Last year on Paddy's Day, I got off the Metro in the morning on my way to work, and there in all its glory was shamrock growing up between cracks in the pavement. Well, it wasn't shamrock. It was clover, but nobody except me would know the difference. I teach English as a foreign language, and that morning, I was on my way to teach a class in a big company. They were businessmen and women who wanted to know all the English words connected with the "how to make lots of money and get paid for it" type of vocabulary.
So I pulled up a few clumps of this stuff and in I went to give my class. In Barcelona, everyone seems to wear their best clothes all the time. They always look like they've come from a fashion shoot for I went round the classroom, pinning bunches of clover onto these businessmen and women in this company and saying `Happy St Patrick's Day!' to everyone. They were not impressed by the clods of earth still attached to the clover, and kept telling me I was ruining their outfits.
The next class I gave that day was on the other side of town and when I arrived, all the kids had cut out big shamrocks from green cardboard and pinned them onto their clothes, as a surprise for me. On the card shamrocks, they'd written Paddy in front of all their names. So I taught a roomful of Paddy Pedros and Paddy Eleanas and Paddy Miguels and we had great craic. I should have kept the clover for them.
Niamh Nolan (29) is a TEFL teacher and presenter of the programme, Radio English Teacher. She has lived in Barcelona for two years.