I don't believe it!

There I was, sitting in an empty classroom in an emptier secondary school wondering what manner of assorted freaks were about to arrive. Would someone be wheeled in strapped to a crate in a Hannibal style mouthguard? Would I shortly be joined by conjoined ginger lesbian triplets with dandruff and halitosis? Yes, that's right, I've enrolled at a course at the Open University. Well, the Norwegian equivalent. This is a course in Norwegian, so a necessary evil if I am ever to anything other than a barmaid.

Well as it turned out, my new classmates are relatively normal and most of them are quite good at Norwegian. There are two Germans, one Spaniard, three Poles, three Lithuanians, a Chilean, a Tunisian, two British people (including me) and an Australian. When I told the boyfriend's mother this she said "Gosh, it's very international, isn't it?". Yes, it's a Norwegian course in Norway, think about it.

I say most of them are good at Norwegian. This is with the exception of course, of the native English speakers. The other British person speaks Norwegian with a Yorkshire accent and says everything precisely as written (even though he isn't from Yorkshire) and the Australian has been studying Norwegian for two years can't string a single sentence together. He speaks so slowly that time actually speeds up. I mean, you can rely on him to be wrong. Nobody in the history of mankind has ever been less right. He makes George W. Bush seem fairly on the money.

The only other exception the the general level of competency is one of the Lithuanians, who speaks Norwegian at the speed of sound and with an astonishing Lithuanian accent. I think that the less able members of the class think that they can't understand her because she is really good and therefore speaks really quickly like a native. Well no, it's that she mutters a unwavering stream of conscious gibberish until the teacher (who, incidentally, is from Bosnia) physically restrains her. Honestly, it's like sitting next to a Virginia Woolf novel. In Lithuanian.

Well, I'm now a homeowner and have been for three weeks. The reason I only write this blog now is, of course, because setting up wireless broadband was a tortuous uphill struggle of eternal misery and hell. I did, however, manage to receive telephonic instructions in Norwegian and get it to work, for which I will be patting myself on the back until the end of time. It still doesn't work properly, though, so of course I have to stay at home from 7am to 10pm from tomorrow until next Friday week when an engineer might come and look at it.

Oh god, I'm Victor Meldrew.