Influx

Very many thanks for the kind words, hearts and stars on my milestone yesterday.


This is not a shopping street and these youngsters are speaking English to each other. That makes them an exceptionally unusual group of EFL students. The other 98% currently in Oxford are mostly in great monoglot gaggles making the shopping streets impassable as they complain about ‘English food’ while eating ‘MacDo’ (that’s a French word), or laugh (in Italian) about buying a singular panini. In contrast, a subset of the 98% spends as little time as possible on the streets as they scurry from one shop to the next. They are the children of China’s elite who are here to buy goods made by China’s poor - so avidly that announcements at the station by Bicester Village (a designer outlet eight minutes by train from Oxford) are in Mandarin.

It all irritates locals but since the students bring in a lot of money, including wages I’ve been paid in the past to teach them, we’d be foolish to complain.