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Hi Mick C - they're not an attack, more a frustration that some incredibly detailed background from direct experience is still met with a pretty hard-nosed attitude that seems to think that it's a good idea to race to the bottom where, because one person did such-a-thing, everyone can? No, not everyone can.

Because one country doesn't provide something, others should follow like lemmings and not offer things, rather than what we had here in the UK being something to inspire other countries.

Oh - and by the way - it's a nonsense that other countries don't provide court interpreters.

Your other point - I don't consider the middle class to be ignorant. I do, however, see comments time and again and if I had one Capita interpreting job fee for every time a holiday home in France or Spain or a white-collar move to Germany/Holland/wherever is mentioned, I'd be able to go on a luxury wet low-season weekend in Skegness.

I'm not - before I get another accusation - suggesting that all Brits move abroad in nice cosy circumstances where they can prepare easily but the assumption that Johnny Foreigner must jolly well learn English before he moves here is one of the most lead-headed and pointless I have ever encountered. It is not grounded in reality.

People and the circumstances I've seen them in, once you learn a small amount about their working lives, simply don't always get the chance, or don't take the chance, or try hard and don't have the aptitude - and there's more than just a question of whether they deserve to be given an interpreter based on merit.

One other myth to bust. The foreigner who speaks well but asks for an interpreter.

I've interpreted in trials where defendants and witnesses did speak very clear and good English but needed an interpreter because despite speaking the language well, their skill in deciphering what someone said to them and understanding it first time, without repetition, due to variations in English accents spoken by counsel, witnesses and even court staff, was not as good as their speaking skill would have you believe.

They cannot risk answering a question with the answer to something that wasn't quite what they have been asked, and risk an answer being misconstrued. They therefore sometimes don't require me to do much but on a few occasions I am called to clarify or repeat or simply put a question in precise Spanish or Portuguese the question in English that one of the counsels had put to them.

There is more to everything than meets the eye and I really am sick to the back teeth of lines of thought that are from a thought process in black and white, pub-level opinion, that when confronted with experience and argument in full detailed Technicolour, are still sneered at.