English and I, a steady, long-term, exclusive relationship

This is a more personal, less writerly-oriented piece than I intended to write for today's column, but the experiences described here colour so much of my life and my writing that I feel it is a good start to my series of random posts of being bilingual and a second-language writer.

English and I, a steady, long-term, exclusive relationship

My first encounters with English date back to my early childhood, when I observed my mother as she helped neighbouring children with their English homework. I asked to be enrolled in the English club when I was eight years old and enjoyed it a lot until the teacher I liked left to be replaced by one I didn't like. I sat the next year out but remembered enough to come top of the class when we started English lessons in our last year of primary school. I kept being quite good all through middle school, but failed the exams that could have secured me a spot at a top-notch language focused high-school.

My English levels stagnated quite a bit, I disliked my Year 11 teacher and I was still the best in the class. My smugness levels deflated the next year when I started studying for my Literature baccalaureate in a class of seventeen people, with a new English teacher. Don't mistake me here, I was good, but Ms N. knew it would only take a bit of work for me to be great and she treated my lazy approach with all the 'So what?' it deserved. She gave me a 13/20 for a piece of writing coursework with dreadful tenses coordination mistakes (I was more used to 16s, 17s) and I couldn't hate her for it. I wanted to impress her. I hold her responsible for my being such a huge grammar nerd.

I worked hard, I tried to understand the mechanism of the language, I read and watched a lot more English and I became quite good. The smugness returned. My year 13 English average was 18/20 and I didn't hesitate long to pick a uni major. I walked out of my baccalaureate English exam thinking how easy it had been to find all of my classmates in tears. It seems that year's paper was one the hardest set in that decade. Waiting to take the spoken English exam was nerve wracking, but I could see the relief in the examiner's face when she realised that there was someone who could speak good enough English to have a conversation with. I got 18/20 for both and when I went back to my highschool to tell Ms N. about it, she said she hadn't expected any less of me.

I went to study English and Communication at uni and remained quite smug throughout my first year. By the end of it, I was dead bored. The English wasn't challenging whatsoever, everybody else sucked and the communication part was definitely not something I wanted to pursue. I knew I didn't want to be a teacher (Oh, the irony!), so I went to the second uni in town and started a cultural management course. It included maths, economy and I was better at English than the teacher. A giant uni strike came along at just the right time. I fell in with the bad leftist crowd, fell in love, fell out of school.

The next September, I went back to study English in my first uni Lyon 2 - I had validated all my credits in my first year there, so I was allowed in second year without any issue. The people were more interesting, the English more challenging, I met linguistics and translation and delved more deeply into Frenglish geekery. I took medium German and Spanish for beginners and kept being told off for adding random English words in every other sentence.

Third year was a blast uni-wise. By then there were people who were really good, providing some healthy competition and I had geeky friends to make fun of the people who were really bad with. My best friend had transfered to my uni for his third year and we always sat together, making snarky leftist comments and earning ourselves a reputation for asking too many questions. I applied for a spot in the Erasmus programme to come and study in London. There was only one spot, but most of the really good students were applying for places in the US or Australia and I landed the London spot.

Then I came here and got to be immersed in English all day long and I don;t even know how I could describe this to you. I don't know if it's a feeling, an opinion, or what, but it makes me happy.

I miss French, sometimes. I miss speaking a language that I don't have to think about. I miss the colloquialisms of French and the fact that I know precisely what all the connotations are to everything that I say. I miss how I wouldn't have to think twice of the structure of the previous sentence, were I writing it in French. I miss having French people around to share social, political, media-related references. I miss the food and the friends. I want to cry writing this list.
Yet when friends back 'home' ask me if I'm staying in London next year, I can't imagine not staying. I have discovered in the past two years that I care about the English language more than I do about politics and if you know me, you know how big a deal that is.

I've always read stories, in french or in English and I've written stories before I came to think of myself as a writer. But what draws me to writing, ultimately, is the English. That's what makes it hard and what makes it interesting.