Roll your own

My dancing is terrible. In fact I don't dance. I can't clap in time, I can't keep rhythm, I can't sing. At junior school they wrested the triangle from my grip enraged with my inability to strike it at the appropriate moment. At Grammar School I was beaten for singing badly. It was presumed that I was singing so tunelessly to be rebellious.

I can't roll Rs either. This is essential for speaking Spanish reasonably well. The R at the beginning of a word has to be rolled and the double RR has to be rolled. To Spaniards I sound like a Benny Hill Chinese person.

There are dozens of YouTube videos with tricks, methods, advice and examples of how to roll Rs. They all start by saying that everyone can roll Rs. Just the same way as my music teacher, Philip Tordoff, told me that everyone could sing just a few moments before he set about me with a ruler.

Apparently the trick, for Rs, not for singing, is to put the tip of the tongue on the alveolar ridge and expel enough air so that the tip of the tongue vibrates. The tongue, to produce a Spanish R, has to be somewhere near where it would be if a British person were to say de. I can do that. I can make my tongue vibrate but there is some coordination necessary with my vocal cords and that just escapes me.

It is, as Mr Jones my Latin teacher used to say, a bugger.