If I had all the money I’d spent on drink, I’d spend it on drink.
Sir Henry at Rawlinson End

What do the non-Anglophone nations do with their human flotsam and jetsam? The fluke that has made English the global language has proved a useful way of disposing of ours.

English teaching is perfect for idlers and misfits, as it requires training and qualifications of a level somewhere between hairdressing and road sweeping. The salaries are therefore appropriate, even excessive. Of course, teachers whinge about them, on the dubious premise that teaching a language badly is much more important than cutting hair or keeping the streets clean.

Earlier generations of middle-class reprobates were shipped off to the Tropics, where they promptly expired of malaria, diphtheria, typhoid or plague, or were served up as the pièce de résistance at a local banquet, or occasionally survived on a diet of gin and opium into mottled old age. This is more or less what still happens.

In those days they had big red noses and preposterous shorts and sunhats. All that has changed is the style of sunhat. You can spot English teachers in the Tropics by their deplorable dress sense. You are sitting in a quiet restaurant among murmuring diners with immaculate clothes and hairdos, when in bursts a boisterous rabble of giant scarecrows, who proceed to drink every bottle of beer within a two-mile radius. This invasion is observed in silence by the locals. You can imagine how the ancient Romans felt when the Goths arrived.

Expat teachers in the Tropics are treated with a curious degree of deference. If you see a group of local people with an English teacher, guess who is doing all the talking. The teacher may have left school with nothing but a C minus in swimming, but the locals sit there politely while he explains what is wrong with their country. At the end of a certain kind of film they would rise up silently and chop him into pieces, but in real life they just nod and smile a lot.

Most teachers, of course, have liberal, leftish views on important issues, such as low pay in the educational sector. This generosity seldom extends to the ragged-trousered population of whichever country they are teaching in. In fact their opinions on the fecklessness and lethargy of the natives are not very different from the ravings of their colonial-era predecessors. Could the locals remind them uneasily of themselves?