"Here's what we do know"...

I hear that phrase on the news quite a bit, every time there is a live report from the scene of something dramatic or tragic. "Here's what we do know.".. It's the baseline of established truth. The poured concrete on which further clarification can stand. It might not be much, but it is solid and reliable and certainly good enough for most of us, given the circumstances. No educated guesswork. No stabs in the dark, no taking a shot at anything.

Which brings me, as neatly as a napkin, to my recent Channel crossing and a conversation overheard betwixt a couple of English chaps in the Duty Free queue, resplendent in their boat shoes and pastel linens. They were discussing how each other had "gotten on" with the language bit. The French-speaking parts of their holiday. It appeared that they couldn't understand a word of anything that was said, nor make themselves in any way understood.

Now the majority of people who can't speak a word of French - or Spanish, or Cantonese, mostly tend to open with statement of how much a particular language they can't speak, but they can somehow, totally understand. Other people have a tendency to say how much they excel in another, irrelevant language, that is not at all in play, just in case anyone listening thinks their IQ is only double digits.

Not these two...

I mean I suppose their honesty was refreshing. They absolutely owned their lack of linguistic expertise, swapping stories on how to get by with pointing, finger-numbers and Pictionary mimes, but mostly it seemed, they supplemented their holiday French by just speaking slowly and loudly, in English.

It is one of those "permitted failures" - the same as anyone over 45 being hopeless with Social Media. It is admitted cheerfully. Nothing to be done. We all get it.

What these two were blissfully unaware of, was the fact that they were already possessed with several thousand words of French, but simply never perhaps dared to say them out loud.

Because they are. We all are. The Englishman who "can't speak a lick of French" spent his fortnight as a regular at a café with menus, a carafe of wine; admiring the façade of the cathedral and the silhouette of the trees; he ate an omelette, paid too much for a souvenir, which gave him a flicker of déjà vu... He has a fiancée, who is so chic - which is a bit of a cliché, but he has a rendezvous with her at 7, will bring a bouquet to the restaurant and so on...

It's a list that doesn't so much end, as give up from exhaustion.

He used fifty French words on the very day he told his story in the duty-free queue, saying he knew absolutely none. He just said them in an English accent, and so they didn't count.

They reckon - and I don't disagree - that an English speaker who has never studied a word of French can recognise many thousands of them on sight.

Many thousands... That is not a smattering; that is a working vocabulary - a good 3-month's worth of words, sitting unclaimed, in the very linen pockets he's convinced are empty.

The reason for this uncanny knowledge, is a single date, and every English schoolchild knows it, without ever quite knowing how it got into their mouth - 1066.

When the Normans sailed across the English Channel with William the Conqueror, they quite naturally brought their French words and phrases with them, laying them down on top of Saxon English, like a fresh coat of paint.

French became the language of the court, the law, the church, and above all the table. For three hundred years the people who ruled England did so in French, and English stood underneath and quietly absorbed it.

You can still taste the arrangement at dinner. Out in the fields, tended by English peasants, animals kept their plain old English names - cow, pig, sheep... But the minute they were fully under-cooked by French Chefs, and set before the Norman conquerors, they immediately turned French on the plate - beef from the French word "bœuf", pork - from "porc", and mutton of course, - from "mouton". The one who raised it spoke English. The one who ate it spoke French. And we have actually been eating in two languages ever since.

The whole social order of medieval England, was mixed up, re-ordered and preserved forever in the time it took to walk from the barn to the banquet.

By the time the dust from the battle of Hastings settled, something approaching a third of the English dictionary had gone French - some proper dictionary folk say closer to half, once you count the Latin words that arrived by way of the same embarrassing Conquest. Which makes the English Channel a more pathetically porous border than it seems even today.

Sixty miles across, and most of the words in our library, simply waded in and swam across.

So it doesn't appear to be the actual vocab that prevents us from a chat with the concierge. Which means it must be the music...It's always the music.

The Englishman abroad isn't missing the words, he's missing the tune.

He already knows garage and massage and croissant - what stops him is the fear of the melody, the shape of the vowel, the shrug of the syllable, the awful vulnerability of trying - and ultimately getting it wrong in front of a pretty woman behind a counter. He owns every note. He simply can't bring himself to sing the theme tune.

And I have come to think this is the truest thing language ever taught me about belonging. That the distance between stranger and neighbour is so rarely the words we lack. It is having the nerve to say the ones we already have - often totally wrongly - and to trust we'll be understood in spite of the horrendous errors.

I remember approaching a woman in Florence, walking her basset hound. We had just arrived in Italy from Asia. I spoke so little Italian - I knew almost a negative number of words. What I wanted her to hear, was "What's your dog called?" But what came out was literally, "How is your meat naming?" - The words for dog and meat - Cane and Carne - are just too similar...

But it was fine... Yes, she was slightly alarmed... Yes, she stepped up the pace and took out her pepper spray, but underneath all that initial panic, I am certain she was grateful that I had at least tried.

Most of the vocabulary of being at home in the world was issued to us long ago. What we run a bit short of is rarely the words. It's the courage to make the sound.

And I have come to think that this is what the last year of Postcards has quietly been about too. Setting out into somewhere foreign and discovering, week by week, how much of it was already ours. How thin the water really is. How many of the things we thought unfamiliar were standing on the other side, familiar as old coats, just waiting to be worn.

So here is what we do know.

We are far less foreign to one another than we think.

Sixty miles of choppy water; a song sung to a slightly different tune; and many of the same words standing patiently on both banks, waiting for somebody to have the nerve to say them.

Au revoir, then.

You already know the rest.

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.