May I Make an Appointment for Last Week?

Yes, that is exactly the phrase I recently used whilst calling to make a medical appointment. Well…what I actually said was: Puis-je prendre un rendez-vous pour la semaine dernière? (I live in France.) In any case it greatly amused the medical secretary…I think she’s still laughing. It’s nice to make someone’s day brighter. By the way, I did get the appointment—but for the next week. But you had worked that out, right?

In my defence, I would like to say that part of my oxymoronic question was down to my age. You see, I’ve never been this age before. What about you? So most of what I do is being done for the first time since I turned 71. Things both physical and mental take more time than they used to do. Some are damn near impossible. To wit: my wife and I were at a restaurant with friends and we ordered a bottle of cider. We’re all about the same age, and none of us could open it. Then I spotted a workman at a nearby table and voilà, the cork came out with ease. I like to think the four of us had made his job easier…

So here I am, never having been this age before and having to speak and write in French on a daily basis. I hasten to add that French was some way down my list of ‘second languages.’ I had studied German, Hebrew, Greek and ancient Egyptian before I began to study French. And several other (mainly ancient) languages came along later. What I am discovering—at this age I have never been before—is that languages seemingly go into the same file cabinet in my brain. Thus, I can never be completely certain regarding in which language a word will exit my mouth. The top runners are usually German or Hebrew. My brain is well aware that the word for which it is searching is not English, so if in a pinch, it pulls out the correct word, but in the wrong language. But, of course, only I know that I used the word correctly.

In this world of mass migration, I take comfort in knowing that I am not alone in jumbling up my words. Our area in Basse Normandie has a fare number of Turks as well as Africans of various nations, so, when standing at the till in le supermarché, I often earwig to see how they handle French. They usually fare better than I and, in any case, many of the North and West Africans have had French as a first or second language. Such was the case in England about a thousand years ago…but I’m not that old. There’s an English lad in the village, who, at age 8, now speaks French fluently, and with a French accent…but then he’s never been my age before.

I also comfort myself by knowing I have never called a bus driver a ‘squid’ when boarding local transport in Greece. That zinger came from the mouth of an American woman I heard in Athens. She was keen to show off her newly learned Greek by saying ‘Good day’, but her brain dished up the not totally dissimilar sounding ‘calamari’. I thought the driver was going to throw her off his bus. Oh well, I suppose she had never been that age before…