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Interview
7 June 2015 2.00 h

One call away from leaving

David Holmes Every Friday afternoon on El Punt Avui TV Nicole has a chat with an English-speaking expat. Here is her talk with Dave Holmes, who works for a publisher and is a member of the band, Los Stompers.
How did you dis­cover Cat­alo­nia?
I was liv­ing in Southamp­ton with my part­ner and we had just fin­ished uni­ver­sity and we were weigh­ing up op­tions, which were very few. A friend called me…her mother had a lan­guage school out in Gra­nollers and would we be in­ter­ested in going out and work­ing there. Nei­ther of us had con­sid­ered teach­ing.
Was teach­ing not your back­ground?
We both stud­ied mod­ern lan­guages: I did French and Ger­man, she did French and Span­ish. We thought, let's give it a go! We came here, bought an inter-rail ticket and thought we would travel for the sum­mer. We got here, some­one picked us up from Sants and the first piece of news we were greeted with was that there wasn't a job!
What did you do?!
We thought, don't panic, let's have a look around and leave our CV's in lan­guage schools. Many peo­ple we met said if we didn't have a job in a lan­guage school by the end of the week then we haven't tried hard enough.
How long ago was this?
It was 23 years ago.
Was learn­ing Eng­lish as pop­u­lar then as it is now?
It has al­ways been pop­u­lar. I think the dif­fer­ence is that there weren't so many chil­dren's classes as now. I think with the re­ces­sion that peo­ple feel that learn­ing Eng­lish is a pass­port to get­ting a job for their chil­dren. We waited a week and hadn't heard any­thing but just as we went to get our train at Sants we got a mes­sage to call a lan­guage school. They asked us to cover a class that evening! We flipped a coin to de­cide who would take the class. After the class they gave a job to both of us!
Do you still teach now?
No, I work for a pub­lisher now.
What was it like learn­ing the lan­guage?
The first lan­guage school I worked for of­fered free classes in Span­ish for the teach­ers. Hav­ing learnt French made a big dif­fer­ence. It meant the gram­mar made sense and the struc­ture of the sen­tences. I thought to my­self, I want to mas­ter Span­ish be­fore I start learn­ing Cata­lan. Then quite quickly it came ap­par­ent that you never mas­ter a lan­guage. You get to a cer­tain level after ac­cel­er­at­ing rapidly at the be­gin­ning and then it plateaus. The great thing about liv­ing in Cat­alo­nia is that they are re­ally en­cour­ag­ing about you learn­ing their lan­guage.
Lets move onto……what do I call it? A hobby of yours or an­other job? The band youre' in, Los Stom­pers!
It's both. It is a folk-rock band. It is being mar­keted by our record com­pany as Indie Folk. I play the vi­o­lin and ac­cor­dion.
How many of you are there in the band?
There are five of us. There've been a few changes over the years. The expat mu­si­cian cir­cle in Barcelona is re­ally small.
Are you all ex­pats?
Not now. The drum­mer is Cata­lan and we have had var­i­ous Cata­lans in the group. But in terms of peo­ple who tend to play Irish folk music, there are two or three bars where groups of that na­ture get to­gether. The jazz cir­cuit would prob­a­bly tell a sim­i­lar story for its own genre. I played in a band be­fore. I have played in var­i­ous places; two pris­ons, a dis­used church and a sec­ond-hand clothes shop where they paid us in clothes! Then a friend of mine told me the vi­o­lin­ist had just left Los Stom­pers and I was the only one around re­ally. It was a nat­ural pro­gres­sion as they were friends.
You have al­bums, you have toured, this is the real thing!
Yes we have. We oc­ca­sion­ally get lucky and get a nice fes­ti­val. All round Spain and even Den­mark. We get to go to places we would never nor­mally visit, which is great.
Your son also plays the vi­o­lin.
Yes, but his thing is singing.
Where are you orig­i­nally from in the UK?
I am from Boston, in Lin­colnshire
There is a UK Boston?
Lots of peo­ple say – but you don't have an Amer­i­can ac­cent! The Boston I'm from is 1,000 years older. The orig­i­nal one.
I re­cently had your son Oliver on Small Talk. We had an in­ter­est­ing chat about his ed­u­ca­tion. As his school closed, you de­cided on home ed­u­ca­tion. How did that af­fect you and your wife, who home ed­u­cated him.
I think that being a trained lan­guage teacher helped, as the tech­niques that you learn as a teacher of any sub­ject can be ap­plied if you have enough imag­i­na­tion, which she does. It wasn't re­ally down to me, I work full time. She was the key player. I helped out where I could, but I can't take any credit for it.
What do you think about it?
Home school­ing isn't for every­one. For some it is ideal and for some it is ab­solutely wrong. But we were lucky enough that my wife was in a sit­u­a­tion where she could do it and try it and it worked for Oliver.
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