Neither one nor the other

I went to the UK, well England, a few weeks ago. I like England well enough but I don't visit that often. I probably go a little more often than once a year but I usually only stay three or four days. My visit in February was my first since May of last year. Both of my last two visits have been prompted by my mum being less well than usual.

It's funny going back. I'm English, I'll always be English and my English is still pretty good - a bit old fashioned maybe but good. My language skills and my cultural knowledge make me feel comfortable in England. I usually know how things are organised, how to behave but if things have changed, or start to go a bit awry, I can ask, I can talk to people, find out what's going. Nonetheless I had, at one point, to hold out a handful of coins and ask the person on the other side of the counter to take the appropriate money. I am, of course, aware that simply using physical money makes me a bit odd but, in the heat of the moment, I couldn't decide which coin was which. There were lots of other tiny incidents to highlight that things are not as they were when I left and sometimes, despite being on home turf, I was slightly uncomfortable in some situations.

I lived in Cambridgeshire for about twenty years and I left a bit short of twenty years ago. For several of those years I worked for a charity. At one point I recruited my dad to help out with something, I don't remember exactly what, but it involved him phoning lots of people we worked with. He found that at least half of the people presumed he was me. On the phone it could only be accent. My dad died in 2000 but long before that he was in hospital in Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. I drove up from Cambridgeshire to see him. At one point the nursing staff needed to do something ghastly related to bodily fluids so they pulled a curtain around his bed and chased me away. I sat on the edge of the bed of the bloke next to my dad in the ward. We chatted a bit. "Where are you from?," he asked.  "From here," I replied. "No," he said, "not now, where are you from, where are your roots?" "I was born in this very hospital," I said. "Well you don't sound like you were," he concluded. I realised I was stateless. In Cambridgeshire I was broad Yorkshire. In Huddersfield I was from somewhere South. 

Something similar happens when I go to England. I'm definitely not from here but I'm a bit out of place there. 

I was amazed and unready to eat at British meal times. I mean everyone knows that Spaniards eat later but do Britons really eat so early? I saw people ordering lunch before noon. My sister tells me that she thinks that British people are tending to book an evening meal in a restaurant earlier than they used to. Her feeling was that, until recently a 7.30pm booking would be pretty normal but that now the same booking is a tad on the late side. I wouldn't expect most Spanish restaurants to be open before 8.30pm! I found it very odd even considering eating at 12 noon or 5pm. 

I went shopping in a supermarket and I couldn't find anything - the ordering of goods seemed to follow no obvious logic but I remember having the same difficulty when I moved from the UK to Spain. Oh, and then I was completely flummoxed by the "scan and pay" or "scan and go" options at the self service checkouts. A very pleasant woman helped me, in a slightly condescending way, with the multiple operations required to pay for a single lemon!

On the bus, even though there is a maximum fare of £2 people were still asking for their stop by name. When you get on a Spanish bus you just want tickets. The fare is the same for two stops or twelve. Mind you the community spirit on the British buses was great. All that clearing the way so someone in a wheelchair can get on or everyone thanking the driver as they get off is something I've never seen on Spanish buses

You can be more specific if you want to get a beer in Spain but really all you have to do is ask for a beer. There are sometimes supplementary questions from the servers in more upmarket bars but that's something fancy and new. In the UK it's always been, a pint of Ghost Ship (or Landlord or IPA and so on) please. Essential to specify both product and quantity (and nowadays to have a sizeable credit limit on your card) .

Strange as well that the cars and buses go on the other side of the road. I whirled around in the style of one of those robot vacuum cleaners when I had to cross the road as I was quite unsure where the traffic would be. In a taxi I had a momentary panic attack when the driver was obviously going to go the "wrong way" round a roundabout.

In the Dhaba I was pleased to be able to lean on my sister and brother in law to understand the menu.

Here though, obviously enough, to Spaniards I'm as English as five o' clock tea, pea soupers and fish'n'chips. Lots of people in shops, restaurants and bars will, annoyingly, speak to me in English despite my best efforts and I'm sure if they had a any spare socks they would offer me them to wear with my sandals.

Sounds British

The rolled R is essential to pronouncing Spanish well. I have trouble rolling Rs. I told you how I paid good money to a speech therapist to try and fix my problem. Nowadays, when I remember, I can make a sound that's good enough to pass muster as a rolled R but it's not a part of my normal everyday speech, it's not something I do without thinking. That's because most of the time I speak English. I have no problem with my British R and I don't have to think about how to pronounce it.

I was talking to a couple of friends, one is Scottish and one sounds Scottish, so they both roll their Rs easily enough. They were telling a story though about making an appointment. There had been confusion between an appointment at 2pm (dos) and 12pm (doce). The pronunciation of dos is a bit like the English doss - a nice wide open o - like in bother or otter rather than the o in hello. There is a tendency for we Brits to pronounce it more like dose. The pronunciation of 12, doce, is something like dough-thay or maybe doth-thay. The way the words are pronounced is not really the important point here though. The important feature is that the stress in the two words is different. My guess is that when our friends were confirming the appointment the Spanish person heard the vowel sound from one word and not from the other.

Stick with me. Like those who wear old fashioned wigs I'm building a case.

People keep asking me what I do with myself now that I'm old and retired with nothing to do. The truth is, as an ex work colleague told me, what happens is that the things that were once shoehorned into the working day now expand to fill the void. My days are full, I often feel a bit pushed even, but I suppose that my concerns are all a bit smaller scale than they once were - have I done the recycling?, have I read a bit of my book?, have I cooked the meal?, stirred the compost?, dewormed the cat? and so on.

One of the things I do is to try to do a bit of Spanish everyday. This isn't just an excuse to mention Ben and Marina, the Notes in Spanish people again, it's because I bought a series of videos from them that gave me the idea for this post. This series of videos is full of tips about learning Spanish. You know the sort of thing - speak every opportunity you get, find yourself a native Spanish speaker to talk to, don't get flustered by getting things wrong, read as much as you can, take delight in the victories and forget the defeats and so on and so on. If you count the videos - each one is available as an English language version or a Spanish version with transcript - I think they said it was over 20 hours - or it may have been 10 hours - either way it's a Netflix series worth.

My own Spanish is alright but it should be better. I've put a lot of work into it over the years and my failings cause me existential angst. I'm not one of those people who has a particular knack for languages, I'm not someone able to mimic sounds and to pick up phrases and constructions from overheard speech without any problem. I don't think many people are. The Britons I know who speak good Spanish seem to do so because they live in a Spanish milieu - living with, married maybe, to a Spanish speaker or working in a Spanish speaking workplace. In effect those people who have no option but to use Spanish for hours and hours on end. British youngsters who have been brought up in Spain, the ones who have been schooled here more or less from the start, not the poor adolescents suddenly dropped into an alien culture, also speak first rate Spanish. Having encountered several over the years I often find that those youngsters have no real difficulty with everyday conversation in either Spanish or English but when it comes to reading and writing or slightly higher level language that it's their English, rather than their Spanish, which is weak. 

The point is, I suppose, that the majority of we British immigrants around Pinoso don't live amongst Spaniards. We just bump into them, and Spain, every now and gain. We chat with our neighbours, we order food and drink, we have short conversations in shops or with officials but most of us have rebuilt a version of our former lives in our homes; little islands of Britishness. So, despite doing classes, despite trying to learn new vocabulary, despite buying videos full of language learning tips, despite our best efforts in general, whilst we're only popping in to Spain every now and again we'll simply have to put up with those linguistic misunderstandings.

Making me smile

I didn't do the 11 plus exam at school. It was just being phased out as I went from Junior to Secondary school but I was part of some survey to see if continuous assessment gave similar results to the old style exam.

The question I remember was: Which is the best pair?

• Peaches and ice cream
• Peaches and cream
• Peaches and apricots

The correct answer is peaches and apricots as they are both fruit. The question is obviously designed to mislead.

Spanish tests love to do the same. A sample driving test theory question for instance shows a tram and a car arriving at an unmarked junction and asks who should give way. The answer is the tram. There is a general rule to give way to traffic from the right at unmarked junctions. Obviously the likelihood of such a junction existing is minimal. The question tests something theoretical and unreal with no real practical application. Spanish education is a bit like that too. One commentator remarked that the Spanish way, for a course for trainee carpenters, would be to have questions on the properties of different woods and the history of cabinet making alongside a multiple choice question to identify different joints but without any sort of practical test.

To join the Spanish national police force here you have to do a competitive exam. One part of the latest exam has a test about words. There is a list of words and the question is are they spelled correctly as in the official Spanish dictionary. This adds a bit of a twist. One of the words for instance is outlet. It's used all over Spain for factory shops. It's spelled correctly in the list but it is not in the official dictionary so if you said it was correct you'd be wrong! Candidates should, apparently, know whether a common, everyday word is in the dictionary or not. If outlet is wrong then Brent, to describe a type of crude oil, is in the list, is spelled correctly and is in the dictionary. Broker is a bit half and half - it's in the list and in the dictionary but it needs an accent to be spelled correctly in Spanish - bróker. The other words in the test are often difficult and/or uncommon words - antediluvian and ribonucleic for instance are obviously words that any police officer is going to be using a lot.

Over the weekend we had the Spanish film awards; they're called The Goyas. The principal host of the  nearly all "virtual" event was Antonio Banderas. He'd obviously called a lot of his Hollywood chums who kept popping up throughout the ceremony to say "I support Spanish cinema" Some, like Tom Cruise and Robert de Niro did it in Spanish. Emma Thompson did it in Spanish too. She said it twice once in her best Spanish accent and then in a parody of a British person speaking Spanish. The comment I read in one of the newspapers said that the stars were "trying" to speak Spanish. I laughed because when the Spanish newspapers report on someone Spanish speaking in English, like Rafa Nadal, Felipe VI or President Pedro Sanchez they nearly always say "in perfect English".  They do, all three of them speak good English just as do Bruno Tonioli and Jean Paul Gaultier.