We are well used to visitors from Britain suddenly saying something like, “Oh my god! I’ve forgotten my toothpaste!” as though they are visiting a country where the trappings of civilization like Christianity and electricity might be in short supply! I sympathize with this attitude as it is one to which I have often found myself subject.
Ever since I first saw ‘Bonanza’ in Spanish
Ever since I first saw ‘Bonanza’ in Spanish
on the TV screens in Tossa de Mar back in the 1950s one feels a certain sense of wonder that the everyday things of life are also available in another language: when Colgate toothpaste is pronounced Kol-gar-tay and actually has foreign writing on it, nothing can be taken for granted!
Spain is so much like Britain that minor differences show up all the more clearly. I suppose that I should be commenting on major social, political and religious peculiarities that I have noted, but something more pressing is engaging my attention at the moment.
Where are the scrapbooks in this country?
I have tried to find one in half a dozen supermarkets and various cheap shops and no luck. Perhaps the cutting out of ‘unconsidered trifles’ and sticking them in an album is a little too old fashioned for a country that prizes itself on its espousal of modernity. But I want to retain some of the apercus culled from my copies of The Week magazine (which I can recommend etc etc) together with other bits and pieces from Spanish newspapers which help my acquisition of language skills. Come to think of it I don’t even know the word for scrapbook in Spanish!
That last sentence encouraged me to be a little more pro-active and find out that there is no word, but a phrase: álbum de recortes, which is descriptive and is perhaps nearer to the English word ‘cuttings’ rather than scraps. Still, armed with this piece of vocabulary I feel emboldened to try further shops – when have I ever eschewed shopping for anything more intellectually satisfying!
My failure to find a scrapbook
Spain is so much like Britain that minor differences show up all the more clearly. I suppose that I should be commenting on major social, political and religious peculiarities that I have noted, but something more pressing is engaging my attention at the moment.
Where are the scrapbooks in this country?
I have tried to find one in half a dozen supermarkets and various cheap shops and no luck. Perhaps the cutting out of ‘unconsidered trifles’ and sticking them in an album is a little too old fashioned for a country that prizes itself on its espousal of modernity. But I want to retain some of the apercus culled from my copies of The Week magazine (which I can recommend etc etc) together with other bits and pieces from Spanish newspapers which help my acquisition of language skills. Come to think of it I don’t even know the word for scrapbook in Spanish!
That last sentence encouraged me to be a little more pro-active and find out that there is no word, but a phrase: álbum de recortes, which is descriptive and is perhaps nearer to the English word ‘cuttings’ rather than scraps. Still, armed with this piece of vocabulary I feel emboldened to try further shops – when have I ever eschewed shopping for anything more intellectually satisfying!
My failure to find a scrapbook
continues with one shopkeeper sneeringly referring to my quest as positively old fashioned! I am now, more than ever determined to find one; I can see this becoming a quest to rival that of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance! And probably with the same degree of success!
We may now have the chance of a house with extensive enough grounds to set up some portable classrooms: it is a possibility with interesting implications. Something to work on and to keep us going in our efforts to provide a reasonable alternative education for kids.
Though, for me, everything is going much too slowly: time ticks on and the kids are back in school tomorrow. We have to be able to offer a viable location and group of teachers before the end of December for a January start; effectively about twelve weeks for something real to present to parents.
It’s a short time!
Though I accept that time is relative - especially when my colleagues have just started the most important teaching term in the academic year and December seems an awfully long way away. Though for me at the moment it is galloping towards me at a frightening rate.
Thank you Einstein!
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