This one is a little more personal in its drive towards socialisation, though no less prescriptive. Forgive me, but I’m too tired to play tennis just now. And indeed, there is no time for tennis, nor any other trivial pursuit: the three months are flying on wings of fire, passing over great continents of vocabulary, mountain ranges of irregular verbs, oceans of tenses and subjunctives where indirect object pronouns swim, sharp-toothed and voracious, awaiting a victim. We are expected to have gained a knowledge of these landmarks merely by gazing at them from a great height. Almost as soon as they come they are gone, into the linguistic past, a place of fundamental risk and confusion where things become unlearned and ungrasped, where pitiful reserves of knowledge are swept away like a pensioner’s savings in a financial crash. Unlike the historic past, the linguistic past is subject to incessant change: whole land masses sink overnight, settlements are razed to the ground, insecure structures are swept away.
