Here we go again!

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Back to school after the holidays!

That statement is both true and misleading. 

It’s true that I did go to ‘school’, or rather a place of education for those beyond the normal years of childhood - which is another way of saying that I am getting Spanish lessons in an Adult Education Centre, though it also appears to have near school age pupils too.  Confusingly.  However, there I go, which brings me to the misleading part.  My present day schooling is only twice a week for two hours - rather different from my previous experience as pupil or teacher!

I might add that the level of Spanish that I am supposed to be doing means that four hours a week is more than enough for my brain to take in.

In a direct proof of the existence of the ‘hand of god’ element in my life, I somehow managed to pass last year’s course and that ‘success’ was used as a direct threat-and-proof by my teacher, so I reluctantly signed on for the higher level course this year.

My horror has been compounded week-on week by the explosion of fiendish verb tenses to which we have been introduced and which stubbornly refuse to stay in my memory.  Of course, mere lack of knowledge does not stop my chattering away in class, ignoring the greying, haggard faces that have to make sense of my enthusiastic but ungrammatical exposition in Spanish!  But there will come a time when surface loquacity will have to pass an exam, a written exam, and smiling-faced gibbering in roughly approximate Spanish will not be enough - or even acceptable.

This year, I have therefore decided, will be the Year of the Verb (YOTV) [And you could read that acronym in Spanish as ‘I Television’, he typed irrelevantly] and I have therefore been vaguely busy in trying to rationalise my learning.

I purchased (and have very rarely used) a sort of book/bible called, imaginatively, “501 Spanish Verbs” that, unsurprisingly contains 501 Spanish Verbs fully conjugated!  Who would have thought!  But wait, that is not all.  There is much, much more - none of which you would find remotely interesting unless you are engaged in the study of the language.  If you are, then this book is indispensable.  Truly.

And it is going to be the key to my groping way towards Spanish verbal acceptability.  The idea is to photocopy part of the introduction that gives a clear and understandable guide to The Seven Simple Tenses and The Seven Not So Simple (Compound) Tenses with a Mood (Imperative) and use these pages as my Daily Readings.  In this way, I am fondly hoping that mere looking will allow the grammatical delights to seep their ways into my brain and become something that I can actually use with something approaching proficiency.

This introduction also tempts with a glimpse of the forbidden pleasures of The Future Subjunctive and the Future Perfect Subjunctive. It says, “The future subjunctive and the future perfect subjunctive exist in Spanish, but there are rarely used” and that is a good enough excuse to ignore them completely, even if I actually knew what they were!

All displaced persons keep referencing their distant homes, and all I want to be able to do is say, with confidence, in Spanish: “When I was living in Cardiff” or “When I used to play badminton in the Eastern Leisure Centre” or “Having been educated in Swansea University” or “I am thinking about taking another course in the Open University in the next few years” or simply “When I was younger” etc.  As well as dreaming about saying, in Spanish something like, “If I had known what it would have been like, I possibly might have” etc.  As it is at the moment, I attempt sophisticated verb tenses but end up sounding like a Tarzan figure whom choses random parts of a grammar primer and hopes for the best.  Which is something!

This morning’s lesson played to my strengths.  It started late, didn’t have any new grammar or vocabulary and all of it comprises various students speaking and responding!  The two hours sped by, and the most concerning element in the lesson was worrying about whether the battery pack on my electric bike would last for the homeward journey.

As it happens it did and the pack is now safely recharged and ready for insertion to get me to my swim tomorrow.

One thing that I note is that I used the term ‘worrying’ about whether the battery would last.  Basically, it doesn’t matter.  Without a working battery, my electric bike is, well, a bike.  It has seven gears and you pedal.  It’s a bike!  It works with sheer leg power.  But the electric bike is like the dishwasher.  I am tempted to let that last sentence stand alone and not give an explanation, rather in the Lewis Carroll “Why is a raven like a writing desk” (or vice versa) but that would be pointlessly cruel.

A number of times I have started the dishwasher and then found a cup or plate that should have been included.  Now, you have to stay with me here, as I did not discover that you could open up the dishwasher and insert something part way through the cycle.  And that knowledge was based on the very first dishwasher I owned where I assumed that breaking the cycle would not pose a problem, and flooded the kitchen!  I know that with water saving and eco-cycles the amount of water used is minimal, but that is not the point.  I would see the lone cup and think, “Damn!  If I had found that a few minutes earlier it could have gone in the wash and now it will just have to wait for the next load.”  What I didn’t think was, “Oh well, I’ll wash it in the sink and dry it with the tea towel.”

As a bike without a battery is still a bike, so a cup can be washed by hand rather than by a machine.

Then I started thinking of other statements that I know that I have made at some point or other whose link to reality is sometimes questionable:

“The hoover is not fully charged, I can’t clean.”

“I’m not going to the shops because it’s raining.”

“I didn't contact you because I mislaid my mobile phone."

"I am wearing this shirt because I do not have any others."

"I bought it because I needed it."

"We have nothing in the house to eat."

"You can never own too many tea spoons."

And I think I better stop there as perhaps I am giving too much away!

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Verbs and worse!

The number of tenses we, in our Spanish class, are supposed to know has now reached some form of critical mass.  God knows, I am unsure enough of the names for tenses in English let alone in a foreign language.  And let me tell you that you cannot be as sloppy in the formation of tenses in Spanish as you can in English.  You have to be exact.  Verb endings indicate who or what is happening without the use of pronouns.  So your listeners can tell.  Or, of course, not.

Well, we have recently had a test.  A written test.  I experienced some sort of brain freeze when I took this one and what little knowledge I had of various verb endings fled from my consciousness like die-hard Conservatives from social justice!

The reality of the disaster of the test was not the worst of my fears.  Our teacher goes in for what you could call refreshing honesty or horrific public denunciation.  During one soul-searing lesson last year it rapidly became apparent that she was going to read out our results openly for the rest of the class to hear.  As there were fewer verbs involved in that debacle I had more chance of passing, but it was a damn near thing!

This time I thought that the “revelations” of ineptitude were going to be confined to a rapid distribution and collection of our finished papers just before we disappeared for the weekend.  I gazed at my paper in blank incomprehension (in much the same way in which I wrote it) and handed it back in, relieved that the humiliation was personal and private.

Imagine my horror today when I saw the pile of papers reappear on the desk of the teacher.  My horror increased as the teacher berated us (yet again) for failing to use accents on interrogatives.  This, we were told, was basic.  We did it last year.  It is something that we MUST know.  She then singled out a selection of students, by name, and asked them why the accents had been omitted!  Wearing an expression of what I hoped was optimistic contrition I gazed at the teacher and waited for the Name of Shame to pinned to my shrinking confidence.  As I knew that in past tests I had used French words rather than their Spanish equivalents, and that my use of accents was always more impressionistic than accurate that the raised eyebrow of pedagogic incredulity would arch in my direction.

But it didn’t.  My paper was given back without condemnation!  I know that in a perfect narrative world, I would now be telling you that in fact I got one of the highest marks in the class and silly me for ever doubting my linguistic ability.  Alas, this is and was not the case.

I looked through my paper and whole sections had the mark that the British Eurovision song entry gets from the more unfashionable fragments of the late empire of the USSR.  I had however managed to garner unexpected marks though luck rather than ability and my written prose piece was enough to get me a scrape-by pass.  I said nothing and showed my paper to nobody and have resolved to Get To Grips With Verbs.

I do have a plan.  Of sorts.  It amounts to cobbling together information from a selection of books that I have in a final attempt to get the forms into my head.

I have to admit that sometimes the circumstances in which you use these Spanish verbs sounds like a selection from the screenplay of The Paleface, starring the right wing, yet supremely talented, Bob Hope.  I mean that bit in the film where he (a confirmed townie) is given advice when he goes out to take on the gunslinger in the Wild West.  Eventually all the advice gets mixed up and he mutters to himself a Surrealistic amalgam of the helpful hints. 

Well, it’s the same thing with verbs.  If you are an English speaker then you will usually find that, after having spoken, you will have had not a moment’s difficulty in being able to have used the most complicated verb formations in normal conversation.  Rather like the grammatical form of that last sentence, whose translation into Spanish is not something I can contemplate with any degree of equanimity.

I swear that we recently had an explanation given to us in Spanish about the use of one of the past tenses which went something like this: “This is the tense that you use for something in the past which happened before something else and which was an action completed in the past but not in the distant past.”  I admit that I might be making some of that up, but I am not making this one up, I am copying it from a text book: “This tense is used for an action or state of being that occurred in the past and lasted for a certain length of time prior to another past action.”  [Their italics]  I mean what chance do I have!

Whinging, however will decline no verbs, so the Desperate Plan for Linguistic Fluency must / has to / will have to / be put in place with some dispatch - or at least before the next test so that I can boost my overall mark!  We were also told today that our particular examination has a pass mark of 65% and not the lowly 40% that we have been working with heretofore.

Something to think about.

As indeed is the continuing situation of chaos in Catalonia.

On Saturday I went into Barcelona and joined a million people protesting about the imprisonment of political prisoners created by the government of Rajoy and PP (the systemically corrupt party he “heads”(sic.)

Rajoy reminds me of the late and completely unlamented Dr. (sic.) Ian Paisley.  Like that reverend bigot the only word that Rajoy seems to favour is “No!”  Rajoy’s idea of conciliation is police violence.  How much the barbaric police “action” cost during the election in Catalonia on October 1^st has now been declared a “State Secret”.  I wonder why?  Rajoy referred to the President of Catalonia as a liar as his way of encouraging dialogue, Rajoy’s speech is always in absolutes, and there is no room for compromise unless the other side capitulates entirely.

Even the Brexiteer liars in Britain seem to be amenable to some sort of compromise; perhaps they could talk to their sister party in Spain and get them to recognize that politics is the art of the possible!

Probably not.

Never mind, I can always turn to the Imperfecto de Indicativo or the Pretérito or even the Pluscamperfecto de subjunctivo to take my mind off it all!

Alternatively there is the second volume of the third level Art course in the Open University to read that arrived this afternoon - and that that book has pretty pictures in it too!  And let’s face it who could seriously turn away from a volume entitled, “Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600-1800”?  I for one certainly can’t.

Good intentions, indeed!

The Stain Fades

 

It seems to promise more: The Stain Fades.  Perhaps the vindication of a long accepted injustice; the regeneration of an intellectual effort denigrated in the past; the justification of a personal attitude castigated by society; the discovery of a really good detergent - anything, other than the whitening reality of the sanguine remains of a cheap bottle of red wine fallen from an inadequately fastened back pack.

Today, The Stain is only readily appreciated in its concentrated, foreshortened form when glimpsed from the top of the road bridge over the motorway.  As I swoop down on my bike, the proximity of my artwork is also its virtual disappearance: the more you look the more it isn’t there.  Which certainly adds another dimension to the already dimension-rich meanings that I have tried to drag from my store of pretentious artistic justifications for causal accidents.

We have had a few sun showers and this has added to the spectral appearance of a once assertive stain.  Now, as we pass in the car, I can only point to where the stain was rather than its actual reality.

The last time that I passed over it on my bike, it was more of a suggestion of what it used to be.  I don’t know if even the last tiny shards of broken bottle are still somewhere on its putative expanse, or have they been wind swept into the gutter - or found their way into the tread of passing cycle tyres or the soles of passing shoes?  I was, however, gratified to find that my stain had acquired a sort of decayed wreath - which was still there today!  I have not investigated this new accretion, as I do not wish to make it more prosaic by accepting mere reality to define my description.

The Stain is not the only ‘land work’ to which I lay claim.  Every time I return from the swimming pool I have to cross the main road to the cycle path.  To do this I have to mount the pavement and then use the zebra crossing to gain my way home.  At the point where the pavement has been smoothed down to allow access by wheelchairs a small blob of concrete has hardened on the curved surface. 

Every time I pass it I think of a description of time in relation to god.  I think it is an Islamic writer who tries to give a sense of the timelessness of god by explaining how little our concept of time means to him/her/it/them. 

The picture of the top of a rocky mountain being swept by the wing of a passing bird once every thousand years is created.  When that mountain has been worn away, the age that will have to have passed for that to happen will be but less than a moment to god.  Since I have been cycling past the concrete knob has not diminished appreciably, in spite of human activity, weather conditions and my kicking it once to see how firmly fixed it was!

My attention has made it my own, I maintain.  I did attempt to write a poem about it, but the more I wrote the more it seemed to suggest the worst excesses of a certain Vogon space captain, and so I have given the writing a rest, but my attention never fails to look for degradation.  And to try and make something of the fact that it seems impermeable!

As you may well be able to tell, this writing is little more than the usual displacement activity which stops me doing a few more of the 100 ejercicios para repasar ortografía y gramática that should be helping me improve my Spanish, but the exercises are getting more difficult and are asking me to use verbs - and not in the present tense!

And the sun is shining and the terrace is waiting to accept my prone body on a sun bed.

Life always gets in the way of good intentions!

Success?

This morning’s information on the OU site that the Assessment Section was down because it was ‘very busy’ indicated that the results of the module that I had taken were going to be released a day earlier than the target date.  And so they were.  So now I have another ‘qualification’ to add to the Castelldefel certificate that gave me a pass at A2 level for last year’s work.

Alas, paper qualifications in a language do not always tell the linguistic truth.  I now have two scraps of paper which seem to indicate that I have a proficiency in the language and, indeed I have been able to ‘speak’ my way through circumstances which have been testing: ranging from local government applications to getting the car sorted out in a local garage; from complaining about obscure prohibitions in an art gallery to finding and getting selections of books photocopied for a long essay in a Barcelona library.  In short, I have coped - though always at the expense of poor natives hearing their language mangled or, as I like to put it, “re-imagined” by my good self.

This situation cannot continue.  I have now been living in Catalonia for years and I should be near to fluent, and the real truth is that I am nowhere near that standard.

Next September will see me starting Spanish 3, an advanced course in Spanish in our local adult education centre and there will be, I’m afraid, no hiding place for inability.  My confident use of limited grammatical structures will be glaringly obvious and I will not be able to bluff my way through the series of tests and examinations that will beset me from early October onwards.

I am therefore attacking my reluctance to settle down to the hard work necessary for linguistic advancement on a few fronts.  I am going back over the work that I should have done as part of my OU course (which I have passed with flying colours, which goes to show what you can do when you are wise in the ways of the OU!) to try and reinforce what basic knowledge is lurking in my brain; I am also going over the work in the text book that we used in Castelldefels last academic year to point up what I am expected to know for the next academic year, and finally, I am working my way through “100 ejercicios” in writing and grammar designed for Year 6 Spanish Primary School pupils!  I am hoping that this three-pronged approach will lessen the humiliation in the first classes in the new year!

Some isolated things do stick.  For example I now know that the word “visón” (which in Spanish is pronounced like “bison” but with the emphasis on the second syllable) means mink.  So I can now translate the title of the Leonardo painting I always recommend to people visiting the Louvre, that in my view is much superior to the selfie-crowded Mona Lisa, and that hangs almost unnoticed just outside the crowded room in which The Picture is virtually un-viewable.  And, in case you were wondering, the Spanish word for “bison” is “bison” - but the emphasis is more on the first syllable.

I have also learned the words for a swift and a seagull, but they have not lodged in my brain as of yet.  For some reason the word for swift (the bird not the adjective) was not in my Spanish Diccionario Primaria Lengua española.  This is an excellent beginners’ dictionary which is entirely in Spanish and which I found in a rubbish bin in the centre of town and rescued.  I can only imagine that some disgruntled scholar was passing from Primaria to Secondaria and threw away the books.  It is in such good condition that I doubt that it was ever used, just dead weight in the bulky backpacks that adhere to kids’ backs.  Well, it is being used now - though I had to find the Spanish word “vencejo” in one of my many other dictionaries.

I knew that “vencejo” had to be the word for swift because I had found it in my “sopa de letras” as part of one of the exercises (number 1 of 100!) in my homework book and I was able to link it to the simple drawing.  In my Collins Dictionary and Grammar I was able to find the Spanish for swift from the English, but the Spanish word was not in the other section.  Odd, but I suppose decisions have to be made about words to be included, and I further suppose that it is much more likely that the adjective (rápido or veloz) will be used rather than the noun.

This is my life at the moment: trying to force into my easy-access memory words that I am unlikely ever to use, but which every schoolchild knows.  God help!

The Stain

Is fading!   

After only ten days it has lost its startling otherness and now looks like some passing shadow.  It is still there and I am confident (barring torrential downpours) that it will last at least another week or so, maybe more.  My determination to documents its degeneration has taken a knock with the reluctance of this program to accept my mobile phone photographs, but I shall persevere.  I have not studied the work of Ana Mendieta https://www.artsy.net/artist/ana-mendieta in my past art courses not to recognize and value the importance and significance of the transitory and gestural when I see it!