A summer in the UK - part 1: the flight

This is a long and tiring day. The longest part of it was when we were flying over the Mediterranean. At first, when Sardinia Island came into view, I heaved a sigh of relief, thinking that we finally crossed all the Mediterranean but when the biggest chunk of the big deep blue sea made its presence felt my heart started to thump and I felt like I was submerging into nowhere, afraid for a moment of the unknown lurking somewhere at the ready to give me a lengthy list of reasons as to why, a poor soul like mine, should be kept to its place. When we left what the British call Europe, the lady next to me started to cherish the lovely sunny weather that day. She asked me if I liked the flight and I said it was too long. She smiled and introduced me to her husband who was sitting next to her and then she spoke about her daughter who was some two or three seats behind us. She wanted to know if that was my first visit to the United Kingdom. I said that I visited this lovely country six years ago, when I was in my second year at university. She was a very nice lady, and that was clear to me right from the first minute I sat next to her before the plane left Tunis-Carthage airport. She was immersed in a book, the title of which I found very funny, especially with the little bear sitting by the right side of it. Later on, and as she showed me the book, it turned out that it tackles some language teaching issues. Yet, the one thing the answer of which I did not come by, was why she spoke a different dialect than her husband. Their being together for years and years, justified by the fact that they had a daughter who was doing a degree at the University of Cardiff, meant for me, a person very much interested in dialects, that living together with people who speak different dialects for lengthy periods would ultimately bring about some sort of convergence or approximation, unless we purposively and deliberately not only want to but also struggle to keep to our original dialects or accents. I did not dare ask her the question, out of politeness.

I remember quite well my living in Tunis for very long periods of time as a student, with all the changes affecting me. I could listen to and speak to the great number of fellow students who spoke different dialects. The point is that there were times when I unconsciously accommodated to the kind of accent or dialect of those people I conversed with. The kind of positive attitude towards a person is, at the end of the day, one way of making a human being come closer to the world of the other; and otherness is no longer seen as a threat but just another manifestation of something that exists alongside us, a complementary component, the other side of the coin, as it were.

By the time we got to Heathrow Terminal Two, she wished me good luck and took her leave.