‘Gracias, Gustavo.’ I picked up my knife and fork. A fresh pizza is strangely irresistible considering it’s just bread with a few bits of stuff on top.
Gustavo paused. ‘How do you say it correctly in English?’ he asked in Spanish. ‘Enjoy your meal?’
I hate this question because there’s no satisfactory answer. Historically nobody in Britain has ever been expected to enjoy their meal, the food being lumps of meat with instant gravy and two boiled vegetables, so the English language has never felt the need to get involved.
Yes, you can say Enjoy your meal we told Gustavo, it sounds fine, but we don’t usually say that in Britain. It sounds more the kind of thing an American might say, like the very irritating Have a nice day! I shall not have a nice day, young lady, because I’ve just been evicted from my flat for non-payment of rent, my wife’s run off with a Japanese weightlifter and my only remaining friend is an ancient poodle with age-related dementia.
A neighbour, by the way - this is a brief digression - who drives a taxi once asked us what was the word that English people used all the time about everything. Ny-ee, ny-ees? Something like that. On trips around the island, for example, he’ll stop at a scenic viewpoint and they’ll say it’s nyees. They have a coffee and it’s nyees, so is the doughnut. Nyees weather. Nyees people.
It’s nice, we told him. If there’s one English word you really need to learn as a taxi driver, it’s nice. Just don’t tell anyone to have a nice day if they look anything like me.
But to get back to Gustavo: in smart restaurants, I told him, the waiter is likely to say Bon appétit! which is not English at all, it’s French.
‘Bon appétit,’ Gustavo nodded doubtfully. You could tell he’d thought about this problem before. ‘Buen apetito, no? But why,’ he continued in Spanish, ‘would you wish them a good appetite when they’re already sitting in your restaurant? If they didn’t have a good appetite they wouldn’t be there.’
No, they wouldn’t.
‘And anyway, if you’re going to wish them a good appetite, why can’t you say it in English instead of French? That would be, what: good apetito? No...’
‘Good appetite. Don’t learn it, Gustavo, nobody ever says it.’ He went back to the kitchen shaking his head – how full of mysteries is this complicated world we live in.
This is just one of many important failures in the English language, in my view. Mind you, the Spanish Buen provecho! - Good benefit! - isn’t much better when you come to analyse it. Of course you’ll benefit, it will make all the difference between being hungry and not being hungry.
Or you can say Que aproveche! which means ‘May you take advantage, may you make good use of it’. By eating the pizza perhaps, as against putting it on your head to keep the sun off, tearing it up to feed to passing cats, spinning it across the restaurant like a frisbee to the small boy in the corner… It’s a daft thing to say, really.
What we need, all of us, Brits, Spanish, French and the rest of the world, is something meaningful along the lines of ‘We hope you enjoy this creation of our chef, made with skill, love and only the very best ingredients’.
Or let’s just dump the pizza on the table, smile cheerily and leave everyone to get on with it. Simplicity!
Perhaps simplicity is the key to everything. I’ve just read - this is another very brief digression - that in a particular region of Costa Rica (the Nicoya peninsula) there are vastly more centenarian old men than there should be. They just go on and on being alive, and a key factor seems to be that they have no challenging bucket lists, no unfulfilled dreams, they expect nothing more from life than to do tomorrow what they’ve been doing today. Simplicity!
But then, that sounds terribly boring, doesn’t it? Perhaps the Spanish have got it more-or-less right after all. Que aproveche! May you make good use of everything, even if it’s only a pizza.
-------------- Do they still whistle? --------------
THE BOOK
An ideal present for anyone who knows La Gomera, or who would like to know it!
Search for Do they still whistle? on www.amazon.co.uk or any other Amazon website.
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