‘Derick beat the pants off the rest of us’

Having come across Derick Herning’s name recently I decide to look him up on the Internet – and discovered from a Shetland News article that he died just three years ago.

The reason I know of him is that I came second when he won the Polyglot of Europe contest in Belgium in 1990.

I always thought I was pretty good at speaking many languages (I took part in the contest with 15), but Derick beat the pants off the rest of us!

I remember him saying he almost wished he hadn’t won, because it meant he had to stay up half the night composing an acceptance speech in Dutch (the local language in the part of Belgium where the contest was held) – we weren’t told the results until the late evening, so it was very short notice.

I also found it amusing that the first and second prizes were won by native Brits, who have a (generally not undeserved) reputation for being poor at foreign languages!

Kevin Cook
Netherlands