Another day
Guy de Maupassant, in his novel A Life, ended with the observation that life is neither as bad or as good as you anticipate. I thought of this yesterday in reviewing a day in which I had an unexpected highlight and something I was looking forward to proved a disappointment.
The highlight was the monthly visit of my window cleaner Phil. He is a chubby, affable fellow. We normally talk about his beloved Manchester United or travel. He and his wife are enterprising travellers visiting far flung fields out of season.
I do not judge a person by his job. I know of many who have supposedly more noteworthy vocations who are more dreary company. Yesterday our conversation was on the state of the nation. We were both amused by the news item that the latest policy initiative of our beleaguered PM was to appoint a Minister for Loneliness. Would the Minister, Tracey Crouch, observed Phil have her own office or would she have to share? I found myself rather disappointed that we could not continue our chat as he waddled off to clean the windows.
Conversely I was looking forward to the first Italian lesson of the new term at the adult learning centre. On arrival I met our teacher who, slightly agitated, was rushing off for a sandwich.
I duly took up my seat in the classroom which was as cold as an igloo because the heating had broken down. One of the class entered and duly spoke at some length of her medical problems. I find few things more boring than someone’s medical history.
She spoke to another member who gave a detailed account of her Xmas visit to Bologna. Our teacher arrived 5 minutes late and asked the lady about her trip. She repeated herself though it sounded more interesting in Italian. The round table conversation lasted for some time.
This left insufficient time for the grammatical exercise, analysis of a dialogue from the course book, a song sung by Andrea Borcelli and the film Pane e Tulipani – a comedy about a coach trip around Italy visiting various tourist sites in which one lady is abandoned.
Our teacher had prepared an extract of the dialogue. I was rather astonished to see the words scupare [literally ‘sweep’ but best translated as ‘shag’), cazzo (‘prick’ as in penis) and stronzo (‘turd’ but slang for bastard).
He seemed to take some delight in explaining these words but it went down with the elderly ladies like the proverbial maladroit best man’s speech.
The upshot of all of this was that the lesson overran by some 20 minutes. I am a punctual sort of guy. If I have to be somewhere by a certain time I will be there and do not appreciate others who are not.
Equally, if a lesson or anything is due to finish at certain time I expect it to do so and plan around it accordingly. Cold and miffed I made my way home.
This is now my third meeting with a teacher since Saturday. My godson’s mother, a teacher, organised her birthday fastidiously but I did feel at certain moments that we guest were on a field trip.
I invited my Spanish teacher and her boyfriend to the Spanish wine tasting of Algy. I had my adult learning course.
I said to my Spanish teacher who,provides a one to one lesson , that the problems with a class is the range and variety of application and cleverness. One lady plainly struggles and – when asked to work on the course materials – is almost invariably confused and wrong. Conversely the lady next to me, a fencing instructress, is so clever she even identified an a error in the course materials.
This means we proceed at an irregular pace not assisted by the teacher being of a loquacious nature.
