By the book

"You use a lot of continuous tenses in your books. Is there any particular reason for that?". It's an interview on the BBC Radio 4 arts programme, Front Row, some twenty years ago. The author was from the USA, he was pleased. "Being interviewed in England is just so great - you want to talk about my use of grammar!".

When we first arrived in Spain I wanted to try reading in Spanish but bookshops used to scare me. They usually had counters and the books were on shelves behind the counter. If you wanted to buy a particular book it was fine. You just asked. In Spanish. Of course they never had the book but you were hooked now, you had to order it, wait two or three weeks and then be shocked by the price. Spanish books are expensive. If you wanted to browse then tough luck. Slowly that changed. Faced by online sellers lots of traditional bookshops went to the wall, despite price protection, and the survivors became more self service. In the newer shops you could judge a book by its cover, turn pages, read a few lines, check the price and whatnot before deciding to buy or not.

I also discovered libraries. Cheap and browser friendly but not quite the same as owning a book. I also realised that books written in Spanish and bought from Amazon UK were, even after delivery charges, cheaper than the same book bought in Spain.

Then Maggie bought me a Kindle and my reading habits changed. It was still cheaper to buy Spanish language books from the UK than from Spain but now they came instantly and with samples. No nice covers though, no paper and glue smell on fanning the pages and print size became a personal choice. After a while Amazon forced me to become Spanish, website wise, but I was, and I am happy with Kindle. One of the big advantages of electronic reading for foreign languages is that the dictionary is inbuilt so, if looking up a word is essential, it interrupts the reading flow a lot less.

Reading in another language has made me more aware of the differences in books. Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne are a harder read than Sally Rooney or Kate Atkinson simply because of when they were written. Some authors though are easier to read than others because of their style and vocabulary choice. I'm a bit out of touch with modern English language writers but, as an example, I remember Philip Roth as being a harder read than Joseph Heller. If I decide to buy a book by Kate Bernheimer or Terese Svoboda in English I may or may not like it but it's very unlikely that I won't understand it.

That's not always the case when I'm buying a book in Spanish. Sometimes Spanish language books are full of words that I don't know, they can have a complicated, difficult to follow, structure and they can have cultural references that I don't understand. Julio Cortázar for instance was Argentinian and famous for his book Rayuela; easy enough to read but so pointless that I've tried it and abandoned it twice. Or Bartleby & Co by Enrique Vila-Matas, a supposed classic, which my own personal review records as being awful: dry, boring and incomprehensible. Sometimes the books are beyond my language grasp. I've tried to read Diario de un Cazador by Miguel Delibes a couple of times. It actually seems like it might be good but there is so much slang, so much colloquial speech, that I've had to admit it's beyond me.

When I buy a book that I find I don't like or I can't understand I often go back to the tried and tested for the next book. Someone like Isabel Allende for instance, or maybe a police story by Lorenzo Silva. Mind you that doesn't always work. I'd just read a book by Marcos Giralt Torrente that I really didn't like so I thought I'd read a Pérez-Reverte. This bloke pumps out books like there's no tomorrow and they're fine, easy to read, often with a nice narrative. I'd seen one called Cabo de Trafalgar, about the Battle of Trafalgar and I thought it would be a hoot to have a book where Nelson and Collingwood were the baddies. Bad mistake, nautical terms on every line: topsails, boatswains, forecastles, rigging and monkeys left right and centre but also with French and English speech spelled to be pronounced in Spanish - guar is bisnes for war is business - I still enjoyed it but it wasn't easy. So, lets hope that Jesús Carrasco has a good one with Intemperie which is the book I've just bought.

You say you love me

One of the things I've realised about being old is that my reference points are different to those of younger people. I know that very few people go out and buy a printed newspaper nowadays, I don't either, but I still say “I read such and such in the paper” or “the papers say this or that”, even though I actually read the news on my mobile phone. I think of the telly as having times when programmes are on rather than calling them up on Netflix. Mention playing a game and I visualise football or Monopoly before I think of Destiny 2.

I used to watch the Star Trek: Next Generation. I haven't seen an episode for years as Star Trek isn't particularly popular in Spain. Actually it often takes me aback how culturally unaware lots of Spaniards are about US culture. I'd never quite realised how fifty first state we Britons were until I lived here. Anyway in this particular episode, as I remember, maybe inaccurately, the captain of the Enterprise is stranded on a planet with a non human adversary. Slowly the relationship between the two of them improves but communication is difficult because the non human speaks in cultural references. It would be as though a Briton used the date of the Battle of Hastings, 10th October 1066, as a way of saying, total rout, defeat with long lasting consequences or a turning point on history.

One of the big problems for my students is that the exams they have to pass are written by people who know about 1066, people with whom I share a culture. Those exam writers know about raising money for charities, about schools owning minibuses and about young people going clubbing. Spaniards don't. So when the conversation or the recording that my students need to understand is about a jumble sale for money towards a new minibus, for instance, my students have a cultural hill, as well as a linguistic one, to climb.

Yesterday I had a class where only one student turned up. The student is very young but she's good at English and refreshingly keen on learning. Nonetheless two hours is a long class for even the most dedicated single student. I needed a change of pace. I remembered a song that I'd prepared for another class of teenagers and asked her if she fancied doing the song Friends by Anne-Marie, at which point she burst into song. She went on to tell me lots more songs that she "loved" or "adored" often with vocal accompaniment. Obviously enough she asked me if I knew this or that song or artist and my lack of cultural awareness, of things Spanish and also of things young, soon began to show through.

As we talked the young woman was almost tripping over her words with excitement. Music is obviously something important in her life.  It reminded me that I had seen a list, "in the paper", a piece from el País in English, written by someone called Christy Romer.  I've just Googled the name and it's a him and he's based in Cambridge.  The list was called "12 classic songs guaranteed to get any Spanish house party moving." Now when I'd looked at this list I hadn't believed it. For a start the examples that the article gave of British "never fail" dance floor fillers were No Scrubs and Come on Eileen. Hmm? Anyway, giving that I had a young person in front of me, keen to talk about music, the sort of person who wouldn't, if she were British, be old enough to believe that the funniest thing ever seen on telly was the Only Fools and Horses episode with the chandelier, I went through the list with her. I hadn't thought the listing was any good because they were all very old songs and lots of them, from my limited knowledge of the artists, or just guessing from the song titles, were either very bouncy songs with lots of voices doing the chorus or overwrought solo efforts. It's quite hard to think of UK equivalents but maybe The Specials and Too Much Too Young or Viva España or some collaboration between Madness with Chas and Dave for the bouncy style. For the style of song which requires a pained expression on the singer's face, so typical of lots of quite famous Spanish songs, UK examples might be Tom Jones with Delilah, Barry Ryan with Eloise or maybe a bit of Renée and Renato. The fact that the majority of the songs must have been released twenty five years before my student was born made not a jot of difference. She recognised and sang every single one.

Class over and I was on my way home. I talked to my bosses who are both sub 30 I think. Young in my books. I mentioned the list to them. They too knew all the songs, maybe a bit Andalucia, was their comment but it seemed to me that they too recognised the list as being legitimate if not, necessarily, definitive.

Just another lesson in Spanish culture for me. Curiouser and curiouser!

For anyone who cares and for the few Spanish readers this is the list.

Celia Cruz - La vida es un carnaval
Rafaella Carrà - Hay que venir al sur
Las Grecas - Te estoy amando locamente
Los Del Río - Sevilla tiene un color especial
Gipsy Kings - Volare
Alaska - A quién le importa
Los Manolos - Amigos para siempre
Sevillanas - El Adiós
Camilo Sesto - Vivir así es morir de amor
The Refrescos - Aquí no hay playa
Bongo Botrako - Todos los días sale el sol
Raphael - Mi Gran Noche

Sitting and walking

I half remember an early city walk that I did. It was around Oxford and the chap introduced himself as the obsequious Turnbull. He was about twelve years old, or so it seemed to me at the time, and he wore a threadbare suit complete with bow tie. He did a good tour though. I like walking tours around towns and cities. Trees and geology in Leeds, Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel, writers in Dublin or 1726 in Petrer - they're all worth a go. I don't even mind those leaflet based walks that do the drainage system in the Fens, Bomber Command in 1942 or Carmen Conde in Cartagena.

We've always tried to throw a few cultural things in amongst the alcohol and wild excesses of our lives (well that and the nightly cocoa) and even having to do it it in Spanish hasn't quite vanquished us. I've taken, purportedly, willing house guests to the theatre or to a film. We've done lots of music - festivals, flamenco, ballet, zaerzuela, contemporary, jazz, latin and opera. Folky and amateur stuff comes out of our ears and even word based activities, like poetry and comedy, haven't been out of bounds.

We've been a bit culturally bereft for the past few months though. Mediaeval and craft fairs, drinking and eating too much with pals and blessing donkeys, for all their fine attributes, don't really count as culture. So I was interested to see a bit of theatre advertised in nearby Novelda. The venue was the Casa Modernista, the Modernist House - a house we think of as being Art Nouveau - all intricate woodwork and stained glass. A theatre company is doing some sort of historical recreation there.

Almost at the same time Yecla advertised guided walks based on the books and life of the writer Azorín. They are commemorating the fifty years since his death. Azorín is getting a fair bit of attention locally because he was born in Monóvar and went to school in Yecla. Both places get mention in his books and so both have organised events. I didn't really see the Azorín link but we got to see a Billy Wilder film a little while ago as a result.

So I set about booking the Azorín tour around Yecla and the theatre in Novelda. A splendidly simple process for both. Google forms from Facebook in Novelda and a simple, reassuringly old fashioned email to Yecla.

Yecla came back quickly with an amusingly intricate form, so precise that it accepted my reservation at 8.03 Central European Time. The Google form didn't work so well. It took a couple of old technology emails to sort it out. The venue people emailed me in Spanish and later, for good measure, in perfectly acceptable English to say that there had been a bit of a blip but they had it in hand.

I was looking for a quote about Spring and the changes it rings to round off this post. Tolstoy's "Spring is a time of plans and projects" would have done nicely but Margaret Atwood made me laugh more "In the Spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."