Last week my daughter started speaking Spanish at school for the first time. I was ecstatic. She has hitherto been more or less mute. Who knew that what she needed was two weeks speaking English at home? The teacher corrected me, the reason she had spoken was ‘the dimonis.’
Of course Spain has a festival where everyone dresses up as demons and locals light huge bonfires in residential streets. Its a bit like Guy Fawkes but the bonfire is raging outside your bedroom window while a Spanish man drinking limoncello from the bottle cools down your exterior walls with a hosepipe.
Reader, it was nuts. She may have started speaking Spanish because she loved the dimonis but she continued because she hated them. The day after her first words were uttered, people dressed as demons were sent into school where they played menacing drums and danced around the children. I subsequently spent hours explaining that nothing is more terrifying to a dimoni than mummy before wading through a pile of instructions in Catalan on how to buy a meat platter for the fiesta.
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