Pour le quartorze juillet

I’ve been working in London eight weeks now and I’m getting used to the early starts, the over-crowded public transport and the dirt that seems to cling to the inside of my nostrils every day. I occasionally hear French voices in the street, and it makes me more inclined not to let my own language skills slip, so I’ve started a campaign to keep my French going, especially as this weekend London’s French community have been celebrating Bastille Day in a big way.

If you’d asked me six months ago if I would ever use an iPod, I would have categorically said no. But I got one in December, and now I couldn’t be without it (and I’ve just realised I can play solitaire on it too). I’ve been on to the French homepage of iTunes and subscribed to lots of newspods. The best I’ve found so far is RMC: Le tout info en sept minutes which is a quick round-up of all the news stories and about as much as I can be bothered to listen to.

I’ve also read the first Alex Rider book in French, which was excellent, although there was some vocabulary about car crushers that I had to make a best guess at. I’ve now bought Mission Polaire, the second in Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series, which I’m having a harder time with. I must have missed the French lesson on mythical creatures, so I’m guessing what type of fairy-thing the characters are from whether they have wings or not.

Regular readers will know I had a short-lived obsession last autumn with the Spanish TV series Un Paso Adelante, which was dubbed into French as Un Dos Tres. On my last visit to Paris I bought series three and four and am once again addicted. Could Adela try any harder to mess up her life? And Juan, Diana and Ingrid: now there’s a love triangle that’s going to run and run. So all in all, I think I’m doing a pretty good job of not letting my old skills slip away.

Unfortunately, my brain doesn’t do a very good job of separating languages. In a meeting last week with one of the directors I was giving a project status update and said, “We should be able to rattrape the delay.” Then I realised that wasn’t actually English, and worse, the grammar of the sentence didn’t work either. “We should be able to catch up the delay” isn’t the most articulate way to explain that your replan has made some improvements to the project timescales.

Luckily, I don’t think many people noticed – they got the sense of it from the context, a bit like I worked out that description of the car crusher. Either that, or they weren’t listening at all…

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