The morning is just opening up. There are livid golden rifts in the clouds and dusty rays of light are illuminating the pink and purple haze which covers the city. The sky is growing to its deep azure and only the gentlest of breezes is moving the topmost branches of the surrounding trees.
And I really don’t want to be here.
For reasons which are never clear to me I was fairly late getting into the car. I do the same things in the same order each morning but the time it takes me to do these things mysteriously changes for unaccountable reasons.
I drove to school in a state of controlled fury and each idiot incursion into my lane as I was carved up by inexpert motoring butchers only increased my burning cold contempt.
I am working my way towards a response to my second pay slip as a person on a permanent contract. I haven’t had it yet, but if it is anything like my last then I will, in the words that are thrown at all politicians nowadays, “have to consider my position.” From my last pay packet I worked out that I was getting paid something under €9 for each teaching ‘opportunity’ that I had in school. For that sort of money I think that I would prefer to dip into what remains of my crisis ravaged savings than increase the profits of an institution which charges its pupils something like €800 a month for the privilege of attending the classes.
The sun has now broken out from the layer of cloud and is bathing me in its refulgent glory. And of course lessening my world weariness and money orientated gloom.
The sun has now gone in and my resentment has returned! God knows what I am going to be like by the end of the day!
We have another case of Gripe A and I really think that I should find out what the key number of cases is at which point an institution should close. My suggestion of “1” has been greeted with sympathy by my colleagues but bureaucratic silence. Such is life!
The staff room has just been visited by a man whom I have never seen before; it turns out that he is a past deputy head who has now retired. He greeted the science teacher who was constructing an examination paper and then presented her with a paperback book, the cover of which was taken up with a cross section of the trunk of a tree. The book was something which had had privately published and it consists of a series of headed thoughts, notes, quotations and oddities which he has culled from his reading over the years. I suppose in English we would call it a ‘Commonplace Book’ – the sort of thing that John Julius Norwich produces ever year at Christmastime.
My grandmother kept one. She was an omnivorous reader and I am sure that some of my addiction stems directly from her. I have a blue covered horizontal notebook which she used to dash down some of the interesting things she read. I have tried to follow in her footsteps but indolence or being lost in the narrative that I am reading usually means that I do not try too hard to find a pencil to mark the passages that intrigue me and then I am far too eager to start the next book to try and find them again in the one that I have just finished.
The deputy head’s book which I have only dipped into seems like a model which is worth following and perhaps I should make a New Year’s Resolution in November (it must be a new year somewhere in the world) and resolve to make an effort to keep my own Commonplace Book.
To be fair to me I have tried to regularize the snapping up of unconsidered trifles by the purchase of a photograph album into which I have stuck those items from newspapers etc which have caught my attention. All I have to do is write out what makes me pause and there is a commonplace book all waiting for a publisher to snap it up!
Yet another aspect of life with which school and the mundane efforts to earn a living interfere!
A visit to El corte ingles after school (a completely bloody day) and the presents for Carles and Carlos are now bought: a Toyota car which explodes into some sort of mechanical monster for the former and the third volume of the Millennium series for the latter. I have the first two volumes of this trilogy myself and am looking for a paperback version of the third, so it was ironic to buy it for Carlos. The gentleman who sold me the book in El corte ingles was the sort of reason I go there: suited, urbane and obsequious just this side of fawning – a delight and he spoke the sort of Spanish that I can understand.
He didn’t have the volume I wanted in English and therefore tried to palm off the latest novel by Dan Brown on me which was. His enthusiasm rapidly modified itself into gentle contemptuous rejection when he gauged my reaction. I was trying to say that whatever its literary merit, The Da Vinci Code was a compulsive page turner – but as neither ‘compulsive’ nor ‘page’ nor ‘turner’ leaped into my conversational Spanish range my qualified praise for Dan Brown must have slipped beneath his linguistic radar.
I have cooked myself a form of stew with various interesting ingredients and I judge that it should now be about ready to be sampled.
Wish me luck.
And I really don’t want to be here.
For reasons which are never clear to me I was fairly late getting into the car. I do the same things in the same order each morning but the time it takes me to do these things mysteriously changes for unaccountable reasons.
I drove to school in a state of controlled fury and each idiot incursion into my lane as I was carved up by inexpert motoring butchers only increased my burning cold contempt.
I am working my way towards a response to my second pay slip as a person on a permanent contract. I haven’t had it yet, but if it is anything like my last then I will, in the words that are thrown at all politicians nowadays, “have to consider my position.” From my last pay packet I worked out that I was getting paid something under €9 for each teaching ‘opportunity’ that I had in school. For that sort of money I think that I would prefer to dip into what remains of my crisis ravaged savings than increase the profits of an institution which charges its pupils something like €800 a month for the privilege of attending the classes.
The sun has now broken out from the layer of cloud and is bathing me in its refulgent glory. And of course lessening my world weariness and money orientated gloom.
The sun has now gone in and my resentment has returned! God knows what I am going to be like by the end of the day!
We have another case of Gripe A and I really think that I should find out what the key number of cases is at which point an institution should close. My suggestion of “1” has been greeted with sympathy by my colleagues but bureaucratic silence. Such is life!
The staff room has just been visited by a man whom I have never seen before; it turns out that he is a past deputy head who has now retired. He greeted the science teacher who was constructing an examination paper and then presented her with a paperback book, the cover of which was taken up with a cross section of the trunk of a tree. The book was something which had had privately published and it consists of a series of headed thoughts, notes, quotations and oddities which he has culled from his reading over the years. I suppose in English we would call it a ‘Commonplace Book’ – the sort of thing that John Julius Norwich produces ever year at Christmastime.
My grandmother kept one. She was an omnivorous reader and I am sure that some of my addiction stems directly from her. I have a blue covered horizontal notebook which she used to dash down some of the interesting things she read. I have tried to follow in her footsteps but indolence or being lost in the narrative that I am reading usually means that I do not try too hard to find a pencil to mark the passages that intrigue me and then I am far too eager to start the next book to try and find them again in the one that I have just finished.
The deputy head’s book which I have only dipped into seems like a model which is worth following and perhaps I should make a New Year’s Resolution in November (it must be a new year somewhere in the world) and resolve to make an effort to keep my own Commonplace Book.
To be fair to me I have tried to regularize the snapping up of unconsidered trifles by the purchase of a photograph album into which I have stuck those items from newspapers etc which have caught my attention. All I have to do is write out what makes me pause and there is a commonplace book all waiting for a publisher to snap it up!
Yet another aspect of life with which school and the mundane efforts to earn a living interfere!
A visit to El corte ingles after school (a completely bloody day) and the presents for Carles and Carlos are now bought: a Toyota car which explodes into some sort of mechanical monster for the former and the third volume of the Millennium series for the latter. I have the first two volumes of this trilogy myself and am looking for a paperback version of the third, so it was ironic to buy it for Carlos. The gentleman who sold me the book in El corte ingles was the sort of reason I go there: suited, urbane and obsequious just this side of fawning – a delight and he spoke the sort of Spanish that I can understand.
He didn’t have the volume I wanted in English and therefore tried to palm off the latest novel by Dan Brown on me which was. His enthusiasm rapidly modified itself into gentle contemptuous rejection when he gauged my reaction. I was trying to say that whatever its literary merit, The Da Vinci Code was a compulsive page turner – but as neither ‘compulsive’ nor ‘page’ nor ‘turner’ leaped into my conversational Spanish range my qualified praise for Dan Brown must have slipped beneath his linguistic radar.
I have cooked myself a form of stew with various interesting ingredients and I judge that it should now be about ready to be sampled.
Wish me luck.
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