A Class Act

Thank god for the French.

This heartfelt commendation is based on the fact that the two French ladies in my English class are much worse than I am: one of them does little more than speak French with a hopeful look as though, both Spanish and French being Romance languages, no one will notice that she is speaking one rather than the other.

As is usual in these classes I launched myself on a sentence of amazingly ambitious complexity with no real vista of a successful conclusion tempting me to a coherent full stop.

This is where being an English speaker is a distinct advantage because a muttered repetition of the word that you need in English usually prompts a few people to rush in to supply the Spanish version.

If you were say, Serbo-Croat or whatever the benighted Balkans is calling itself this week, it wouldn’t matter how many times you barked your glotally stopped language (if such a thing is possible) you would be none the wiser. Everyone in Spain wants to improve their English and I don’t even have to open my mouth before people start speaking to me in English!

My first words in Spanish merely confirm my listener’s suspicions and then I have a battle royal to keep the conversation in my target language. But at least I make the effort, and god knows it is an effort, to speak in Spanish. I only hope that the lessons I am taking now will stimulate me to do the hard learning which is the necessary evil to make merely sitting in a class something real in my linguistic development.

I have homework to do before the next lesson on Thursday: I have asked Irene to phone and nag me to ensure that I am doing the work necessary to gain some sort of fluency. I have been told that, with real application, there is no reason why I should not be ineffectually fluent with simple conversations in six months. That gives me until February to achieve this goal.

God help. And that is sincere!

Although in strictly factual terms I am now living where I would have gone on holiday if I had been in Wales, we feel that we deserve a vacation somewhere else. I would look forward to restarting our short excursions to cities that are served by cheap airways.

I realise that this is not carbon friendly, but I look on travel as culturally essential and therefore carbon neutral. There is also the Angel of Immanent Depression whose extending wings seem to cast a shadow over the future of cheap flights so we need to take advantage of them until el crisis and the tyrannical force of political correctness denies such country hopping to us members of the hoi poli leaving it the preserve only of the rich and concerned politicians.

Were I to say that the temperature of the sea was warmer than that of our swimming pool; I fear that I would not have the instinctive sympathy of many of my readers.

Yet I have to report that after lounging on the beach with my ever present e-book reader the exigencies of the human frame dictated that I would have to return to the flat or venture in to the sea. The weather was fine with a scattering of cloud and a persistent sea breeze, but not withal unpleasant.

I am aware that there are those of my acquaintance who would not fling themselves into the foaming brine unless the temperatures were able to fuse sand into shimmering sheets of glass; others who venture not into the salty shallows unless they can see steam rising from the waves; others who have listened once to my assessment of the welcoming nature of the waters and never trusted my word again, but I aver that the sea today was surprisingly humane and I was able to bob about evincing little gurgles of pleasure. The gurgles came from the fact that the waves were anything but considerate and, although our Mediterranean crests break but a couple of meters from the sea bed it is remarkable how much casual power they pack. It is also amazing how much sand in suspension they manage to transfer from their watery structure and onto (or rather into) one’s skin and crevices.

I had a shower before I went into the swimming pool, had a swim and then had a further shower in the flat when I had finished – and I still I have a faintly opalescent gleam from the residual grains!

I am rapidly getting to the stage where I am feeling like a character in one of H M Bateman’s cartoons in ‘The Man Who . . .’ series. I am ‘The Man Who Wore Shorts in October.’ It doesn’t matter how many times I point out that the weather is fine and it’s warm; there seems to be a timetable which is rigidly adhered to and, according to this calendar summer is over and long trousers are essential.

Although I will bow to public opinion and decorum for my visit to the Liceu tomorrow for the opera I think that I still have a month of showing the leg in Castelldefels.

Unless the authorities get to me first!