Slack work!

Mondays are often “nothing” days.  The misery of re-starting work after the weekend is not conducive to joyous thinking and the blank wall of the rest of the week tends to limit vision.  Routine usually takes over and the day is completed in a stumblingly resentful sort of way which gets you to the slumping relief of the armchair at home eventually.  Geldof got it right.

But what is much more exhilarating is that I have only three more Mondays to go before the departure of the kids – this low number is courtesy of an occasional day holiday next Monday – which somehow puts into perspective the horror of this tediously long year.  The end is in distant sight!

I may bemoan the number of days still left for my sojourn in this school, but they seem to slip away quite quickly when it comes to putting finger to key to write.  Days have now gone by and I have written nothing.  This is because of the easy coma into which I can fall at a moment’s notice when I sink into my armchair.  I do, of course, expect this state of affairs to change magically when I finally knock the dust from my shoes and turn my back on education – at least in its city institutionalized form.  I expect to emerge like a vibrant butterfly from the cocoon of fatigue that envelopes me at present.

I have a half worked out (how poetic) timetable for physical exercise that will come into play as soon as the shackles of school are shaken off.

I blame my newly acquired sports centre for my malaise of course.  If they hadn’t had to contend with the reams of red tape before they could allow actual swimmers to enter their newly constructed dome which covers the swimming pool, then I could have been swimming there twice a day.  As it is, it remains tantalizingly out of splash as the stern guardians of public wet safety scrutinize such a radical structure (in use all over Spain) as a retractable roof before giving it the imprimatur of our pettifogging local authority.  It remains, like so many publically funded unnecessary airports throughout Spain, shiningly empty.

I am hoping that I will be able to use it in the same way that I used the pools at home and have an early morning swim and one later in the day before the small humans start shrieking their clumsy way through the water and across the lane that I am using.  I will have to start growing my fingernails again so that any obstruction can be sliced away!

As the centre is near the house I am hoping that it will become a regular haunt of mine.  There is also a café/restaurant next to it which looks interesting.  I have noted that they often have barbecues which look like good value for money.

When I last called into the centre, having been a member since Easter and never used the place once, on yet another fruitless visit to find out when the pool was going to be available for use rather than contemplation, I was told that it would be open in June with or without the “dome” – which I took to refer to the retractable roof.  As long as the water is heated I don’t much care as the only thing that concerns me in the heart jolting horror of immersion in delicious looking but potentially glacial water.  In my experience the sea in all its rough, natural, heat-loss majesty is often much warmer than the ill-heated communal pool.  It is only in the torrid days of the height of August heat that plunging into the waters of the outside pool is anything other than a way of finding out if you heart is strong enough to survive cardiac shock!

The reality of being without work is beginning to strike me, as is the dramatic decrease in the amount of money I will be living on!  I think that this is a circumstance which should provoke a change in how I live – though the practical difficulties of getting a mortgage at my age are considerable.

I do, however, look forward to traipsing through Castelldefels – map and camera in hand – searching for the elusive bank sell-off residence going for a song.  It should be possible to find something within my price range which should tick all the boxes that have to be ticked for somewhere reasonable to live.  I keep being told that now is the time to buy somewhere taking advantage of the crisis and using it to my advantage.

These things always seem more reasonable in theory than in concrete and glass, but it will be interesting to see what is on offer and it will be fascinating to see how the system works when you actually want to buy somewhere.  I have been told that you have to allow about 10% of the asking price as administration and legal fees – and that could be an essential factor!

The search is on!