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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Tree thieves!



Who would have thought that there is an illicit market in pine cones?

Yesterday Toni phoned the police about a suspicious gang of disreputable characters looking with some unsettling significance into our neighbours’ houses. Toni stationed himself at the kitchen window which gives an excellent view of the road and stared pointedly at the miscreants – and they stared back.

Toni noted that one of them was holding a large stick which he was thrusting through the fence into our immediate neighbour’s garden.

In cases such as these you then have to take the next step and pick up a phone and speak into it as if you are phoning the relevant authorities. Even this tried and tested method of stopping those lesser breeds without the law failed to have any effect. The gentlemen with the obsession for empty houses continued to show an unhealthy interest and even started jumping over the fence so Toni actually and in reality phoned the police.

They arrived within five minutes, by which time one of the men who had jumped over the fence was shinning up the nearest tree to knock the pine cones to the ground.

Toni overheard the whole of the conversation between the man and the police and it turned out that he was collecting cones for selling on to a dealer. The police dealt very leniently with the man and merely cautioned him not to climb into houses when he didn’t have authority.

Of course this incident has given Toni free reign to set up an observation camera trained on the front gate. When I came home he was sitting watching TV and casting glances at a small monitor which had a fuzzy picture of the entrance to the house. By the weekend I fully expect a whole series of monitors to be blinking into life giving a 360 degree view of the surrounding neighbourhood and giving us the illusion of safety! While Toni himself will be looking like the man in the headquarters of ‘The Man from UNCLE’!

The weather continues absurdly fine with everyone wondering just what reparation we are going to have to make when the powers that be decide that we have had enough sunlight to last us for the rest of the year!

It is almost unbearably frustrating for me to see fine weather through the windows of the classroom and have to be on the wrong side of the glass!

I have realized that I am getting up in the dark and, if I call in for food before I get home, I am returning to the house in the twilight or positive darkness as well. This is not good and it makes me tetchy.

I have started reading my new book on the Civil War (the one in Britain not in Spain) and am amazed at how interesting the writer has made the details of the subject. I must admit that I rather relish pondering the deep theological problems that the Calvinist idea of predestination poses for any reasonably thoughtful Christian.

The idea of the ‘Elect’ as a specific group of people saved from the moment that they were born from the horrors of Hell by a God who presumably made an arbitrary decision at some indeterminate time in the past on their status, is strangely bizarre – even for theologians. The fact that these people do not know who they are and nothing that they can do can possibly influence their eventual destination is unsettling.

It is, of course a reduction to absurdity to consider just ‘when’ god decided to make or allow evil to exist and the theological twisting and turning which encompasses the minutiae of theological speculation is almost (please note the word) endlessly fascinating.

It has to be remembered of course that theology is not merely a spiritual exercise but is also the reason for deaths unnumbered for holding the ‘wrong’ view on say the divinity of Christ at the ‘wrong’ moment. Theology was life and death at the time of the Civil War and continues to be an important way of exterminating our fellow creatures.

The book, whose title and author I continue to forget is going to be gruelling and exhausting read, but I think one that will be rewarding. I only wish the print was a little larger. I am almost tempted to find out how much the hardback copy would be and assume that the type is larger there. I could always give the paperback version to an eager colleague who has promised me a history book from his library to read.

So far the ‘one in/one out’ approach to my library is working as I have been able to loan two books from the Davies United Nations Day Bequest to colleagues in school, thus making space for at least two extra books. The book loaned by Clarrie has also gone out to a pupil in school so that means that I can accept three more volumes into my collection. One new book is my copy of the commonplace book which I happened to see brought in by an ex-teacher. My excited gabbling has produced my own copy for which an appreciative email has been sent to the author.

The Worst Bank in the World has managed to bugger up my payments to BlueSpace which is still attached to my old bank account and therefore there is not sufficient money to pay for the storage charges. That is something that I will have to sort out NOW. And I have done so, even if Spanish people on the phone seem to talk at double the speed which they do normally.

I now realize that the payment for the road tolls is also linked to a moneyless account in BBVA (spit!) so yet more work will need to be done! I think it is probably better that everything is in one bank account or I am constantly going to have nasty surprises when I least want them.

Unfortunately this means that I am going to have to have a new radio device for getting through the tolls and I will have to return the one that I have to the bank which issued it. Talking of the Worst Bank in the World I have yet to write the Doomsday Letter explaining all the negative actions that the bank has taken in misusing my account.

Tonight I will have to write the examination paper that has taken second place to a couple of books, television, food, sleeping and anything else that wasn’t actually writing the damn thing.

Two of my classes of older children have been taken up with ‘study’ which is just about as quiet as you can get any class of Spanish students. The only time you have absolute silence in when you make them sit a test then they snap into the default mode for this school and get down to it.

It is almost comical how they accept the examination ethos of the place and assume the right devotional stance when they are confronted by a paper with questions on it and space in which they have to write.

However talkative they are in ‘real life’ when a sheet of examination paper is placed in front of them they become the most monastic group of Trappists that any beleaguered teacher could hope for!

Yesterday after a hectic lesson of finishing off odds and sods of exercises that were necessary for the approaching exams, the kids were allowed a period of study. They were hyper and, as it was the last lesson of a very full day, a little less inclined to knuckle down to the hard work that (even if I don’t do it myself) I do expect my kids to do.

One of my constant pleas to the older kids in the equivalent of my sixth form is that, “You really must listen!” This is something of a fond hope in a Spanish classroom, but it doesn’t stop me trying. One kid actually repeated my little mantra as if it was the substance of a rap song and that got me thinking.

After settling the kids down and getting them to do some self-motivated work I then got down to the real effort involved in writing a song (with chorus) based on the theme of “You Really Must Listen” One line of the chorus was composed entirely of the word, “Hush!” This word the kids find endlessly fascinating.

I completed the song by the end of the lesson and was writing out a fair copy when the bell went. One lad waited until I had finished and then took away the finished lyric with excited little squawks of pleasure. It was pounced upon by other members of the class and they then tried to set it to music.

I am become a legend in my own lesson time!

I was greeted in class today by a couple of the kids actually singing the song to the tune of, “I feel it in my fingers; I feel it in my toes.” Sometimes I think that I allow things to get out of hand.

I still can’t wait to leave the school. It does have its plusses but they aren’t positive enough and the whole experience is certainly not accompanied by sufficient cash to make it worth the effort.

On the other hand . . .

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