April Newsletter 2009

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Ever wondered what Nick Howlett gets up to during the first six months of the year while he is in Spain. You can know find out on the following pages, there is an up date from the man himself.

Six Months A Year In South East Spain

When I first told my fellow Wigmore members I was going to live in Murcia in Spain for six months in January 2007 and that I wouldn't start work until mid-afternoon they thought I'd come back in the summer super-fit, my heart and legs full of miles on the bike in the mornings in the beautiful southern Spanish weather. The reality, of course, proved somewhat different.

The work I was going to do was actually quite hard; trying to teach young learners the intricacies of the English language in a private language school which they attended after going to their normal school in the morning. I was soon to discover that keeping control of the class alone needed large reserves of energy which wouldn't have been there if I had been "beasting" myself in the mornings on the bike! The other problem was that I soon found myself struggling to find decent cycling routes living in quite a large city; Murcia has a population of about 450,000 and is the capital of the region of Murcia. Forget the myriad of lush green country lanes in Kent, here you can easily cycle for forty minutes out of the city in one direction and still find yourself going past big warehouses on ugly roads. The landscape here is relatively baron and very dry looking, with stark mountains rising up in the distance.

Nowadays, happily, I've settled into some kind of training regime, and even better, I don't teach kids anymore! Last year and this year I've mainly survived here by teaching private classes or "one-to-ones". I simply put up an advertisement in the official state language school which is just down the road from us, and wait for people to phone me. They mainly want to practise their spoken English and in practise this often means meeting them in a bar, having a coffee or even a beer with them, and letting them do most of the talking; luckily that's something the locals here are very good at!

Another project I'm involved with is something quite different altogether; another "actor" and me have to perform a play in English to groups of school children who are bused in every day from different schools across the region. We do that four mornings a week for about eight weeks so again I miss out on the training but at least I get to dress up as a middle ages soldier (a kind of crusader) and even wield a sword at one point. Please don't ask me to give a rendition one night at the club house!

Continued...

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