Enjoy!

Very hot today.

I suppose I could just leave it at that. ‘Very hot today’ is, after all, one of those phrases that I have moved country to be able to use! I am now sitting on the balcony in the cool of the evening with a strong cup of coffee with only the noise of the traffic and the whirr of the gimmicky (but effective) USB fan to keep me company.

Talking of company; Carles has been exuding energy today. All day. And well into the night. If whatever is powering Carles could be bottled then the energy crisis would be at an end and we could finally treat the Saudis with the contempt that they more than richly deserve, after all the years of their treating the world as their personal playground in which they can do exactly as they please and buy their way out of the condemnation that ordinary mortals would have suffered just because of the monetary power of the rotting vegetable matter that has accumulated under their arid and bigoted country.

That’s better. There is something deeply therapeutic about a short rant (Though the Saudis deserve a much longer and more detailed one than I can give at the moment!)

The first attempt at house hunting was of limited effectiveness in spite of our attempts to set up viewings. After taking the train from Terrassa to Barcelona and then a walk to another station and a train to Castelldefels and then a walk to the centre we were rewarded with two viewings.

The first was excellently situated with direct views of the beach and sea and overlooking a small but adequate swimming pool. That is the positive and encouraging positive too, but the negative!

On his deathbed Saint Oscar’s memorable final words concerned the wallpaper. “The wallpaper is killing me,” he confided, “Either it goes or I do.” I felt exactly the same when contemplating the decoration; sorry I should have said ‘decoration’ which was seen in the bathroom and toilet. The tiles were of that ostentatious vulgarity which is only seen used by post modernist camp decorators on television trying to prove their virility by assuming that their mere word can make the unpalatable fashionable. The furniture was of a vulgarity and cheapness which would have been hard to match if you deliberately set out to produce the most vulgar display you could imagine. As it was let with furniture we would not have been able to change it, therefore it was impossible to consider. And the kitchen! Words fail me, but I would add that it had plastic curtains rather than kitchen unit doors. Ugh!

The second was a duplex of a much higher quality (and a much greater price.) There were two smallish rooms with a bathroom on one level and a much more reasonable sized en suite bedroom. The living room, dining room and kitchen were all open plan but at slightly different levels. The view of the sea was not direct but tangential, though it has to be said that the sea was very near. The advantage of a sun room was not lost on me, but neither of us felt that this was the perfect domicile.

I will pause at this point to sympathise with my reader who may be losing a certain patience with reading the carping criticism of someone trying to find just the right sort of sunny home by the sea in Spain when, as Maggie pointed out in her email from Cardiff, she, for example was just about to set off for a game of golf in the rain. But bear with me.

Oh yes, and I’ve tried out the sea in which I will be swimming. Not too bad for the time of year and it necessitated only a modicum of undignified squirming before happy acclimatisation was achieved. Much self indulgent wallowing and splashing and even a little real swimming. One couldn’t help the passing thought that this experience was part of the whole idea of coming to Catalonia in the first place!

Toni has lost all patience in the process of trying to find a new place to live and looks forward with real dread to the sequence of places that have been lined up for us tomorrow. On the other hand, tired and drained as I most certainly am, I feel theoretically invigorated by the prospect of being shocked by other people’s idea of gracious living!

As every teacher knows bus travel with kids is fraught with dangerous possibilities. I have had occasion to mention before the notorious trip which ended with one of my colleagues softly, but insistently swearing at a boy clutching a motorway red cone for the last thirty minutes of the journey home. That, believe you me, was one of the lighter moments of the Trip from Hell.

One axiom of bus travel with pupils is to recognize that anyone moving purposely towards the back seats should never be allowed to get there. Any disruptive or naughty pupil who makes it to the back seat will have his evil quotient exponentially increased to truly satanic proportions.

I was reminded of this simple truism when sitting in the back seat of a number 94 bus in Castelldefels. The scratched windows and black marker initials are par for the course on any form of public transport but the treatment of the grey plastic backs of the seats of the penultimate row were new and intriguing. At first I thought that they were merely the artistic swirls of a viciously stubbed out cigarette, but then I realised that they were more intentional than that. There were initials dragged – not incised – in the plastic. Pause for thought; and then a more flamboyant scorch mark indicated the answer. The back seat recidivists were obviously softening the plastic with their lighters and then inscribing their initials and other cabalistic insignia with matchsticks. Pausing, again, only to wonder why they would have both, I leaned back and contemplated the artistic scrawls that would have had an artist like Dubuffet in ecstasies. Not me though. I have never forgiven the dead Dubuffet for having an exhibition of his exorable ‘art’ covering the walls of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York the only time that I visited the place: all that winding space and nothing worth looking at!

I will be thinking of architecture tomorrow as I tick of the desirability of the apartments and houses that we are shown tomorrow.

Frank Lloyd Wright be with me!