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@Linguist_CIOL FEBRUARY/MARCH The Linguist 9 AWARDS FOCUS visitor. I'm not just going to the Middle East because it's an assignment," he adds, reeling off an impressive list of holiday destinations: Sudan, Egypt, Oman, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Lebanon. Speaking Arabic also enables him to tap into the local humour. "It's wonderful to be able to share jokes in Arabic. Especially in Egypt, people love telling jokes, and it's fun learning Egyptian humour. The students I knew there would call out when they saw a tall person: 'four storeys'. It's that kind of jaunty humour," he explains. As he talks, Gardner creates a sense of language as a ticket to an exciting club, not least when he describes a dinner at Buckingham Palace during which a guest kept interrupting his conversation with an Arab minister. "The minister found him just as tedious as I did, so we chatted together in Arabic; it was a club he couldn't belong to." His passion for Arabic remained unscathed when, in 2004, he was shot six times by Al- Qaeda gunmen while on assignment in Saudi Arabia. Documented in his memoir Blood and Sand, the attack took the life of cameraman Simon Cumbers and left Gardner without the use of his legs. On his return to work, he was appointed an OBE for services to journalism. Since then, he claims to stay away from danger zones, but that didn't stop him reporting from Yemen, Colombia and the Tunisia/Libya border last year. The Colombia trip began with intensive tuition to improve the "travel Spanish" he had learnt on previous visits. "I would not want to spend time in Afghanistan, and being rewarded with accolades including six honorary doctorates. His passion for exploring other cultures is nowhere more evident than in his book Far Horizons – a riotous look at his adventures in unusual places – and languages have always been central to that journey. After a stint in the Army, he spent a decade working in investment banking in London, New York and Bahrain. In 1995, he joined BBC World TV in London, setting himself up in Dubai two years later as the BBC's Gulf stringer, before being appointed BBC Middle East Correspondent in Cairo in 1999. He has since conducted countless interviews in Arabic. Now based in London, he explains: "It's very difficult to even get close to understanding a country if you can't speak at least a bit of its language." While travelling in Sumatra as a student, he picked up Bahasa; a short trip to Moscow came with a teach-yourself-Russian book. "In Yemen, there is no way I could have got into kidnap territory in the mountains without Arabic, negotiating which guides we were going to take, who we could trust," he adds. "Even if the people you're working with, or that you're trying to interview, have got English, the fact that you have bothered to learn their language is showing them respect and they will want to help you." It is clearly important to him to afford this same respect to his Arabic-speaking friends, and he enjoys talking to them in their native language. "I hope they see me as somebody who cares about their region and is not just a GRAND TOUR Clockwise from top left: Frank at a book signing for his 2nd novel, 'Ultimatum'; crossing Sudan during his year abroad, 1983; his Egyptian home-stay family; learning Spanish in Colombia; with his dad Neil in 1960s Holland; using Arabic in Jeddah, 2013; with a police pilot in Colombia; and hiking with his parents Colombia without any Spanish, you're just going to miss out on everything," he says. He was joined on the course by his eldest daughter, who is studying Ancient Greek. It was not by accident that his children inherited his appreciation of other cultures. "I've tried to broaden their horizons as much as possible," he says. "We've taken them to interesting places – Bethlehem, Montenegro, Borneo – adventure holidays really." Having journeyed across the world, Gardner says he feels as at home in Egypt and Bahrain as he does in the UK. "Cairo can be exhausting but it's very familiar, and Egyptians are incredibly friendly and welcoming. I also had three happy years in Bahrain. We left in the 1990s and I still go back every year." It has been said that Gardner is a man on a mission to dispel myths about the Arab world, and I wonder how much of his work is driven by that objective. "I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it," he says. "It's an enormous privilege to be on air, to speak to millions of people. To use that platform to try to give people around the world a better understanding of the Middle East – I just love doing that." Frank Gardener won the David Crystal Trophy for his contribution to languages.