A couple of outings in Spain

Interesting week this week. Out and about in Spain much more than usual.

Last Saturday, the Neighbourhood Association of our village, Culebrón, organised a coach trip to a couple of towns over the Murcia/Alicante border. We went to Cehegín and Bullas. As always with the neighbours, the vecinos, it's the human bit that makes it interesting. I'm not a particularly outgoing or effusive person, but that doesn't mean that, as we waited for the coach to arrive and as people drifted into the agreed setting-off point, there wasn't an awful lot of cheek-kissing, hearty handshakes, backslapping, and a general bonhomie that always makes me grin internally. We got to Cehegín and did our bits of wandering around, looking at museums and churches and whatnot, but the real focus of any outing with Spaniards is the meal. The restaurant that the organisers, María Luisa and Inma I think, had chosen in Bullas was absolutely cracking.

There was a busload of us, 50 plus people, and the meal was 30€, so not particularly expensive. I expected dead ordinary. Mass catering is mass catering, and banging out food always diminishes the quality but, to be honest, if I'd turned up as an individual diner and got the same food and the same service, I'd have been well pleased. There is no way that I would have got as much drink as we got as a group though. Ramón, alongside, kept asking me if I was thirsty, and, whatever the answer, he'd order up more beer or more wine. By the time the meal was coming to a close, the noise level had increased markedly, the jokes were more frequent and raucous, and that slight alcoholic haze settled gently over the coffee. Our visit to the wine museum may have lacked a little in formality, and the coach home was noisy.

On Wednesday two groups organised by the local town hall, the book club, I'm a member of, el Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas, and the Adult Education service had arranged a coach trip to Valencia for a presentation and question and answer session with a Spanish writer called Laura Ferrero. The greetings at the pickup point were much more "Good morning, how are you?" than back slapping and kisses. Once in Valencia we got a tour of the Library building, where the event was being held. It's an enormous, decommissioned or is that a deconsecrated monastery. Impressive building; not so impressive a tour. One of those tours loaded with dates and details and almost nothing interesting or entertaining even though the place itself had served as monastery, prison, library and conservation centre which must have produced any number of interesting tales. 

The session with the writer was good. Her presentation was brief but interesting and she answered the questions from the audience in a straightforward and succinct fashion. The talk done, it was meal time. This time the food was more what I'd expect of mass catering; it wasn't bad, it wasn't good. It was fine and it only cost 21€. The meal though was a completely different affair to the neighbourhood thing. I suppose the difference was that this was a more sober, educational visit with a specific purpose other than leisure but I suspect that the real difference was that there were far more Northern Europeans. The Adult Education people were generally people learning Spanish and we brought our Northern attitudes with us. It was still good fun though, as was the boat ride on the Albufera, a fresh water lagoon crammed with birdlife, which was how we topped off the day. The coach home was so quiet that I nodded off.

My final, out in Spain, event was a visit to the Camera Club over in Petrer. I'd popped in to their exhibition when we were in Petrer for an event a couple of weekends ago, and the bloke looking after the exhibition had told us that the club meets regularly on Thursday evenings. I mentioned these meetings on the Facebook page of the Pinoso Camera Club, and one of the, I think, founding members of that group said he'd be happy to go along if I did. So Bill and I went along to a meeting of the Grup Fotogràfic de Petrer yesterday evening. 

The activity was that the members of the group had been given "homework" to take a nighttime photo. A photography professor from Madrid then commented on each of the photos in a sort of Zoom-type conference call. People could join the presentation either in the HQ of the club, as we and about maybe fifteen people did, or from their home or office. I'd talked to the organisers beforehand, and they were perfectly welcoming and friendly without being effusive. I was a bit surprised that, as the club members came in to the room, they didn't seem surprised that there were a couple of gúiris in their midst nor did they show much interest in us. I found the session perfectly interesting without being overwhelmingly exciting. I'm considering signing up as the quality of the photos didn't make me feel totally inadequate. I think, for Bill, it was all a bit more difficult as he doesn't have a lot of Spanish. When the critique session was over, I checked a few questions about club membership and activities with the chap who had been most welcoming, and then we cleared off. Maybe it would have got livelier if we'd stayed for the beer and snack we were offered as we were leaving.

Two kisses and a big hug

I wrote about the Pinoso Book Club, El Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas, only a year ago but that's not going to stop me doing it again. The group is named for a local teacher and poet - well loved and still missed. You may have seen the poetry competition named after her. It also just happens to be her centenary this year.

The club is organised by the Pinoso public library, which is housed in the Centro Cultural - the modern building halfway up el Paseo de la Constitución, next to the Indian restaurant.

Like the majority of book clubs I've heard of, the plot is simple. The group reads the same book. I don't actually mean that - we have more than one. I thought to change the sentence to read that we all read similar books, but that doesn't work either. So I'll take it that you know what I mean. Anyway, after reading a book, the group comes together and comments on it. We have some, nominal, say about books for inclusion in the next "course," but really, the librarians choose the books using criteria like who's fashionable, mixing international, Latin American and Spanish authors, access to the books through the library system and slightly politicized things like not only choosing male writers.

The organization is pretty slick. We get a spiral-bound, bulky magazine-thickness booklet, which details the members of the group with contact details, dates of meetings, dates of national or international literary events, books that we'll be reading this year with a bio of the authors, a bibliography, the cover notes on the book, and any additional paperwork. It's comprehensive. The librarian and archivist who look after the group must put a fair bit of graft into its production. There are about fifteen of us in the group. I'm the only bloke, but I'm not the only Briton.

So when I joined, and I joined it as a language challenge, something a bit beyond my grasp, with the advantage of being local and with local people, I supposed that the process would be clean and simple. Read a book, in Spanish, turn up at one of the usually three weekly meetings, natter about the book, go home, and repeat the process. It turns out that the group life is much more involved than that. There are quite often book launches from local authors, and the club gets involved in those as well as things like World Women's Day or World Poetry Day. There are sometimes little outings to do with a book that we've read or an author visiting a nearby town. I've found that there have been nearly as many ancillary meetings as scheduled ones. Naturally, being Spain, the group has its own WhatsApp group, and that too can be most amusing.

I taught English in Pinoso for two or three years. In that time, quite a few local people passed through my classes, but it's only very occasionally that I see any of those old students. On the other hand, when I'm out and about in Pinoso, I keep bumping into members of the book club. I don't know why, but the book club people seem to be everywhere. It's rather nice. They're a good bunch, and they've been very kind about my faltering Spanish.

Anyway, at the beginning of this month, as the sort of end-of-course do, the group - well, the librarians - had taken the opportunity to organise a Q&A session with a writer called Elia Barceló. I read something of hers for the session, but before that, I'd never even heard of her. Her Wikipedia entry suggests that I should have. She's both well known and well regarded.

She did her session with us, and then, as we are in Spain, we went to a bar to eat and drink. I wasn't at the same table as the writer, and when the people at my table started to go home, I got ready to leave too. I thought it only good manners to say goodnight to our guest of honour even though I hadn't said a word to her all evening. The writer was effusive when she said goodbye to me. I suspect she was probably impressed by the good humour and bonhomie that the Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas generates and that she'd had a good evening.

A long, long grind

I've been trying to learn Spanish since Methuselah was a lad. I remember being well pleased when clay tablets gave way to parchment and quills. Alright, not quite that long ago but it really was a textbook with cassettes and Sunday morning programmes on BBC2.

In my case the catalyst was a trip to Barcelona. At Victoria coach station I bought a ticket for the first bus going to somewhere warm. It was nearly Greece. Barcelona was great. There was no doubt that I was going back. When I had trouble getting a beer in Tarragona my task was clear. My partner of the time thought my plan to learn Spanish was a stupid whim. Back in Blighty, at our local bookshop, she steered me towards the cheapest Spanish textbook; the cheaper the book the less money wasted. She was very surprised when I signed up for evening classes and astounded when I went back after Christmas.

I didn't really learn much Spanish in the classes but I learned a lot of Spanish because of them. I think the classes were a couple of hours long, so, given a ten week term and three terms a year, a full year would be 60 hours of class time with maybe a dozen in the class. The big advantage, for me, of classes, and I've done a lot on and off, has always been that they give a structure and an impetus. I did as my teachers bade. I wrote essays, I ground through vocabulary lists. I repeated and repeated verb tables to learn the tenses. I might not be able to use those verbs in a real sentence but it did mean that I could recite, parrot fashion, all sorts of tenses and all sorts of irregular verbs. Years later, living here, teaching English to earn a crust, I recognised my verb table recitation mirrored in the way that my students knew the alphabet or the numbers. They could recite the 26 letters or count to 100 easily enough but write a random number on the board or ask them to spell their email address and they were up that famous creek and paddleless.

That first flirtation with evening classes only lasted a couple of years. My spanish learning became a bit on and off. A couple of weeks wandering around Extramadura or Christmas and New Year in Mallorca as a holiday rekindled the spark. Sometimes I'd sign on for a course and struggle through a whole academic year, or not. Sometimes I'd just buy a new book and CD course.

I'm still trying to learn Spanish. I've been able to order a beer for a while though I still sometimes, exasperatingly, get that wrinkled brow, pulled up nose look from the servers. I repeatedly have to wage a little battle with the waiter or waitress to continue to speak Spanish as they decide that their English is better than my Spanish. I was once in a restaurant with a woman who lives with a Spanish man, who speaks Spanish to her husband's family all the time, who is more Spanish in manner and custom than British. She found herself confronted with a waitress who was determined to speak to her in English. In a sly way that rather cheered me up, it reassured me that I wasn't alone, but it made her very, very cross.

Unless you're one of those people that has a natural flair for languages take it from me that none of the quick fixes really work. For most of us it's pure graft. Even if you are an intuitive learner you can't order egg and chips without knowing at least three words - probably four in Spanish. In my opinion it's the speaking, being in a conversation, that actually makes the difference. Listening to Spanish, reading Spanish, writing Spanish all help but unless you can talk, listen and respond then you're not really there. If you live with a Spanish speaker or you pass a good part of your day in a place that speaks Spanish (school, office etc) you'll probably get pretty good pretty quickly. For the rest of us, we're not going to get very far when ordering a coffee or turning down the carrier bags in the supermarket is the most practice we get.

The methods are manifold. I sit in a bar and swap English for Spanish. I sit in front of my computer and swap English for Spanish with a bloke who lives in Toledo. I pay good money to sit at my computer and talk at someone in Gandía who occasionally corrects me. I read nearly all my novels in Spanish, I go to a book club, I watch some Spanish telly, I go to some Spanish films at the cinema, I go on walks and visits and to talks which are delivered in Castilian, I listen to several podcasts a week, most of which come from Spanish radio so that I pick up a bit of Spanish life and culture as I grapple with the language. Generally I've given up on textbooks and things designed specifically for learners but, for reasons of loyalty, I still watch the videos, produced by a Spanish woman and her British husband, the couple who first introduced me to podcasts years and years ago. The only text book I still know to find on my bookshelves is Neil Creighton's Spanish Grammar book - Punto por Punto. It's not a good read but it has been useful over and over and over.

When it comes down to it though it's still talking, listening, reading and writing. The videos on YouTube, the WhatsApp messages to the plumber, the podcasts, the online classes, the interactive quizzes, the Zoom or Skype based intercambios, the TikTok grammar lessons and the Deepl language translator are all very shiny but they offer very little fundamentally different from my very first BBC text book backed up by the tapes and the TV programmes. It's the access that has changed. Living in Spain accessing Spanish is dead easy but, even if I were in the UK or in somewhere like Botswana I wouldn't now need to tune in to the exterior service of Radio Moscow on the short wave to listen to Spanish. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

¡Dígame!, the CD cover in the photo, was the course book, a BBC course book, that went with that first course at Peterborough Regional College. The CD came after the cassette.

Club de lectura Maxi Banegas

For years and years I've been fed up that my Spanish isn't as good as it should be. It's always seemed to me that without being able to read, understand and speak Spanish we immigrants become perpetual tourists. Obviously some things get translated for us and they are accessible because the Internet makes them so but lots of stuff will sneak by if we are not able to understand the conversations of our neighbours, read about events or keep up with the current affairs type memes that pop up on social media.

I try to do something Spanish language most days. I have conversations with people on the Internet or I read a few pages from a book or learn a few words. I read and watch Spanish news, I listen to Spanish radio and other bits and bats. I'm also still on the mailing list for a couple of language learning websites too. One of them, a video blog, suggested that we should set ourselves a language challenge; do something that was a bit beyond our grasp - pushing the envelope as they used to say in my youth. Now it just so happened that, a couple of days after seeing that video, I went into Pinoso to see the unveiling of the balcony banners related to International Women's Day. One of the banners had been done by the local Book Club or Readers Circle, el Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas (Maxi Banegas was a poet and teacher from Pinoso). As I usually read books in Spanish, I thought, "why not?".

Bull by the horns time. I went directly from the square outside Pinoso Town Hall to the Cultural Centre which is where the library is, to ask about the book club. They seemed to think I was a bit strange, actually lots of people would agree but that's another blog! They told me I would be the only man - perhaps that was it. Maybe they were appalled by my very British accent when speaking Spanish but my take on that is that Bruno Tonioli's's Italian accent makes him cute to TV viewers so why shouldn't the same idea work for me?

Anyway they gave me a date for the club, a Wednesday of the next week. That meant a 270 page novel in eight days. Easy. The librarian seemed a bit shocked that I was willing to buy the book. Normally the library provides the books to the readers. In fact I bought the book in electronic format almost as I was talking to her. I find electronic books much easier to read than paper books, not because of any liking for the format but because the Kindle has a Spanish dictionary on it, so, when I get to a key word that I don't understand, I can look it up without interrupting the flow too much. 

I turned up the next Wednesday with the book, Aquellos tiempos robados, read. The club had been cancelled, apparently a speaker was expected and, because she was ill, the session was scrubbed. They hadn't really expected me to turn up so nobody thought to contact me. 

I have been to one meeting though. I was made to feel welcome and it was splendid that there was another Briton there. I was given a booklet which gave details of the books to be read by what dates along with author's biographies, sleeve notes and the like. Very professional. Speaking in Spanish, about a book in front of a group of about a dozen people is not as pleasant as drinking beer on a sunlit terrace but it wasn't humiliating. My Spanish may have been verging on gibberish but nobody sniggered openly. There's another meeting this evening, that makes three books I've read because of the club and all have been good, well chosen. I'm on to number four and the first few pages had me guffawing so I think it will be good too.

What's more I was able to go back to the video blog and report that envelope duly pushed.