I CANNOT bear to watch one more family from wet and windy Macclesfield moving to sun drenched Tuscany. I don't want to see another Birmingham couple swap their semi on a crowded estate for a rambling, tumbledown farmhouse in the South of France.

And it's not just that I'm envious of the warm weather, picturesque surroundings or the better quality of life featured on so many relocation and lifeswap reality TV programmes. What really, really galls me is that all the English families ever featured think they can set up home in another country, be accepted by the local community and walk into a well paid job without bothering to understand one word of the language.

Perhaps I am exaggerating a bit here. I did see one programme where a couple from Liverpool borrowed a tape on speaking Catalan from the local library two weeks before they moved to Spain. But since they were going to Madrid, where Catalan isn't spoken, that hardly counts.

This unappealing, and peculiarly British, mixture of ignorance, arrogance and plain bad manners was very much in evidence in the pretty little medieval village in the mountainous region of northern Mallorca where we spent the half term holiday last week.

My cousin, a fluent Spanish speaker who lived in Spain for a year, brought her 13-year-old daughter, who has started learning the language at school, hoping it would help improve her vocabulary.

Some chance. Everywhere we went, in shops and cafes, we were automatically spoken to in English, menus and signs were in pidgin English. There were more English than Spanish newspapers sold in the shops.

This is not just for the tourists but for the large numbers of intransigent English-only speaking second-homers and retired couples who have bought villas, complete with Sky TV satellite dishes, in the area.

Admittedly, I don't speak Spanish, but I did at least bring along a phrase book with the intention of attempting to communicate with Mallorcans in their native tongue. And I was only there for a week, not the rest of my life.

Luckily for us, English is an international language. But if all languages of Europe continue to be swamped by our own brand of monolinguism, we all lose out.

It hardly helps that Education Secretary Charles Clarke inexplicably abolished the requirement for pupils in Britain to study a language for GCSE from September.

Depressingly, I read on my return that a Government survey of state schools shows foreign languages are now fast disappearing from the curriculum. Is anyone really surprised?

RADIO One DJ John Peel really was a nice man. When I was in a band at university, we did what everyone in a band did then and sent him a demo tape. He was kind enough to play it, without commenting, thankfully, on the music, which I now realise was utter trash. He said he liked the name - Fez and the Fire-hydrant Men, Featuring the Fezettes - and then sensibly moved on.

Peel could spot a good band, but he was also compassionate enough to encourage the efforts of the young and clueless. I dread to think what Simon Cowell would have said about it.