Testing times in old Blighty

Ayoung friend from Zimbabwe is trying to become British. She has traded her lovely African accent for an estuarine drawl, can swear fantastically and she says "whatever" with great frequency – so now she is almost there.

Personally, I think she may be overqualified and may be a threat to the nation's sense of self.

Given that she manages to hold down two jobs, is studying for a degree and supports a vast, extended family back in her home country, all without any complaint, couldn't she make some of us look rather idle and whingey?

In the meantime, she's having to swot up for her Government citizenship test, and showed me the little revision booklet full of curious and apparently random facts about life in the UK, many of which were news to me.

I had a go at a version from a company that promises, for a fee, to help you through the tests, and I struggled to make the grade.

Among the things I didn't know was that apparently house buyers make an offer through the solicitor (I thought it was the estate agent). I can be excused since my last house-buying venture was so traumatic I erased it from my mind and swore never to leave my present home, except in a box.

Looking behind the scenes at this test, all sorts of human agony is hinted at. There is, for example, the explanatory section in Welsh.

Does that mean that our friends across the Severn now have to take a test that they can wave at the tolls and, if so, how come the tolls work only on the way in?

Or, possibly, has someone told some poor migrant who washed up in the Valleys that they can get by in Welsh and that nobody learns English these days?

In the meantime, what happens to me now that I've failed the mock test?

Do the immigration people come and take me back where I came from? And if so, where's that to, as they say in Bristol?

They'll have to look long and hard at the thorn-filled bush that is my family tree, then quarter me and post the parts to London, Argyll, Belfast and Taunton.

Once there, I will presumably have to take another test, and if I fail I'll get sent further back again to wherever my ancestors' ancestors came from – probably to some Viking enclave in Scandinavia, a corner of Saxony or to Spain from whose armada some swarthy sailors were shipwrecked and cast ashore on Britain's western coasts where they bred with the locals including, as family legend says, some treacherous Scots, a tribe of which have had black instead of red hair ever since.

On reflection, I think I'll just keep quiet about it.