Location

Spain

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway

The bull ring at Ronda, Spain, March 2016

My Spanish students were always very opinionated. They seized up at the awkward exam questions but with other topics – the test their Latin teacher gave them, feminism and bull fighting – they were fluid and non-hesitant speakers. Bull fighting, they despised: a cruel sport for machismo old men who ought to wake up to the modern age, morality and manners.

Even in Hemingway’s day, the custom of bull fighting was often considered barbaric. He seemed to predict the slow decline and even to accept the change, with reluctance. His book, which I’ve read and found fascinating, is however not barbaric. It’s odd. Between the dense facts and the strings of poetic description, the nostalgia and the adulation, are tangents on writing and society, parenthood and death. It’s not a book that pretends, but it is odd.

I suppose, from a modern point of view, that is, a Christian point of view, the whole bullfight is indefensible; there is clearly much cruelty, there is always danger, either sought or unlooked for, and there is always death, and I should not try to defend it now, only to tell honestly the things I have found true about it.

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

My problem with Hemingway is that the first book I ever read by him wasn’t a novel. It wasn’t the Old Man and the Sea which is supposedly admirable piece of literature, but I found a little tedious (perhaps I’m just too young still to get it). It wasn’t For Whom the Bell Tolls, which has in it all that macho, yet defeatist, fighting in it. It was A Moveable Feast, which, published after Hemingway’s suicide, is a memoir of those years in Paris where Hemingway screwed up his first marriage and knew it.

And it’s the self-awareness that I kind of find myself admiring. It’s the self-awareness which I found myself compelled by in A Moveable Feast, and which the glimpses of throughout Death in the Afternoon compelled me to keep turning the page, even if I lost track of which matador was which. More than anything, though, the book was a reminder to be careful. We jump to conclusions so quickly and on so little evidence. We are fast to speak, fast to criticize, fast to cast out moral judgements, yet remain so unaware of what we’re talking about.

It’s easy to attack the visible cruelty, it seems so much more acute. But much harder is recognizing and attacking the silent and invisible cruelty that hides unseen. How many of our own enjoyments result in harm to others, whether they be people working in inhumane factory settings, through the land that’s damaged in the hunt from raw materials or the dumping of waste. How many animals live and die for us in our current lifestyles, how many are affected by our impact on the environment, and how many of them live good lives?

My Spanish students were children, eager to be heard, eager to have the right opinion. Their passion, their beliefs, their insistence that the world must become a better place was heart-warming. In many ways they were much better at expressing themselves than older generations who might wait to check their audience is on their side before opening their mouths. They had lots to say; they had much to learn.

El Coronel

The towers of San Gimignano
Tuscany, Italy, May 2018
On route to learning… Spanish.

A little under two years ago, I received an email confirming that from the following October, I would be teaching in a school in Spain. I had worked in Spain before this. I taught English at an immersion camp one summer. Spanish was forbidden. A few years after that I worked as an au-pair in the Catalonian region, a place where the children’s first language was Catalan, not Spanish, and where I was supposed to talk English. I learnt a pathetic smattering of Catalan words and the Spanish phrase ‘café con leche’.

On receiving my job offer for Spain, I went off to Italy for the best part of the following two months and so it wasn’t until the very end of July that I began contemplating that I was going to need to speak Spanish.

As a language teacher, I am fascinated by how we learn languages, or more precisely, how we fail to learn them. Although I was instructed in French for five years at school, and obtained an A grade, with maybe 300 hours of class time, I have remarkably little ability to communicate in French. This is not a unique situation.

I asked the adult students in a physics class here, in Chile, how long they had been learning English, for some the answer was ten-years.

“Perfect, we can talk in English.”

They shook their heads. Whilst they have sat through class after class, they haven’t obtained any skill with using the language. Put on the spot they couldn’t create a sentence. Their cheeks pinkened.

In the school in Murcia, Spain, students in the top classes who have been forced through the intense bilingual Spanish system can express themselves. They are capable of sharing their disgust at the idea that British schools have gender segregation for physical education in English, for example. Once they let go of their inhibitions start to rant about their Latin teacher, unfair exams and each other. The top classes. Teenagers who often go to school in the morning and private classes in the evenings.

Some students are different. I ask for their name and they roll their eyes. A few minutes later they’re interviewing me about British politics, tearing apart my taste in music or asking me about how to travel the world. These students are different. I ask them how they learnt English, and they shrug. With a bored expression they seem to ponder a moment, they had classes at school, yes, but so did everyone else in the room. Then it comes out. Either, they play video games – often online video games against native English speakers – or they are obsessive about music or they watch a lot of television in English. Whichever it is, they absorbed words in context and then actively sought out clarification.

I am not a musical person and I don’t watch a lot of television or play many video games. But I don’t need to, because I have the language in context all around me, every day, and I am forced to actively seek out clarification because, otherwise, I cannot make clear to Loreto when I’m going to be free for her to drop off her fresh-from-the-farm eggs so that I can make pancakes.

Although I teach them, I don’t believe that English classes work particularly well. It’s basic maths. The teacher can listen to only one student at a time. This means that the majority of the students’ mistakes pass by without immediate correction, by which point the urgency of learning the point has drifted away. Or, the students fail to make enough mistakes. If students were listening to each other speak, and learning from each other then maybe it would work.

But even then, by the time Thursday’s class comes around, Monday morning’s vocabulary has been almost entirely lost. Teachers correct the same pronunciation, inject ‘do’ into the same questions and rehearse the same few phrases over and over again.

When I was learning my times-tables we used to practice them every day at school, quickly, a five-minute bout of scary anyone-might-get-asked firing of six times eight, seven times two…

The students memorise what they have to for the exam. Then a week later then put it aside and start the next chapter with contains new vocabulary for them to rehearse for a few weeks and then not use again until the following term. They might be able to spell their first name, but they cannot recite the alphabet.

I think one of the reasons why so many students fail to learn is that they don’t start with a clear goal. For those who are driven by music, video games or film, I don’t think they start with a grand goal of speaking a foreign language. They start by wanting to know what they’re singing. Or they want to beat the bad guy in the game. They want to win. They have something specific that they want to understand.

I would say that not-coincidentally, several of my Spanish teenagers understood elements of Japanese or Korean. Nobody taught them as such, but they’ve filled their time watching and listening to videos. Where they have been curious, their brains have naturally put in the effort to learn.

So what was my goal when I first started learning Spanish? Something more specific than simply survive.

In August 2018 I walked into a bookshop in Leeds, went upstairs to the foreign languages section and looked at the selection of books available in Spanish. I pulled out Gabriel García Márquez’ El coronel no tiene quien le escriba.

Reading it seemed like an impossible task.

Today, nearly two years later, I finished it.

Delightful tales of the English Subjunctive

Just before leaving Spain I begged the Spaniard to take me to the hill where Jesus stood. He told me it was midday and too hot, but I pouted and he took me anyway. This is a photo from that hill. It’s got nothing to do with the subjunctive.
Region of Murcia, Spain, May 2019

When Rapunzel came to visit the other week, I greeted her off the train in Spanish. She doesn’t speak Spanish, so she replied in French and we flicked through the three languages as if it were a game we were playing.

As we settled back into English – it’s our only common language – the chap following us up into the station gave us both a very perplexed look. Our British accents, neither local to the area, didn’t fit with the flurry of foreign words we’d been giggling through.

But language can be a lot of fun

Yesterday, for example, I looked up Chilean Spanish.

“I’ve spent the last few months learning the Spanish future, to discover they don’t use it in Chile,” I messaged Rapunzel.

“No me gusta,” she replied in Spanish.

“Exactamente.”

We played with language for a few lines, discussing an article that’s relevant to Rapunzel printed in a Spanish newspaper. Then I asked her the question that was on my mind.

“Do you do subjunctives?”

“Je ne pense pas que ce soit necessaire.”

If you want to get a Spaniard to roll their eyes, you ask about the subjunctive

They seem to think that it’s obvious where it ought to be used. And that there’s nothing strange with the present subjunctive having two forms with identical meaning. As far as I can tell, the only purpose of this is to add poetical value of the word within its sentence.

The Spaniards are much fonder of using the subjunctive than us English speakers

Although I’ve never met anyone who’s persuaded me why. I mean, I understand that we do have such a form in English. Chances are, you use it without knowing. It’s a bit like how you know to use a noun and a verb before you learn the labels ‘noun’ and ‘verb’. But how does anyone know where to use it? It’s a mystery.

Our English subjunctive feels quite posh

And because it’s not so obvious and I didn’t know it, here it is:

In the present

It is necessary we be on time tomorrow.

I recommend he leave now.

In the past

If he were here.

If I were you.

I’m not convinced that I use the present subjunctive in my speech

Unless I was caricaturing someone posh. If anyone catches me doing so, can you please point it out to me? I’m curious to know.

Whereas I’m certain that I do use the past subjunctive

It’s simpler to identify than the present subjunctive because it always involves the word ‘were’. In the first- and third-person ‘were’ replaces ‘was’.

If I were you…

If you were nicer…

If he were here…

If we were happy…

If you all were intelligent…

If they were mad…

Here again, it gets complicated by my dialect

In Yorkshire, you may say ‘when I were there yesterday’ meaning ‘when I was there yesterday’. And in the town where I went to school, it’s also common to replace ‘were’ with ‘was’ as in ‘we was eating chocolate’. In standard English, this would be ‘we were eating chocolate’.

Thus, if someone were to say ‘If I was you’, I’m not sure I’d notice that they were in the indicative mood, not the subjunctive. Would you? Or am I blinded by my non-standard English?

Did you notice the ‘if someone were’ in the previous sentence is the past subjunctive?

This doesn’t help me understand how to use the subjunctive in Spanish

And Rapunzel is right. On an everyday basis, it is not necessary. You can get by alright without it. Even if the locals might despair of your ignorance.

But so much of language is not necessary, it doesn’t mean it’s not wondrous. Plus, the idea of conjugating a word for its poetic flavour makes me smile.

Jesus.
Region of Murcia, Spain, May 2019.

Teaching English as a Foreign Language (when you don’t know your grammar )

TEFL
The centre of Murica.
Río Segura, Murica, Spain, May 2019

No message.

There was a signal, so I sent a message announcing my arrival at the bus station in Murcia, in Spanish, a language I knew some words of but had never spoken.

“Yo soy aqui”

I intended to say, “I am here”. Translated it does mean “I am here” but, as any Spanish speaker knows, it should have been “Yo estoy aqui.” As it’s the verb estar (to be) nor the verb ser (to be) in such situations.

In ‘Spanish time’ my host arrived and waved me to her car

She spoke some broken phrases of English. More than I spoke of Spanish but that first day, neither of us could construct a sentence.

If you have since met the Casera, the rolling English you heard was not what I experienced that first day. You heard her speaking after months of living with a native English speaker in her apartment.

Therefore, we couldn’t say much, yet we somehow conversed for the next twenty minutes.

This was a swift education. When it comes to conversation, the most important thing is to have faith.

Very soon, I’m going to meet a Chilean man at a Chilean airport

I will have to open my mouth and speak.

Butterflies swarm in my stomach to think of it. We have two common languages, so it shouldn’t be a problem. From his writing, I assume he speaks beautiful English since his style of composition made me smile with some admiration. I speak Spanish, more or less.

He speaks Chilean Spanish; I speak Yorkshire English. Hiding behind the Andes, Chilean Spanish has developed its unique forms. Yorkshire is well, Yorkshire. I’m told my accent is lovely, but at least for the first week, unintelligible.

I speak non-rhotically, which is a pain when it comes to learning Spanish

Rhotic being a technical term meaning I drop my ‘r’. In Spanish this is a problem as every infinitive verb ends in a vowel followed by an ‘r’ and in many forms of British English (non-rhotic English) such ‘r’ sounds are abandoned.

Take the word ‘car’, which I pronounce ‘cah’.

And then apply this to the Spanish ‘hablar’ (to speak) and get ‘hablah’ which more or less is ‘habla’. I.e. he speaks.

You may wonder, ‘what the hell are you on about Catherine?’

Which is understandable. I wouldn’t have known any of this phonetic vocabulary, if I hadn’t spent quite so much of the last year searching to discover what this annoying letter ‘r’ is.

Despite hours trying, I have never been able to trill an r

But even the single r in Spanish is a harder sound than any r in my English. My pronunciation of ‘Gracias’ is wrong, not because I fumble over whether it’s a c or a th sound in the middle, but because my first syllable is fluffily soft.

From the feedback I have surmised from my students, I imagine my Spanish accent would work if you were casting the little sister of a Disney princess. It’s not the sound I was hoping for.

We take speaking for granted

When I speak in Spanish in front of my parents, I expect them to understand. They should understand me. They are my parents. When my mum stares at me as if I am speaking gobbled-gook, I wonder why. It takes me a cognitive churn to understand that she doesn’t get what I’m saying.

When I speak in half-formed mumbled English, they seem to know what I mean. If I mime, they tend to get it. They know me, they know my voice. So, I find it bewildering how when I’m speaking Spanish are there so many blank looks?

But we also take for granted our knowledge of our language

We instinctively know what feels right. Or, to invert that idea, we know what sounds wrong. We feel that someone is speaking our language as a second tongue before we know how they’re mis-forming the grammar or before we can identify where the pronunciation mimics their native language.

My Spanish students stumble at the difference between the ‘b’ and the ‘v’ sounds. A Finnish friend has a wider spoken vocabulary than me but speaks with an odd ‘v’, which gives her foreignness away.

As children, we absorb this language knowledge without realising we’re doing it

Grammar especially. Later, at school, some English teacher tries to explain what a noun, a verb and an adjective are, by which point we’ve been using them for years.

Then we start to study a foreign language. I did French and German at school. At this point, lots more grammar descriptors come into play, like verbal tenses and moods, and we become very confused.

French, German and English might have much in common, but their structure differs.

Learning German was not a success

Despite having had approximately 110 classes in the subject, I can’t say anything useful whatsoever. When I’m in Germany itself, I recognise some words but not much else. I don’t have any innate feeling about German and so, to me, it’s random sound.

When you don’t have any feeling about what is right or wrong in a language, you’re reliant on rules

You use your first language as a basis for the language you’re learning. Then, rather than learning the new language from scratch, you adapt the rules you know to the new language. My Spanish students ‘cook my mother’ because such grammar makes sense in Spanish.

I would say that my job requires some awareness of this grammatical web.

As an English language assistant, they tell you all you need is to be able to speak English

Which sounded like a wonderful way for me to teach and avoid my lack of formal grammar education. The marketing chaps stress how your role is to conduct conversations and focus on speaking skills.

While it’s true that from a feeling we know when a student says something we wouldn’t, it’s insufficient for answering why.

And the best students ask, “Why?”

At first, I figured I must be able to work it out. I’d think of a few examples and the student would nod. A few hours later I would be in the grocery store or cooking dinner and an exception to my supposed rule would pop up.

At which point, I had to hope I remembered which student in which class had asked the question. Then I’d need to admit I’d made a mistake, and then from somewhere work out a satisfactory explanation or the grammar.

After a few such incidences, I took the better line, “I don’t know. Let me check.”

Teaching English is a constant lesson in humility.

The English grammar experts were all around me

They were the teachers, whose English was sometimes odd in its form, but who had learnt grammar first, conversation second. And hence, they knew the rules inside out.

But this is not my only linguistic challenge as a language assistant.

Most native speakers don’t speak standard English

I don’t. When I’m teaching, I try to speak with clarity and standard grammar, but I refuse to adopt my ‘a’ or my ‘u’ into anything but what it is. My ‘r’, as I’ve said, is a hopeless case. I could not fake an accent, even if I wanted to.

It is only through learning grammar though that I can differentiate between my Yorkshire (my idiolect) and Standard English. This is important. I mustn’t trust my feelings. To say ‘I am sat on the sofa’ feels right but it’s not standard. Furthermore, I have no problem with double negatives or double contractions, although I try not to use them.

When a child uses a double negative, which is a common mistake for native Spanish speakers, I smile and tell them they sound like they’re from Yorkshire. I show them their mistake ask them to use Standard English for school. I couldn’t tell them they’re speaking wrong when it’s the same quirk as we have at home in England.

It’s not infrequent that I screw up

And I’ve given classes where I’ve caught myself speaking with non-standard grammar. At this point, I pause the class and wave my arms about a bit.

“You know how here you say ‘estamos’ as ‘etamo’ because it’s your dialect? When I said ‘I am sat on the sofa’ it was because of my dialect. It’s not standard English. Please do not do this in your exams. We should say, ‘I am sitting on the sofa’ as it’s the gerund here.”

But it’s important to recall what is correct varies depending on who you ask

I met one (Australian) English teacher who thought it was abominable to teach children to use contractions in their writing. I bit back the urge to say, ‘You shou’n’t never do what?’.

If a child put some double contractions into a piece of dialogue, I’d give them bonus marks.

I love beautiful language

Books with intricate sentences which wind stylistically in directions you didn’t suppose possible enchant me. Yet, what’s most impressive about language to me is how we can mangle it and still communicate. For eight months the Casera and I lived together. Neither of us fluent in the other’s language, we used whatever language allowed us to communicate. So what if we broke all the grammar rules and pronounced the impossible imperfectly, we conversed.

It all depends on faith.

Learning to outline (and evaluate that outline)

Results or excuses: getting up early as planned
Results or excuses: I had to plan ahead and set the alarm to get up early enough to have a final glimpse of Murcia. I wandered through the city for an hour before going to have breakfast at one of the earlier opening bakeries.
May, 2019.

Mark Twain said, “If I had more time, I would write a shorter letter.”

And Blaise Pascal wrote, “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.” Which translates as, “I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

And various other people at various other times said something similar. And it’s all bullshit.

It’s an excuse.

What it means is that the writers leapt right in

They felt rushed and therefore didn’t pause to think about what it was they were going to write before they wrote it. Long-winded writing (which is something I excel at) comes from poor planning.

I have been studying writing now for a while, and the biggest factor contributing to long-windedness, without doubt, is in how well I outline. In this brief article, I will write about my outlining review process, which does assume I have already created an outline.

Why do I care so much about avoiding bloated articles?

When I was voicing my distress at my article length getting out of hand someone asked why this was a problem. There are benefits to long articles, such as in appearing in search results, and many people find putting together a short article much easier than writing a long one. All this is irrelevant to me, I want to be able to sit down with the intention of writing 800 words, outline those 800 words, and come out with 800 words.

I want to be able to predict how much I need to write and how much time that’s going to take and get the prediction right.

So, when I’m outlining, I review my outline against my prediction

The question I first ask is have I chosen the right word count for the subject matter? If the outline suggests that the article is going to be too long, which is a frequent occurrence for me, I split the article into separate outlines there and then. Before I’ve written a sentence.

A quick look through an outline can give a good sense of whether it’s about to spiral out of control. If the points I’ve outlined are vague, it’s going to spiral. If I’m too emotional about what I’m writing, it’s going to spiral. If it’s a topic I lack confidence on, it’s going to spiral.

But how does one stop an article spiralling across too many pages?

The question I ask myself is whether each point marked out in the outline is going to require more than one paragraph to explain. An ideal paragraph contains a single idea which you develop within that paragraph. If my idea will overflow my paragraph, then I need to break that idea down into its respective points at the outlining stage.

If you’ve got readers on mobile devices, then you might feel compelled to create super short paragraphs

Personally, I love long sentences and long paragraphs (assuming they are eloquently punctuated). I love beautiful writing. But on my phone, lengthy blocks of text are more challenging to consume. To keep my paragraphs short, I break-up some of the longer paragraphs and excessive sentences during my edit.

You’ll learn from practice how long your paragraphs tend to be. And from this, you can approximate how many paragraphs you need for your desired word count.

Outlines might feel restrictive – you may instead believe writing should be a free activity

Ideas should pop out at great, fabled moments of inspiration. Words should fly from your fingertips in a natural progression. I don’t disagree. This is exactly how I write my diary, it’s how I write when I’m doing writing-therapy, it’s how I first put story ideas to paper. Some of my best ideas and phrases come like this. But the gods forbid that I edit these ideas as they appeared in their raw form on the page. I’d lose days to it. I have lost days to it. Free-writing is great when you don’t have to then edit.

But what I’m trying to do it learn how to create consistent, strong content

One of the Mother’s phrases that she walloped into my head is that in life you have a choice between results and excuses. Not having enough time to write a short letter (i.e. not planning what it is you want to say) is an excuse.

It’s also inconsiderate to the reader. We’re all under constant information bombardment as it is. If you have something to say that’s worth someone else taking their precious time to listen to, presumably it’s also worth planning.

After all, if we´re being honest, to plan and write a short letter takes a whole lot less time than to write and edit a long one.

If you want to learn about life, talk to someone who has lived a tough one

Conversation with a Spanish Grandmother - Jardín de Floridablanca, Murcia, May 2019
Jardín de Floridablanca, Murcia, May 2019

My Grandmother leant me a book about a nun

In her twenties, the nun in the book went to an interview for a place at the National College of Domestic Subjects to study cookery. In front of the panel, she was asked to read a section from The Times newspaper. Having been born to wealth and educated by her mother to become a lady, she read with what she describes as a ‘cut-glass accent’.

A chap on the panel whispered, “I don’t think Sister Agatha will be much good in the East End of London.”

At which point she realised her error and broke through the ice around them by adding, “Now, me ‘ole Dutch, where we ‘orf tonight?”

Smiles appeared throughout the panel, which decided to accept her. She’d proven she could adapt her tone.

Speaking in an inclusive manner can be rather tricky

Conversing isn’t always easy, especially across cultures, across differences in educational opportunity and across generations. I think those of us who seek out opportunities to converse across such barriers don’t give ourselves enough credit for what we do.

Just the other week I was reminded how hard we must work to get the most out of a conversation.

Imagine a very tidy living room and a stiff-backed sofa

I was sitting upright, body lent forward, alert because I was having coffee with my friend´s mother – a tiny woman with strong eyes. Such a situation can be a little daunting even if you speak the same language, but here I was having to converse in Spanish. Spanish. That language which has me dancing on the edge of my comfort zone on an almost daily basis.

This time, I was talking about France

I have within me a repertoire of short stories to which I have learnt, through perseverance and embarrassment, the relevant vocabulary. Good conversations involve stories or at least interesting examples the other person can connect to. Stories also fill time and make a conversation feel fluid.

What’s more, I quite enjoy trampling over people’s assumptions about me. I enjoy eliciting surprise. You need a bit of wonder sprinkled in a conversation to keep your audience paying attention.

During this conversation, however, I was doing nothing artful with my language

The anxiety that strikes me whenever I must speak to someone new in Spanish had entered my bones, and the cogs in my brain were overheating. The Spanish grandmother didn’t ask complex questions, but her Spanish is drenched in dialect, which frustrated our translator and aid (her son), who desperately wanted me to understand for myself.

I was speaking particularly badly

I was nervous. So out of necessity, the Spanish grandmother was taking responsibility for the structure of the conversation. I hate this, but whilst I can structure a conversation in English, doing the same in Spanish is beyond me.

From the start, she knew I taught English

Like many people, she was curious as to how I’d ended up where I was. I explained how I’d worked in a ‘proper job’ once upon a time. In an office, at a desk, next to a window. And I explained how I’d watched Spring come from behind the glass pane, summer pass by, and eventually autumn arrive. Then I told her about France. I told her about working the land, driving diggers and feeding the sheep.

Now lost between a historic frustration and a series of memories, I described my nostalgia for that physical sensation of labour. I tried to avoid romanticising it because hard physical labour is not romantic. But I did contrast the physical work on the land to the labours of the mind. And all this in broken sentences with the verbs conjugated aloud.

The Spanish grandmother frowned

Her eyes communicated her recognition of my naivety, not in a patronising manner, but in the way that a teacher might look at a child who just hasn’t quite got it. A maternal look, but not a soft look.

Her voice, however, when she spoke, was soft and steady. She said that outside work is both, body and mind.

I felt that she was navigating through some of her own memories

Even now she works on the land and has done I believe for much of her life. Her skin is golden, showing a lifetime of being drenched in sunlight. The previous week she’d been picking flowers. She knows more about the land than I ever will, but when she spoke, her words were more like poetry, describing the relationship between the worker and the land as a form of art.

This was not what I had expected

As I learnt about the woman I was speaking to, I was reminded of how although she had little formal education, she possessed immense wisdom, and it gave me an insight into my own child-like self. In her eyes, I am not much older than a child.

Although, she acknowledged with a little surprise, I have experienced a lot for one so young.

Her school life had centred around the church

Every morning in her school she’d had to start with prayers because her school life had happened under Franco’s Catholic Nationalism. A complete contrast to my upbringing. I declared myself an atheist at the age of 7. The only people who argued the case for religion with me were my father (whose beliefs don’t appear to include an almighty being) and much later, Grand-père (who went to mass every Sunday and brought me back gigantic meringues).

She asked about my religious beliefs or lack of belief

And I fumbled through my vocabulary, trying to find the words to describe something I’m not sure I could articulate in English. All the time she watched me with immense curiosity.

Religion in Spain is a dangerous topic. Some people talk about religion as a pillar holding up the rest of life, whilst others have an audible snarl in their throats when they mention the church. I’m fascinated by these attitudes to religion, but I know I must tread with care. The girls at school describe my Yorkshire influenced accent as being cute, and although I’m sometimes conscious of the childish sound of my voice, sometimes I’m grateful for it.

She listened though, receptive to what I was saying, and I was grateful.

And then just before she was about to leave, she motioned to my ebook reader

It lay on the coffee table where I’d discarded it when she’d arrived. She told me she didn’t read on phones and suchlike, she reads books printed on paper. A literature lover. Despite all the differences we might have, we are fellow bibliophiles. My heart felt lighter.

Which brings me back to my Grandmother’s book about a nun

I started off sceptical. Reading about a rich young lady who gave up her fiancé and dedicated her life to her God, I wasn’t sure how well I’d connect. At first, I found her story a little frustrating.

And then, in her fifties, she decides that she’s going to travel. She doesn’t have much in the way of cash, because nuns don’t, and yet, her passion to travel forced her to find a way. And that I could relate to.

What’s more, when she talked about her terrible driving, I couldn’t help but think of the habit-wearing nun who nearly ran me over the other day.

The book was A Nun’s Story by Sister Agatha and Richard Newman.

If you enjoyed reading this, you might like a reminder of this old post about what I learnt talking to Grand-père.