Judging by the acres of glossy adverts in the Sunday supplements, you'd probably guess that almost everyone in the UK was off this summer to an exotic holiday destination. You know the kind of thing - blowing softly into a conch shell on the edge of a dreamy blue lagoon while lying on a bed of freshly-picked pineapples.
For those of us who aren't filthy rich, or freeloading travel journalists, the reality is slightly different. Of the 40 million holiday trips made by UK residents each year, nearly 29 million are to other members of the European Union, with Spain and France accounting for almost two-thirds of those.
If you throw in Malta and Cyprus, favourite haunts for British holiday makers, you end up with more than three out of four sunseekers making trips to places in Europe, not to remote desert islands.
When they get there, the vast majority will expect to order drinks and meals in English, and to be understood almost wherever they are. The interesting thing is that, by and large, they will be.
In an era where the skills of the workforce - vocational training, lifelong learning, and dozens of other initiatives - are high up the nation's agenda, our embarrassing inability to speak foreign languages seems to have been missed completely.
Those of us who occasionally meet union colleagues from other countries seldom have to dip into limited multi-lingual vocabularies (if we have any at all), and many meetings with representatives from across Europe are conducted entirely in English.
This is no surprise really - only one in three Brits professes any foreign language skill at all, including those who can just manage "two beers please" on a Mediterranean beach, while in other EU countries one third of the population on average can speak English fluently enough to conduct a grown-up conversation. And that doesn't include other second or third languages that they possess.
As the process of globalisation, love it or hate it, puts more and more emphasis on international trade this ought to be a real concern for UK Plc, and its educational establishment.
Yet, amazingly, the language gap seems to be growing, not shrinking. A survey of young people conducted by an international recruitment agency has revealed that only half of current UK students have any second language at all, while among their counterparts in European universities a staggering nine out of ten speak English.
One reason for this is that decades of foreign holidays have ingrained the idea that English-speakers can get by anywhere in the world using their mother tongue - a perfectly fair observation.
However, when it comes to the international jobs market there's a problem. If you were a multi-national recruiter faced with two equal candidates, one with three languages, and the other with English alone, whom would you choose?
Despite the prevalance of Anglo-Saxon as the globe's lingua franca, we risk becoming less and less employable if we don't sharpen up our grasp of foreign languages, no matter how good our other skills might be.
The solution to this, in part, is education, education, education, and here a personal comparison of national attitudes to language training speaks volumes. My daughter is about to start at secondary school, her first chance to study a foreign language in the classroom. By the time she is thirteen, it's possible that Modern European Languages will have been dropped from the National Curriculum as an obligatory subject, depending on a government review.
Meanwhile, her cousin, who was born and bred in Spain, will be continuing her lengthy tuition in English which began, as an obligatory subject (and I'm not making this up), at the age of four. There's a lesson for Charles Clarke somewhere in there.
So, perhaps those of us lucky enough to be looking forward to our holidays in Europe ought to pack a phrase book and have a go, while remembering of course that for many members of our union summer is a time of exertion not vacation as they work their socks off earning a crust.
So it's either commisérations or bon voyage! - delete as appropriate.
Tony Lennon
July 2003
