Life in Culebrón

I have innumerable stories about going to the cinema. I started young and I'm still adding to the store. As an eleven year old I marvelled as my Auntie Lizzie sobbed while watching The Sound of Music. When I was fourteen my dad insisted that we went to a bigger cinema in Leeds to get the full Cinerama effect of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was well over 30 when I tried some sort of gruel that Poles prefer to popcorn as I watched a Swedish film with French subtitles in a Warsaw cinema. In Banjul I wondered if the running and shouting antics of the audience for a Kung Fu film would turn violent. As a student in the 1970s I recall scraping together enough loose change to see Last Tango in Paris with someone who really thought it was about dancing. In Madrid, in the early 80s, I sat, rifle-less, on a grassy knoll one August evening for cinema in the park. Hooking the speakers over the wound down car windows at a drive-in in Pennsylvania. Delighting in seeing season after season of black an...

Despite my best efforts none of my students would ever be confused with a native English speaker. It's the same for me. Try as I might, when I speak Spanish, I sound like an English person mispronouncing Spanish with the wrong cadence. Lots of Britons around here complain that, when they say something, in Spanish, to a Spaniard, they get a blank look but that, when they eventually get through and ask the Spaniard to repeat the offending word or phrase it sounds exactly the same, to them, as what they originally said. Most of us are, apparently, deaf to some sounds and incapable of reproducing others. We went to see a French film last night called Historias de una indecisa in Spanish or, originally, L'Embarras du choix, in French. It was a nice, enjoyable, light romantic comedy; very French with lots of style and even more eating and drinking. One of the characters was supposed to be Scottish; in reality the actor was English. Either way the man knows how to speak Englis...