In the Park (Cecilia Peartree)
As I suppose is the case with many people at the time of writing this, my mind has been taken up with monitoring the news via various sources. There is only so much of the current news footage I can cope with at one time, and I don’t want to comment directly on what’s happening now. However, as I get older my mind tends to wander back to things I had almost forgotten about, and so the other day I found myself remembering a conversation I once had as a teenager in a park in Leningrad (St Petersburg). I was fortunate enough, although perhaps that isn’t the right word for it, to be able to study Russian and German at school instead of the more usual French and/or Latin. I found Russian was much more difficult than German because of all the endings that had to be learnt, which in some cases replaced the need for definite and indefinite articles, and sometimes made prepositions redundant. However I did persevere with it for six years and almost went on to study it at university, but I had...