Notes of an old refiner

The Pushkin Library in the centre has an "English club" on Thursdays, 16:00, for people over 55. The teacher is Aigul Temirovna Dosmailova, a young woman, maybe 27, patient like a saint. There are nine of us: pensioners, one former tram driver, and a retired nurse who corrects my pronunciation more than the teacher does. We read "The Old Man and the Sea", a short version for students, and I understand it better than the others because I know about fish: our dacha canal had carp in the 1980s.

My English notebook, page one. Tenses in red.

The first thing she corrected: I say "I am a pensioner since 2001". Correct is "I have been a pensioner since 2001". These tenses! In Russian I have one past, and it is enough for the whole life.

Home work for the next week: write ten sentences about my day. This blog is good for it. So if there are mistakes, now you know who to blame, it is Aigul Temirovna and my 1959 institute.