Polite's the point!

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I weaponize politeness.

I’ve always been, so I’ve been told, ‘charmingly polite’.  But that simple statement begs lots of questions.  Is ‘charm’ something that is part of authentic ‘niceness’ or is it something which is much more self-aware and knowing?  Is ‘charm’ a spontaneous emanation of the warm parts of one’s soul or the calculating approach to get what you want?  Or, indeed, neither of these things.  I do remember from my teaching days that I always used to promote politeness as a sure-fire way of getting what you want with the least amount of effort.  And I was able to adduce example after example of what came my way through the soft power of simply being nice.

And what, after all, is politeness?  The following an age-old code of proper behaviour facilitating human interaction, or a hypocritical façade allowing cynical manipulation?

To which the proper answer is, I think, “Yes!”

The way that I was brought up followed a fairly conventional lower middle class professional path.  As teachers, my parents had a highly developed sense of responsibility and inculcated in me a series of ethical standards that were firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian-British-Welsh-Tidy-Proper approach to human living.  This in spite of the fact that at least 50% of my parental influence (i.e. my dad) was more geared towards the robustly atheistic and cynically socialist way of life.  The actual basis of my mother’s Anglican (Church in Wales) faith, I never really discovered, and when I was old enough to engage in theological discussion with her I never really came out victoriously.  Well, she was, after all, my mother and did not hesitate to use the most underhand maternal pressures that mere biblical and theological argument merely brushed against!

 

But some ethical principles were set in stone:

1              A lady never picks up her own dropped glove, it is the duty of the man (or boy) to return it to her.

2              A man (or boy) walks on the outside of the pavement, next to the road when with a lady.

3              A gentleman tips his soup bowl away from himself and eats (not ‘drinks’) his soup from the side of the spoon.

4              Civilized people push uneaten food to the right side of the plate and place the knife and fork, parallel to each other and at 90 degrees to the person, on the right side of the plate too.

5              CPs do not scrape the knife and fork on the surface of the plate.

6              CPs should obey the more reasonable of the 10 Commandments as far as possible.

7              When taking Communion, you should take the cup from the hands of the vicar and drink from it yourself.

8              When reciting the Creed you should remain standing when the rest of the congregation (though excess of Popery) kneels during certain phrases.

9              The yellow Labrador bitch is the best dog that there is and, while other dogs (NOT CATS) might be cute, they are not YLBs and should be treated as lower life forms.

10          “Fair play is bonny play.”

11          “Never refuse a good offer.”

12          China, cutlery and glass are important: always buy quality.

13          Always clean your shoes.

14          Don’t bite your nails.

15          Pronounce ‘trait’ in the correct, French way and not by sounding the ‘t’.

16          “Anything is better than nothing.”

17          Keep coloured clothes from white clothes in the wash.

18          Close the door.

19          Always say “please” and “thank you” and “excuse me”.

20          Have a cup of tea and offer a cup of tea on all possible occasions.

I have just read through those 20 rules or suggestions or thoughts and have realised that a great deal of my life is encapsulated therein!

Anyway, to get back (almost) to the point.  I have been brought up to be polite and reasonable and charming, and it either fits the character that I have, or that character has been formed by the way in which I have been raised.  Whatever, the truth (if such a thing exists) I am (as Popeye said) what I am - and that’s the way I roll.

So why does all this come to mind on this Saturday afternoon? 

Well, we have just had lunch in our usual watering hole and I had the worst meal that I have ever had in the restaurant.  My spaghetti first course was over salted, the spaghetti was nastily al dente and the sauce was bland.  My second course was of over-cooked tasteless cod with a clam sauce in which most of the clams were shut-shell dead.  The orange I had for dessert was sort-of OK.  I had rebelled against the god-awful house wine and bought a more expensive (for Spain) bottle that was the best part of the meal!  And did I say a word about this?  No I did not - except of course to Toni who had had a menu plate of pork loin and half-and-half salad and chips that he enjoyed.

I mean, let’s face it: the meal was not free, I paid for it.  It was, you might say, a service.  And it wasn’t good.  And I said nothing.  I even had to pay for the upgrade on the wine!  So why didn’t I optimize my opening sentence and say something in the nicest way possible to show that I was not happy?

It probably comes down to cowardice and an attitude that could probably be properly added as number 21 to the list above: “Put it down to experience and get on with it.”

Because, one of my Great Life Lessons was discovering that people actually listen to what you say in a sequential way.  So, if you say one thing and then say another, people tend to put the two statements next to each other rather than regarding them as separate utterances.  So, no matter how polite you are about voicing an opinion about the saltiness of food in a dish in your regular restaurant, it will not be regarded as a one-off, only of relevance to the dish in question (no matter how reasonable such an assumption might be) but rather as a negative which calls into question any previous positive there might have been.

There are exceptions.  One time in Le Monde in Cardiff, I ordered a vegetable soup.  It came and one sip told me it was impossibly salty.  I took another sip to confirm my taste and, behold, it was so!  Unfortunately we were sitting next to the open kitchen and the chef who prepared my soup was within ladle smashing distance.  But I simply couldn’t drink the soup.  So, talking my courage in both hands I timidly called the waiter and intimated that there was a trifle more salt in the soup than I could handle.  The dish was taken away and returned to the chef who immediately took a spoon and tasted the soup for himself.

One taste later, the chef asked me if it was my dish, agreed that it was undrinkable and asked me to choose what I wanted from the menu - he suggested the much more expensive king prawns which I thought was a jolly good idea.  They were delicious, I was delighted and I have not stopped going to Le Monde and would recommend the place to anyone looking for decent food in St Mary Street in Cardiff without hesitation.

But with our Saturday restaurant, we are a bit too chummy with the owner and staff, but not chummy enough to have a sub standard dish dismissed as just another irritation instantly remedied.  A tricky situation.

So, in some situations, my much vaunted charm and politeness are just veneers, have no depth and do nothing except give a gloss to the problem.

I’ll carry on smiling because that’s the easiest way!

Put a spoke in it!

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Why do the spokes on the back wheel of my bike keep breaking?  In all my time of owning bikes in the past this has never happened, but with my new electric bike it happens all the time.

OK, the wheels on this bike are small and I am not, but I refuse to accept the depressing analysis that says that my avoirdupois is the reason for metal failure!  Taking the bike back (again) to the shop, the technician was mystified by the constant breakages.  I have to admit that the original spokes looked somewhat flimsy, but those have been replaced (at great cost) by much sturdier struts and so there is even less justification for breakage.

The shopkeeper did point out my foldylock (one of those jointed thingies that locks your bike to something immovable) and suggested that I might have hit its bulk against the spokes when locking the bike, but this is something that I have thought about too and make every effort to keep foldylock and strut apart.  So the mystery continues as does the outpouring of money.

But the money will have to be paid because I am now reliant on my bike.  This has nothing to do with a zest for exercise, but all to do with the fact that my bike is electric.  This is the sort of bike that I needed when I was growing up in Cardiff.  Living in the suburb of Rumney, going in to the centre of the city was a delight because you could coast your way down the long length of Rumney Hill.  But any delight was limited by the thought that to get home you would have to cycle up it or, following the eminently sensible philosophy of my dad’s “If it’s easier to push the bike than ride it: push it!” by pushing it.  The long slog either way of attacking the slope was waiting and depressing.  How might my early life have changed if all I had had to do was put the bike in first and the assist on five and peddle nonchalantly.

I do not want you to feel that I have succumbed to old age and smile vaguely at passing scenery as I press a button and whizz along.  No, my bike (electric though it is) uses the battery to ‘assist’.  The bike has seven gears and operates as a normal bike if you want it to.  The motor gives you five levels of assist to make the peddling easier.  To be absolutely truthful there is also a throttle which does give you a ‘free ride’ but I tend to use this feature to cross roads where the throttle will propel you forward without the need for clumsy peddling, especially if you are stationary and starting off in seventh gear!

So I am reasonably ‘good’ about the level of cheating that I use with my bike and even though I use the fifth level of assist to go up hills, I leave the bike in seventh gear which means that you still have to peddle to go where you want.

What owning the bike has meant more than anything is that I now use it more.  I am much more likely to go into town on various errands using the bike because not only is it easier to park when you get there, but you are able to enjoy the experience without too much effort.

You also have to bear in mind that I am not in Britain and I do not have to worry as much about rain and cold as I do here.  It is only in the last week or so that I have started wearing a jacket and I am still wearing shorts and sandals!  And as I am typing this, the setting sun is illuminating the tops of the pines and wispy cloud adds interest to an otherwise faultlessly blue sky.  So there is an incentive to get out and about - and to feel good about making the effort too!

My Spanish lessons (two hours, twice a week, subsidised by the city hall, god bless them) are in the centre of Castelldefels in an adult education centre whose immediate vicinity is devoid of free parking spaces.  Or at least the nearest free parking spaces are up a one-in-one hill and ‘officially’ too far away.  On the bike there is no problem as I can lock the thing up next to my classroom and within feet of the front door.  And since the classes started last month there has not been a single occasion where adverse weather conditions have encouraged me to use the car!  Not one!

My bike is also foldable.  Its construction is solid so, although various bits and pieces fold up and down and together it is hardly easy to manhandle into the boot of the car when it needs to go to be seen to, but it can and has been done and will be done again when in an hour or so I go to pick it up so that it will be available for me to go to my lesson tomorrow.  I wonder how much the guy who has repaired the spokes on three or four occasions will have the temerity to charge me?

This typing, as my more experienced readers will have guessed, is more displacement activity than literary endeavour.  I have the exercises 3B in both our textbooks to do on the use of the subjunctive in Spanish.  In one of my informative Spanish/English dictionaries in the middle ‘note’ section the explanation of the subjunctive and when to use it stretches from page 58 to 65 - and that is in note form!  What chance have I got!

Well, I’ve stopped typing, so I will now have to go and get the bike, then it will time for a cup of tea and a little light TV watching - and then copying from the back of the book!

Oh, I have drafted another poem called, 'The Victors' - it's about flies!  You can read it at:

http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/

 

Better tomorrow?

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There is something infinitely galling about having you flu jab and within a week being gifted a stinking cold from your nearest and dearest.

At least mine is not as bad as his and with my judicious doctoring (i.e. going to bed to sleep it off) I think that I am well on the road to recovery.  I must admit that today has been a lazy day (for purely medicinal purposes) and I did not shower until later in the day; have only worn a tracksuit and have taken to my bed twice!  I have not been outside the house at all today and I have rejected the idea of going for my daily swim!

I have not been completely slug like and have completed a poem called ‘Misophonia’, the inspiration for which was found (or rather heard) on a metro station in Barcelona when I was returning from a demonstration demanding the release of the Catalan political prisoners held by the right wing minority Spanish national government.  And yes, I do know that the government makes out a case for their being nothing of the sort, but rather like northern Cyprus that is only recognized by the Turks, so the government is the only one persuaded by their fatuous arguments.  Anyway, all that political agitation and I write a poem which has nothing to do with the reason why I went up to Barcelona in the first place!  Ah well, par for the course!  If you want to read the poem it is at http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/

I have also been reading Mark Twain, the 1872 book “Roughing it”.  It is always a delight to read something that is generally regarded as a classic and discover that it really does deserve that accolade because it is so good to read.  Twain’s language has a freshness and he writes with such an ironic eye that you are captivated by his descriptions.  The pace of the book is also helped by the fact that this early semi-autobiographical episodic approach to travel writing is set in the high and dangerous days of the Wild West and includes epic journeys on stagecoaches, silver exploitation, violent death, Mormons and easy racism.  Twain’s approach to Native Americans and African Americans may well be ‘of his time’, but it still makes for uncomfortable reading - but that is also part of the literary history of America and must be dealt with.  I have not yet finished the book, but it is well worth reading.

The Spanish lesson yesterday was sparsely attended.  I suggested to the teacher that was because we were going to tackle the subjunctive and it had struck fear into the hearts of her pupils!  I think that was only partly a joke.

She took us through the basics of the subjunctive with the aid of a printed handout and seemed to find some inspiration in our faces as she explained.  I think that I maintained an air of frightened acceptance throughout the lesson and I am not sure that I was substantially more informed about when to use the subjunctive with confidence than when I had contemplated it as a esoteric unknown concept last week.

The teacher sought to encourage us by suggesting that we would not find many more references to the subjunctive in the rest of our course and that it would not play a substantial part in our examinations.  This is fine and dandy, but it does not tie in with the undoubted fact that the Spanish use the subjunctive much more than the English speakers do in their language and it is much more common than with us.

Tomorrow I have to essay the homework that we have been given which is to insert the correct form of the subjunctive in sentences.  At least I can do this armed with my trust “501 Spanish Verbs” book, the textbook, the Internet and the handout.  And if all else fails the answers are at the back of the book!

There is always a way!

Listening & reading & worrying!

Well, the years of living in Spain must have counted for something: the guided tour around the houses of Los Indianos in Sitges in Spanish was basically understood by me as long as I concentrated.  And therein lies the rub.  Art, poetry, gastronomy, swimming, music, literature and so on and so on - they are all more interesting than studying Spanish for me.

As a past language teacher I should find the acquisition of a new mode of communication an exciting challenge.  The trouble is, I don’t.  And don’t think that I haven’t rehearsed all the possible arguments in favour of knuckling down and getting stuck in and putting various parts of my anatomy to gyrating rough surfaces, I have.  And I have yet to be convinced.

You would think, would you not, that someone with my proven inability to keep silent on any subject completely irrespective of how much, or indeed if any, knowledge informed my contributions, would embrace the chance of finding another mode of expression.  But no.  I do my homework with sullen resentment and little sticks.  I have gone over verb endings (-í, -iste, -ió) in various modes (-ía, -ías, -ía) and at various times (-é, -ás, -á) and I still look at such constructions with unalloyed, clear, blank, incomprehension.

And Spanish has two verbs for the English verb ‘to be’ so ‘I am’ can be ‘yo soy’ or ‘yo estoy’!  So, the English sentence ‘I am ill’ can be written in Spanish as either ‘Yo soy infermo’ or ‘Yo estoy infermo’ - but they mean different things.  And you probably wouldn’t use the ‘Yo’ in Spanish either, because the verb form tells you the person.  So, ‘Estoy infermo’ would indicate that you have something like a cough that you hope will clear up soon, while ‘Soy infermo’ means that you are permanently ill.  That’s quite a useful differentiation, but not useful enough to merit having to use two different verbs, when the use of an explanatory phrase might clear things up!  But one has the learn the language as it is and not as one would like it to be.  And English has phrasal verbs that are revenge enough for Spanish learners of our tongue!

 

Anyway, I was quite pleased with myself for following a fairly detailed social, historical and architectural wander through the narrow streets of Sitges and there were always English speaking friends to fall back on in the group when the sheer concentration on sequences of foreign words just got too much!

I got more pleasure from finding out that the name Sitges is derived from the word for silo!  There was, in times past, a small natural harbour near what is now the church and a brisk trade in the commodities that were stored on the shore in silos.  These silos were used for twenty years or so and then demolished and new ones built.  For archaeologists the delight is finding one of these disused silos because they are always filled in with rubbish, but historic rubbish, the bits and discarded pieces of what our ancestors thought worthless, broken and lost.  They were described by the guide in enthusiastic terms because of the ‘treasures’ they reveal to modern eyes.

We went to Sitges by train and I cycled up to the station, as there are racks and bicibox to store bikes.  As my bike is a fairly flash electric number I am very much disinclined to leave it on public display - even with the sturdy steel jointed lock that looks the business.  Far better to have my tastefully blue bike hidden from questing eyes.  The bicibox is a sort of Nissan hut looking construction that has a series of slotted covers that can be raised by the resting of a special credit card sized ‘key’ on the operating pad of the ‘hut’.  A screen will inform you of the available spaces for your bike and you can select a ‘box’ open it and place the bike securely inside.  That, at least is the theory.  For the first time in my experience I found that all the spaces in the bicibox outside the station had been taken.

There was a Plan B.  Behind the station in a large car park for the commuters who go to Barcelona every day there is another bicibox.  I confidently cycled a couple of minutes to that box and took the last available space.  Never before have I experienced such demand - even by the station.  I fear that what was a good idea used only by the few has now become an accepted way of bici life!  This is disturbing because if I cannot put my bike in one of these bici boxes I will not leave it out in the open air when using the train.  And for two full bici boxes there is no Plan C.  I will have to give this some thought.

Which I have now done and I have reminded myself that there is a third bici box a hundred yards away form the front of the station in the car park by the church.  So that is Plan B, but what do I do if all three of the bici boxes are filled?  There really is no Plan C - apart from returning home and taking the car!  Which rather defeats the whole idea.

I am typing this with the Diana Newall book, ‘Art and its global histories: A Reader’ lurking tauntingly or teasingly on my left.  The ideas from yesterday’s read are still fresh in my mind and I yearn for more information.  I have just opened the book at random in the section for ‘Art, commerce and colonialism 1600-1800’ and have seen a primary source text entitled:

‘Iohn Huighen van Linschoten. his discours of voyages into ye Easte & West Indies Deuided into foure books (London: John Wolfe, 1598) 

that the Reader informs me is, “one of the great travel narratives of the early modern period” - as any fule kno!  Well, I didn’t.  But do now, and I love that sort of thing!  And the spelling has been modernised for ease of reading - who can ask for more!

I have replayed the interview of Alfonso Dastis, the foreign minister of the minority right wing National Government of Spain and Tim Sebastian (see yesterday’s blog) for the unadulterated pleasure of seeing an over-confident Conservative apologist discomforted.

Jabs, art & politics!

When you feel smugly self-satisfied that you have started the day well by popping into your local health centre and having a flu jab - then there is possibly something wrong with the way that you are looking at life!

I even told myself that going there on my bike and having a swim afterwards was exactly the way to get all the goodness from the injection coursing around my veins or whatever.  I was in and out of the nurse’s office in a couple of minutes and that included a greeting, an enquiry after my general health and a hearty goodbye.

I have, courtesy of my ever-generous partner, already had one bout of sniffling, coughing and phlegminess.  It was an extended and miserable experience and had the disturbing feature of my getting better, having a sort of day off for good behaviour and then the illness returning with a vicious sneer of misery.  If the jab can keep a repetition of that unpleasant experience away then all well and good.  And, I might add, its efficacy is about to be put to the test because my partner has started sniffling again in what I can only describe as a professional manner.

Still, I have a “school trip” to look forward to!  I expect that you are expecting me to state that this will be the first school trip that I have been on as a student since the dim and distant days of my grammar school.  But wrong!  This will be my third school trip with my Spanish class.  The first trip was a tour of Gothic Barcelona; the second a much more satisfying visit to a Cava producer (with sampling of the produce) and tomorrow’s trip will be a guided tour of the houses of Los Americanos in Sitges.

 

These houses are the prestigious dwelling built by Catalans who went to the Americas and made their fortunes and then came back home to show off their wealth.  You should bear in mind that one of the famous brands of rum was founded by a Catalan - think of bats and you’ll get the one I mean, and there is even a museum in Sitges devoted to it.

The houses are built in a Catalan version of Art Nouveau and Sitges is particularly rich in these architectural pieces.  I have been on a guided walk around Sitges to look at them before, but this time the commentary will be in Spanish and will therefore not only challenge my knowledge of the language, but will also be a test of my memory of what was said in English the last time to help my translation.  It is so much easier reading Spanish rather than hearing it spoken by a native speaker, but that is the reason for these little trips, to get us to experience something approaching normality in the use of what we have been studying.

I have finished reading through the second volume of the textbooks for the Open University art course that I am not taking.  Buying the book is only (!) a hundred quid, rather than the two and a half grand for the actual course itself.

I have to admit that the book read itself.  It was an absolute delight.  I was going to stretch my reading by trying to limit the chapters I read at one time, giving myself, I reasoned, a decent period of time to let the new ideas sink in and perhaps do a little light research around the topics introduced.  Fat chance of that!  Once started I found myself allowing myself “just a little more” until it was more of a gorge than a measured read.

The contents of this excellent book taken from the course description on the OU site are:

Block 2: Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600-1800

You will explore art and visual culture of a period in which the major European powers competed with each other for global dominance. The influx of ‘exotic’ goods, above all from Asia, transformed European taste and artistic production, including seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and gave rise to the vogue for ‘Chinoiserie’ in eighteenth-century Britain. Art and architecture were exported across the Atlantic to Latin America, where some of the most spectacular works of the Baroque era were created, as well as to North America, where Thomas Jefferson built his ideal classical villa, Monticello. Local circumstances and cultural traditions helped to shape the transfer of art works, and artistic models from one context to another. A key theme for this book is the relationship of art and visual culture to slavery and the slave trade.

The one great thing about art books is that they have pictures!  Though there is also the point to be made that ‘reading’ the pictures sometimes takes up more time than a comparable block of text!  On the OU website for the course there is probably opportunity to load up the pictures on line and to search them by expansion so that hard to see details in the illustrations become clearer.  I compensate for my lack of access to that resource by wielding a rather impressive looking magnifying glass and looking, as Toni pointed out this afternoon, like an obsessive Sherlock Holmes - or is that tautology?

Anyway, I have a lot to think about as the book has made me re-evaluate some of my assumptions and has given my a whole series of associations to consider.  In that respect it is something like “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond - a book I whole-heartedly recommend.   

The volume is subtitled “The Fate of Human Societies” and its descriptive sweep of human history and pointed questions that arise from his observations force recognition of why history is as it is.  I can remember my first reading this book, and the fact that I had to put it down a few times because the import of what I had just understood struck home!

Part of the excitement of reading Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600-1800 is that it is obviously a base from which you need to expand.  There are suggestions and questions in each of the sections that beg for further study.  There is a “Reader” to go with the course that is rather harder work with smaller print, more pages and fewer illustrations (and only in black and white) and has critical, historical and primary sources to widen the inquiry.  This is where the web site, course guides and tutors, as well as the other students make the study come alive.  Still, I am supposed to be studying Spanish and not Art and its Global Histories.  So there!

The situation in Catalonia continues not to improve, mainly because of the almost criminal intransigence of the national government as represented by members of the right wing, systemically corrupt minority government of PP and its depressing Prime Minister Rajoy.

What did bring a smile to my face was watching the interview by Tim Sebastian of the foreign minister of the minority government, Alfonso Dastis.   

All credit to Dastis to go on a programme and speak in English, something the prime minister could never do.  His performance, however was execrable and his bluster in response to Tim Sebastian’s well researched, well supported and well put questions was depressingly familiar to those who have heard politicians go out to speak to the media when they are under prepared and have a poor case to put.  The interview can be heard here 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7Wupp5IcL4

                       and is well worth listening to at length, although when you consider that this is real life for us rather than a politician making a fool of himself, it does get really depressing.  And he is one of the more impressive members of the government!  God help us all.

But tomorrow, school trip.  Take your pleasure where you can!

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.