“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905

This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

I’m going to tell you a few wee stories about my journeys learning Spanish, French, Italian and a little bit of Catalan. Growing up in an impoverished neighbourhood of Glasgow, I found my escape in dreaming, in reading and in languages. They all, in some ways, opened my world and reality to something new and different. My first communicative exposure to another language, on a regular basis, other than the Gaelic spoken by my grandmother and English all around, was in Primary Five (around 8-9 years old) at St. Augustine’s Primary, Milton in 1992.