Time is pressing!

MONDAY 28^TH NOVEMBER

One doesn’t like to go on and on about it but, the loss of Saturday morning to the viciously pointless three hour twenty minute meeting in school affected the whole of the weekend.  The rest of the weekend was not as relaxing as it should have been and the cleansing dynamics of a normal two days off were twisted.

And so back in school where the convulsive Examination Season (yes, yet another of them) is in full swing and the papers to mark are already piling up.  I was hoping that the 1ESO papers which were sat in the penultimate lesson on Friday afternoon would have been waiting for me so that I could do the mechanics of preparing the papers for marking before the start of school.  But they are nowhere to be seen.

If I don’t get those papers out of the way then they will be met by the mock examinations that the equivalent of the second year sixth will be taking today and then the 3ESO are taking an examination tomorrow.  So, unless I do something today, by tomorrow I will be snowed under and I will be in that position where there is so much to do that I will do nothing!

This typing is displacement activity because I have just been told that the papers are probably waiting for me in my tray in the other building.

They were and were duly marked.  As were two other sets of examination papers and a couple of sets of books from ordinary lessons.

My return home was something of an escape to tranquillity!

Mondays in Castelldefels seem to have the same value as Wednesdays in Britain as many of the shops appear to take that day for early closing.  As indeed did the restaurant which we had decided to patronize.

Desultory walking through the streets eventually meant that we patronized a fairly expensive restaurant which also serves pinchos.

Our meal of three tapas and a few pinchos with a glass of Coke and a glass of beer was expensive almost €37 – which is a little more than one would like to pay for a casual meal out of an evening!  They were tasty and well served, but not enough to justify the high price.

Very often indulgence only needs the slightest encouragement and that encouragement was given to me yesterday by the unprompted admission by Tina that she thinks that the payment for past catalogue of the BBC is money well spent.

I think it was trying not to listen to another shouty sports programme on Catalan television where each participant was, in a way which is totally in keeping with the prevailing culture of debate in this country, putting forward a personal point of view at the same time as everybody else.  And, of course, at the highest possible volume, that I made the sudden and executive decision to pay whatever the BBC asked for some decent programming.

It was ironic that the first of the back catalogue programmes that I watched featured Brian Blessed as King Richard IV in an early episode of Black Adder – one could not hope to find a more definitively shouty performer than he.  I have to be fair he was perfectly cast, as this version of history demanded an over-the-top gung-ho character to fill the role!

With the memory of the polished episodes of Black Adder, especially those set in World War I, most clearly in my mind, it was something of a shock to see the young and as yet largely unformed character of Black Adder on the screen, crude and with little of the superior withering contempt that became such a feature of the man.

TUESDAY 29^TH NOVEMBER 2011

Today has been a feat of dislocated classes and frantic marking.  The rush is on to stay at least partially ahead of the mass of papers which are beginning to accumulate in unwanted drifts around each member of staff.

I should not complain too much because my actual marking is quite limited as my various bits and pieces do not have examinations as such and I am well through most of the duty marking that I have to do.

Tomorrow the meeting with Management to discuss my teaching.  This is going to be an interesting meeting in all sorts of ways, and I need to give it some thought as it draws closer.  What I thought of saying I will now not say and I am sure that they are not going to ask any searching questions to which they might expect honest answers!

And so to bed.