Looking for an easy life

Ages ago quite a famous teacher of English here was being interviewed on the radio. The reporter asked him how long it took to become bilingual. His answer was the sort of answer you don't want to hear, particularly if you've just bought one of those "Learn Arabic in three months" or "Swahili in ten minutes a day", type courses. He reckoned about 3,000 hours or about four hours a day, Monday to Friday, for nearly four years. As he stressed that was study type study not just listening to the radio or reading magazines. He did have faster methods which, surprisingly, involved spending money on his courses, materials and schools.

The interviewer went on to ask how many of this bloke's students had become bilingual. To be honest my neuron deficient brain doesn't recall exactly what he said but it was some hideously low number - 10, 20, maybe 100 - out of about 25,000 students. He did go on to say that only about 2,000 had crashed and burned; absolutely incapable of picking up the most basic stuff. He reckoned the vast majority abandoned learning when they'd reached a level they were happy with, be that beer ordering or engaging in a heated discussion about environmental politics.

I recognise what this bloke is talking about. I've been trying to learn Spanish for ages but it's years since I've done any real study. I can't remember the last time I sat with a text book trying to memorise verb tables or understand maybe disjunctive pronouns or demonstrative adjectives. I still pretend to be trying to learn things. I often write down a new word that I've read or heard, I read books in Spanish and go to the cinema to see films dubbed into Spanish. My Spanish is alrightish but sometimes I can hear the mistakes I'm making as I fail to make myself understood and I sometimes don't understand. I still shy away from conversations if I can.

Recently I've become very aware of my inability to pronounce the R with sufficient vigour for most Spaniards. They hear the equivalent of "Is this chew weseived?" when I'm trying to say "Is this chair reserved?". Spanish is a language where the link between the letters and the pronunciation of the word is inviolable so the wrong sound in a word can cause profound difficulties. English speakers are used to dealing with inconsistent pronunciation. We read that some ancient band was happy to record a record without any psychological angst at the changed pronunciation of two words spelled the same. Pronouncing so, sew and sow the same (but not if it's a sow) doesn't lead to disbelief amongst the population of Bradford. Spaniards though do wonder how reed and read and red and read can be word pairs. What we perceive as a very close reproduction of the Spanish word can, at times, be almost incomprehensible to a Castilian speaker.

Anyway, unfettered by work I thought it was about time to put a bit more effort into my Spanish. I've found someone willing to exchange some Spanish for English and I'm paying someone to correct my conversational Spanish. It won't work of course. The language hasn't magically seeped in in fourteen years and it won't this time either. Just like the interviewee said what I really need to do is to put in some graft but I'm a bit off hard work so that won't be happening. I don't suppose it'll do any damage though.

Crime and punishment

I've got a few hours of teaching over the summer with an academy here in Pinoso. Sixty hours of preparation in six weeks for the B1 exam.

Within the European Union there is an agreed framework for language study. Various educational bodies organise exams to accredit learning at the various levels which go from starters - A1 - through to more or less bilingual at C2. So B1 is a lower intermediate type course.

This is the official description of the B1 level: Can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. Can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an area where the language is spoken. Can produce simple connected text on topics which are familiar or of personal interest. Can describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes & ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans.

So basically it says that you can get by in situations that you know about with texts, recordings and conversation in English. Obviously enough, within the documentation for the exams there is more detail but to give an example, about pronunciation, the documentation says that a word should be intelligible.

Now I have a critic. A Spaniard who lives in the UK and who always takes me to task whenever I make generalisations about Spaniards. So here we go. I await his comments.

It seems to me that one of the elements of the Spanish education system is to punish errors. The exam I am teaching to is run by Cambridge Examinations and their style is to reward success. To give an example at school. If a Spanish pupil fails more than a given number of subjects then they are sent back to repeat the year. There are opportunities to resit the exams between the end of one academic year and the start of the next so lots of Spanish youngsters spend a good deal of their summer holidays cramming for exams. If they pass sufficient of the failed subjects they can continue without repeating the year.

Lots of the students I deal with have learned with the la Escuela Oficial de Idiomas, the Official School of languages. Without having direct experience of la escuela oficial it sounds to me as though they have some quality teachers doing a quality job. On the other hand they seem to be very nit picky. They teach the sort of English that is grammatically correct but, at the same time, old fashioned. It may well be true that "Could I have an orange juice, please?" is more formal than "Can I have an orange juice, please?" but I don't think many English speakers would worry about that. Indeed it may well be that the escuela oficial is even more grammatically correct and teaches "May I have an orange juice, please?" I was taught, and I still say, "If I were you..." but I have no problem with "If I was you..."  - I'm sure the escuela oficial does. So the students are barraged with lots of rules, lots of detail. They become so caught up in the detail of the grammar that they find it difficult to speak or to write fluidly. Now grammar is important but if it gets in the way of basic communication it becomes a problem.

So one of the problems I have with my students is getting them to see the broader picture. Through their learning career they have seen their work returned covered in red pen. Every detail mistake is punished. Rather than being praised for having written something that has mistakes but would be perfectly comprehensible to an English speaker, the only comments are on the errors. Students are corrected as they speak breaking the spontaneity and communication. Obviously mistakes have to be corrected but they don't need to be over emphasised. "Then these two persons go to the cinema," says the student. "Ah, says the teacher - so these two people went to the cinema - and what film did they see?" Corrected but not deflated. Oh, and I've been told a couple of times by Spanish colleagues and employers that I should replace my black or blue biro with a red one so that the mistakes are highlighted.

We were doing something about the speaking exam and I mentioned that asking for clarification was a good thing - it shows that students are behaving as real people would if they were speaking. I mentioned that navigating around a word they didn't know or remember was also considered to be positive. "Oh, I've forgotten the name but it's the thing you use to dig the garden". I sensed that the students didn't really believe me. On the listening exam where lots of the questions are multiple choice I was stressing that they should leave no question unanswered. if you have three choices and you don't know which it is give yourself a sporting chance and plump for one. "Don't they take marks off for getting the answer wrong?" I was asked.

The tyranny of mealtimes

I used to listen to the Archers. For those of you that don't know the Archers is a long running British radio soap. The reason that I started to listen was that it used to start at 7.05pm. By then I was usually in the car and on the way to a meeting. And, that's because evening meetings in the UK invariably started at 7.30pm. I don't know whether that's still true. I can't really speak for UK habits nowadays but my guess is that things haven't changed. Likewise I would guess that the most popular slots for dinner reservations in restaurants will be 8pm or 8.30pm. Countries have timetables and most people know that Spain's is a little different.

Making a sweeping generalisation, as though it were the truth, most Spaniards leave the house with a minimal breakfast around 7.30 or 8am and get to work for the usual sort of times – 8,8.30 or 9am. Shops and lots of offices don't open till 10am. There's a mid morning break for something reasonably substantial - a sandwich, fruit, yogurt and drink sort of sized snack. Lunch is somewhere around 2pm or 3pm and I think that the majority of people still go home or to a restaurant and have a quite hefty midday meal. There's time to do a few of the household chores as well as to eat before going back for the second stint of three or four hours work starting at 4pm, maybe at 5pm. Dinner is usually eaten anywhere from 9pm to 11pm and lots of people manage to fit in some sort of snack between lunch and dinner - it's a good time for a tapa. Now that's like saying that everyone in the UK works 9 till 5. There are as many working patterns as there are businesses but the idea of a morning shift and an afternoon shift divided by lunch is a sound generalisation for a good percentage of the population.

So, if a Spaniard were making a dinner reservation 8pm just wouldn't do - most would be still at work and the majority of restaurants would only just be gearing up for the evening anyway. You would be perfectly safe with a 9.30pm reservation, though in some places and at some times of year it may be a little early. 10pm would be fine. Later wouldn't be odd especially in summer or when something was going on. Events, theatre and stuff generally kick off quite early, maybe at 7.30pm or 8pm which doesn't quite fit with the hypothesis that everyone's still at work but I've been to lots of plays that start at 10pm too. In summer, for instance in our local fiesta, many of the performances start at 11pm or midnight.

At work, at the job in Pinoso, they asked me if I fancied doing a couple of intensive 60 hour English courses in July. The truth is that I would rather read a book and lounge in the garden but the tax man sent me a hefty bill this year and I need the money so I said yes. I didn't need to guess much at the timetable. We'd have a slot in the morning and a slot in the afternoon. My arithmetic was up to it; four weeks working Monday to Friday at three hours a session, fifteen hours per week or sixty hours across the month doubled up for the two courses. Probably 9am to 12 noon and probably 4pm till 7pm or maybe an hour later. Either slot would be very normal, very standard.

Then we ran into a snag. My employers run a playscheme in the summer and a venue change meant that the morning slot wasn't open to us. Then the Spanish timetable dealt another blow. We couldn't possibly start before 4pm, any earlier and people wouldn't even have time for a quick lunch. And getting home for the next meal meant that going much beyond 9pm was pushing it a bit too. Again the basic arithmetic that Miss Bushell had driven into nearly 60 years ago came into play. Nine minus four is five and that's less than six and six hours is what you need for two courses of three hours a day. In order to get in the 120 hours for the two courses we'd need 24 sessions. The neat package of the same time slot for a nice self contained 60 hour course was out of the window. Other internal timetabling considerations made it even more complicated until eventually we ended up with a course running across six weeks with a variety of time slots.

I once shared a house with someone who stuck to a strict eight hours work, eight hours leisure, eight hours sleep policy. He was completely out of step with society. He'd have had a hard time of it in Spain.

A theory what I have

I was asked if I'd ever written a post about learning Spanish. To be honest I wasn't sure. Normally my blogs complain about my inability to construct an error free phrase, which Spanish people understand, rather than anything on the methodology. I had a quick search through the blog and I couldn't find anything specific. So, here it is but, before launching into it, I should say that there are tomes and tomes on the theory of learning languages. People who know how brains work have theories about how to learn languages or language acquisition in general. They know much more than me. They are right and I am wrong. This attempt is going to be, relatively, short. It will contain lots of generalisations and it's a personal and not a researched view. And, of course, you need to bear in mind that my Spanish is rubbish.

Learning a language is easy. The vast majority of children do it. The method is also pretty obvious. The children listen to the words and phrases. They grasp that there is an idea behind the word or phrase. Maybe it explains something, maybe it is to give a command or order or maybe it is to transmit information. They learn the words or phrases and then build on those to express their own questions and views on the world. Later they learn how to read and write.

So, one of my first beliefs about learning a language is that it is just one big memory task. Unless you know some words then you won't be able to speak, read, write or listen. You have to learn lots of words and lots of phrases. This is especially true of idiomatic expressions. I use an example with my English language learners. OK, let's get the lead out, let's get cracking and put this baby to bed. It makes sense to me but it would be a bugger to understand if I were Spanish. The Spaniards do the same. Simple combinations of ordinary words that have completely different meanings to the sense of any of the individual words that they are made up of. They are easy to overcome though, you just have to learn them. You'll know a method that works for you for learning things. It is not a fast process. Learning a language for most people takes thousands of hours.

It's not just knowing the words and phrases - it's saying them adequately enough so that they are understood. It doesn't take much to make a word incomprehensible. For instance a Spaniard, speaking English, once asked me for some un-irons. There was no context to help - the word was onions. We English have plenty of trouble with lots of sounds that are easy for Spaniards. I'm not talking about the ones we know are difficult like the double rr or the y that sounds like a throaty j. Take the letter o and the way that you just voiced it to yourself - like oh. So for our town, Pinoso, we tend to say pin-oh-so when the sound is more like pin-oss-oh. What seem like quite small mistakes to us make words incomprehensible to Spaniards who have been brought up with a language that ties the sound of the letters to the sound of the words. Spaniards have a systematic and almost unbreakable set of rules for speaking Spanish. That's why they have so much difficulty saying would, friends or soap. So that section in your Spanish books that gives you examples of how to say the letters and vowel combinations is really, really important.

There's another little aside to speaking a language that is the rhythm that a language has. Think of the way that Italians sing as they speak or how Australians stress the end of a sentence, the way Swedes sound like the chef from Sesame Street. We have a cadence to English that is confusing for Spaniards. English speakers need to try to mimic the Spanish rhythms and tones. Without doing that you're going to have a lot of trouble, for instance, asking a question. ¿Estás de acuerdo?

I'm not a big fan of grammar. The rules for most languages, other than Esperanto, came after the language existed. Google tells me that the first English dictionary was published in 1604, the year that the Hampton Court conference laid down the rules for the King James Bible. That means the language was pretty well established by then. The first decent English dictionary was Samuel Johnson's in 1755. That's the one that Baldrick mentions in Blackadder, the one without sausages in it. The grammar that gets reproduced in grammar books is a description of the way the language is used rather than the rules from which a language is constructed. A bit like the difference between Common Law, based on societal customs recognised and reinforced by the judicial system, and modern laws which are drafted in intricate detail. I can't deny that grammar is useful. I teach grammatical rules in English and you have to learn the basic rules of Spanish grammar if you are going to speak Spanish. You need to know how verb tenses work how genders agree and hundreds of other things but there is a point when the exceptions to grammar rules, in my opinion, make them almost useless. So, again in my opinion, there is good grammar, useful grammar, and almost useless grammar. In an English context think about Tesco and Sainsbury's who speak good English. Nonetheless, they used, in the past, to have ten items or less tills (countable nouns should use fewer) and McDonald's who also speak good English, say I'm loving it despite knowing that stative verbs aren't generally used in the continuous form. On the other hand the difference between the use of you're (you are) and your (belonging to you) is big grammar. Big grammar is something that Tesco or McDonalds can't play with. 

One of the areas of Spanish grammar that confounds most English speakers is the subjunctive. Old people, like me, still use the subjunctive in English from time to time - it is important that he learn the rules or I wish it were sunny - but the form is definitely on the way out. On the other hand it is very much alive and well in Spanish. The rule says something like the subjunctive is used when the meaning of the main clause makes the events described in the subordinate clause "unreal" i.e. not known to be a reality at the time of the sentence. So, for instance if you see a T shirt with a picture of Kurt Cobain on it in a shop window and go into the shop and say that you want the T shirt with the picture of Kurt on it you use the indicative but if you're not sure that the shop has a T shirt with said picture then you have to use the subjunctive - busco la camiseta que lleva una foto de Kurt (you're sure such a shirt exists, indicative) and busco una camiseta que lleve una foto de Kurt (the shirt may or may not exist so you use the subjunctive). Now you tell me that any ordinary person learning Spanish is going to be able to work that out from first principles in the heat of the confusion of trying to construct a sentence and buy a shirt and I'll be happy to call you a liar. On the other hand most subjunctives come after little set phrases - es posible que - for instance, is followed by a subjunctive as are hundreds of others. If you're willing to slog it out and learn all those little introductory phrases then you will get the subjunctive right as often as most Spaniards. We're back to memorising the language.

So, my advice on grammar is to learn the stuff that you use in nearly every sentence you would ever use. Learn how to use articles, adjectives, adverbs, how to decline verbs and, indeed, learn as much grammar as you like and as you possibly can but, as soon as it seems to be becoming too esoteric, fall back on how children learn language and learn some phrases as the basis for other similar phrases.

Something else I would recommend is that you read things in Spanish and listen to things in Spanish. Spaniards and Britons do not use the same language to express the same idea. What the language learner is after is how to express what they want to say. Most Britons can say "good morning" in Spanish but if they were to overthink it then they're actually saying goods days - "buenos días". I sometimes despair when a fellow Briton is complaining about a Spanish waiter asking "¿Qué te pongo?" because, the Briton says, that the phrase means "What I put you?" Alright, the first definition of poner in the Spanish-English dictionary may be put but it's not the only one and, for heaven's sake, the question is obvious enough. Consider that the idea is "what do you want?" or "what can I get you?" even though there aren't a lot of directly translatable words in the phrase.

Just to finish off here are some disconnected jottings in no particular order and mainly for people living in Spain. I like classes because, once you've signed up, you feel you have to go. The people who employ me in Pinoso at Academia 10 would be very happy to sell you a class. Text books, learn Spanish type text books, vary in quality but most of the modern ones I've seen are pretty good. In Pinoso there is an intercambio session - half an hour of Spanish in return for half an hour of English every Monday evening from 8.30 at the Coliseum in Constitución. Talking to yourself is good because you realise the words you can't pronounce and you can often hear yourself making mistakes. Describing things as you walk around might help. Reading things like signs and number plates as you do the shopping is simple and easy. Five words or phrases at a time rather than the first two pages of your new vocabulary book. Start by watching TV ads rather than feature films. If you like reading Mills and Boone better the Spanish equivalent than starting with Episodios nacionales. Maybe set your phone or Tom Tom to Spanish rather than English. And a long etcetera.

September

It's pretty hot. Yesterday I went to Villena to have a look at the Moors and Christians parade. The parade started at 4pm and, according to the State Weather Agency, that was the exact time when the day's temperature reached its zenith  of 40.4ºC. Just for my mum that's 104ºF.

It's a bit unusual for it to be so warm in September. September is the month when Spain gets back to normal. The youngsters are going back to school, shops are back on regular opening hours, the Guardia Civil shelves its various traffic campaigns until either Christmas or the next long bank holiday weekend. On the telly the new series are getting under way and, on the radio, the journalists and DJs who have held the fort whilst the better known presenters take their holidays are going back to whatever it is they do when it's not July or August. League football is more or less back into full swing. The courts are about to go back into session too so we can look forward to a revival of all the corruption trials that have been on hold during the sandcastle and siesta season. It's not quite everyone who goes back to normal because there is a bit of a move to taking holidays, amongst groups like pensioners for instance, at the beginning of September when the weather is still good but the prices of accommodation and travel drop.

The politicians haven't had their usual long break. They've been in apocryphal darkened rooms with beer and sandwiches. We've had two General Elections one in December of 2015 and one in June of this year and in both cases the two traditionally big parties have found their number of parliamentary seats reduced because of the emergence of two new parliamentary groups. This means that nobody has a clear majority and the politicians have all been doing the it's my bat, my ball and I'm not playing. First the socialists had a go at forming a government and failed leading to the second General Election and we've just watched as the conservatives failed to form a government too. There's still talking to do and maybe they'll cobble something together but positions are so fixed that it looks unlikely. The general view of politicians, always bad, is at an all time low - the word vergüenza, disgrace or shame, is on everybody's lips. There are a couple of big local elections coming up which may lead to change but generally the pundits are talking about a third General Election. Spain's Constitution lays down a strict timetable for the holding of elections and without a change to the law, which is in the air but which needs all the parties to agree, the next general election will be held on Christmas Day. Can you imagine the turnout?

I'm still on holiday, or rather I'm not working. It's just about now that the various education courses are advertised but the start date of even the earliest courses won't be till the middle of this month and the majority will kick off at the beginning of October. It looks as though I'm going to be back with the same employers as last year which is not exactly a reason for rejoicing but it's an income and I need to earn some money. With a bit of luck I may also have a second little job teaching English at an academy in Pinoso. If it happens, and I have personal experience of the problems of getting new courses off the ground, it will be good to be working in my own community for a change.

Knobs and knockers

I didn't use to notice English much. Maybe it came as a bit of a surprise when the radio alarm burst into life and I hadn't the faintest idea what Brian Redhead or John Humphrys was saying to me for the fleeting seconds of semi consciousness before I woke up. Then that was a long time ago. The fact that there were still clock radio alarms proves it.

I'm very aware of language now. For one thing I live in a place where speaking easily isn't, like breathing, just second nature - it's something that has to be striven for. On top of that, my students, well the ones who don't shout all the time, ask me questions about English. They seem to want rules. They want rules of grammar. I'm not a big believer in grammar. A set of rules invented after the fact to make sense of something that is essentially random in my opinion. I don't know a grammar rule without exceptions and, in many cases, the exceptions are much more common, in everyday speech, than the regular stuff. If language weren't illogical then Arabic speakers, French speakers, Chinese speakers and English speakers would obviously have chosen the universally correct word rather than using بيض, œuf, 雞蛋 and egg to describe the same thing.

Students aren't happy when I tell them that, for quite a lot of things, the answer as to why we use this formula or that expression is because we do and there is no rule they can learn to remember it and no better explanation to be found.

Lots of the people I have worked for have told me that I should always speak English when teaching. Generally, I try to but, to be honest, when it is a direct swap and I know the Spanish I just give the translation. How long would it take to describe an egg? How many other words would you need to describe along the way? And I don't think that saying huevo is the Spanish for the English word egg is going to spoil anything. After all, when all the the roundish reproductive bodies produced by the female of many animals consisting of an ovum and its envelope of albumen, jelly, membranes, egg case, or shell, according to species translation is over the typical Spanish speaking student is going to remember, or forget, huevo.

I always think that things, in the sense of nouns, have a direct translation. Logically things like car, boat, bone must have direct translations. Some things, the less solid things, may have cultural differences built into the language so that we need to add a bit of interpretation to find an equivalent or useable word. Take an idea like nice, agreeable, pleasant and you will guess that the English variations lead to other variations with differenet nuances in Spanish.

I've run into a couple of odd cases recently though. Spaniards don't seem to have a single translation for door handle. That's a standard house sized door with a standard household handle sort of door handle. Hook came to my attention again recently too. You'd think that a hook, in the sense of a reduced size version of a Captain Hook like hook bought from an ironmongers, as an option to a screw or a nail, would be easy enough but, in a class with just six students, there was no one word that was acceptable to all of them.

Funny old world isn't it?

Driving home the other way

Now that I work in Cieza my route to work has changed. It's about about 60 kms each way and the journey time - that is the time from when, with seat belt fastened and radio playing I accelerate away from our front gate to the moment I park up outside my workplace - is about 45 minutes. Even with my primitive arithmetical skills I can work out that means I average just 80kph or 50mph.

On the way to Cieza from Culebrón the left from our track onto the main CV83 would be an illegal manoeuvre involving crossing a solid white line and hatched areas. Should the car around the corner be Guardia Civil that would be a 300€ fine and goodness knows how many points off the spotless 15 of my licence. Would I do that or would I be more likely to make the legal right turn, cross into the village, turn around in front of Eduardo's and rejoin the CV83 heading out towards Pinoso? The choice, as that voice on Blind Date used to say, is yours.

Towards Pinoso then, at the roundabout just before the town off to the right skirting the industrial estate and the open land where the bullocks are chased around by the local lads at Fiesta time in August. I've wondered about stopping a couple of times to take a snap up the hillside there because with the morning sunshine the houses on the hillside in the Santa Catalina area look very colourful and jolly. Left at the next roundabout then and skirting the North of Pinoso before clearing the town and heading out towards Jumilla. Careful of the speed limit through Casas Ibañez - lots of stories there about speed traps - and across the border into the Murcia Region. Off to the right the Sierra del Carche and its 1372 metre peak. All along the road small hamlets, cultivated land - lots of vines and olives and almonds - a modern bodega and quite a lot of fallow or maybe unusable land.

The road is relatively straight with almost no traffic and the car tends to settle at something comfortable. It would be easy to find myself exceeding the 90kph open road speed limit. There are a few bends just before and past the failed Venta Viña P Restaurant and Los Olmos, the very strangely located kart racing track, hotel and restaurant complex. After a while the road straightens and drops with a great view out to the Sierra de Sopalmo - a big wall of hills and, in the distance, the A33 motorway.

Up to now I've been heading basically East but somewhere around here I want to start heading South on the A33 which runs down to Murcia City. Until quite recently I would have used one of the  trunk roads, the National or N344 to make that journey but, in 2012 the first 30kms or so of the Motorway, the Autovía, A33 between Blanca and close to Jumilla was opened having cost some 122 million euros. Eventually the A33 will connect motorways coming out of Andalucia and Murcia with motorways in Alicante which will make all sorts of routes faster but will principally create an inland route to cut the corner on the way up to France. There is a snag though. Although the Pinoso road is the principal East West road in the area the road builders, in their wisdom, chose not to add direct access to the motorway. Instead I have to drive a few kilometres on the old, and now very quiet, ex main road or I can cut the corner and go through the village of Encebras. I like the Encebras route despite the 20kph speed limit, which I obviously keep to, because there is the vague chance of seeing somone on foot. I did pass a tractor the other day but otherwise no vehicles so far. And Encebras has street lighting which always strikes me as bizarre for a village that can have no more than 50 inhabitants.

I do about 18kms on the motorway. Nice black tarmac and clear white lines with very little traffic. So far the journey has taken about 20 minutes. The motorway bit takes another ten minutes or so. Suddenly there's a built up area just off the motorway, the village built around the old, 1868, railway station for Blanca. It's 10km to Blanca but there's Spanish railways for you. Apparently 800 people live in Estación de Blanca but all I notice really are the Blancasol agricultural co-op and the bar where the Guardia Civil park up for a mid morning coffee. It's quite a strange road layout to get onto the RM402 which connects the motorway I've just come off with the motorway I want to join, the A30, heading out of Murcia for Albacete and on to Madrid. There is a marked change too from countryside to messy urban in this bit of Murcia and that means much more traffic.

I have to take a bit of a left turn across traffic which is quite an unusual operation on a free flowing Spanish road. It's much more common to send you right into a little semicircle to allow you to turn left by crossing traffic from a stop sign. The junction is marked by a strange, single, abandoned block of green and white flats built in the middle of nowhere. The junction also has unexpected adverse camber and leads into a another slip road which is both the exit and entry to the A30. That can be fun at times. Some eight kilometres heading back North now, off on the Cieza turn, a couple of roundabouts and into the entrance to the town. Bonica Cieza it says on a big sign just there, a very Murcian way to suggest that the town is pretty. Certainly the local inhabitants seem to stick up for it and what I've seen looks nice enough. Down past the park and a big sort of esplanade which is always full of people out for a bit of a stroll in the evening, full twist around a roundabout and then a right turn onto the bit of wasteland that surrounds the school where I do my English teaching. Then it's just a case of parking up and avoiding any large shards of glass from any newly broken beer bottles from the night before.

The route home isn't an exact repeat but my guess is that you've taken as much as you can now so let's pretend it is.

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.