An hour with Ingrid

My journey to learn Spanish

“Hola”

Ingrid says, her fine featured face beaming warmly.

She stands in her jeans, in the entrance to her modest, suburban home. Maybe ten years older than me, she is petite with pony-tailed caramel coloured hair and dancing brown eyes.

She ushers me into her kitchen where I sit down. She asks me in Spanish if I would like some water or a cup of tea, as I try to mentally construct a sentence I can throw out casually, that might impress her.

You see, every Wednesday bar school holidays, I take a bus to Halifax, then another to a suburb for my weekly Spanish lesson.

Last year, I decided to make some changes to my life.

“I will finally learn Spanish!” I vowed.

I’d tried a couple of times at night classes, but my attempts had always ended after a few weeks, due to it just being an introductory course or low numbers.

This time, I was serious and committed to finding myself a one to one tutor.

“It’s all online these days” said the naysayers.

Naysayers! They’re always there telling you you ‘can’t’ do things, aren’t they? Like the time I was told I couldn’t have a face painting business without a car, and ended up having a very successful one for years and commuting by public transport.

I refuse to listen to their negativity!

That said, certainly lockdowns had massively accelerated the already thriving model of ‘online learning’.

But was that really what I wanted? To sit looking at a screen for more hours than I already did?

No.

And where there’s a will, there’s a way!

So much of the time we go with what is ‘easier’, supposedly more convenient.

But what about what is possible, better, a superior experience?

What did my body and soul deserve?

I was determined I would find a face to face tutor, whatever it took!

My first attempts to find someone were met with disappointment. I looked at those closest only to find that despite being near, sadly, they were only providing online lessons.

Many of these ‘online tutors’ were offering a first lesson free as a way of drawing in clients. But I didn’t want a freebie! I was happy to pay and travel in order to secure the satisfying human experience I was worthy of.

It was important to me on many levels.

Firstly, I didn’t want the lesson to be something washing over me. Screens are a lazy way of consuming information. You can sit in your pyjamas, switch someone off and ghost them, should the experience disappoint. I craved real interaction and accountability. To have to make an effort. This was not ‘means to an end’ learning for me. It was not ticking a box. I did not have to learn it.

This would be learning for personal growth and pure joy. Screens would steal or dilute my pleasure.

There is something about physically travelling to a place that cements commitment, too. On snowy and rainy days, you have to really want to do it, brave those elements.

I also knew I would be less likely to jack it in if my tutor was a ‘real person’ I had physically met.  I would feel the responsibility of it. The guilt of letting someone down.

I scoured the internet, as well as local notice boards and eventually found an advert on a community Facebook page that was a few years old. Would she still do the lessons? I texted the number and waited.

Sure enough, she did and at a reasonable price!

The next week I headed over to her house on what would become a weekly commute.

Ingrid is one of those people who tries to deter you. Perhaps it is her way of weeding out the time wasters. I can relate to and respect that.

“You know it will probably take years to get to fluency.”

She warned

“Once we get to the past tense, a lot of people give up….”

I nodded

“And you will need to invest in some text books and practise……”

But this ‘real talk’ just made me sure I had found the right person. I appreciated her no-nonsense, practical outlook.

And now, every Wednesday morning, I sit down at her kitchen table organising my file, pencil case, text books and exercise book. It makes me feel like a teenager again, albeit a teenager with Poundshop reading glasses.

Ingrid is a neat, tidy person.

I, am not.

There’s something about being in the company of these ultra-neat types that conspires to make a person like myself, appear even more slovenly and uncouth. Every time I try to pull my study material from my bag, I find myself making loud rustling noises like Emu grappling with a lucky dip, dislodging an old tissue or launching a piece of chewing gum across her kitchen floor.

My creased text book is stained with red lipstick that has accidentally become open and bled against it in my bag.

Every scrap of my scruffiness seems magnified, I’m suddenly self conscious of my bitten nails as her tiny modestly ringed hands remove my dog eared sheets from my ring binder, unfurling them, popping them into plastic wallets and smoothing them down with dainty tan fingers.  It’s like being next to one of those organised girls at school.  The ones who try to impress the teacher by ‘helping’ you, sorting you out.

But I love it!

All of it.

The care, attention. The look on her face as I get something right. The way I feel she is genuinely rooting for me. The way I can talk to her in Spanish more and more as my confidence increases. It’s the one hour of my week, I feel I am growing. Slowly but steadily making some progress in something, just for me.

Ingrid has a screensaver on her laptop, of her home city of Lima in Peru. How her eyes sparkle when she talks of it. The weather, the beaches, the sweetness of the mangoes, her son….

Sometimes, she talks about where she has been or is going in her camper van with her husband. In a couple of weeks she is off to Sweden as that’s where her father’s family is from (hence the not-very-Spanish name). One day she showed me her Instagram account with all her road trips on it.

Another time, she produced a few of her craft projects  - she makes crocheted bags.

As I leave, she always waves me off with the same word.

The first few weeks, I wondered what the word was. It sounded like ‘crudité’ but in the absence of cucumber and carrot sticks, I’d guessed it wasn’t.

Turns out it was ‘cuídate’ or ‘take care’.

And how I do.

I take care to cherish this rewarding and beautiful connection I’ve established and nurtured.

I take care to guard against the march of cold ‘Big Tech’ by being the change I want to see in the world and keeping alive face to face learning and paying in cash.

Do I take care of my Spanish?

Well, maybe not as much as ought to.

But I’m absolutely savouring the journey.

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