I dream in English. I wake up and think in half-formed sentences, scrambled, but still in

English. At the breakfast table, I say "good morning" to my mother in Russian. Dobroye

Utro. Perhaps it's more of a grunt, but the sentiment still stands.

School's taught in English—that was the entire purpose of moving here anyway: Moscow

schools aren't as good as they used to be, my dad used to say. English schools in Spain

were better, apparently. I call him every day, and we speak in Russian. When I pick up

the phone, I don't say Hello, I say Allo. Apparently, some Russians say "White House

speaking" - we're funny like that.

I don't count in English ('seven' has two syllables; 'sem' only has one), but my mom still

gets upset if I accidentally say 'like' in the middle of a sentence. Christopher Hitchens

called it a discourse marker, a signifier of the "Californianization of American

youth-speak", whatever that means. The only thing that Spain has in common with

California is its climate. There are also more Spanish speakers in California than there are

in Madrid and Barcelona combined. The more you know!

But I do say 'like', like, relatively often, so maybe Hitchens was right. Good for him.

My friend, on the other hand, says 'like' like it's a comma, like if she doesn't she'd have to

start the sentence again. When emigrating, her parents came to the same conclusion as

mine, so now we're both English-speaking and in Spain. We speak in Russian sometimes,

when we don't want the people around us to know we're talking about them. Thing is,

they've started to figure it out, or maybe we've lost our golden touch of subtlety. We

haven't stopped doing it; we tell them we're speaking about our dogs.

I once heard a different friend speak with her mother in French—all posh and proper and

postured—and felt sucky, being on the receiving end of the language barrier. But I've also

not once denied being a massive hypocrite, so there's that on that.

As it were, we speak in Russian, but we're not exceptionally good at it: in conversation, I

use way too many words ending in 'tion' (nation, revolution and association sound the

same in every language) and equate the text message autocorrect feature to a single

brightly lit torch in the middle of a misty forest. I flounder (like a flower in a stream, my

mom says; you can guess what the flower is a euphemism for) between two languages,

two identities, even though I've only been to England once. This is where a proper

journalist would tumble right into a discussion of post-colonialism and the ubiquity of the

Anglophone hegemony—soft power and such—but I'm not a proper journalist, so I won't.

I've only been to England once, but here I am writing a whole piece about it. But that's

just the immigrant experience, innit babes? Xx