Ah well!

Shades of the metaphorical prison house are hastening towards me at a frightening rate!

There seems to be no area for compromise between my determination not to complete lunchtime duties and my employer’s equal determination that I should. The end of the month is the crunch time where the only position for discussion is whether I resign or am sacked! Being sacked seems to be a new feature of my working experience in Spain, or at least in Catalonia.

Meanwhile (as if nothing was looming!) I continue my life in school.

The poem a week has been started and the painting a week will soon commence. The paintings by Sitges’ favourite almost son – Rossignol – have been colour photocopied and laminated. They now bedeck our walls in readiness for the unit on the famous man. And shame on you if the name of Santiago Russignol is not one you know!

But news of the most momentous sort overshadows all I have heretofore mentioned: my OHP has arrived!

The kids were fascinated! They crowded around and expressed the astonishment more usually reserved for the extravagantly metallic and sleek forms of the latest computer! Such retro technology! Such style!

I do not, of course, have transparencies, pens or wipes and it took me a while to work out that the lens and the adjustable bar was actually stored inside the machine – that was a first!

Victoria (bless her!) turned up with a packet of transparencies which she assured me I could use as they had not been purchased with her own money. I have few scruples in education but using other colleagues’ money to finance my own little obsessions is almost one of them! I am sad enough a guy to tell you that using my OHP was a positive pleasure.

I truly cannot understand those colleagues who scorn to use this cutting edge technology of yesteryear. Have they no sense of post modernist irony? Do they really want to be defined by the bland unimaginative expanse of a dingy whiteboard? Why don’t they go all the way and espouse the merits of the unlamented chalk board?

There! I enjoyed that and I managed to push to the back of my mind my impending unemployment!

It doesn’t take much!