Still Waiting

Today is the calm before the storm.

The last day of individual study before the sitting of the final evaluations of the year: before the orgy of setting, printing and marking the examination papers begins.  And just when you think that life is an empty, arid apology you are hit with soul-drainingly futile meetings to add hot coals of frustration on a psyche already desiccated to the state of an Andean mummy.

Still, we are in June (the last month of school) and already the timetable is showing signs of fracture with the promise of acres of free time in which to indulge our whims and fantasies.

 

However, “fracture” in our school necessarily involves extra frantic administration as one activity has a knock on effect with the classes left whole and normal.  We have no slack in the staffing in our school so that a single absence can cause chaos and the concept of the “supply teacher” remains firmly in the memory of teachers from Britain because the reality here is that they are rarer than hens’ teeth.  Here the hens don’t even have gums!

It was, given our recent weather, somewhat depressing to listen to Radio 4 and hear the weather forecast prefaced by an announcer saying, “For those of you hoping for rain, you are going to be disappointed.”  “Hoping!”  Dear god, what is happening back in my country when temperatures of 25 degrees are seen as a boring and worrying continuation of splendid weather.

We have torrential rain making its inexorable progress down the coast from Girona towards our presently sun bathed city!

It was interesting however to see pupils who had come up to my desk to ask about the use of certain words and phrases in our infuriating language furtively compare their skin colour with mine.  Needless to say I am the more convincing Iberian than they!  I only hope that we get enough sunshine for me to maintain and extend the depth and profundity of my brownness – which to me at the moment is little more than a desperate British holiday maker’s superficial fortnight sheen!

As if to reinforce the irony of the British weather forecast it is now raining in Catalonia as we are engulfed in the front which has been sweeping down from the north.

 

“Chocolate Week”, an instant tradition inaugurated by my good self, has got off to a triumphant start by a colleague (excused from making something himself because of his part-time contract) arriving in school with a magical construction in chocolate from one of the finest patisseries in Barcelona. 

This was a chocolate cake with a shimmering layer of semi solid dark chocolate on top and succeeding layers of ever more chocolaty delight beneath.  A circular wall of chocolate kept it together with a chocolate sweet on top with a jaunty sprig of rosemary: it looked wonderful and tasted better!

We are all now thoroughly disheartened by what we have to achieve with our own homemade efforts.  I have already decided to augment my now decidedly pedestrian British Brownies with a chocolate sweet stuck on top of a square of chocolate stuck on top of each Brownie.  With jam.  I will not be downgraded to ordinary by a delirious quasi-illegal dream of a chocolate cake bought in by someone else!

I must admit that I am somewhat worried by the fact that I have never made anything like these in my life and this will be very much a first attempt. 

At least I will be alone with my experimentation as Toni and family will be revisiting their collective youth by going to Colonias. 

Toni’s Mum, as the eldest of three sisters had a harder time than her siblings and never actually made it onto a school trip, so this is an opportunity for her to “get her due” at long last and go on holiday as she would have done when she was a child. 

This has been imaginatively organized by her daughter and will include her children and grandchildren accompanying her.  At which point my imagination comes into play and I am grateful that I am visiting an exhibition in the centre of Barcelona on Saturday and making chocolate brownies and am therefore unavailable to participate in such jollifications!

While “The Family” will be Having Larks I will be swearing at chocolate that refuses to melt properly or cook properly or set properly.  It is an adventure to which I am looking forward. 

In a way.