Wood day

Its friday today so it must be wood day. Wood is at a premium at the moment and our winter supply has almost gone. I guess we want to be warm tomorrow so out we must go in the rain collecting wood . We are determined not to to buy and extra load of pre chopped stuff this winter so we have become scavengers, marching about with wheelbarrows and ropes looking for fallen branches. Maybe next year we will fill the wood shed and so avoid having to collect wet stuff in the rain heres hoping.

Dusting the clock

“HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.
NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.” 
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

One of the first questions that I was asked when I told my friends that we were moving to Spain (After explaining that in Galicia you don't get year round hot temperatures and we would not have a swimming pool) was "are you going to be teaching english?" I felt qualified to be emphatic when I said no because of my obvious lack of remotely connected qualifications or experience. However now several years later, and with Steve having gained the relevant qualification and more students than he can handle, I find myself with my first students.

A part of me is amazed that so many people want to learn English that simply being a native speaker is considered by some people as sufficient qualification. I have salved my conscience by restricting the lessons to conversation rather than grammar. Sensible of me having discovered that my pupils, two teenage girls who's first lesson was last week, know considerably more English grammar than I do! and rather more sadly, their spoken English is about at the same level as my spoken Spanish despite my having lived here for 5 years (Big sigh……... I really must do better)

Of course it would be nice for me if we could live with no income at all, if taxes didn't exist and we could produce everything that we needed, so that I could swan around all day working in the garden or the house chatting with dogs and ducks ( An unfortunate by product of living in the country, still I suppose its marginally better that talking to walls) and generally pottering to my hearts content. Steve got fed up of pottering after we had been here only a few months, hence the teaching qualification, remarkably pottering is a thing that some people are  just not cut out for.

The thing about this teaching is that is takes all day, not the lesson or the preparation but cleaning the kitchen. The kitchen is the room where we do everything and as Steve has the car the girls have to come to me and the table is in the kitchen. Last week I positioned myself where I could see the clock so that I could tell how the time was going. Big mistake…... all that I could think about was how dusty the clock was. This week I dusted the clock but worried about what else I'd missed. The strange thing is that Steve uses the pitch for one of his students and never once has he mentioned the dust on the clock!!! nor have i ever seen him with the feather duster in his hand. Why is that?

A new Start

I started writing Diary of a Dreamer because my husband and I had come to a point in our lives when we had an opportunity for change. It tells the story of that move to another house, another lifestyle, and anther country. But what happens once you have made that move when you settle into your new life and that life has become the norm?

 Well, you have a new story, but  this time one made up of little things, the mundanity of a daily routine. Just as a the success of a marriage is not determined by the splendour of the wedding, the success of a lifestyle is not defined by the move, it is the tiny day by day changes, the lessons learned and the mistakes made, the things that make you laugh and the things that make you cry that tells the story of that life.

So as the Walrus said to the Carpenter: The time has come to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings……..