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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

They Shall Not Pass!



After a few days of positively Welsh grey gloom, Castelldefels finally squeezed out a few minutes of vapid sunshine.

I have been in a foul mood, glaring at low cloud and shining pavements glistening with recent drizzle and rounding on convenient Catalans and demanding when the much vaunted constant sunshine of our stretch of coastline was going to lighten my day.

My day has not been particularly lightened by the Closure of the Door to the Ablutions in school. The threatened division of Administration and the Lesser Breeds (or teachers as they are sometimes known) actually came into force this morning. We were, therefore, locked into our section of the school – the only egress reported to the plucky band of dauntless educationalists by the Escape Committee was up the stairs, through the IT room, into the library, down the stairs to reception and then making a run for it!

The alternative toilet was reportedly ‘near the children’s toilets’ in itself a disagreeable and malodorous possibility.

With colleagues in tow I inspected the reputed toilet. It was through the same entrance as the kids, with girl kids to the left, boy kids to the centre and an unremarkable door with a badly cut out sign reading ‘Staff Toilets’ stuck on with outsize sellotape. The ‘toilet’ turned out to be a windowless hovel with luridly coloured bulbous plumbing accessories and no wash basin.

One does not want to appear precious, but one has one’s standards and a Stygian bog was not up to any of them.

I remarked to the headteacher that at the end of the period I Would Go To The Toilet. If the door to the acceptable loo was locked; the Stygian Bog was not acceptable, I would therefore immediately utilize the Escape Route and return home to make use of the more civilized facilities available in the flat.

My immediate colleague adjacent to my classroom, who has had the spark of professionalism extinguished from her eyes over the last few days evinced a lively desire to follow my example and walk out.

Big build up: inevitable anti climax.

Marching down from the library, car keys a-jingle in my pocket, the Door of Exclusion was ostentatiously open.

Defeat of stout party and return to normality.

Not really.

The atmosphere in the school is one of paranoid exasperation. If real financial commitments had not been made by my colleagues, and if they shared the callous disregard of the owner, the school would be minus the entire primary staff!

Added to the trials and tribulations of closed doors, non appearing photocopying and the usual petty restrictions, there have been murmurings that essential accompanying parents who want to come on the forthcoming trip to the zoo thus fulfilling the requirements of adult/pupil ratios are to be asked to make their own way to the zoo and then pay for their tickets.

Every day and in every way life is made just that little bit significantly more difficult.

On the positive side I have managed to finish reading ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

Let me start by saying that I enjoyed it.

That sort of opening immediately shouts the word ‘but’ at the reader and I do have a few ‘buts’ to add to the pleasure that I got from following the narrative.

This literary detective novel is, in its five hundred pages, wonderfully self indulgent. If you are a lover of melodrama and Grand Guignol then this is for you. That is not to say that it is vulgar; there are sections of the novel where the writing is a sheer delight, but you have to read tongue in cheek, if you will accept the clumsy cliché.

For me the style put me in mind of ‘Wuthering Heights’ ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’ and a sort of melange of Dickens, Trollope and a touch of Eliot (George that it, though T.S. could find a home here too!) Infuse the lot with more than a hint of Borges’ magic realism and you are almost there!

We follow the main character from his traumatic choice of book from the wonderfully evocatively named Cemetery of Forgotten Books to the final pages of the novel over a period of some twenty years and we are left to wonder who the hero (if there is one) of this novel is.

The characters we meet along the years are both mordantly realistic and whimsically grotesque but throughout all the action and time the city of Barcelona stands out as a palpable creation giving structure and literal geography to the narrative.

If this novel does not sustain the imagination and promise of the opening chapters, it does provide a stimulating kaleidoscope of picaresque entertainments along the way.

I recommend it with some enthusiasm.

And now to more soul destroyingly mundane concerns: I have to take the weekly (!) assembly on Friday and some sort of entertainment from my class is demanded.

Where is inspiration when I need it?

Sigh!

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