St. Mallory's Forever!

22. XUAN: Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside...

All together now: "Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside. Oh, I do like to be beside the seeeeea."

Well, except when the beach is full of nudists, as it was in Brighton yesterday. Yep, we unwittingly strolled onto the official naturist beach.

It seems that the other girls aren't quite as good navigators as they think they are. Perhaps a map would have been an idea?

But I digress. Back to yesterday. It was quite a traumatic time, one way and another. Though not the nudist beach, so much. I mean, I spent two years in Paris and we holidayed on the French Riviera where an all-over tan is de rigeur, so I was used to seeing acres of naked flesh, but clearly for some of the girls it was a first. Poor creatures.

No, for me the trauma was when the coach broke down and blocked a busy road and we became the focus of everyone's attention. And not in a favourable way. My vocabulary of offensive swear words increased tenfold thanks to the ripe expressions being bandied about by the drivers blocked either side. They fairly turned the air blue.

And yes, there's another English expression that defies all logic. How does one turn the air blue by using an expletive or two? What colour was the air prior? How long does it stay blue? What shade of blue does it turn anyway? Are we talking sky blue, navy blue or electric blue? If anyone has any ideas, let me know in the comments section and I shall be forever in your debt.

Anyway, we finally arrived back at St. Mall's and got to go to our cubies for some privacy. At least, that was the plan.

I decided to distract myself by working on the perfect-English essay for my ESL test, which was going reasonably well until I was interrupted by Abby and Helen. It seemed they wanted to explain the rules of lacrosse to me. Well, Abby did.

As it happens we played lacrosse at the American international schools – the game was invented by the American Indians after all. I happen to be an expert wielder of a lacrosse stick — remember those molecular rearrangements? And I'm not saying anything about Dr. Cristophe's unexpected sick leave at my school in Paris.

But I had no intention of letting St. Mall's realise I can play lacrosse. From bitter experience I know that once a school labels you as excellent at a given sport you are expected to abandon your normal studies and give up your free time for extra practice, competition against rival schools, etc.

Thanks, but no thanks. So I played dumb as Abby waxed lyrical about the finer points of the game. Helen admitted she had never played lacrosse in her life. Poor Helen — I'll go over it again with her later and straighten out a few of those convoluted guidelines Abby tried to give her. Abby means well, but she can't explain things for toffee.

And what's that all about? Explaining things for toffee? I swear the English language was designed with the sole intention of defying all linguistic logic. "Raining cats and dogs?" "Snatching forty winks?" Gordon Bennett!

And then there's the totally bizarre "Bob's your uncle." I can say with a high degree of certainty that I have no uncles called Bob. I'm Chinese, after all.

If I didn't know better I'd think the term "idioms", to describe these bizarre turns of phrase, derived from the fact that they were spoken by idiots.

Now, if you'll excuse me I've got to go and see a man about a dog. I was going to invite him to my cubie, but there isn't room to swing a cat in here.

Oh, and apologies in advance to anyone overseas reading this who hasn't a clue what I'm on about. There is no man with a dog, and there is no cat in need of swinging. I was just "pulling your leg."