My support worker Sophie lives in Cuba for half the year, to escape the winter here, and comes home for the summer. This year her boyfriend Lazaro’s come with her. They’ve been staying at the castle for the last few days and it’s been lovely getting to know him.

Lazaro doesn’t speak English, so our conversations have been limited, except when Sophie translates for us. But there are a couple of tics that he understands and both make him laugh a lot!

The first is ‘Fuck’ and the second is ‘Gato’.

‘Gato’ is Spanish for cat and has crept in as a regular tic as a result of them staying here.

While ‘Gato’ makes Lazaro and me laugh, Sophie doesn’t seem to notice it at all, and that’s probably because she’s bilingual. ‘Cat’ is a regular tic in English as well, and she only seems to notice that I’ve said it in Spanish if we point it out to her.