My days are numbered. I wait in fear and trembling for the soft thud of envelope hitting the floor. Justice will prevail.
A flash of light while speeding my way toward the opera. Sudden realizations that this stretch of road alone in all the roads of Catalonia has your typical boy racer (of all ages) meekly submit to the newly imposed speed limit of 80 km an hour. Yet I ignored the uncharacteristically moderate behaviour and recklessly exceeded the limit by 10 km an hour!
I suppose that some of the preceding writing indulges in a degree of poetic licence. My letters (eventually) find their way into our post box which is on the inside surface of the garden wall of the flat. I would have to have hearing at the level of acuity of a highly strung bat to hear my post arrive! Especially as the post is delivered as a lump of correspondence which falls through the central letterbox only to fall to the ground because the box is broken and it has no back.
Someone, something, sometime then sorts the letters and puts ours in our little box. Our box has a plastic window so that you can tell when there is mail. That at least is the theory. I don’t think that anyone has cleaned this little window since the box was first placed there. If the little window was cleaned it would be easier to see if there was any mail.
And here you get to one of those stupid problems that human flesh is heir to. Which one among us can not say that we have left undone those things that we ought to have done (and there is no health in us) [think of the Prayer Book] There are some things that we ought to do that would take virtually no effort; would be done in the twinkling of an eye – yet we omit to do them.
Usually they are tiny cleaning jobs: the gunge around the base of taps; the casually glimpsed smudge on a window or mirror; the slightly grubby light switch; the crystallised sugar on a sugar spoon; the gunge in grooves that bedevil surrounds of sinks and cookers; the dust that accumulates on the base of standard lights and inside open ornamental bowls. I hope that all of this is striking some sort of resonant chord with someone out there and it is not my personal paranoia that is being illustrated!
Cleaning the little window in our mail box is one of those jobs. Every time you look into the murky plastic you make a resolution to clean it. It doesn’t work with a thumb brush – I know, I’ve tried. I would have to bring a paper towel down and do it properly. And, if I am truthful, the floor of the box could do with a clean too. But by the time that I have walked up the stairs to the flat the intention has gone and the preparation to ensure a thorough job is just too much of a fag to bother with.
So, ever since we first arrived in the flat, this has been one job that has been waiting to be completed.
How shameful! How slothful! How typical!
On a more self pitying note I have to tell you that the efficacy of the anti-flu jab has now worn off. I have not had a cold throughout the ostensible winter in Catalonia I have felt, like Miss Flite, that there has been a cold somewhere in the room. I have, however kept the damn thing at bay until the last couple of days. I have felt thoroughly rotten today and yesterday but, as is my wont, I have had to do without sympathy because I don’t seem ill. “What?” asked one of my colleagues today, “always happy, Stephen?” If you exude bonhomie then it is unlikely that you are going to score highly on the sympathy-for-the-miserable scale. I must remember to look more morose. On principle!
Today has been the day that my class (augmented by extraneous bodies from another class whose teacher is on a skiing trip with pupils at a resort where there is no snow) has completed the production of their models of the sculpture suitable to go in the centre of roundabouts.
I have to admit that you will never know the reality of the phrase “needy children” until you have been the teacher in charge of a class of primary school pupils hell bent on constructing a model of anything using cardboard, paper, plastacine, tooth picks, lolly sticks, sellotape, coloured paper, photocopies, felt tipped pens, elastic bands, straws, tissue paper, silver paper, clear plastic sheet, pencils, ink pens, rulers, glue and paper clips.
After a while the words that make up your name appear meaningless as seemingly countless mouths mouth it. In an act of sheer self protection I have insisted that all the kids have to use ‘may I’ rather than ‘can I’ before they get anything. This allows me a few precious seconds to refocus on the next of the faces demanding attention. They remind me of nothing more than a nest full of young birds that, as soon as the parent bird appears, turn toward the parent and squawk with gaping mouths towards their provider.
I can now, fully, understand the frenetic life of the dealers on the floor of the stock exchange who appear to be communicating with the entire population of the place all at the same time. Any primary school class in full creative flow producing some artistic artefact would reduce the hardy denizens of the stock market floor to gibbering wrecks in double quick time!
And we did science experiments as well. Though not during the same lesson – that really would have been a living hell!
We are now working our way towards a book exchange. The idea is simple. The pupils bring in those books which they feel that they have outgrown or no longer want and exchange them for similar books that their friends have brought in.
A simple and unremarkable idea you might think. But no. Our kids are already developing the proclivities which have allowed their parents the financial freedom to send their kids to a fee paying school. The idea of exchanging a book ‘for ever’ was greeted with horror. When I think about my books, my kids seemed to be saying, the emphasis is on the personal possessive pronoun (or adjective) (or whatever) what I have I keep. My books they seem to be saying are, by definition, not anyone else’s.
Tomorrow we are designing posters for this (traumatic) event. I will not hold my breath to see how many books turn up!
Meanwhile I have to design the vouchers which will be issued to each child for the books that they bring in, which in turn will allow each child to claim another book.
We live in a materialistic society.
A flash of light while speeding my way toward the opera. Sudden realizations that this stretch of road alone in all the roads of Catalonia has your typical boy racer (of all ages) meekly submit to the newly imposed speed limit of 80 km an hour. Yet I ignored the uncharacteristically moderate behaviour and recklessly exceeded the limit by 10 km an hour!
I suppose that some of the preceding writing indulges in a degree of poetic licence. My letters (eventually) find their way into our post box which is on the inside surface of the garden wall of the flat. I would have to have hearing at the level of acuity of a highly strung bat to hear my post arrive! Especially as the post is delivered as a lump of correspondence which falls through the central letterbox only to fall to the ground because the box is broken and it has no back.
Someone, something, sometime then sorts the letters and puts ours in our little box. Our box has a plastic window so that you can tell when there is mail. That at least is the theory. I don’t think that anyone has cleaned this little window since the box was first placed there. If the little window was cleaned it would be easier to see if there was any mail.
And here you get to one of those stupid problems that human flesh is heir to. Which one among us can not say that we have left undone those things that we ought to have done (and there is no health in us) [think of the Prayer Book] There are some things that we ought to do that would take virtually no effort; would be done in the twinkling of an eye – yet we omit to do them.
Usually they are tiny cleaning jobs: the gunge around the base of taps; the casually glimpsed smudge on a window or mirror; the slightly grubby light switch; the crystallised sugar on a sugar spoon; the gunge in grooves that bedevil surrounds of sinks and cookers; the dust that accumulates on the base of standard lights and inside open ornamental bowls. I hope that all of this is striking some sort of resonant chord with someone out there and it is not my personal paranoia that is being illustrated!
Cleaning the little window in our mail box is one of those jobs. Every time you look into the murky plastic you make a resolution to clean it. It doesn’t work with a thumb brush – I know, I’ve tried. I would have to bring a paper towel down and do it properly. And, if I am truthful, the floor of the box could do with a clean too. But by the time that I have walked up the stairs to the flat the intention has gone and the preparation to ensure a thorough job is just too much of a fag to bother with.
So, ever since we first arrived in the flat, this has been one job that has been waiting to be completed.
How shameful! How slothful! How typical!
On a more self pitying note I have to tell you that the efficacy of the anti-flu jab has now worn off. I have not had a cold throughout the ostensible winter in Catalonia I have felt, like Miss Flite, that there has been a cold somewhere in the room. I have, however kept the damn thing at bay until the last couple of days. I have felt thoroughly rotten today and yesterday but, as is my wont, I have had to do without sympathy because I don’t seem ill. “What?” asked one of my colleagues today, “always happy, Stephen?” If you exude bonhomie then it is unlikely that you are going to score highly on the sympathy-for-the-miserable scale. I must remember to look more morose. On principle!
Today has been the day that my class (augmented by extraneous bodies from another class whose teacher is on a skiing trip with pupils at a resort where there is no snow) has completed the production of their models of the sculpture suitable to go in the centre of roundabouts.
I have to admit that you will never know the reality of the phrase “needy children” until you have been the teacher in charge of a class of primary school pupils hell bent on constructing a model of anything using cardboard, paper, plastacine, tooth picks, lolly sticks, sellotape, coloured paper, photocopies, felt tipped pens, elastic bands, straws, tissue paper, silver paper, clear plastic sheet, pencils, ink pens, rulers, glue and paper clips.
After a while the words that make up your name appear meaningless as seemingly countless mouths mouth it. In an act of sheer self protection I have insisted that all the kids have to use ‘may I’ rather than ‘can I’ before they get anything. This allows me a few precious seconds to refocus on the next of the faces demanding attention. They remind me of nothing more than a nest full of young birds that, as soon as the parent bird appears, turn toward the parent and squawk with gaping mouths towards their provider.
I can now, fully, understand the frenetic life of the dealers on the floor of the stock exchange who appear to be communicating with the entire population of the place all at the same time. Any primary school class in full creative flow producing some artistic artefact would reduce the hardy denizens of the stock market floor to gibbering wrecks in double quick time!
And we did science experiments as well. Though not during the same lesson – that really would have been a living hell!
We are now working our way towards a book exchange. The idea is simple. The pupils bring in those books which they feel that they have outgrown or no longer want and exchange them for similar books that their friends have brought in.
A simple and unremarkable idea you might think. But no. Our kids are already developing the proclivities which have allowed their parents the financial freedom to send their kids to a fee paying school. The idea of exchanging a book ‘for ever’ was greeted with horror. When I think about my books, my kids seemed to be saying, the emphasis is on the personal possessive pronoun (or adjective) (or whatever) what I have I keep. My books they seem to be saying are, by definition, not anyone else’s.
Tomorrow we are designing posters for this (traumatic) event. I will not hold my breath to see how many books turn up!
Meanwhile I have to design the vouchers which will be issued to each child for the books that they bring in, which in turn will allow each child to claim another book.
We live in a materialistic society.
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