Today I remembered yet another box full of documents and papers which I had put away for sorting. Most of it is loose pieces of paper on which my grandmother, Olga Woronoff, had written notes and stories. Some of them are in English, a fair bit in Russian. The vast
As the saying goes, school days are the best days of our lives – or are they? I tend to think the days we spend in school are not memorable for the education we receive, but for the friendships we make and the lack of responsibility we have. It is
As I have mentioned before, my father learnt Latvian, English, German and French at high school and also knew a smattering of Russian. As a Baltic-German who did his schooling in Latvia, it is not a great leap to presume he spoke German at home and Latvian within the wider
If I were ever granted three wishes, my first would be to understand every language in the world because I would then be able to comprehend all of the family history documents I have inherited. Not that I would need to know more than German, Russian, French and Latvian, but
For me it is the smell of Christmas which brings back childhood memories. I just have to walk past freshly cut pine trees to remember the ones we used to have. In the weeks leading up to Christmas my mother and I would make decorations, cutting coloured paper into strips
There is a Chinese proverb about learning languages which goes: “To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world”. For a few years now I have been learning German. Although I stopped formal lessons some time ago, I have a couple of