Travels with Charley John Steinbeck’s travel writing, from 1962, called Travels with Charley: In Search of America has always made me want to publish a travel journal. Naturally, it was the name that caught my attention initially, Charley, Charlie, but then the sense of quest. You could search forever. The travelling need never end. In 2003 I proposed this title as a research project to my Masters supervisors at Newcastle University: In Search of French America. But you might not find it, they said. Twenty years on and I realise they knew something about English-speaking cultures. It is impossible to find French in the UK, in the US, Australia, New Zealand, or in the Anglophone communities of India and South Africa. Why is French so well-hidden? In Britain there is no free French-language TV channel. No French newspapers sit on the racks in W H Smith; Le Monde is only stocked in major airport newsagents. That's because no one knows any French in the UK, you might thin
ISSN 2753-7803
