Bring it on!

There is nothing more irritating than someone with a gaping head wound pulling rank and jumping the queue when you have been waiting patiently to see the doctor.

Not me waiting, you understand, but Toni sitting beside me wearing a surgical mask and looking very sorry for himself. When eventually he was seen, the doctor confirmed that he had some sort of flu. If it gets any worse, then his microbes will be interrogated to see if he has the porcine variety.

And the rain continues its relentless falling.

Terrassa has been cancelled. No beating the log for it to shit your presents (Don’t ask; it’s Catalan and traditional and it wears a little hat) and no Christmas meal at the restaurant. It makes a change for Toni to be ill rather than my good self. I was building up a sort of tradition of being ill on Christmas Day, but all good things come to an end and I was in rude health last year. Perhaps Toni is starting a tradition all of his own.

This illness has meant that I have had to do a certain amount of panic buying for Noche buena and Navidad even if much of the food is going to be for myself. Christmas will be Christmas no matter how ad hoc the preparations!

Toni’s illness has also put a question mark over our proposed visit to Benidorm to visit a warmer part of Spain and to catch up with Brian.

At long last I have sent off the e-mail Christmas card. Taking the photograph proved to be the easiest part of the enterprise and I had to go no further than our garden for the augmented plant. Putting the photograph on a page which was capable of being opened as a file on an email was altogether more difficult and that took three attempts. And I’m still not sure why it worked the third time and not the first – but that, of course, is one of the joys of working with computers. Allegedly.

Dinner was two sandwiches: Spanish ham for Toni and smoked salmon for me. I must start planning the Christmas lunch now.

What have I got in the fridge?

Countdown continues

Only those unfortunates who get up at a quarter past six in the morning can really appreciate a lie in until nine o’clock: two and three-quarters hours of oblivion. Or rather an extended period of vivid dreams - a legacy, I think of the lingering effects of the medication to make sure that my single day off school remained as a single day!

The only thing that made the last two useless days of school supportable was the knowledge that today I was going to Barcelona to search for interesting wines to tickle the taste-buds of our little group of wine snobs (unfair!) in Stages in the New Year.

As the colleague who was going to accompany me had to go to hospital for emergency treatment at the weekend it seemed that she would be unable to wander about in Barcelona. Luckily the two ridiculous school days were so obnoxious that we were both determined to wash the memory away with a day out as soon as the term was ended.

We met, as is traditional for me, outside Habitat and, as if on cue, the rains started. What should have been a pleasant ramble around the elegant streets of Barcelona turned into a damp grumble, dodging puddles. This weather is most uncharacteristic and should have the good grace to bugger off to a country where it is more typical.

However depressing the conditions, we did not allow ourselves to be depressed: we were, after all, free on a Wednesday!

One of our first stops was in a superb chocolate shop where the elegant displays of boxed delights were almost too much to resist – until you noticed the price! I was much taken with a box of thirty-six chocolates set out in regulated lines and the top of each chocolate was decorated with a design composed of repeated numbers. The chocolates were grouped into nine batches of four and their flavours were, to say the least, experimental including such delights as curry chocolate and stout chocolate!

As I was looking for a present I had to tell myself that my somewhat eclectic taste might not be shared by the recipient, so I played (fairly) safe and chose more conventional confections.

This shop also has a coffee/chocolate shop and so we were able to have a flavoursome cup of rich, dark coffee and we also chose a single chocolate (packed in its own little box) to accompany the drink.

Thus refreshed we ventured out into the gallery area of Barcelona and saw the usual mixture of the urbane and the insulting. One ‘exhibition’ comprised the wall of the gallery being roughly painted in strips of colour with the paint pots lying around and a fringe of sports’ newspapers at the bottom of the walls to catch the drips. We almost didn’t go in because we couldn’t tell from a casual look if the gallery was being prepared for an exhibition or if it was the exhibition itself!

We looked at Greek classical sculpture; Egyptian artefacts; child-like coloured scribbles; prints by Victor Vaserely (a name from the past); an amazingly various collection of generally figurative artists; spectacularly well taken photographs; a childish take-off of something that Roy Lichtenstein did better and last, but certainly not least an exhibition of Ramon Casas.

We were on our way to lunch when through torrential rain I saw the unmistakable style of the artist that I regard as the finest that Catalonia has produced.

The exhibition was small and had pieces of dubious quality including some fugitive pieces that should surely be in a museum for experts to study and not stuck in some sort of totally inappropriate ornate frame simply because of the same. However, there was a Casas portrait sketch which stood out from everything else for me. And it was for sale. And therefore could be mine!

For only €45,000!

I will have to wait for El Niño and hope that I am successful in that draw.

Though if anyone has forty-five thousand lying around doing nothing . . .

Lunch was a chatty delight with mushroom risotto and a beautiful piece of salmon, followed by pear in chocolate sauce – and a bottle of wine. This, surely, is how all Wednesdays should be spent – apart from the rain of course!

Toni has returned from the frozen wastes of Terrassa, chilled to the bone and with the start of a cold. He is urging me to pile on the clothing when we go up to participate in the seasonal celebrations!

And I still haven’t wrapped the presents!

A break in the clouds?

The damp grey misery of yesterday is now forgotten as sun illuminates a blue sky artistically arranged with fragmented clouds. Unfortunately this means that I will have to do my stint as a referee.

This is somewhat intimidating as my colleagues have told me that in previous years there have been fisticuffs over some of the decisions of the poor old ref. Well, I hope that they are a little more flexible with someone who has no real idea of the rules apart from the necessity of getting the ball in the back of the net to make some sort of point.

The day is shaping up well to be a thorough horror. As I type this in the staff room there is a sound track emanating from one of the computers of two childish voices singing the winning numbers of El Gordo (The Fat One) the National Lottery for Christmas. Due to circumstances which I find difficult to understand I have ended up with three tickets for this celebration of greed. The most important one was bought in Sort (Luck) in the mountains of deepest darkest Catalonia; one of the others was bought as part of the school purchase of a number, and the third was a mistake. You might think that the numbers of tickets would be a general irrelevance until I tell you that each ticket represents a decimo (a tenth of the actual number) and each one cost €20! I have never spent so much on a lottery but, as I think any reasonable person would agree that it would be insupportable for a group of colleagues to win anything and to find oneself left outside the money. It would make working with them or with their memory if they had left on a tide of Cava and hysteria, totally impossible – so the purchase is a sort of fear acquisition! The third ticket I can’t really explain and therefore I hope it’s a winner. I really, truly, sincerely hope it’s a winner.

The rain has cruelly kept off and therefore the football matches seem to be a real possibility and therefore my ineptitude as a ref. is about to be demonstrated to the world! Ah well, I am sure that it is character building.

The rain held off long enough for me to do both my stints on the ‘pitch’ and then the elements became so inclement that the head of secondary stopped the competition (to much annoyance) and caused yet more chaos in a school that wasn’t prepared for pupils suddenly going back to classrooms.

Ad hoc provisions (or films as they are known) are now being shown to all and sundry. Since this school is not a neighbourhood establishment we cannot send the children forth to their homes; we have to contain them until the normal end time when parents descend in droves and completely clog all approach roads.

I now park as near to the main escape route from school as possible. By the time that I emerge and attempt to get to the motorway, parents have usually assembled into the slow moving snake that judders forward in impulsive strikes as the population of the world makes its way home.

I rely on the fact that I am a teacher in the school to shame parents into letting me out; or rather I rely on the kids in the back informing their parents that I am teacher. Yesterday I got into my car and started up using my indicator to inform the stationary landscape of cars that filled the narrow road that I intended (with their kind acquiescence) to make my way into the metallic train.

As usual the flashing indicator and slow edging out appeared to have achieved its result and a car dutifully held back while the traffic in front went forward a car length. With a cheery wave of the hand I moved out only to have the car that I thought was being courteous suddenly lurch forward using part of the pavement to ensure that it stayed in front of me!

Luckily it was at the end of the day, and so I could afford to laugh at the petty minded vindictiveness and grotesque possessiveness of a single car space that this driver displayed. I thought of the child (whose head was just visible) and the agony of embarrassment that it must be suffering. My laugh was not exactly light as I did consider noting the registration number and . . . doing something; though what did not really form itself into anything definite from the nebulous clouds of gentle hatred. I will just let it remain as a memory to be placed next to so many others in the continuing story of Iberian driving!

The day is dragging itself along with my having unexpected periods of freedom spoilt by trying to keep control of pupils who (together with their teachers) quite patently do not want to be here. As far as I can tell the rest of my day is going to be taken up with looking after (yet again) Year 9 and the assisting with the Invisible Friend distribution of presents in Year 7.

As one of my cold colleagues (physically not emotionally) said while getting damper watching desultory football played by inadequately dressed girls, “I’d rather be at home!”

I think he spoke for us all!

Bitter bunny!

As the ludicrous two day week which marks the end of term is turning out to be a disaster on many levels, I will not dwell too closely on the flaccid chaos which characterized today and which looks as though it is going to be a continuing theme for tomorrow.

Instead I will concentrate on the more mellow chaos which is at present all around me in the living room.

With Toni safely in the bosom of his family preparing for my arrival with wrapped presents and nowhere near the Room of Chaos, I have popped into my storage facility and liberated more boxes of books. The number of boxes left in the little room near the airport is rapidly approaching single figures and I will soon be able to cancel my contract with the storage people.

When I find somewhere to put the books which are at present piled up on the stairs, on the sofa, the coffee table and the dinner table. Oh yes, and the floor.

All shelves are full and some are double stacked, but I have to have my books.

Take the recent releases. Beardsley drawings; Tom Sharpe novels; my old paperback version of ‘Catch-22’; Dickens, Coleridge, Ronald Searle, Tolstoy, Martin Amis, Goya, Brangwyn, Lowry drawings, ‘The Way of the Sufi’, all my Douglas Adams novels; Hardy; an amazing number of John Arden plays; Dannie Abse; my copy of ‘Spring Awakening’ from which I learned the lines to play Professor Corona Radiator; traitor Blunt’s book on Italian art and hundreds of others – all of which I have to have around me. 'Where' is the only problem.

Still I have a couple of days before I go up to Terrassa and join in the festive fun and I am sure that I will think of something and find some nook or cranny to fit a few hundred books. Possibly.

Today it has rained. Rained with the sullen determination that I know so well from British weather at its most spiteful. It created problems for the planned jollifications for the kids today and the threat of rain tomorrow threatens the arrangements for the last day of term.

As the last day stands at present: the day opens with my having to take a class for a colleague. This imposition is then followed by my being a referee in a football contest (!) and then normal teaching. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to these delights. Because to do so would be to lie.

Thank god for my books!

How many days to what?

I cannot remember a less Christmas-like build up to Christmas than this one.

I will leave aside the unseasonal and careful sunbathing inside the house but with the French windows open. It is more the complete lack of ‘atmosphere’ I sense where I am at the moment. Many of the houses and flat by which we are surrounded are at present unoccupied so the number of windows with any decoration is limited. Only a few gardens have outside lights and our municipality had generously succumbed to the mood of festivity by stringing a single bedraggled twinkling message over one main road.

I suppose that the air of concentrated panic which characterizes the UK at this date is partly because there are so few shopping days left to Christmas Day. In Catalonia there are plenty of days left to The Kings on the 6th of January which is some households is the more traditional time for the exchange of presents. This also means that The January Sales get off to a slow start in these parts - and certainly not on Boxing Day, which is of course much better known as my Saint’s Day, ahem!

I have at least found my Christmas ties which, by a strange kink of quirky fate number two: just the same number of days that we have to work in the last week before Christmas! Talk about coincidences! My ties have now taken on a legendary life of their own in the life of the school with pupils keen to know exactly how many I have. To hide the fact that I have no idea how many I possess, I always answer “Seven” to this question when it is raised. To which the bemused pupils say, “No, that’s not right because there is the one with the Simpsons; the one with the mouse; the cartoon one; The Big Ben (the definite article is always used); the one with the man; the flower one – and so on. To all of which I give an enigmatic smile and disappear into the staff room for a cup of tea.

Our tea bags are supplied, but they are of the sort that would never sell in the UK. They are of such insistent insipidity that it takes two bags to make one halfway respectable cuppa. Lipton’s tea is very popular here and the stuff we have is Horniman’s: the names have a distant historical tinge to them and put me in mind of the worst excesses of Watney’s Draught Red Barrel. All of them have (or in the case of Red Barrel, had) a sort of zombie after-death-life in the coastal fringes of Spain. The sooner they are consigned to the dustbin they deserve and are replaced with Brains SA and PG Tips the better.

The next two days are going to be intolerable because no-one (surely) wants to be in school. The kids will all be there as their parents will not want them cluttering up their homes. The most we can hope for is that there is a mass exodus from the city as our well healed parents depart for their skiing lodges or ice hotels or wherever the rich go to celebrate a stable birth.

Talking of stable birth, I have now finished reading ‘Jesus’ by A N Wilson. In a revealing quotation Wilson writes, “Luke never states that Mary and Joseph were staying at an inn, still less at an inn where there was no room for them, still less that they were therefore obliged to sleep that night in a stable. He merely says that the particular room in which Jesus was born did not have a cradle in it.” What is truth asks jesting Pilate! Still my Belen is replete with all the traditional trimmings including the obtrusive (and typically Catalan) caganar.

It has been another gloriously sunny though cold day and the nights illustrate how good these houses are at staying relatively cool in summer but how bad they are at being able to be heated up in the winter. There is central heating, but it is pathetically inadequate. Monday will see me going out to buy a moveable radiator so that the future winter months are not too severe.

Toni who is with his family in Terrassa has told me to dress in many layers when I join him on Christmas Eve as it is bitterly cold there. Even though it didn’t settle, it had a good go at snowing there as well!

The Christmas meal has been booked and soon my tripartite holiday will commence: Terrassa, Benidorm and Cardiff. Not many others will be following that pattern I reckon!

Grow up!

Why is it that driving brings out the sadist in us all?

Returning home today I have to negotiate a turning which leads on to a dual carriageway one of whose lanes leads to a slip road for the motorway to Barcelona and the other leads me home. Although there is a single white line painted on the road to discourage lane switching, many Catalan drivers regard such ornamentation as mere road decoration having nothing to do with driving restrictions.

As I was proceeding in the correct (outside) lane in heavy traffic I noticed that next to me in the inside lane was a young man in a car which looked as though someone had inserted a pump in some vehicular orifice and blown it up to resemble a giant Tonka toy. We had both stopped at a traffic light controlled zebra crossing which was a couple of hundred yards from the turning to Barcelona. The turning which I did not want to take, but from which the young man assumed I was going to nip in to steal a march on him and sail away to the Catalan capital in front of him. He therefore inched forward to give himself the advantage when the lights changed to green.

I pride myself that I have always been a smooth and speedy getter away from stationary. I remember with affection the time that I bought (perhaps unadvisedly) some sort of boy racer Ford car, whose name escapes me at the moment but I am sure it will reappear before I end. I had bought it because it had electric windows (as good a reason to buy a car as any other in my view) and not because of its speed. Perhaps what I later discovered to be called a ‘spoiler’ on the back should have given me a hint of what the car was, but such things passed me by in those days. Might it have been an XR5? That does sound familiar.

It did mean however that when I was waiting at traffic lights by attention would be drawn to spotty youths revving up their engines at my side and looking at me in what I could only call a challenging manner. The lights would change to green and I would pull away in a sedate, yet purposeful manner ahead of spotty youth who would respond to being left by hurtling past me at some ludicrous speed with a determined look on his face.

So I went back to those days today when the car next to be edged forward with exclusive hope towards his part of the road. I edged forward as well, just enough to encourage his belief that I wanted to get into that inside lane to go to Barcelona as well. And, just as he triumphantly swerved his way ahead of me into the slip road that I didn’t want to take I rode majestically onwards in the outside lane towards my destination. I do hope that his petty triumph was not curtailed too abruptly!

It does set one up for a relaxing Friday evening!

It's the thought that counts

Toni’s present is going to be far more difficult to find that I had anticipated. His request seemed, on the face of it, not unreasonable – a little archaic perhaps but something which one of the more established stores should be able to provide without too much fuss. No such luck! My complacency on visiting and outer suburban El Corte Ingles was destroyed by two urbane assistants telling me that not only did they not stock it but also I would be disappointed in any proposed visit to the central version of that august shop.

Time to rethink and rapidly scan through my memory of old fashioned shops that I might have encountered on my peregrinations around Castelldefels and environs.

At one time I was almost as good as my mother at zeroing in on likely shops in my area no matter how bizarre the item might be. Defeat in one line of attack would only prompt me into more rarefied excursions into the more esoteric shops which were part of my consumer map of the city.

Here in Castelldefels I am much more limited and my knowledge of where to get things only extends to a few shopping centres and a sketchy knowledge of the town itself. It was such a paucity of knowledge in depth that sent me to the one-stop solution of a pricy department store like El Corte Ingles. Serious thought will have to be given if the item is to be found – and I’ve probably left it too late to ensure delivery via the Internet stores. However, I will not be defeated: I regard it as a challenge – even if the present may actually be presented in the New Year rather than the old one.

Our departmental meeting today outlined the next series of examinations with which we will enliven the academic existence of our pupils in the next few weeks. Grammar seems to have been thrown to the dogs and long lists of ‘Things to Learn’ have taken its place. Over the past few days I have had to explain things a range of things including ‘have to’. ‘must do’. ‘could do’, ‘should do’. ‘I’ve got it on the tip of my tongue’; ‘reality shows’ the passive, reported speech and ‘Of Mice and Men.’ Never a dull moment. And yes, that is irony.

Three more days to go!