In secondary school, I took both French and German. For five years, both classes were taught by the same teacher, and took place in the same classroom, straight after each other.

This meant that twice a week I got very confused, having ninety minutes of German class, and then staying in the same seat and in the same room in front of the same teacher to have a further hour and a half of French lesson. The first twenty minutes of the second class were invariably a write-off. My adolescent brain simply couldn’t shift gear that quickly.

As years have passed, switching between concentration modes has become easier - or at least, more necessary. I go directly from meeting to meeting without confusing the two, and can manage to flip between applications on my desktop as well as in my concentration.

But there are a few things which still catch me out.

The first is dialling for an outside line. I do it at work, and then I go home and do it there, too. My fingers do it before I have a chance to engage brain and instruct my digits that it’s not necessary.

The second is using affectionate nicknames. Hanging up from a phone call with P, I am liable to call the next person I speak to something sweet and affectionate: “could you do me the numbers report for September, honey?”

My mum does this with the cat, my sister, and I: the name of whoever she’s been addressing most recently gets transferred subconsciously to the next.

The third is also linguistic. See, like many people, I seem to have two linguistic compartments in my head, labelled respectively “English” and “Foreign”. After years of instruction and practice and experience, the bulk of the “foreign” compartment is occupied by Spanish, with the remainder reserved for school French, conversational German, and the odd phrase picked up from travelling, of Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Polish, Scottish, Portuguese, Quechua, Italian, or <insert other random language I know ten words of here>.

The problem is that Spanish almost always bubbles to the top. I’m in Germany and someone asks me a question. I understand the question. I know the answer. But out it comes in Spanish.

In Paris, I’ll figure out what I’m going to say to the hotel concierge, and I’ll say it just fine, but as soon as he responds, in French I can understand, I say “Gracias…bugger! No! Merci! Yes! That’s it!”. I suffer from tourist Tourettes.

Increasingly, I’ll be strict, and remind myself that the language I require is notspanish notspanish notspanish. So then, in Lisbon, I’ll open my mouth to say thank you, and out will come (notspanish notspanish notspanish) “Köszönöm“.

Hungarian, for Pete’s sake. I don’t even speak Hungarian - just ten words, of which Köszönöm (thank you) happens to be one (Sajt happens to be another, but that’s a different story).

In the bran tub of languages that is the “foreign” chunk of my brain, you frequently end up with a little linguistic surprise.