Uniform?

The School That Sacked Me is now trying to foster a sense of corporate identity by forcing male teachers to wear an official tie and female teachers to sport an official scarf. This is the equivalent of the designer of the Hindenburg airship worrying about the motif on the china while ignoring the fact that the gas that made the Hindenburg lighter than air was highly explosive hydrogen!

My facile guilt about the supposed return of the pupils should have been delayed until next Monday as that is the real starting point of their education for the next academic year. I therefore have time to work on a suitable literary analogy to complement my feelings!

‘Ghosts of Spain’ is the evocative title of a descriptive ‘travel’ book written by Hispanophile Giles Tremlett. It takes the form of a highly opinionated vision of Spain’s past linking Tremlett’s personal appreciation of what it means to be living in Spain at present and how aware we should be of the past. He touches on taboo subjects connected with the Civil War and the way in which Spaniards have dealt with the aftermath in a democratic society. Tremlett deals with a whole range of social, political and religious situations in modern Spain and (as befits the Guardian’s Madrid correspondent) is beguilingly liberal and articulate in his analysis.

I particularly liked his chapter on ‘How the Bikini Saved Spain’ – an amusing analysis of why the cheap tourist trade came and stayed in Spain rather than elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The underlying motivations of the central characters involved in the development of ‘what once was one of the most beautiful spots on the Spanish coast’ from a ‘modest beach-side village, a place of sailors, fishermen and farmers who patiently tended almond, olive, carob and citrus trees’ to place where the ‘burghers of Benidorm have rolled out a welcome carpet of concrete, tarmacadam and brick’ speaks volumes about how Spain has developed over the last fifty or so years.

This is a book which I can recommend as a compelling read but one which is badly proof read and a disgrace for something under the imprint of Faber and Faber and especially when the Epilogue states that the paperback edition has been revised to correct typographical errors!

Wrong!

But still worth a read.