Why can't we dress decently - like the Germans?

The original Dad's Army. Just wait till Zeta Jones pops up...

Dad's Army, the age-old British comedy about a bunch of grampas trying to stop Hitler invade Britain, is being refilmed by the makers of "Mr Bean's Holiday". To sex it up, the remake will feature Catherine Zeta Jones, who falls in love with a German spy at a British seaside resort.

How romantic - Hitler, Nazi spies, and granddads getting off on the beach with Bond girls: England 1 - Germany 0. No wonder we're still teasing Germans with war comedies. We simply can't leave this whole "beating-the-Germans" thing alone. Germany, after all, beats us at almost everything else. And nowhere more so than in the way we dress.

Remember all the hullabaloo a few years back about PJ Mums? You know, mothers who drop their kids off at school and then go shopping - while still in their pyjamas. It's such an issue in Britain today that Tesco supermarkets have been forced to introduce a dress code banning customers from shopping in pyjamas.

It's snowing, but hey who needs a coat? 
 Saturday nights in Britain.

But even when we get it right and wear "proper" street gear, we're still not smart. We tend to underdress - all year round. Walk through any British town on a Friday or Saturday night, and you'll see crowds of young girls hurrying through the cold in "navel gazers" - garments that only go half way down their chests. The skimpy shorts and skirts covering a tiny bit more of their shivering bodies might look hot on Miami Beach but not in the centre of Birmingham on a winter's night.

Please don't get me wrong. Of course we can dress properly when we want to. At weddings, funerals, Wimbledon, and just about any event involving the word "Royal". Watch the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, or any movie starring Hugh Grant, and you'll see what I mean. We're just not very good at dressing smartly for everyday things, that's all.

Of course we can dress smart -
if we want.

Not so the Germans. Whether they're on holiday, at parties, school or work - even when they just pop out for a bottle of milk - they always dress decently.

Watching Germans at recent beer festivals reminded me how Germans can also provide the demeanour to match their sensible sense of dress. They can drink, drink, drink, yet still be in control. Another nice challenge for Brits too.

Learning isn't just about shining at exams

The best way to learn a foreign language is to practise with a native speaker. So I was delighted when a group of students invited me to an event called “All You Can Speak”.

Their project, I discovered, was all about pairing up students of different “tongues” languages, and taking turns to speak each other’s native language.

We kicked off with a Round the World Quiz where you had to answer questions on different cultures.

A charming Chinese student helped me with the quiz and, for a brief moment, I toyed with signing up for a Cantonese tete-a-tete. 

Answer all the – rather difficult, I thought – questions and you could win some great prizes. Things like PÖNS dictionaries and Cinemaxx tickets. Lots of winners, it seemed, were looking for a Spanish native-speaker. English came a close second, with Chinese hot on its heels. 

Interestingly, the easiest foreign language for Germans to learn is not English at all. It’s Norwegian Bokmal. For English natives, likewise, it’s Afriakaans. In any case both German and English have more in common with Norwegian than with each other. 


If English is a battle why not try Norwegian?

                                                          
We tend to see language learning solely as a key to academic qualifications and business success. We focus on tests and end-of-course-exam grades, rather than the learning experience itself.

Learning another language, however, can help us better understand other cultures – some often very different from our own.

It was good to be reminded about this at “All you can Speak.” And to forget all about tests and end-of-everything grades for just an evening.