Growing up, I only wanted to learn French. Love the lyrical rhythms, the art, the architecture and most of the stereotypes (including long, long lunches and fields of lavender). It helped that I had an awesome teacher in third form (year nine) who taught us colloquial French (including a few swears. In retrospect that was clever as he got & kept our attention) then when he retired, one of the most influential teachers I’ve ever had, Anne Dunphy, stepped up.

Madame was also the school principal, and as I found out later, involved in a number of other professional bodies. I now have no idea how she managed to squeeze in a class but I am grateful she did. I learnt so much in that class about art (we went to the Rembrandt to Renoir exhibition and received plenty of attention & info from the curators), movies (Manon des Sources at the Lido is a good memory), history & geography. I can still understand a little verbal and can get the gist if reading a book or newspaper. Thanks, Madame. You got me out of another year of Shorthand Typing too. Massive bonus.

So I was a little gutted when Z decided to ignore French and focus on Spanish this year. Spanish! Yes, I know this is a romance language and similar in origins to French & Italian but it’s just that much different that I struggle to get my head around it. Despite his best intentions, I am still at the Dora level –hola! Uno, dos…ocho…

I do however know all the words to the Backpack song. Which is slightly less useful than Ted’s Thunder song, given our current weather pattern. And Boots is cute but geez! give Swiper a chance!

PS – if you read yesterday and didn’t give me a book recommend, shame on you! Never mind, I dumped Miss Highsmith and moved on to an old McCaffrey contempory, Stitch in Snow. She’s the creator of Pern but I think this preceeds most of those. It’s not bad – dated but not bad!