Speaking a foreign language is like writing on a post-it with a thick marker.

I should tell you about my trial shift as an usher at the Piccadilly theatre when i arrived in London in 2006.

Guys and Dolls was on, Patrick Swayze was playing the charismatic gambler, Nathan Detroit.

It was about thirty minutes before the beginning of the show. I was dressed in black with an apron on, following my manager down an aisle in the stalls after a short tour of the building. Regardless of how welcoming she was, her Irish accent transformed the whole presentation into a rodeo for my mind.

Alien to most nuances, desperately looking for hints and familiar words, nodding with a low level of sincerity, i was trying to stabilise the vivid activity that was happening around my eyebrow area with my jaw, by holding a polite smile. It was about reassuring the other person while silently being very confused; finding a simple formula to keep the flow of the conversation going. It was like playing a Pop song on the piano while listening to Jazz in my headphones.

She took me to the spot where i was meant to stay to welcome customers. I will never forget the look she gave me when she saw me continuing walking behind her, not understanding that i was meant to stay there until the interval. When she had to explain to me again the simple task of standing in one place, the blush that went to my cheeks felt like lava, which kept me from asking what ‘interval’ meant, which became the next problem to solve.

Embarrassed, i stood there wondering if i had compromised my chances of getting the job and was anticipating the fact that i was going to face customers who might expect a standard from me that i couldn’t deliver. My uniform implicated me in a responsibility that seemed bigger than i could deal with. I was imagining myself taking a driving lesson in Gotham city while wearing a Batman costume.

Still, the question about the word ‘interval’ was unresolved. If she had called it ‘the intermission’ or ‘the break’ it would have been fine but since i understood ‘enter vol’, my imagination led me to believe that it could be a theatre jargon meaning ‘entering the volume’ which could relate to the beginning of the show.

Every customer who came towards me represented a new challenge, i hoped to only attract the magnanimous ones. There is a limit to the amount of time one can ask someone to repeat what they just said. After an unsuccessful second time, sweat would appear, and on the third time, if the person wasn’t creative enough to say it differently, i would have to be creative in finding a new job.

However, understanding isn’t everything, especially when one has a strong French accent and a limited vocabulary.

There are faces that English speaking people pull when they’re trying to figure out what a foreigner means that are uncomfortable to see. The awkwardness grows even more when they are listing words that come to their mind that sound close to what you've just pronounced, and you know you’ve lost all grace when you start spelling out letters.

Or even, when using an English word listed in the French dictionary that is a false friend in English such as ‘smoking’ which in French means a ‘dinner suit’. Tell your manager or anyone with a confident tone, “The man with a black smoking” and watch their reaction.

In a similar vein, i discovered that evening that my accent could attract innuendos. I remember telling one of the head ushers who asked me why i wanted to work in a theatre, “Because it’s happiness!”

He smiled, went to get another head usher and asked me to repeat what i said. I realised that even short sentences were not always safe, they thought i was saying, “Because it’s a penis!”

Then the show started and Patrick Swayze appeared on stage, making most women from the 1200 seats of the Piccadilly theatre cheer loudly with passion. He took a moment before delivering his next line, standing still like a statue to acknowledge the reaction of the crowd without getting out of character, with a universal language that everyone understood, just by his physical presence and charisma.

And so i watched the first half of the show, making my own version of the story with the few bits that i could grasp.

At the intermission, i was given a tray with pots of ice creams, all flavours seemed to make sense apart from ‘sticky toffee fudge’. I was pretty sure that toffee could be a cousin of coffee but ‘fudge’ was a total nonsense to me, without knowing the expression.

Selling ice cream doesn’t require much conversation though, and having people lining up in front of you pushes you to be quick and so, and perhaps because i wanted to shift the dynamic a bit, i tried to embody my usher uniform and to reply confidently to questions that seemed simple to me. A customer asked me where the loos were and i told him that there weren’t any, for the simple reason that i didn’t see any ice cream pot lids with the taste of loo written on them.

I still remember his look when i said that and having to keep a straight face whilst he explained to me what a loo was.

It was a tough night but somehow they gave me the job. Every day after that was a new adventure and every time that i understood someone or someone understood me right away, it felt like a blessing. I wished to get this feeling more often, to grasp more expressions, to flow fluently in conversations, i wished so hard to be able to get jokes.

Here i am, 16 years later, developing a book series, telling this story with nuances in English.

It’s been a long way, and i still bump syntaxes when i park words into a sentence. My accent is still thick but my marker is much thinner.

Thank you for reading this today or for reading my books or listening to my audiobooks if you ever do. And thank you even more, if you’ve bought an ice cream from me and were patient.