My little student, Quim
(seriously, leave all the Victorian fanny jokes by the door – it’s pronounced Kim, or rather Keem), is fish mad and I suspect he puts up with having to read
and do endless v v v v v v v v v v vs with me because he gets to (over)feed
not 1 but 2 aquariums.
We tend to limp through the hour with a
mixture of going over his homework, working on his (not very good) reading and
then wasting considerable chunks of time surfing the internet for silly you tube
videos. I like to think he probably
learns more from the last thing than the former (did I mention this wasn’t my
forte?).
This week’s reading session threw up a bit
of a surprise, we read through a section of his text book that introduced various characters from around
the world describing something unique about their country (or area). We had a native Madrilanian talking
about some national park (sorry, I
forget the name), an Alaskan talking about a similar subject, a child from
Tanzania talking about solar panels, an Irish child talking about wind farms
and an English child talking about cheese rolling.
Yup, you read correctly, cheese rolling! Because we all know that of all the things
the English are famous, or even infamous for, is cheese rolling….hmmm.
My student thought this somewhat marginalised English eccentricity was hilarious, or in his own words: "muy loco". Getting bored with repeating ‘i’ as in ‘eye’ (with pointing) to my young charge I fired up the laptop and decided to show him the delights of the world famous sport of Cheese Rolling that us mad-as-a-box-of-frogs English folk get up to each week in our spare time.
To be fair it is very funny. I know it only happens on one weekend a
year in some remote village in Gloucester, but why should I be the one to spoil
the romance? Watching grown idiots hurl
themselves down a stupidly steep slope at Cooper's Hill often dressed in little more than their underwear (and for one
man a mankini), probably breaking ribs, arms, legs, necks en route was very comedic.
However, one thing was bugging me…
Young Quim, seriously – you think cheese rolling is mad but racing around a village whilst being chased by a herd of marauding bulls is perfectly OK? Bizarrely he couldn’t see the issue. Granted our village’s version of the Correbous is on a much smaller, and certainly less dramatic, scale than the San Fermin in Pamplona. And without doubt the only injury that is likely to occur to any game bullrunner is a twisted ankle or a blister from a rubbing espadrille, but I still think the Spanish tradition holds the “muy loco” title.
