My French teacher here in France is an older lady called Delphine (older being somewhere between 60 and 75 years old - I just can't tell!). She's a darling. We met at the local community French lessons offered by kindly retired people for the small sum of 10 euros a year. I didn't go there much after the first six months because I couldn't follow what they were trying to (kindly) teach me...and to boot we were in a pre-fabricated type building, not a centuries-old, aching with past memories and dripping with gorgeous history kind of stone building. Not at all. Anyone who went to school in New Zealand from about the 1980s onwards will know what I mean by pre-fab type buildings, only this one was bad and seriously ugly. My problem was that I absolutely could not be in beautiful France and have French lessons in an ugly building. The feng shui was just all wrong for me.
Anyway, Delphine and her husband Jean-Pierre had a granddaughter who had worked on an alpaca farm in Christchurch, New Zealand (but of course!), and Delphine was very keen for us to meet. One Saturday we met them at a local restaurant for a delicious French lunch and we got to know them all - Delphine and Jean-Pierre, their daughter and her children. After that, dear Delphine generously invited me to her house for French lessons, and I keenly took her up on that suggestion. I have now been going to her house once a week for the last two years, and we send each other postcards whenever we are away on our holidays. Delphine used to teach English so she slips between the two languages gracefully. She laughs a lot too - often at me - but I don't mind because it stops me from being embarrassed at my mistakes as I join in with her for a good laugh. I'm not even sure that I blush anymore!
She and I are looking through the manuscript for my (recently-published-now-available-for-sale-on-amazon-websites-for-example) book called 'Waking Up In France', and slow line by slow line we are translating it into French. This has to be the best type of French lesson I have ever had! Seeing words I have written in English gradually transformed into a real French sentence with the correct words in the correct order is a joy to behold, and kind of makes the French make more sense to me. And so I come home and type it all into my computer so that my brain will register it all the better. I even use the 'insert symbol' option to make all those clever e-accent acute, e-accent grave, a-accent grave, etc... Quite a job!
But what made me laugh was that Delphine and I were working through the manuscript - the first page of the prologue in fact, and she was laughing hard. That wasn't unusual, but then she said something that made me hoot. She said, "Sara, this is really, very good. You should write a book!"
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