Open Writing

'Did you finish it?' asked a cheerful open-faced lady at the next table, when I folded up my newspaper and put it into my friendly green canvas shopping bag.

She and her husband had been enjoying a cup of coffee at the pavement café while I worked on the crosswords. 'Yes, almost,' I replied. 'I've finished the Quick and the Cryptic but there are still a few words to find in the Target puzzle.' And I added that I don't like the Cryptics on Monday — the compiler's clues are often complex but rarely clever.

And so commenced a long, long conversation between the three of us. It's December, and now that the weather has turned warmer there are more people taking the air, with or without their dogs. One of my opening gambits is to talk to dogs, but this couple, of about my age, didn't have a dog. They just liked to have a good chat and I'm always delighted when the other person opens the conversation. It makes me feel less of a chatterer.

Well, we worked our way through crosswords to writing letters to the editor. Hal — that's not his real name but I anonymize and disguise the strangers I meet — is a frequent letter-writer. He has strong feelings about the ways mining companies earn and share their profits. I discovered later that he is a very active member of the Greens.

He revealed that he has visited far more countries than the three or four I've lived in. Not in and out like a tourist in a comfy bus, but travelling by local buses or whatever was available, and getting involved with the people he met. For him, life is a continuous learning experience. His account of learning the Turkish language, with the help of a fellow-traveller, was particularly interesting. I wasn't aware that in the 1920s Arabic script had been replaced by the Latin alphabet and the language standardised. Hal found it very easy to learn enough to engage in simple conversations with people he met along the way.

Language reform took place when Kemal Atatürk was reorganising the previously Ottoman country and creating the Republic of Turkey. In the mid-1950s, one of my friends, who had lived in Turkey just after that period, and was a great admirer of Atatürk, asked me to develop and print photos she had taken but had never had processed. I felt honoured to be trusted with the task and to be the first person to see those photos. I felt strangely close to real history even if at the time I didn't understand its significance.

At the café, we moved from the reform of Turkish to the perceived need to reform English. What problems it creates for learners from non-English-speaking and particularly Asian backgrounds! How do we explain, for instance, the different pronunciations of ough in though, thought, bough and rough? However, apart from the way they are said, the spelling of English words presented few or no difficulties to my Chinese private students. Visual memory was probably the clue. If a child has to learn up to 1,000 Chinese ideographs in order to write, her memory has had a lot of exercise and practice. English spelling is partly 'look and say', with visual memory making the link.

I have one regret, and a feeling of guilt, about this wonderful conversation at the pavement café — I talked too much. I hope we shall not merely be ships that passed in the night but will meet again one day for another meeting of minds. And I shall do more listening and learning.