Life in Cartagena

In the 1970s, as Sixth Formers, we were obliged to take it in turns read the daily lesson in school assembly from the Bible. "This morning's lesson is taken from the Gospel according to St John Chapter 15 verse 14." When it was my turn I bribed someone to swap weeks with me. I took the half term week. By paying, and I was willing to pay a lot, I would only have to stand on stage and do that chapter and verse stuff three times instead of five. I hate - and I can't stress enough how strong that word is - performing. Dancing in public fills me with dread. Again, mark the word: dread. Almost any humiliation is better than dancing, or performing in any other way. I spent sleepless nights for weeks beforehand worrying about "Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends." Somebody trying to force me to dance "because I'll love it when I get started" has no idea to just how close they are to violence. I know that ...

Back in 2008 when Heath Ledger died I heard the news on the morning radio. I knew someone was dead. I knew it was a film star. I could understand the biography but blow me if I could get the name. Then I recognised the Spanish title, En Terreno Vedado, as the equivalent of Brokeback Mountain. Deduction, my dear Watson, filled in the gaps. There are pretty tight rules about how to say words in Spanish. There are variations of accents and what not but, basically, Spanish is a very phonetic language. Fine with Spanish words but a minefield for the foreign imports. I find Anglo names in Spanish mouths almost unrecognisable and words that Spaniards think are English but said with a Spanish lilt can be difficult too. This isn't much of a problem in speaking Spanish as I simply avoid the imported words and stick with the more old fashioned Spanish version.  The real problem comes with English words used to describe a product - a US film with an English language tit...

The one place that offers general Spanish for foreigners courses in Cartagena - the Fundación de Cartagena para la Enseñanza de la Lengua y la Cultura Española  - has an annoying habit of putting on its courses when we're working. Maggie has never managed to find a course that has fitted in with her timetable but, just once in three years of trying, I did. We're an unreliable lot though, we foreigners, and after a few months my course fizzled out through lack of numbers. Shame. The Fundación had organised something for this afternoon  - a sort of club for foreigners to get together and speak Spanish. We met at the language school and then headed off for a local bar, the one in the photo. About a dozen of us all told: Dutch, Irish and Brits as well as the two Spanish teachers. Not an Earth shattering experience but not bad at all and all for 2€ per person.

Here in Spain the language is cared for by a committee of the great and the good, the Royal Spanish Academy. Every now and then they publish a new dictionary or a new grammar. In reality though it doesn't matter much what the academics say because native speakers the World over are, as I delight in telling my students, the owners of their own language. So if my nephews want to describe a thing as sick, meaning that it is good, then so be it. Yesterday morning my Spanish class was a real headache; the teacher spent a couple of hours explaining the use of a verb structure to me that required not only a relatively complicated grammatical construction but also a philosophical understanding that was way beyond me. In the evening I went in to work for my evening teaching sessions. What had originally looked like a free hour was assigned, at the last minute, to a young woman who had asked for extra tuition in preperation for an English exam. Her grammar text book was in Spanish but it...

You may have noticed that I live in Spain. Most Spaniards who are studying English firmly believe that a longish stay in the UK will turn them into fluent English speakers. I'm not so sure. At home Maggie and I speak to each other in English and we live an English sort of life. At work my job is to talk in English. At home. on TV, the majority of series, dramas and films are American and they are broadcast in their original language version as well as the dubbed Spanish versions. We watch in English. At work I must be doing something either wrong or right as they keep upping my hours. My contract was originally just 15 hours per week but from next Monday I will be teaching 34 hours. This doesn't leave me a lot of time for those little adventures that took us out to Spain - going to the pictures, roaming the area, doing the exhibitions and what not. Most weekends we retire to Culebrón which is great in the relaxing sense but a disaster as regards our Hispanicisation .  Al...

Last year we were thwarted in our attempts to find a Spanish class in Cartagena. This year there's nothing for Maggie because of her work pattern but, as I'm free on Monday morning, I've been able to get a place on a course run by a set-up called called Funcarele. I can't get to the session on Wednesday but something is much better than nothing. It was the first class this morning. Just six of us and a very pleasant young woman teacher called Rocio. I suppose they'll change my timetable at work now.

I don't make many calls on my mobile phone. Very few friends. Very few business calls. A little while ago the daily wash and spin cycle did for my cheap phone and I went mad when I got another - tactile screen, Internet, mp3, GPS - the works. I took out the very cheapest contract though at just 9€ per month. I just got my third bill. The first bill was for zero because in transferring from a pay as you go I had credit in hand, the second was 11€, around the figure I'd expect. I tried to check the (paperless) bill online but the Movistar website was having none of it. The third bill was for 25€. Now for someone without any pals this seemed a bit high. Persevering I beat the Movistar website and got to see the breakdown. The problem is that they are charging me a monthly fee for Internet access rather than the "pay as you go" option I asked for. I went back to the shop where I bought the phone. Movistar logos and stickers everywhere but the young woman behind the ...

Certain Spanish soft news stories do the rounds each year. Spanish summer ends on 1 September and as people return to work the news always includes little filler pieces about how difficult it is to go back. In a couple of weeks time the story will be the cost of text books as the youngsters return to school. Back to school is la vuelta al cole, la vuelta al curro is what I've just done, back to work. In fact we both started work today. We intended to leave Culebrón yesterday evening so we could unpack but the cat sensed something and scarpered so we had to put it off till this morning. Horrid, up at 5.30 - long before dawn. It was bad enough for Maggie after two months off but pity me - eighteen months since I last had a proper job. The strain! - polished shoes, shirt with collar, new people to meet, new routines to learn. I'm working at the Wall Street Institute in Cartagena and everyone was welcoming and friendly. The centre has a good positive feel to it and the teachin...

Last night we went to the Mandarache shopping centre where they have been advertising turns on Thursday and Friday evenings for the past couple of weeks. Nice to see the place a bit livelier than usual. There were tables all over the square where a slightly confused waiter provided us with cheap brandy in tumblerfuls and weak but expensive mojitos. The act was a woman comedian. She did one of those things that comedians do, she talked about commonplace things and events but pointed out their ridiculous aspects. I understood maybe 20% of the gags. I was pleased with myself; 20% isn't bad as a language score given the circumstances but what pleased me more was that I recognised the situations she was ridiculing, the adverts on the telly and the people she described. Spanish culture slowly but surely seeping in through the pores.

Lots of things in Spain are different from the UK and lots of things are exactly the same. For instance, I don't really use my mobile phone much at all but every time it explodes into life I'll be in the pictures or driving or zipping up in the gents. I was in the supermarket queue today, packing stuff into carriers when it started ringing. It was a chap from the Wall Street Institute, a langauge school that has my CV. They wanted to offer me an interview. So there I am fighting the noise, the lettuce and the chicken and trying to have a sober conversation with a possible employer in a language that causes me immense difficulty under the best of circumstances. I have the interview though.

A while ago I put an advert on some Internet site advertising as an English teacher. After seeing the ad the owner of a language school contacted me by email saying that she was looking for someone who spoke good Spanish as well as English and did I fit the bill? I replied (in Spanish) saying that I was sorry but that my Spanish wasn't too hot. It was a very short message but, because I remembered to put an accent on a simple word, the langauge school owner came back and suggested I give her a ring. We spoke in English for a while then she said we should speak in Spanish. A few sentences into the conversation she said that my Spanish was OK. My response was "Pero hago demasiado errores" which is supposed to mean "But I make too many mistakes" - it's a direct translation from English. It's not what Spaniards would say, they would say "I commit too many mistakes" or "Cometo demasiados errores." And it's stuff like that which u...

I've still got some cheese in the fridge for shipping but most of it has now safely reached its destination. I was asked to use a very famous international carrier. When the shipment is ready I give them a call and they send a man and a van. The first time the van driver took a while filling out the packing note - the to and from details. When I got my copy I noticed that on the line titled Street he'd put the city whilst the street was on the line called Name . I thought at the time that it showed how little ordinary Spaniards know about the World - that neither a word like strasse nor the name of a big German city was recognisable to this man who deals with parcels all the time. By the time he came to collect the last lot of cheese we'd seen each other four times so he was a bit more chatty. "Pah!" he said, "bloody international forms, they're in English, I have no idea what any of these lines are for, do you know what Country means - is it país?...

For many years in the UK I worked in the Youth Service. It's odd how different the Youth Service here looks on the surface to the one I knew. In Cartagena, amongst other things, it acts as a "dating agency" for people who speak one language but want to learn another. By arranging appropriate pairings people get to hear and talk the other language with a native speaker. Remarkably the Youth Service not only talks to me, as an old person, it also talks to the Library Service. Between them they have arranged a number of multilingual book clubs. You read a book in your target language and then turn up in a bar (how Spanish) to discuss it. The libraries provide the books. I met the other people who are trying to learn Spanish and like reading yesterday when I was given my book Sabor a Chocolate (Chocolate flavoured) by José Carlos Carmona. There were Belgians and Germans and Austrians and most of them could have been my grandchildren. It's a great book though. Dead ...

As my regular readers know (thank you both, I hope you got your Christmas cards) it grieves me how poor my Spanish is after five years here. No matter how hard I try to learn vocabulary, decline verbs and jot down useful phrases I still fall apart when I have to speak Spanish. I have a couple of language exchanges, intercambios, each week. The idea is that we meet and we speak a bit of English and a bit of Spanish. One meeting is with a Spanish chap who takes his language learning very seriously, as an academic challenge. The other is with an Ecuadorian woman who has more practical reasons for wanting to learn English. Both of them do what every Spanish speaker does when I get going on this topic. They say my Spanish is good (but they have no answer as to why people screw up their faces in incomprehension when I try to buy a packet of fags) or that a few mistakes are all part of the fun. I say the same to them about their English - all jolly civilised. I can't agree though whe...

Youth and young seem to be pretty inclusive words in Spain. When the TV news talks about the difficulties facing young people buying a first home they are talking about anyone under 35 not just teenagers. That in mind I wasn't too concerned about going to the Espacio Joven - the Young Space - to ask about language exchanges. A couple of people had told me that the "youth place" people were the organisers of a language exchange programme. Espacio Joven was a busy office; there were lots of twenty somethings looking at notice boards full of information about jobs, flats to rent, courses and things for sale. I presume that Espacio Joven offers services and information to young people but it wasn't obvious what or how. I'm sure they will have an impenetrable website somewhere that explains it all in extremely long words! As usual there was absolutely no indication of where to go or who to talk to - no enquiries desk, no notices explaining what any of the 10 to 15 ...

The Official School of Languages. Not some back street academy run by a pack of St Trinians types. No, the real thing, the official thing. They do lots of English courses and plenty of other languages but they don't do Spanish courses. It was one of the first places I checked when I started the hunt. Despite all the setbacks we are still looking for a Spanish course or, at least, some Spanish practice. I went to the Escuela Oficial today because a colleague of Maggie's had suggested that their noticeboard was loaded with people looking for intercambios, exchanges, half an hour of Spanish and half an hour of English over a beer a couple of times a week so that both sides get a bit of conversational exercise. As you can see from the snap the place was heaving with people. But, on the noticeboard, nobody, nothing; well I could have rented a flat or bought a car or got some translation work done but no inercambios. I left a little ad of my own. Fingers crossed.

I may have started when I was younger but I distinctly remember making plans to avoid dancing classes at school when I was 7 years old. Over the years I have gone to great lengths to avoid dancing. I was told that dancing was the key to sex when I was a teenager so I went to a couple of discos but I hated them. I decided that I could do without sex if it involved dancing. I don't dance. People are always telling me that I should. They tell me how much fun it is, how I'll enjoy it when I get started. They're wrong. It isn't fun, it's humiliating and I don't enjoy it - I detest it, I hate it, I loathe it and I would quite happily hurt the fools who continue to pester me about why I should dance. Today I went back to the Adult Education Centre for the "presentation" about the Spanish for Foreigners course. There were a couple of hundred people in the hallway pushing and bumping into each other, I was dripping with sweat having walked there quickly, there ...

Years, nay centuries ago I worked in adult education - evening classes and what not. As part of the annual routine we would work hard from around April time to ensure that we had a full programme of courses to offer as September came around. We produced booklets with details of the courses, we advertised in the local newspapers, we updated websites and we did all we could to sell our courses. We tried hard to describe the course, where, when, what people might learn from it and what was expected of them. In fact both the students and the teachers used to get fed up with the amount of detail we asked for and supplied. Maggie and I want to do a Spanish course. We've done them before here in Spain but usually in small towns where a quick visit to the Town Hall or the library has turned up a leaflet which gives sufficient detail for us to know when and where the course is, how much it costs and how to sign up. In Cartagena, a city of 210,000 people it didn't prove so ea...