So, the census revealed that the number of people living in England and Wales who could not speak any English was 138,000.

I was kind of surprised at that figure and I actually thought it would be higher.

I know there were a fair few scary headlines this week exclaiming how bad it was that we had all these people here who couldn’t speak any English, but let us put things in perspective.

I am a firm believer that you should actually be able to speak a level of English. It will help you get a job and makes things a whole lot easier.

It can make your life more comfortable.

But I don’t think it actually matters as much as has been made out. The reason I can comfortably say this has much to do with being multi-lingual. The reason someone else might not agree with me is that they are not multi-lingual.

If I meet someone who can’t speak English I can normally converse with them in numbers three, four and five on the list of most spoken languages in the UK. The problem is solved.

I am always surprised that Europeans tend to be able to speak more than one language. Okay, not so much the French but I have met Spanish, Germans and Dutch who’s English is excellent.

One has to admit we British are rubbish at learning other languages. I know this because I am guilty of this too. If I don’t know the language I am going to expect someone to speak English. If they don’t then I have learnt the sign language for ‘Giz a bag of chips?’.

What I find more annoying, though, is how you get some folk moaning about people speaking English as if it would actually matter to them? Speak English … yeah but just not to me.

Integration … you must be joking! We are all slowly withdrawing ourselves into some virtual world where our only real friends are the TV and mobile devices.

In 20 years’ time speaking to each other won’t matter. We will just send smiley face, ‘poking’ each other and tweeting nonsense in the hope that someone cares.

I think I need a holiday. Somewhere warm where they serve chips.