Going through a bad spell

One of the perils of being an English teacher abroad is it doesn't take long before you forget bits of your mother tongue. In a lesson today with a very nice lady whose daughter lives in Germany, the need for a term for knives, forks and spoons came up and I had to look it up in the dictionary to check the number of 't's it needed. The word, of course, is 'cutlery'. Incidentally, my student said she was eager to learn English partly so she could communicate better with her German son-in-law. I suggested that wouldn't it be better to simply learn German, but she replied, "Oh no, his English is very good!" Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, my spelling has never been brilliant, but out of the daily newspaper game, occasional reading and this blog are the only ways of sharpening the blunt edges of my spelling. When I was in America writing obituaries for the Log Cabin Democrat (that's the newspaper's real name, by the way), I could always claim any misspelling was in fact just British spelling, and the excuse worked vice versa when I returned to Britain fresh from four years of looking everything up in my Webster's Dictionary. These days I have no excuses, and I find my trusty Concise Oxford English Dictionary is getting plenty of exercise. Now, I just need to work on my Japanese kanji...