HALCYON DAYS (PART 2)
ONE CONSTANT SOURCE OF HILARITY FOR ME, ON THE BSH RUN TO THE SUN, WAS THE STOIC REFUSAL OF MOST OF OUR TRAVELLING COMPANIONS TO TRY SPEAKING ANY FORM OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE.
Iwouldn’t claim to be a particularly accomplished cunning-linguist myself, but I’d never dream of travelling to a foreign country without taking at least a phrase book with me as, not only does it make life easier if you try to master the basics of the local language, but it also tends to engender a much friendlier response from those hardworking café/bar/shop owners who are understandably sick to death of ignorant British tourists who seem to believe that shouting at people in English’s just as effective as trying to be polite in the native tongue of the country they’re travelling in.
One year I asked for a show of hands to see how many of our
118 punters’d brought a Spanish or Portuguese phrase book with them. Just nine hands were raised!
The following day, as I pulled into a roadside cantina near Palencia for lunch, a guy came over to me and asked: “Oi Rick, how do I order food?” “Just like you would in a café at home,” I replied helpfully. “Pick something off the menu and ask for it.”
“Read the menu?” he said with a look of horror on his face. “We just want salads and coffee!”
“Okay, that’s pretty simple,” I said, letting him off the hook. “Is tuna salad okay?”
Both he and his missus nodded. “Okay, just ask for dos cafés con leche y dos ensaladas mixtas, por favor!”
After repeating the phrase back to me twice, he nodded and headed to the counter. We could hear him repeating it under his breath as he waited while two other guys spectacularly failed to order egg and chips by bellowing it at the top of their voices while flapping their elbows and making chicken noises (eventually they settled for two beers and two enormous bags of crisps).
As our hero stepped up to the counter and took a deep breath, his British reticence kicked in and he asked, in an apologetically quiet voice: “Can I get two coffees and two mixed salads, por favor?”
His wife asked me: “How do I call him a ‘f**king idiot’ in Spanish?”
“I think it’s puto idiota,” I replied, only for her to repeat it at the top of her voice, causing laughter from everybody else in the cantina.
Just to put the icing on the cake, a few minutes later the guy from behind the counter brought two plates of ensalada mixta over to our table, and placed one before the lady, saying smoothly: “Para bella dama” (for the beautiful lady), then placed the other before her husband saying: “Para puto idiota” (for the f**king idiot) with a broad grin and a wink.
For some folk, communicating in a foreign language can be further complicated by them being pretty unintelligible even in English. I fondly remember the laughter-pain in my ribs when two Geordie lads tried to explain the difficulty they experienced when asking a mechanic at a garage in Salamanca for directions to Camping Regio at Santa Marta Del Tormes. “We wuz reet f**k’n lost Rick! So wi pulled in at a garage an’ asked an oily owd gadgee for directions to Regeeyoh at San’a Mar’a. How man, ee divven’t unnerstand us at arl!” one of the wonderful Geordies explained, as my mind raced to translate it into English.
Then his mate said: “How man, I even tried askin’ im usin’ worr phrase book worreye bort on the boot on the way ova heeyah!”
Just as I was about to compliment him on trying to use a phrasebook, he produced it from his pocket and waved it at me to emphasise his point. “That’s a Portuguese phrase book,” I said, pointing to the word ‘Portuguese’ in large print on the cover.
“How man! Worra c**t am I? Ah suppose that makes it ma roond then does it?” he said as we all pissed ourselves laughing over an impressive collection of empty beer glasses.
On one of the trips when we travelled up the length of France, where we were having to cover a lot of miles each day to stay within the 12-day limit to the trip, I’d already been on the road for eight hours that day, and was just approaching the foothills of the Pyrenees when I had to turn around and go back halfway to Bordeaux to rescue a chap called Rab who’d broken down at a fuel station 140k behind me. It was just as well I was alone in the truck because my own language got more than a bit fruity as I headed back to pick him up. Rab, as you may’ve already guessed, was a man of Scottish persuasion, and he was riding a rather nice chop that had unfiltered bell-mouths on the carbs – not the best choice when travelling on dusty European roads in dry weather. To give him his due, the reason he hadn’t called me earlier was because he’d spent a couple of hours trying unsuccessfully to clean the shite out of the carbs himself, but he may’ve enjoyed a little more success if he’d been able to explain his problem to the people running the fuel station but, despite the historical influence of the French (particularly the Och French) on the modern vocabulary of the Scots, Rab’s almost impenetrable brand of Jockery was just too high a linguistic hurdle for them to leap over, despite them having a pretty good command of English. It was then I realised that, where for most of us the language barrier started as we came down the ramp of the ferry on to a European shore, for others, it actually began part-way down the A1 near Scotch Corner!