It is always a good thing to have money about you when you go out to have lunch in a restaurant.
I suppose the use of the bike to travel a little further afield and remembering to take the locking cable used up all the available memory for the trip and did not ensure that I took my wallet.
The meal was excellent: a substantial salad followed by a zarzuela of fish which comprised a selection of white fish with some shell fish cooked in an earthenware bowl in a home made sauce. The red wine was palatable and the ice cream at the end of the meal was more than acceptable. The only trouble was that, as I finished my coffee, I suspected that my lack of ability to pay for the meal might be a little unacceptable.
The more I checked my pockets to find my wallet the more it wasn’t there. As I had gone a little further away from the flat than usual I was not eating at my local cafes so the restaurant that I was using was not one in which I was known.
My hesitant, shamefaced admissions of penury were brushed aside with an airy wave and my assurances that I lived relatively near and I could get the money in a few minutes were accepted with complete equanimity!
I therefore disappeared, leaving the bill looking rather forlorn and solitary without card or cash and peddled home. My wallet being found I peddled back and, completely unmarked; I regained my seat and poured myself the remnant of my wine as a well deserved reward!
It is nice to be trusted!
Our Spanish lesson this morning was centred on a number of Spanish words which take a different article from the one that you expect. Spanish (like most other European languages) gives a gender to those inanimate things like ‘bed’ and ‘light’ and ‘beach’ which adds a quite unnecessary level of complication to the language. Although we had been given rules to try and discover whether a word was male or female we were now introduced to the exceptions. Some words which should be female are male in the singular but female in the plural! There are always things to catch you out!
The individual words were merely the springboards to further discussion which ranged from the tactile nature of Mediterranean people, via the ways in which different nationalities place their knives and forks at the end of the meal to the use of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ by people of backgrounds. And all in Spanish!
As usual my contributions were in halting Spanish. However, when compared to what can only be described as blatant French spoken by one of the two representatives of that nation in our class, my command of the language appears idiomatically fluent. Which it isn’t.
The lessons last from 9.00 am to 11.00 am and at the end of that period of two hours I feel drained and can hardly believe that there is a major chunk of the day still to go!
Part of it today has been taken up with my reading some of Maugham’s short stories. The short collection I have on my e-book reader is set in the South Seas and includes the famous story ‘Rain’
whose power I had forgotten. The conflict between a haughty bigoted missionary and the prostitute is written with taut economy and the ending is truly shocking. As a short story writer Maugham is one of my favourites and I have missed my collections of his complete stories which are lying in cardboard boxes in storage waiting for shelf space.
Free the literary five thousand!
I suppose the use of the bike to travel a little further afield and remembering to take the locking cable used up all the available memory for the trip and did not ensure that I took my wallet.
The meal was excellent: a substantial salad followed by a zarzuela of fish which comprised a selection of white fish with some shell fish cooked in an earthenware bowl in a home made sauce. The red wine was palatable and the ice cream at the end of the meal was more than acceptable. The only trouble was that, as I finished my coffee, I suspected that my lack of ability to pay for the meal might be a little unacceptable.
The more I checked my pockets to find my wallet the more it wasn’t there. As I had gone a little further away from the flat than usual I was not eating at my local cafes so the restaurant that I was using was not one in which I was known.
My hesitant, shamefaced admissions of penury were brushed aside with an airy wave and my assurances that I lived relatively near and I could get the money in a few minutes were accepted with complete equanimity!
I therefore disappeared, leaving the bill looking rather forlorn and solitary without card or cash and peddled home. My wallet being found I peddled back and, completely unmarked; I regained my seat and poured myself the remnant of my wine as a well deserved reward!
It is nice to be trusted!
Our Spanish lesson this morning was centred on a number of Spanish words which take a different article from the one that you expect. Spanish (like most other European languages) gives a gender to those inanimate things like ‘bed’ and ‘light’ and ‘beach’ which adds a quite unnecessary level of complication to the language. Although we had been given rules to try and discover whether a word was male or female we were now introduced to the exceptions. Some words which should be female are male in the singular but female in the plural! There are always things to catch you out!
The individual words were merely the springboards to further discussion which ranged from the tactile nature of Mediterranean people, via the ways in which different nationalities place their knives and forks at the end of the meal to the use of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ by people of backgrounds. And all in Spanish!
As usual my contributions were in halting Spanish. However, when compared to what can only be described as blatant French spoken by one of the two representatives of that nation in our class, my command of the language appears idiomatically fluent. Which it isn’t.
The lessons last from 9.00 am to 11.00 am and at the end of that period of two hours I feel drained and can hardly believe that there is a major chunk of the day still to go!
Part of it today has been taken up with my reading some of Maugham’s short stories. The short collection I have on my e-book reader is set in the South Seas and includes the famous story ‘Rain’
whose power I had forgotten. The conflict between a haughty bigoted missionary and the prostitute is written with taut economy and the ending is truly shocking. As a short story writer Maugham is one of my favourites and I have missed my collections of his complete stories which are lying in cardboard boxes in storage waiting for shelf space.Free the literary five thousand!
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