You have just hit a slight nerve there Graham. I'm finally doing a lot more exploring of the area I live in than I ever did before, and I am constantly seeing groups of young lads and lasses out together, enjoying the countryside in a way that I don't remember happening in my youth in the UK.

With my parents, if I brought a girl home, it was a case of full grilling about her social status, and then let's settle down and watch TV together, without a word spoken...

But onto the whole German/Swiss-German thing.

I arrived here with an allegedly good German accent, and was assumed to be German. This did not go down very well with me because folks expected that I had the vocabulary, and it wasn't there.

Everyone told me that I should learn Hochdeutsch, but while not a bad idea for vocabulary building, how was I to talk to the little old lady at the till in a shop?

One of my first delights in Switzerland - the little old lady at the till told me something-or-other. When I didn't understand, she looked up the queue until she spotted someone who looked like a teacher, and asked her to translate into English - answer: this lettuce is wet; take it out of the plastic bag before you put it into the fridge.

The thing is that by trying my limited German, then French (which doesn't really work here), I had someone go out of their way to help me.

It's the trying, and I recently realised why the English (at least of my generation and before) are so rubbish with foreign languages. In my schooldays, language teaching was extremely formal and mostly written rather than spoken. You got absolutely hammered for a written mistake, and I mean physically beaten at times; mental abuse at other times, and that hurt more in terms of self confidence when it came to a spoken language.

But back to SG vs HG. The summer before I came to Switzerland I had read "Train Spotting", which for those who don't know the book, is written in Scottish dialect. The only way I got through the first few pages was by reading it aloud to myself, imagining a Scot was speaking to me.

Suddenly I could see why the Swiss don't like speaking HG. Translating that to my English, although I can do Yorkshire English and also what I will call High English (think clear BBC English, as spoken by Trevor McDonald), you will never find me speaking either "Sloane Ranger" English, nor the Cockney/Mockney that the BBC seems to prefer nowadays.

I'll shut up now.