Noises off

I typed the first draft of this when the lights were off - all over Spain. What a strange experience that was. We were fine but it did make us think about the number of things that would be difficult or impossible without power. You know the sort of thing - even if it were possible for the staff to get past the supermarket shutters to open up  they would find the the lights, freezers and cold displays off, the price scanners wouldn't work, the tills wouldn't open and even if the customers had cash there would be no way to compute the bill or store the loot. We imagined abandoned electric cars with depleted batteries, abandoned thermal vehicles with empty tanks (no electric to work the fuel pumps) and traffic chaos as all the traffic lights failed. Perhaps one of the oddest things was that, when we got in the car, the radio started up, as it does so often, and we didn't notice that the programming, which told us about the blackout, was being broadcast on what is normally a culture channel. We swap from news and talk radio to music radio all the time but, apparently for lots of youngsters talk radio was a bit of a novelty, never before experienced.

But back to topic. We went to the theatre the other night. We went to see The Mousetrap, the Agatha Christie whodunnit. Of course, being in Spain it wasn't the Mousetrap, it was La Ratonera and it was in Castilian Spanish. When we came out of the theatre, El Principal in Alicante, I turned to Maggie and said, well I understood about 10% of that. Maggie replied that it was because the volume wasn't loud enough. It must have been loud enough for the Spaniards around us though because they giggled or snorted or guffawed in all parts of the theatre including the seats round about us. I didn't think it was loud enough either and I did understand the couple of snippets that, because they were supposed to be a radio broadcast, were louder. But I come back to the fact that the Spaniards around us seemed to have understood it, low volume or not, while we didn't.

The weekend before we'd been over in Yecla for a guided tour of the San Francisco church. The guide was a woman called Alicia. It's not the first tour we've been on with the Yecla Tourist Office where she's been the guide. Her accent is pretty Murciano but she's easy enough to understand. Should I say she's easy enough to understand with a following wind. For instance if she's facing towards me, as she speaks, I find it much easier than if she has her back towards me as she points something out. If we're in the street, or close to the street, she's much more difficult to understand when a vehicle passes. If she bores her tour group or in some way causes them to disengage then it's much more difficult to keep up with what she's saying because of their chattering. That said the Spaniards in the group snigger and snort and guffaw together as she tells her stories while I blame the pesky background noise.

They're two examples but it happens all the time from missing the first few words that the server says to you in a bar to not hearing your name called as you wait in the hospital waiting room. And if someone, let's use Trump, is speaking English on the telly and there is a translator repeating what he's saying in Spanish then I find that I'm half hearing the English and half hearing the Spanish and I can make sense of neither.

Generally, nowadays, my Spanish isn't that bad. I often fluff my first lines or miss the first words and at times I come away from an experience, in Spanish, cursing my inability to master the @#$%ing thing, though, as I said, it's sort of OK. Just give me another twenty years or so and I'll have it cracked.

So is my lack of understanding based solely on my (decreasing) hearing ability? I think not. Put me in a situation where everyone around me is speaking in English but the background noise is high - a party, a sporting event, a concert, a crowded bar - and I can't hear properly either. The damage to my understanding is much less though and, in broad stroke, I can continue to communicate while in Spanish I would be completely lost. I think this is largely because I know the structure and the forms of my own language so well that I can fill in the blank spaces with educated and informed guesses. That's why a British film dubbed into Spanish is easier to understand than a Hollywood film similarly dubbed and both are much easier than a film recorded in Spanish. In the British example the word order, the unspoken cultural reference points and the probable responses to a situation will be much more like mine. I'm pretty well versed in United Statesian English too but less so than the British variety. And, of course, in the Spanish version the responses and attitudes are those of a Spaniard on the Lavapies omnibus which is quite a long way from Clapham.

It may have been that the volume at the theatre really was a bit low but the Spaniards started with an advantage even if I know who did it even before we got going.