6th: Hold the front page!

We’ve had a few days examing since the last blog, so what can we tell you? Well, as you can see from the headline news, courtesy of the Woking Informer, today was something of a severe day for those being examined. Not a primary or middle school, but a high school, with lots of seventeen and eighteen-year olds taking the basic exam and failing the first hurdle of being able to tell me what d ay it was. Some even had trouble with, “What’s your name”. It was then that I knew the butcher’s bill for the day was going to be high. Still, what can you do, eh? The centre, before learning of results, were keen to make me as “at home” as possible, even providing tea in my break. Tea, which is so, “typically English”. Yes, but perhaps not so typically English if the stuff is orange, heavily sugared and with four ice cubes in it (on a cold day). I can imagine the folk at work and their disbelief. Still, I am grateful for the stuff – kept me going through the darker moments of the day. There’s a picture of me on a train, returning from exams. Lovely.

Some mildly humorous comments from the past couple of days include one lad’s recollection of going to London. The most interesting thing he noted was that “there are more traffic lights than in my city”. Little to argue about there and much to the chagrin of drivers in both cities, I should imagine. Interesting how the world is viewed through other people’s eyes, eh?

Then there was revelation that ‘poodle’, with a minor change of the first vowel, sounds just like ‘puddle’. It took me a moment to realise what was going on when the girl told me she had a “white puddle”. At first I thought there’d been an accident, until she went on to say, “her hair’s as soft as a pillow”. A curious metaphor, no doubt, and leaves one wondering a little about the safety of the dog.

There was also the lad who let me in on a little secret about a side-line Her Majesty’s got going on over here. When not opening supermarkets and inviting old Etonians to form governments (I read with dismay that most of the new cabinet are millionaires), she’s got a thriving musical career. Oh, yes. When talking about music, the boy informed me that his favourite singer was “The Queen – I listen every day”. I wonder if she pays tax on that.

There’s the perennial problem of aspiration (extra ‘h’ sound), with a girl telling me about ‘hair pollution’ (although I had to admit that in parts of Napoli, both ‘hair’ and ‘air’ pollution are certainly a problem), and a final favourite, which is the lad with the unfortunately named, ‘Luca Matitti’. As a boy, not so bad, although it does remind me of a couple of students in London, one who’d taken his father’s German name of ‘Meidich’ [pron: my-dick] and from his Italian mother’s side, the first name, ‘Luca’. The other was a French beauty named, ‘Angelique Lecoq’. My, my.

Just one more day in Caserta before I set off for the mountainous region of Benevento.