I feel like the new kid starting in a scary unfamiliar classroom after the summer holidays, wondering if my gym kit will get me beaten up at lunchtime.
But I’m actually a 30-year-old adult who talks to people for a living, and who has no intention of getting changed anytime soon.
Welcome to French 102.
At the start of 2015, I enrolled in French 101, a seven-week beginner’s crash course in the language of love, hosted at the excellent Alliance Française.
I really didn't expect to still be here. But after blitzing my first exam (yes I WILL keep dining out on that for a few weeks more, ma), I find myself proudly sat in the next class up. Amongst the serious, the succeeders, the survivors – the ones who simply kept turning up.
And I don’t like it one bit.
I’m like a fish out of water. Where did my old classmates go? Of the three guys in 101, I’m the only one still standing.
Meh – they were nice guys, but eat my dust. At least the girls all made it.
What concerns me most is the newbies. And there’s a lot of them. My old pack if officially outnumbered by unfamiliar, unfriendly faces, who all seem to know each other already.
And they’re all really good.
In the first class we answer questions and introduce ourselves. I soon learn that all of them have a car (voiture) but one. And that only one has a child (enfant), and that he has two. And that he has two cars, too. He used to have a Peugeot. Five years ago.
In French.
And all I can think to tell the class is that I don’t belong here. That I liked the cosy family familiarity of 101.
But I don't. I raid my stock phrases. I tell them I'm an English journalist (anglais, journaliste), who comes from near London (a côte de Londres), who has four siblings (deux frères et deux sœurs) and one car and no pets and who likes le cinéma and la musique and...
Rob Garratt is studying beginners's French at Alliance Française Dubai, a non-profit language and cultural institution established in 1982, which teaches French to more than 2,500 students every year. Find out more at www.afdubai.org.
