I went away for a short walking holiday east of Frankfurt am Main last week. After three to four hours of non-stop walking in hilly countryside in the morning, I then flop around in my room, reading.
As I didn't have enough time to go to the public library and pick two new French books for this month, I rooted around my shelves at home and came across two books I'd brought back from Wales with me a year or two ago.
One of them was a copy of Moliere's play Les femmes savantes; the other was Colomba by Prospere Mérimée. The former had been printed in 1962, the latter in 1904; both had been bought by me in Chester when I was a schoolgirl and both had notes at the back to help learners understand the grammar and vocabulary.
Yes, I'd bought them when I was 17 or 18 years old, in the pre-Internet days, when buying books in foreign languages was no easy feat if you grew up in a Welsh village of fewer than 4,000 residents. In those days, the family would travel for an hour and a half to Chester to go shopping for clothes you couldn't get in our area then.
I would nip into bookshops to try and find foreign books I could use to practise my skills on because Chester was practically a metropolis in comparison with my village and you were more likely to find some educated person there. And this was the result all those years ago. Over the years, I'd made desultory attempts to read them, but they had always been a bit too dry and difficult for me.
Finally, however, I managed to settle down and read them from beginning to end. I knew I'd get round to them some day.
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