Going Native!!!

I recently heard someone on the radio here declare that England has too many “wet led” pubs. This interesting term turns out to mean pubs where people go solely to drink; drinking (alcohol as a rule) is the major activity of the establishment and you are lucky if you can find as much as a packet of crisps let alone anything more substantial to soak up the alcohol. I wanted to shout out my agreement. I am missing the gallego habit of giving you a little something – tortilla, crisps, olives, some unidentified food item on a chunk of bread – when you go for an early evening drink.

It’s not that Spain doesn’t have its share of semi-professional drunks. There’s a little group of them who gather around midday at the top of our local park with cartons of wine. They perch on the back of the bench - for all the world like the corner boys from the American police series The Wire except that they are older and fatter and not black – and chew the fat until the police come along and move them on. So yes, there are those who drink just to get drunk but as a rule people still nibble as they drink and even the botellonistas take a pizza or something similar along.

Maybe I’m just going native, adjusting so well to my Vigo life that Greater Manchester seems strange. Further evidence of this was my reaction to the faces of the children at my grandchildren’s primary school. I went along to meet them one afternoon and found myself thinking as I looked at all the little ones coming out, “Ooh, don’t they look pale and pasty!” Then I remembered my friend Rosetta meeting my grandchildren on their first visit to Vigo and commenting, “¡Qué blanquitos son!” (How pale they are!) I have clearly grown accustomed to the more sunkissed faces of Spanish children, even in relatively rainy Galicia.

On that same afternoon outside the school, my daughter sent me over to “talk Spanish to Ana” on the grounds that this madrileña married to a Mancunian doesn’t get much chance to speak her own language. So I went and introduced myself. “¿Dónde aprendiste el español?” she asked me, “Tienes acento gallego.”

Well, how about that!?!