Oh, really, Mr Johnson? Mandarin, you say? Can you say it in Mandarin? Ah. Nevertheless, you, as Education Education Education Secretary, have cheerily expressed your expectation that, by 2012, when the Chinese athletes arrive at the Olympic Village, lots of Britons will be able to chat with them. Asked the way to the nearest Nandrolone ‘R’ Us, our children will be in a position to give detailed directions, without pointing.

Um. Do you know how many teachers of French there are in Britain? Yes, you do, because I have just phoned your department, and they know, so I know that you know. There are 23,000. Teachers of Mandarin? 78. Something of a task ahead, then, if pupils are to drop French in favour of Mandarin: you will have to find 22,922 Mandarin beaks pretty sharpish.

But first things first, because that is the way education works. Of the 200,000 children soon to take GCSE French, do you know how many will end up able to chat to French people in it? 12. Only an educated guess, I admit - guesswork was my core curriculum - but I spend a lot of time in France, where I see a lot of Britons, most of them middle class and therefore middle-educated in French, and do you know what I see them doing? Shouting and gesticulating. They are not doing it to pass themselves off as French, they are doing it because they can’t. If they need something for the weekend, the only word the shopkeeper will recognise is weekend; he will have to rely on sign language to work out what the something is.

I do not know why, when their own language is so complicated, Britons find simpler languages impossible, but has it not struck the Education Secretary that Mandarin might prove a little tricky? To start with the alphabet, you can’t: there isn’t one. Where you start is with the first of 50,000 different characters. Since each can be pronounced in four different ways to articulate four different meanings, we arrive once more at the figure of 200,000: in other words, as it were, if each of the pupils currently struggling to learn French were to learn instead one different Mandarin word each by 2012 (a big ask, I promise) they would all have to turn up in the Olympic Village if Britain is - how did Mr Johnson put it? - “to raise our game, in order to compete in an increasingly globalised economy”.

To which end he has a further vision, some might say one even more Olympian, of Britons flocking by slow boat to China to buy, to sell, to holiday, to settle, doing it all in fluent Mandarin. Ooer. Given that globetrotting Britons never use any accent but their own, even that extraordinary handful who have managed to learn a few Mandarin words will have been unable to master the requisite ten tones: they will ask the way to the Terracotta Army, and find themselves ordering double-glazing.

Nor is shouting and gesticulating advisable: remember that chap who tried it in Tiananmen Square? They drove a tank over him.

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