds them to the simple reality that if the betting agencies paid out more than they took in, they'd soon go bankrupt.

You all right?: pronounced as the single word y'allright. Standard Yorkshire greeting that is not meant to make you paranoiacally wonder if you suddenly started looking very ill. It is also considered bad form to take this as an invitation to give a detailed description of your current problems. The appropriate response would be 'yes, how about you'.

Whinge: there was so much whining going on over here (one class whining about another, one sex whining about the other, Eurosceptics whining about Europhiles etc.) that it became necessary to invent a second word for this activity so that people don't have to repeat themselves.

Eurosceptics: one half of the population who have never really looked at a map and seen the unmistakable geographical reality that Britain is actually located in Europe and is not next door to America as they believe.

Europhiles: the other half of the population who like to pretend that Britain isn't separated from the continent by a large body of water.

Hence Britain's ability to stand alone against Hitler in the Second World War (which Eurosceptics love to rub in the faces of Europhiles).

Yobs: in the land that gave the world football hooliganism, they also needed to invent another word to describe violent people.

Toffs: while yobs tend to be mindless working-class thugs who have dedicated their lives to beating others senseless, toffs are mindless upper-class people who have dedicated their lives to clubbing and drinking themselves senseless.

Clubbing: this is not the upper-class version of what sadistic people do to baby seals. Rather, it involves going out to nightclubs where you end up drinking so much that you make a complete fool of yourself. Fortunately, all your friends do the same thing and because of the copious amounts of alcohol you've all drunk you have absolutely no memory of it the following morning and can easily con yourself into believing you had a good time.

Pathetic: the househusband who enviously wrote the last two sentences.

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19/05//00