Old familiar ways

I do a Spanish class each Monday. I do it to make sure that I speak at least a little Spanish each week. Otherwise I probably wouldn't. One doesn't need much Spanish in a supermarket or a bar. In my job the expectation is that I speak English. At home Maggie's English is as good as mine and she makes sure that we watch English speaking TV.

Last week the young woman who teaches me Spanish had written a short piece about a local festival. I noticed that it was tagged as level B1. This is one of the levels of the Common European Framework for language learning. The description of level B1 says that someone at this level can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in everyday situations and can deal with most situations likely to arise in an area where the language is spoken. People who do level B1 English courses with me can, in reality, hardly string two words together.

Yesterday we went to see a film called Tarde para la ira which translates as something like Too Late for Anger which is a film that won lots of awards in the Spanish equivalent of the BAFTAs or Oscars. Without the pre film blurb and without the images on the screen I would have had no idea what was happening at all - it was far too hard for me to understand.

Today we went to the village restaurant, Restaurante Eduardo. Restaurants are easy. The language is easy but today I was lost for most of the time. Eduardo is usually a bit vague and the trick is to ask for what you want and see if he has it rather than expect him to tell you what he has. But today I had hardly any idea what he was talking about.

When I was young it would have been an experience that I would have described with the, then, very trendy adjective of surreal. Today, as I wondered what Eduardo was saying the adjective, in English, that sprang to mind after all this time here was pathetic.

Custom and Practice

When I first started the  blog it was simple. The idea was to celebrate, or at least note, the diffferences between what I'd always considered to be everyday and what was now ordinary in a new country. So the fact that I ordered neither quantity nor type of beer - I just asked for a beer - gave me material for an entry. Everything from a fiesta to a supermarket visit was grist to the mill.

Nowadays it's different. I don't want to repeat the same entries over and over again and I'm, perhaps, no longer the best person to notice the differences - or so I thought. Strangely though in the last twenty four hours, a couple of tiny incidents have reminded me that I've still not quite caught on.

I do lots of English language exercises that revolve around food. In one drill I have the students do a bit of imaginary food shopping to mark vocabulary like savoury, packet, jar, seafood, game, poultry, herbs etc. They have to produce a meal from their list of savoury ingredients which come in jars and so on. A second is a variation on the TV show Come Dine With Me and there's another on preparing a romantic dinner. In all of them the end product is to produce a meal of starter, main course and pudding. I've always presumed that the minor confusions around starter and main course were simply linguistic ones. Yesterday though when we popped in to a restaurant for a meal something clicked. The eatery, on the outskirts of Fortuna, only had British clients. Maggie and I chose different starters from the set meal but we had the same main. I noticed that the menu, the list of food with prices, didn't use the Spanish equivalents of starter and main. Instead there was a list of first and second courses followed by the dessert. It wasn't something new to me but I suddenly realised that my interpretation wasn't quite right. The difference is subtle. Here we have two courses of equal weight rather than a lighter starter followed by a more substantial main course. If we were going to emulate that in Spain it would be much more usual to share the starters in the centre of the table. So there is an ever so slight difference between the structure of a standard three course "English" meal and a standard three course "Spanish" meal. Just enough of a difference to discombobulate my students.

Someone who works in the school that I work at in Cieza has been suggesting that we should get together. On Thursday he seemed determined to make it this weekend. He said that he thought he was free for Saturday "por la tarde", and he'd be in touch. When he didn't phone this morning I just presumed it was off. A couple of hours ago I noticed a message from him on my phone saying that he was sorry but things had changed and he wasn't free. When he said tarde to me I automatically translated it to my English idea of afternoon. Now, even to we Brits, afternoon is reltively flexible. It may, technically, be bounded by 6pm but I think the interplay between afternoon and evening is much more subtle than that - a combination of daylight, activity and time. It's similar in Spain except that tarde covers both afternoon and what would be relatively late evening for us. My pal's mental picture of having a drink in the "tarde"and mine were poles apart. It wasn't a translation error it was a cultural error.

I know that a couple of Spanish people read this blog from time to time. It's possible that they will dispute my reading of the situation. I would point them to Restaurante and Mesón. Several Spaniards have told me that there is an obvious difference. When pressed though they don't seem to find it so easy describing those differences to me. It all becomes a bit Cockburn's - one instinctively knows. In just in the same way I remember entertaining a couple of Spaniards in the UK who were perplexed as to why this was a pub and that was a bar or why this was a restaurant and that a café. I knew, indeed it was obvious, but I was unable to enumerate those differences in any logical way.

Day to day

Last century I passed a fair bit of time in schools. Firstly I had to study in them. My secondary school, between 1965 and 1972, was quite a violent place as I remember. Bullying from other pupils and downright violence from the staff. Later, between 1996 and 2004, I had an office in another school though I couldn't say I really took much notice of my surroundings. I was working in what was called Community Education - adult education, youth work and community development - and it just so happened that our office was there close to the classrooms and other facilities that we used for some of the programme. The only time I remember venturing into a classroom during school hours was to have a word with someone who organised the Duke of Edinburgh's Award for us. She was a teacher at the school and I went to hunt her out in her room. Noisy as I remember it, and much less formal than when I went to school but everyone seemed to be working with purpose.

I'm working in a school again now and this time I'm actually with the youngsters for at least some of the time. I have nine lessons a week with nine different groups. They are full classes with around thirty pupils in some, a few more in one and a few less in others. I think one of them is a special needs type group though, to be honest, I'm not sure. They do pretty well with the English and they seem keen which is all I need to have a good time.

The school is interesting. It's a very loud place. It's very informal. I'm at one with the dress code in jeans and t shirt and I may be a bit over finicky in having a shave before going to work. At times when the pupils are on the move, in fact every time, it seems a bit chaotic but I've never seen any violence or any bullying other than the sort of fleeting and unthinking attacks that young people unleash on each other without pre meditation and without malevolence. I'm sure it's there but I haven't seen it. I have, on the other hand, noticed lots of acts of kindness and friendship between the students which surprises me.

The youngsters don't show me any respect but they don't show the opposite either. Tens of them greet me every day as I wander the school and some even try to pass the time of day with me.

The noise level in the classrooms is pretty high and the real teachers who hold my hand in the lessons occasionally make someone change seats or leave the room. I presume this means the youngsters must be misbehaving in some way but I never notice. I do notice the ones who don't participate at all though. There are several who just stare at their shoes or draw elaborate pictures in biro. There seems to be no expectation that they join in at any level.

The academy, the afternoon sessions are a completely different kettle of fish. These are paid for private lessons. Most of the youngsters are there because their parents believe that English will be good for them. This may well be true but English is less appealing than the park, their friends or Sponge Bob on the telly. I sympathise. They go to school all day, they have homework to do and then they are expected to do more studying. So it's a bit of an uphill struggle and some of the little dears sorely stretch my patience. The adults and older teenagers in the academy are perfectly nice.

One thing I have probably noticed about the Spanish Education is the apparent use of books. In the school my role is to model real English so I am expected to talk and listen. I am not expected to work to any particular scheme or pattern but I get the idea that most courses start at page 1, exercise 1, go on to exercise 2, exercise 3 etc. The youngsters are certainly keen, conditioned maybe, to fill in the gaps in the exercises. In fact it seems much more important to fill in the gaps than understand the language that goes into the spaces. This involves a lot of pencil sharpening, rubbing out and the modern versions of tipp-ex. I was told yesterday that I will be given a timetable for working through the various books - you know the sort of thing. By the end of January you will have completed Unit 4. Apparently parents don't like to see the books that they have paid for not getting filled up with writing, rubber detritus and tipp-ex. Progress can be measured by the number of pages completed.

I'm sure that such an innovative methodology will turn out legions of capable English speakers.

My new job

Forgive the indulgence of this entry.

I started a new job a couple of weeks ago teaching English with a language school based in Murcia city. They didn't give me a job in the city though but asked me to work in a co-operative grant maintained school in Cieza which is a very pleasant but lengthy 60km drive from home.

For three mornings a week I work in the school, with classes of youngsters. Their ages range from 12 to 16. I am there to do the authentic English bit - real structure, real vocabulary and real accent. Mainly speaking and listening rather than writing or reading.

For four afternoons a week I work in the same school buildings alongside a team of three or four other English speaking Spanish teachers. Indeed I work in the same classrooms, but this time for the academy, the private language school which sells English classes. The age range there is from six year olds up to adults.

I'm far from settled. The students seem nice enough and nobody has hit me or abused me directly as they did when I worked in Fortuna. First impressions are that the school is good and the staff have been perfectly friendly. On the other hand I still haven't worked out how a lot of it works or even got all of the various text books and other materials that are the basis for the ten different groups that I work with in the afternoons. Teaching full classes of ordinary schoolkids in a school is something completely new to me too.

All in all I have nineteen diffferent groups and getting to know them all is not something that comes easily to an old man with a failing memory. The teaching has been fine, I've even enjoyed most of it, but the record keeping has been driving me crazy. The records are necessary to ensure that I don't cover the same thing twice with the same group. Planning has also taken much longer than I like, and probably than it should. The truth is though that simple maths says that with so many groups even ten minutes per week on each means I'll be doing over three hours of unpaid work. All I can hope is that it will all become easier and faster as things settle down.

Or maybe I'll just decide that working isn't really for me any more and give it all up, sit in Culebrón and try to live off my small pension and the sweat of Maggie's brow.

A cinema, a parade and something on words

Here are some ramblings from this weekend.

Once upon a time Pizza Express used to serve really good pizzas in interesting buildings. The person who launched the restaurant chain was a chap from Peterborough called Peter Boizot. One of his other ventures in the town was to try to restore the old Odeon Cinema to its former glory as a single screen venue. I've not been to Peterborough for ages but I have this vague recollection that the venture failed. People must prefer multi choice cinemas.

Spain, like everywhere else, has multiplexes in amongst fast food franchises and out of town shopping centres. The big, single screen cinemas are a thing of the past. Youngish people, twenty somethings, I taught in Cartagena still talked nostalgically of the city centre cinemas so it can't be that long ago that they disappeared. Nowadays the old cinemas are gone, boarded up or used as retail outlets.

Years ago, on holiday, I saw my first ever Rus Meyer film in a cinema in central Alicante. On Saturday as I Googled the films from a restaurant table on my phone I was surprised to find that there was a cinema, Cine Navas, just 400 metres away. And, for once, Google maps wasn't fibbing. It was all pretty run down to be honest but it was still pretty impressive, acres and acres of velvet curtains lined the walls and the floor was raked downwards from the screen so that you naturally looked up to the screen. Quite different to the tiered seating of today. The screen was big enough but the image was a bit dull and the soundtrack less than crisp so I wondered if it actually was a real film. The film by the way was terrible - Viaje a Sils Maria or the Clouds of Sils Maria in English I think.

When we came out of the cinema we could hear music. At the top of the road there was a parade. We went for a nosey. Hundreds of people were walking along the street wearing "traditional" clothes. We presumed, and I later confirmed, that it was an early procession as part of the "Bonfires of St John." Nowadays this big Alicante festival is usually given its Valenciano name of Fogueres de Sant Joan rather than its Spanish or Castellano name of Hogueras de San Juan. It marks the Saint's day on the 23rd but it also turns around the shortest night of the year. Huge statues are burned in the street. I like San Juan, it's a very community festival in lots of places with people lighting little fires to cook food, setting off fireworks, jumping over waves to get pregnant etc. San Juan seems also to be a signal. People go and open up their winter long abandoned beach or country house ready for summer.

We'd been in Alicante on Saturday to collect some visitors for one of Maggie's Secret Wine Spain bodega tours and we'd taken advantage of being there which meant spending money. So Sunday was quieter. Very quiet. Too quiet. I polished the car and, as I did so, I listened to a podcast from the radio about the visit of the Beatles to Spain. The Spanish expert on the Beatles explained that their first single Lips Me hadn't been a big hit. I had to listen three or four times to eventually decide that Lips Me was Please Me. The pronunciation and also the mis-titling of Please Please Me didn't help. Later in the programme I was told that the big break for the Beatles was thanks to Harrison Knight. I thought of the people I could remember as being associated with the Beatles - not Brian Epstein, not Mal Evans nor Neil Aspinall nor that American chap because he was an Alan something. Then it struck me. A Hard Day's Night.

This sort of strange pronunciation of English words is very common here. English is fashionable so using an English word in place of a perfectly good Spanish word is rife. There is also a tendency for the English way of saying something to supplant the more usual Spanish form. Lots of English language sounds are very difficult for many Spaniards, hence the mispronunciation. There is a second problem too. If a Spaniard knows how to pronounce an English word correctly it often isn't recognisable to other Spaniards who haven't studied English. So words are intentionally mispronounced to make them intelligible. Sometimes there is a sort of recognised half way house type pronunciation. I can usually guess at common words but names are a real problem - trying to interpret the names of music artists on the radio is by turns a lot of fun and frustrating.

Get me an aspirin and an elastoplast will you?

It was a few years ago now. I was in  a small supermarket. The product organisation escaped me. I'd found the washing powders and bath cleaners but the washing up liquid was laying low. Breaking with my usual stubborn silence I asked a shelf stacker where it was. The Mistol is at the back, near the freezers," she said.

Just as we Brits use aspirin, escalator, biro, trampoline, thermos, sellotape, catseye, dormobile, durex, bubble wrap, photoshop, stanley knife, armco, JCB, fibre glass and lots more trademarks to describe generic products so do the Spanish.

So Mistol is a brand of washing up liquid. I bought it that day, just grateful that I'd found the stuff. It's good stuff, it smells nice, it has lots of flavours. There is a little dodge, a little marketing ploy, with Mistol though. It has a really wide spout in relation to most other brands of washing up liquids. The liquid gushes out and gets used up very quickly. I've decided it's an abusive design and I've bought Fairy again the last couple of times.

Obviously I don't know all the Spanish trade marks that have become household language but these are some of the ones I've noticed. Actually as I worked on the list it became so long as to be boring so I cut it down. Bimbo is used for sliced bread, Danone for yoghurt, Avecrem for stock cubes, Casera for a sort of lemonade often mixed with cheap wine, Bic for Biros (see how whimsically I write?), Dodot for nappies, Rimel for mascara, Kleenex for tissues, Táper or Túper (mispronounciation of abbreviated Tupperware) for plastic food containers and Post-its for, well, Post its.

I suppose these words change with age and possibly with location. I hoover up (not often enough according to Maggie) but I don't think it's a popular generic term amongst younger people or amongst people from the South of England. I had something similar with aspirin, aspirina, which is a Bayer trade mark. I asked for aspirina in a chemist's in Yecla. The chemist asked if I were sure and produced the trademarked brand at, say, 4€ and a generic at well under half the price. I went for the cheaper brand. I only use them to ward off heart attacks after all. The chemist obviously thought this was all a huge joke and spent the next few minutes coaching me in the pronunciation and rhthym of ácido acetilsalicílico, acetylsalicylic acid. Years later, now fluent in ácido acetilsalicílico, a chemist in Cartagena took me to task. "For God's sake, don't be so prissy, say aspirina," he said.

Professionalism

It's probably some sort of jingoism on my part but I can't say I'm that impressed by the professionals that we have occasionally used here. By professionals I don't mean doctors or mechanics or plumbers or builders. They seem fine or at least just normally inept. No, I'm talking about the sort of people who work from offices and should wear suits - architects, lawyers, accountants, bank workers and the like.

A friend of ours was going through a divorce. The lawyer forgot to tell her that the divorce had been granted. Right on the ball then?

When we first got here we hired a lawyer to sort out our residence papers. We thought we could do it ourselves but to avoid hassle we paid a professional. Unfortunately the lawyer was completely unaware that the legislation was changing. He went through the tried and tested process but, by the time we went to collect the documentation, it no longer existed. We'd paid upfront. There was no talk of a refund. We did the correct paperwork ourselves.

As a part of some half hearted anti money laundering legislation everyone has to prove that they are who they say they are to their bank. This has to be done in person at a branch. The legislation was introduced in October 2010 leaving over four years for the banks to collect the information. In the last few weeks the banks have been in some sort of blue funk trying to get an extension on the implementation date at the end of April. They seemed to have forgotten to tell anyone. I read it in the press. This really is leaving your weekend homework to the school bus on Monday morning.

Last year the tax office caught up with some untaxed pension income of mine. I went to the Revenue to sort it out with my annual declaration. I wanted to correct any underpayment in previous years too but the Tax Office said that was a job for an accountant. I'd gone directly to the Tax Office because I reckoned that if they made a mistake at least it would be an "official" mistake. Anyway, following their advice I went to an accountant in the town where I was living. He told me there was no past tax liability - I was in the clear. The man did not fill me with confidence though. He used a calculator for the simplest of sums, He made lots of ooh and aah sounds as he stared at his computer screen. He kept reaching for his fags before remembering that it's no longer legal to smoke at work. He wasn't Cockburn's Port.

This year I have to have an accountant as I am self employed. The first thing my accountant did on my behalf was to register me as self employed. I knew it had happened because the Social Security confirmed it in a text message and took money from my bank account. They took 40% more than the accountant told me they would take. I heard nothing from the accountant though, not a dickie bird. When I went to see him a month or so ago I asked for the self employment registration certificate. "Oh, haven't we sent it you?," he said. 

The tax people don't seem to have forgotten that I get a UK pension. They sent me a letter offering an amnesty on any unpaid taxes on pension income to foreigners like me - no interest, no fines, just the normal payment of any unpaid back tax. My new accountant didn't seem to want to see the letter that the Tax People had sent even though I said that it talked about a new process, a special form. Unlike last year's accountant my new accountant is sure I owe the Revenue something.

Today, when I sent a WhatsApp to ask him when I might see the paperwork that they were going to submit on my behalf  he replied by phone. I've told him that I try to avoid technical phone calls in Spanish preferring emails or other written options. He told me there was a specific form that had to be completed in my case. The Tax Office need to send the form to me so that in turn I can send it on to the accountant. I presume this is the special form mentioned in the letter that he didn't want to read. Before he rang off he said he just wanted to be sure that he had my correct postal address. It was perfect except for the street, the PO box and the town.

He thinks we should leave the submission till the last possible day. That sounds like the perfect strategy to me.

Support for corvidae

The music festival season is just beginning to warm up in Spain. We usually try to get along to at least one event. It's good to hear a band that goes on to greater things - "Calvin? great musician! First time I saw him he was on the tiny fourth stage just by the latrines at half past six in the evening" It's good to hear new bands in general and I always look forward to those vegetable noodles they serve in the overpriced food areas too.

So I was reading an article, in Spanish, from a national newspaper. It was suggesting ways to keep the costs of festival going to a bare minimum. It suggested coachsurfing (sic). Fortunately for me coachsurfing was hyperlinked and when I followed the link there was a little piece about couchsurfing (sic). Taken along with the rest of the article about how nice someone had been to some tourists I decided that it was about an internet method of finding a floor to kip on. Someone who would put you up on their couch for a fraction of the price of the cheapest hostel. I have no idea whether couchsurfing is in use in the UK but there is a fair chance that it is - it's just new to me. I may know what wotless and glamping mean but it's imppossible to keep up with all the linguistic changes from a couple of thousand kilometres away.

Back in our living room I was watching some late night current affairs programme. The subtitles were on. They repeatededly mentioned crowfunding (sic) which is a fair phonetic interpretation of the word the people were using during the debate. I guessed straight away that it was not some crow support charity but a mispronunciation of crowd funding. Similar things happen all the time. I'm never quite sure whether the word is basically an Englishism given a Spanish twist - like WhatsApp becoming wassap or whether some Spanish person has decided that an English word or phrase will do the job better than a Spanish word and invented something that only exists here. Not to stray too far a really simple example of the latter would be the word parking, which is a well established and widely used Spanish word, that translates as car park or parking lot.

English words crop up in the middle of educated Spanish speech all the time. Today, in maybe an hour or so of radio listening, I noticed base camp, hotspot and peacekeeper. Often the words are pronounced to Spanish pronunciation rules so that they become unintelligible to my Brit ear. It's quite strange to maybe hear a new phrase or word on the radio or TV only to realise, when I see it written down, that it is some perfectly simple English word. Change the stress, as my students do, on ear to make it sound like a West Country exclamation and you'll appreciate how easily and quickly it can happen.

At least I've worked out a strategy for one thing that used to flummox me all the time. I get to the cinema and the title is in English. I often tried, unsuccessfully, to guess the Spanish pronunciation. Now I just say the title in English and follow it up with a Spanish phrase which says "I hate it when the titles are in English." We all have a bit of a laugh and the success rate on trouble free ticket buying has skyrocketed.

Slightly off

I signed up for a weekly Spanish course yesterday. I haven't quite given up on the language yet - despite what Maggie says, and what I know to be true, that I will never speak Spanish adequately.

I have just finished a blog post. Looking for information I was wading trough official bulletins, where laws and official notices are published. I could understand them but I wouldn't pretend that it's easy reading. It's the same with books, I normally read in Spanish but, at the moment, I'm reading a book written by an Englishman and it seemed perverse to read it in translation. I have to admit that it's much more comfortable reading in English.

We took Maggie's car for an ITV yesterday, the road worthiness check. The tester took the car off us and drove it through the various test bays himself. I have the feeling that he was only doing that with us immigrants. Easier to do it himself than explain the various actions he required of us.

Bank yesterday too to comply with some legislation. No problem really but the odd falter so that I chose to be economical with the truth rather than explain a complicated situation.

I stupidly lost a pair of sunglasses. I went to the three shops that I'd been in to ask if I'd left them there. In two of the three cases I stumbled slightly as I asked. Nothing serious, just a slip of a tense that needed correction or a falter over the pronunciation of a word, not a problem I notice with English.

I wanted an appointment with my accountant. I used WhatsApp to avoid a telephone conversation.

A Spanish friend asked me for my opinion on a service he was considering buying. At the end of my reply, which I rewrote several times before running it through Google translate and a spell checker, I added my usual - I hope you can understand what I meant to say.

Easier to buy the poor supermarket meat than ask (and queue) in a butcher.

And so on.

It's nice living here. It's home. But the truth is that language affects every aspect of everything we do from watching the telly to getting a beer. Anyone who isn't fluent in both the culture and the language will always be a bit out of it.

Day to day

I remember some adverts at the cinema along the lines of "Which teacher changed your life?" It was a recruiting campaign for teachers; the idea being that teachers could make a real difference. Without the Ms. Williamsons or Mr. Gwizdaks there wouldn't be as many great novels or so many life enriching scientific discoveries. I've never really believed in the concept of inspirational teaching. I do not doubt that some teachers are better than others, that some teachers explain concepts better than others, that some teachers are more empathetic than others but, in the end, I think it's the student that counts. I was an average sort of student and I got average sort of results in a whole bundle of subjects. Who taught me seems to have been irrelevant. Nowadays anyway the very idea of a teacher as the fount of all knowledge seems so Victorian when my phone can tell me much more about chemistry than Messrs Lofthouse, Bottomley and all my other school chemistry teachers put together.

I'm certainly no inspirational teacher myself. I don't particularly care for the job and I do it because I get paid. I'm reasonably organised and I'm reasonably lively so I don't think I'm a bad teacher or anything but I'm certainly nothing out of the ordinary. I've now worked in three different "academies"  which seems to be the accepted translation of the word academia which is usually used to describe a private language school here in Spain.

One of my academies had a flexible learning system built around units of learning but two of the academies, including my present one, use a standard and very simple system which is a bit odd to British eyes. The students pay a fixed fee per month for a set number of classes. The classes are usually graded by ability or by age. So, take an example. In March this year if your classes were on Monday and Tuesday you would get ten classes but, if they were on Wednesday and Thursday you would only get eight. Actually that's not quite true because Father's Day, Thursday March 19th, is a holiday so there will only be seven classes for the Wednesday/Thursday brigade. It's a swings and roundabouts system and most people simply hand over their cash and come every month. You can play the system of course and some people do. December, for instance, is plagued with holidays so lots of students do November, miss December and come back in January.

English is a regular topic of conversation in Spain. There's a belief that without English you cannot succeed. Professionals often need English. Teachers, for example, have to have a high intermediate qualification in English (B2) no matter what subject or area they teach. On the radio there are often pieces complaining about the intrusion of English into the everyday language. It seems to be pretty cool for Spaniards to drop in a few English words to the conversation. The funny thing is that the variations in pronunciation mean that many native English speakers do not recognise the words as English. On top of that many supposedly English words aren't used correctly. Cross and camping for instance are well established, everyday words used by all Spaniards but the first is a cross country race and the second is a campsite. There is camping close to the start of the cross would, I suspect, confound most Brits.

So there is a sizeable market for English language teaching across the age range in Spain. The backbone of the majority of the academies though is children.  Responsible adults want their children to succeed. They send them to do English because either they are doing well at school and want to reinforce the success or because they are doing badly and want to make up the deficit. In reality the level of even the best of the youngsters is excruciatingly bad. I have no idea what's going on with English language teaching in Spanish schools but it isn't working for the youngsters I bump into.

It may be, of course, that for me at least there's no need for younger students to apply themselves. Most of the youngsters would rather be manipulating a games console, kicking a football or chatting with their pals than doing English and as long as they do well, or better, at school their parents will leave them alone. There is no real need for them to try and speak or understand English for me. I can offer neither substantial threats nor incentives. So even the nicest of them, the ones who seem keen, chatter all the time. Spain is a noisy country which means that everyone knows that you need to raise your voice to be heard. The result is that chatter often turns to shouting. Amongst the less interested, on top of the noise, there is fighting. They fight each other and occasionally they fight with me in the sense that they will try to wrest a board marker from my grip or force closed the book that they don't want to study. There is a lot of pinching and kicking amongst them and a fair bit of stabbing each other with pencils. Tearing up worksheets is the norm. I hate English (said in Spanish of course)  and a point blank refusal to participate in the activities are common. Several of the younger children seem to delight in dropping their trousers or throwing snot around. Most endearing. The environment is not one that fosters speedy language learning and one of the real differences between me and a properly trained teacher is that I have no idea about classroom management.

Personally of course I'm still struggling to learn a bit more Spanish, to improve my fluency and what not. So for the past few years the parallels between my own struggles with a language and those of my students have made the whole thing quite interesting. I don't find it quite so aborbing anymore now that I spend most of my time asking people to get off the table or to stop shouting.

A spaceman went visiting

I think it started with the chappie on passport control at Stansted. The notices around him requested that we please do this or that. No use of the imperative. No demands. He said hello. I greeted him back. The rest of the exchange was equally pleasant. Maggie and I were in England for a few days over Christmas and the welcome at the border was a change from my last couple of experiences and a good start to our trip.

I don't go to the UK that often and when I do I find myself noticing it much more than I did when I lived there. For instance, when we were staying with Maggie's family in Bedford I went for a stroll around the area they live. Lots of well established family homes, normal, average sort of homes built anytime between maybe the 1930s and the present. I took snaps; I found them intriguing. I'm sure the people who saw me wondered what I was doing and why. One chap even asked me. He'd been in his home since 1955 when it was a new build. 

In England people were generally very nice to me. A lot of my conversation with strangers has been in commercial premises. I thought I noticed a very direct approach. It struck me as an egalitarian approach; an exchange between equals  Sometimes in a queue or at a bar I also appreciated the very clear instructions or requests that preceded those exchanges. Some of it may well have been scripted by the HR department but I have no complaints about their work. Good English and a good approach I thought.

I really do notice the language. I often turn as I hear someone speaking English. I listen for new phrases, new idioms. I felt to do OK in the few conversations I had. I'm always slightly concerned when I go back that I'll sound like some Dickensian character speaking an archaic form of English mired in the past. There were a few minor blips but I thought everything was fine.

It was cold. It didn't look cold from behind the double or triple glazing in the kitchen with the central heating doing its stuff. The robins, magpies, tits, finches, spuggies and other birds that I recognised on the bird feeders which festooned the gardens of both houses we stayed in looked warm enough. In fact wearing a couple of layers of coats, gloves, a scarf and thick socks it didn't even feel cold outdoors for the first ten minutes but then the heat would seep through those socks and out of my feet. After twenty minutes my ears had crisped up and my runny nose was red. I could feel the blood vessels in my cheeks bursting. England is decidedly cooler than Spain.

It's a different colour too. At least where we've been in Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire it's a sort of muddy brown with green splodges and a leaden grey sky. To be fair though on Christmas Day and part of Christmas Eve it was cold, crisp and clear till it got dark - dark at four for pity's sake!. That lack of light was so depressing. There was a mournful sound that seemed to go with the flat even lighting. I'd never really thought of it before but it's a sound instantly associated with so many British winters. It's the call that crows make from the sharp edged, leafless winter trees.

The last time I was in the UK for Christmas was about ten years ago. If my memory serves there are now fewer Christmas trees in windows than there were then. The lights on houses were lovely though with the LEDs sparkling away outside countless houses. Light fighting back against the darkness as it were - very poetic. Spain would be better with more private lights in my opinion.

We got vegan food in one of the three houses we visited. Vegan is hardly traditional fare but, even then, surrounded by Christmas crackers and Santa shaped salt shakers the meal ws not only tasty but it felt traditional enough. Food in the other two houses followed well trodden paths - mulled wine, turkey, sprouts, mince pies Christmas cake or Marks and Sparks nibbles. Brilliant - comfortable, time honoured food. Nonetheless I noticed the variations in the food cupboard as I searched for Branston to put on my wholemeal breakfast toast. Decaff tea seemed so common as to be normal. If the food wasn't reduced fat or reduced sugar then it was enriched in fibre. The idea of a healthier lifestyle seemed to be everywhere and it extended to the different coloured recycling bins parked outside the houses and to the solar panels on rooftops. We have all those things in Spain too but they are all, in my petrified English terms, a bit "Good Life" or brogues and good thick cardigans with cod liver oil at breakfast rather than the norm.

I started this piece before leaving the UK but the phrasing was so bad (I blame having to type on the tiny Android keyboards) that it had to have a serious rewrite. I'm home now trying to keep comfortably warm inside the house in Culebrón. It was great to be with family and their families. We ate, talked and drank to excess. They gave us sumptuous gifts and we replied with bath salts and woolly gloves but it was lovely to relive one of those Christmases which eventually slows to a crawl as everyone dozes in front of the totally ignored telly in an alcoholic haze or turkey coma. Of course it wasn't even real gogglebox as it came from Netflix but the continuity was there.

I have to be honest though. Great place to visit but I'm glad to be home.

Comfy

I don't start work for a couple of hours so I thought I'd go to a local bar for a bit of a read and a coffee. I'm in La Unión, quite definitely a part of Spain, but the story is based in Pinoso.

Last weekend I was in Pinoso. I laughed to myself when I noticed a sign in a bread shop "I don't speak English but at least I try." It seemed strange that the shop owner felt the need to apologise for speaking Spanish in Spain.

I was in town to get the tyre fixed on my car so with that job done a reward seemed in order. I thought bacon sandwich. A bacon sandwich and a cup of tea. If tea were involved I needed somewhere British so I went to the charity shop and café bar run by the animal charity PAPAs.

Despite spending very little time in Culebrón I knew the two people who were serving the food and drinks in the bar. Whilst I was sitting there a couple of people passed through who said hello to me. The bacon sandwich involved close questioning about the crispiness of the meat and the colour of the bread. I gave confident answers. It was all together a pleasant and comfortable experience. And it was a good bacon sandwich - just as it should be.

Now I'm off for this coffee. I have three bars to choose from and all of them are good. I always get a courteous welcome and sometimes a friendly one. I won't have any linguistic or cultural problems and if I did I would be able to cope with them. The exchange will be a short one though - businesslike. Nobody will ask me when Maggie is due home, comment on my Facebook photos or ask if I still have the same car.

One of my students, a bloke who speaks cracking English full of idiom and colloquialisms, told me yesterday that when he lived in the UK people would ape his pronunciation and snigger.

Language, language always language to make it just a touch more or a touch  less comfortable.

Moonstruck

There's a bit in Moonstruck - actually it could be in any film featuring Italian people in the United States but I'm pretty sure it was Moonstruck - where the family sits down to eat mountains of spaghetti and behave like Italians. The film came to mind as I dithered between Spotted Dick and Lemon Meringue.

I'd been out all morning and I hadn't been anywhere near Spain. At one point there was a gang of us hanging around a petrol station just out of Barinas. I was one of them. I had an alcohol free beer in hand and I was enjoying the sunshine as I wandered around looking for a poster advertising the loss of a dog. A chap who was blowing up the tyres on his van shouted across to the pump attendant that the place had a very foreign feeling today. The petrol man just laughed.

We were on a car treasure hunt. This one was to raise money for Barney's dog rescue. There must have been about forty of us involved as we drove hither and thither counting the number of arches here and the purpose of the flagpoles there. Perfectly good fun. Our endpoint was the White House restaurant in Fortuna where I feasted on liver and onions. I even considered ordering a cuppa to finish the meal just to maintain the Britishness of it all.

I'm aware of my Britishness much more here than I ever was when I lived in the UK. I'm reminded of it every time I try to coax one of my students to pronounce would like wood and not like gwud and every time a waiter gives me that second glance as I order something.

I went for the mixed fruit cheesecake in the end by the way.