Women and desire : Part II

Last Friday I was teaching my students at the bank about language useful for meetings. After that was done, we practiced. I decided we'd draw up an agenda of things to discuss and suggested as a first item Bratislava's congestion problems. I then asked my students what other points we'd like to discuss. Jason suggested we return to the more important concern- what do women want? Samantha smiled and laughed, having had no knowledge of our earlier discussions, but agreed to this.

After taking us masterfully through a range of possible congestion solutions, politely dismissing my off-beam suggestion that we fly to work in private airplanes, Samantha handed the chair over to Jason, who asked for Samantha's opinion on the vital question at hand, after we had summarized our earlier thoughts on the subject.

She agreed with the points made on Wednesday but wanted to add a thought of her own – women want to feel that men give them enough space to develop as they feel fit, as they wish, that women feel that the man is not overly controlling of them, and that the manner by which they protect and are devoted to them does not interfere with the granting of that freedom.

So there it is then. All wrapped up and sorted. Well, except that I should mention Gulliver's contribution of last night. That women want men to make them feel uniquely special and important in the man's eyes, to be specifically attentive to them in a focussed way. Maybe we can file that away under the desire for 'devotion'?

Another thing I did with my students was teach them about writing stories. If any of my native English speaking readers are like I was before I trained to be a language teacher, you won't even know what the 'past continuous' is, let alone how if differs from or relates to the 'past perfect' or the 'present perfect'. All three of these are tenses, which one hopes you masterfully employ on a regular basis without knowing it.

Stories, as you may have noticed, usually happen in the past (simple stories anyway). For a writer this makes life easier, since you don't have to worry about two thirds of the absurdly complex English tense system. What, you don't think its complex? Go grab your nearest Slav and ask his opinion.

I walked (past simple)
I was walking (past continuous)
I had walked (past perfect)
I had been walking (past perfect continuous)

Unless you want to get all passive about stuff:

I was walked (past simple passive)
I was being walked (past continuous passive)
I had been walked (past perfect passive)
No, you can't do past perfect continuous passive, unless you want to say "I had been being walked". Do you?

These four past tenses (the so called 'narrative tenses') are all you have to worry about –as long, that is, as you avoid direct speech, which can then wheel in the other two thirds of the labyrinth in whatever way you want.

So, by avoiding direct speech, avoiding complicating chit chat in your story, you can simply focus on these four tenses (or seven if you might want to go passive) and sigh a very big sigh of relief that you don't have to bother about the mother of all tense nightmares, the Present Perfect and her even worse Grandmother, the Present Perfect Continuous:

I have walked
I have been walking

Simple stories remember, simple stories, I'm talking simple. For those learning to write, ok? So no comebacks, please, about how you can use the Present Perfect, for example, if you are alluding to your own or others' general life and experiences –for example in your preamble to your narrated past events. Phew!

Right. Keeping things simple, the things to know about these tenses in straightforward stories can be briefly summarised thus:

Use the present simple to talk about completed events that happened at a specific, finite time (at 8.30 yesterday I spotted some fine breasts) or to talk about sequential events that follow from others, as it were, step by step from the past towards the present (I picked up a marshmallow, but then I spotted some fine breasts and dropped it into my uncle's soup).

Use the past continuous to give the general background to your story (I was sitting on my balcony stroking my chin and all the birds were singing joyfully), or use it to give the background event or action to some other specific event which interrupts it (I was happily stroking my chin when I spotted some fine breasts) or use it (if you want, you don't have to) to describe what happened between two times or during a particular past time period (for the whole of the flight to Vegas I was sweating most profusely).

Use the past perfect to talk about something that happened before something else that happened in the past. Got that? (I missed my train because I had been preoccupied by the sight of some very fine breasts). Actually, I am suspecting that the past perfect gradually dies out, but don't tell Cambridge that, ok? I find it most useful in talking about causation, explaining why x,y, or z happened. You can get round it if you use shorter sentences, however, and if you use time referencing words like 'before' or 'earlier' etc. Still, there will always be occasions when it really has to be used.

Anyway, I thought I'd test my students' story writing skills and gave them free reign to write me a story about anything they liked, anything at all. I also said I'd write them a story, just to keep them company. None of them, however, wrote about sweat, marshmallows or breasts, not even I.

What I did write was this:

"Two weeks ago 2 million Martians were traveling across space on their way to Planet Earth. They were looking forward to conquering the human world and hoping we would all be asleep when they arrived.

Yesterday evening they arrived in the skies of England, just as Bolton were defeating Manchester United in a crucial Premiership match.

The Martians had never watched a football match before. They were very intrigued by the short trousered gentlemen, their antics, and the importance they seemed to place on the possession of a small, spherical object.

They decided they had been missing out on much in life and returned peacefully to the red planet, awestruck at how simpler it must be to play football than to conquer planets.

They will not be troubling the citizens of the blue planet again, but have begun to erect temples in honour of their new footballing religion."