The best you can say about a day of rain is that it makes the beach look clean and changes the colour of the sand.
I have learned not to resent these days of dampness so much as they also give a veneer of cleanliness to the pavements which, in this part of the world, are not washed by celestial moisture in quite the same way and with quite the same regularity as they are in my home country!
‘Not resenting’ is not the same as liking and I look forward to the progression of clear, cold days which characterise the winter here.
The winter is also the time when the municipality makes good all those things which will not be able to be mended in the summer when all the good tourists pour in and dislodge their cigarette stubs and money. It sometime seems as if we are due for some sort of royal visit as little persons in fluorescent yellow jackets descend on us and rip up roads, change sewers and strip off topsoil in what appears to be an uncoordinated rampage of ostentatious civic spending. Then we see nothing but the refuse collectors for weeks.
We do apparently have a police force but, apart from the two dune bike riders who ‘patrol’ the beach in the summer and are conspicuous by their absence in the cooler months, I am prepared to side with the natives here who opine that the police are always “in the bars” fortifying themselves for the fray rather than dealing with it!
Talking of illegality, yesterday I met a past parent from The School That Sacked Me. This was while I was still reeling from hearing how much it was going to cost to replace a (very, very, thin) arm on my favourite Silhouette™ glasses. Ophthalmic technology seems to borrow from the logo ridden rag trade where it appears with both that less is much, much more. The skimpier the bikini the more you pay. I believe. This is not from personal experience you understand but one does want to feel that Mies van der Rohe’s comment on architecture is a general rather than a subject specific truth!
The parent and I after effusive greetings set about doing what all do when two or three are gathered together with memories of that infamous place of learning: we shared comforting abuse at the expense of The Owner and the travesty she owns. This parent was a person who spoke to the school about her own experiences in Burma to give weight and reality to our efforts to raise money by means of a Readathon. The same Readathon about which The Owner and her minions have said nothing to anybody.
How one wishes that one could take her Iago-like silence (though she doesn’t even say, “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.”) and give Graziano’s reply, “Torments will ope your lips.” If only!
The parent said that, because of the remorselessly increasing fees in The School That Sacked Me she had to withdraw her son, but she was eloquent in her denunciation of the place and all its works.
Her son, though a positive star in my Maths class has struggled in his new state school and now she was desperate. So desperate indeed, that she asked if I was giving private lessons! To ask me to give Maths lessons is akin to asking Lazarus about life insurance: we both know that the subject is quite important but we are not quite sure about what relation we have to it!
I may still be able to recite the formula for solving quadratic equations (“ALL over 2a!”) but I’m buggered if I’d be able to apply it and so what ever residual quantity of scruples I still possess preclude my even remotely being taken for a Maths teacher!
The parent and I parted with warm wishes for the immanent destruction of The Owner and even warmer wishes for our mutual survival!
I have started reading ‘The Black Arrow’ by Robert Louis Stevenson a novel set in the times of Henry VI and concerned with a wronged gentleman fighting to rescue his true love etc etc and all the dialogue in pseudo-medieval English. Were it not for the status of the author I think I might have given up already, but I’m over half way already, so the adding of another Stevenson novel is worth the effort. I think.
Having had a cursory look at information readily available on the web about the novel I find that my lack of enthusiasm matches Stevenson’s own. He intimated that he did not want to write an introduction for the novel when his collected works came to be published and, further, in a letter to a friend he described how “the influenza has busted me a good deal” so he took the easy way out and indulged in writing in archaic language which he described as, “Tushery by the mass” and he summed up his story by saying, “may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush!” Not exactly shining commendation!
The story was serialised in Young Folks; A Boys' and Girls' Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature a title which is surely just about enough to put anyone off reading anything inside such a ponderously labeled magazine!
If only for that reason I will obviously continue with the story to the end. ‘The Black Arrow’ is the sort of thing that Aunt Bet and my Dad will have read as they steadily exhausted the literary resources of the library in Abergwinfi - omniverous readers as they both were when children!
Sometimes it’s easy to see where character traits have come from!
I have learned not to resent these days of dampness so much as they also give a veneer of cleanliness to the pavements which, in this part of the world, are not washed by celestial moisture in quite the same way and with quite the same regularity as they are in my home country!
‘Not resenting’ is not the same as liking and I look forward to the progression of clear, cold days which characterise the winter here.
The winter is also the time when the municipality makes good all those things which will not be able to be mended in the summer when all the good tourists pour in and dislodge their cigarette stubs and money. It sometime seems as if we are due for some sort of royal visit as little persons in fluorescent yellow jackets descend on us and rip up roads, change sewers and strip off topsoil in what appears to be an uncoordinated rampage of ostentatious civic spending. Then we see nothing but the refuse collectors for weeks.
We do apparently have a police force but, apart from the two dune bike riders who ‘patrol’ the beach in the summer and are conspicuous by their absence in the cooler months, I am prepared to side with the natives here who opine that the police are always “in the bars” fortifying themselves for the fray rather than dealing with it!
Talking of illegality, yesterday I met a past parent from The School That Sacked Me. This was while I was still reeling from hearing how much it was going to cost to replace a (very, very, thin) arm on my favourite Silhouette™ glasses. Ophthalmic technology seems to borrow from the logo ridden rag trade where it appears with both that less is much, much more. The skimpier the bikini the more you pay. I believe. This is not from personal experience you understand but one does want to feel that Mies van der Rohe’s comment on architecture is a general rather than a subject specific truth!
The parent and I after effusive greetings set about doing what all do when two or three are gathered together with memories of that infamous place of learning: we shared comforting abuse at the expense of The Owner and the travesty she owns. This parent was a person who spoke to the school about her own experiences in Burma to give weight and reality to our efforts to raise money by means of a Readathon. The same Readathon about which The Owner and her minions have said nothing to anybody.
How one wishes that one could take her Iago-like silence (though she doesn’t even say, “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.”) and give Graziano’s reply, “Torments will ope your lips.” If only!
The parent said that, because of the remorselessly increasing fees in The School That Sacked Me she had to withdraw her son, but she was eloquent in her denunciation of the place and all its works.
Her son, though a positive star in my Maths class has struggled in his new state school and now she was desperate. So desperate indeed, that she asked if I was giving private lessons! To ask me to give Maths lessons is akin to asking Lazarus about life insurance: we both know that the subject is quite important but we are not quite sure about what relation we have to it!
I may still be able to recite the formula for solving quadratic equations (“ALL over 2a!”) but I’m buggered if I’d be able to apply it and so what ever residual quantity of scruples I still possess preclude my even remotely being taken for a Maths teacher!
The parent and I parted with warm wishes for the immanent destruction of The Owner and even warmer wishes for our mutual survival!
I have started reading ‘The Black Arrow’ by Robert Louis Stevenson a novel set in the times of Henry VI and concerned with a wronged gentleman fighting to rescue his true love etc etc and all the dialogue in pseudo-medieval English. Were it not for the status of the author I think I might have given up already, but I’m over half way already, so the adding of another Stevenson novel is worth the effort. I think.
Having had a cursory look at information readily available on the web about the novel I find that my lack of enthusiasm matches Stevenson’s own. He intimated that he did not want to write an introduction for the novel when his collected works came to be published and, further, in a letter to a friend he described how “the influenza has busted me a good deal” so he took the easy way out and indulged in writing in archaic language which he described as, “Tushery by the mass” and he summed up his story by saying, “may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush!” Not exactly shining commendation!
The story was serialised in Young Folks; A Boys' and Girls' Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature a title which is surely just about enough to put anyone off reading anything inside such a ponderously labeled magazine!
If only for that reason I will obviously continue with the story to the end. ‘The Black Arrow’ is the sort of thing that Aunt Bet and my Dad will have read as they steadily exhausted the literary resources of the library in Abergwinfi - omniverous readers as they both were when children!
Sometimes it’s easy to see where character traits have come from!
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