One young lady obviously assumed that the use of her right indicator automatically caused all the traffic in the lane she was entering to cease to exist. This assumption was rapidly refuted by the horn-sounding, lights-flashing, rapidly swerving cars which had retained their reality in spite of the winking indicator!
Another motorist kept to the middle lane at a more than sedate pace and ignored drivers swerving to right and left around him. He must either have been very sure of himself or a complete idiot as he did not seem to realise that drivers in the morning are not the most forgiving of god's creatures!
Our school is built on a site which has virtually a 1-in-1 slope; the surrounding streets are correspondingly steep and to simplify (or complicate) matters we have a one way system encircling the school. When parents bring their spawn to school in their 4-by-4s they have to deposit them (no matter how old they are) at the gates of the school. It is of course unthinkable that they might. At the bottom entrance to the school there is a T junction whose long arm is almost laughably steep. The top of the T, approaching the school there is only a right turn (except for motorcyclists of course) which leads away from the gate. There is no parking space at the top of the T.
I think that you can tell where I am going from here. The lack of a parking space means nothing to our parents; so they stop and park, just after a sheer slope and an almost blind turn. Two parents’ cars were parked today with the second car which was travelling up the hill in front of me simply partially turning and stopping with no indication whatsoever. Luckily, I am beginning to develop the sixth sense which is essential when driving on Spanish roads and double guess what the persons around you might do and, sometimes more importantly, might not do!
I feel that such challenges set one up for the day. But I would still prefer to do without them. Oh for a job in the British School of Barcelona in Castelldefels and no more getting up at 6,20 in the morning, rising to the sound of the rubbish men noisily arriving to empty the bins and even more exuberantly noisily emptying the bloody things!
Fond hope!
Today is the day when I have my second Spanish lesson of the week. I think that the one-to-one lessons that I am having are an expensive luxury and I will have to suffer the indignity of downgrading to the membership of a group and suffer the horrors of the loving attention that Iberians give to Grammar with a capital G! Perhaps I am a little more prepared for this unhealthy preoccupation now that I have been forced to consider my own language in a little more specifically grammatical detail.
I think that the basic problem that I face is that I want to be able to speak with some degree of fluency and read so that it doesn’t hurt to peruse a match report in one of the intellectual papers which litter the news-stands and I do not want to be able to write with the same degree of fluency. I really need conversation, but that is the very expensive option and I don’t think that the school will cough up for that.
I will have to speak to John in the language school today and try and work something out.
If the examinations were stressful then the returning of the exam papers is cardiac arrest time. When papers are returned, calculators appear and all maths is checked and double checked. All marks are queried and all decisions made by mere teachers are called into question. It is a nightmare.
You can see what sort of adults they are going to be by their fussy, possessive and arrogant behaviour at this particular time. The head of English tells me that it is the same and has been the same and will be the same until the end of time; the trick, I was told is not to take it too seriously as the kids have the sort of attention span that makes Homer Simpson look like one of those medieval hermit scholars who devote their lives to the study of some obscure grammatical form in the later books of Deuteronomy!
And to cap it all I have been hoist by my own computer. In an excess of organization I created a table for my results and started filling them in before I had finished marking. The end result of all this is that I used an old copy of the processed results which were lacking the marks from one question. This omission creased panic, despair and something approaching real emotion in my class who had to be placated with assurances that normal results would be continued as soon as I had massaged them!
Nothing is ever simple!
I have now discovered that the mini-holiday is not surrounding the weekend but on Monday and Tuesday. I do not see why we should not make a sortie to Sort to buy a ticket for the Christmas Lottery. This may not be instantly explicable to non Catalans.
Sort is an actual place in Catalonia, but in Catalan it means ‘luck’ so it is traditional to buy lottery tickets in Sort (Luck) for reasons which should be obvious. As so many people buy, it is hardly surprising that there are a great number of winners who bought their tickets in the place – but logic does not extend to games of chance in these parts!
It’s worth a try!
I have now had three highly expensive lessons in Spanish in a local language school. They are delightful and it is wonderful to have personal attention and have one’s elementary problems pointed out and corrected with gentle indulgence! But it can’t continue at the price that I am paying. The school is not going to fork out for individual lessons for me just so I can take part in their interminable meetings in a foreign tongue!
John, the teacher in charge of the school, will try and find a group that I can join and that will make the cost a little more bearable.
Tomorrow is the last time that I will accompany the PE teacher down to the sea so the kids of the 3ESO can go yachting. Although this means a long, long day for me, it does have the advantage that it gives me an afternoon ‘off’ every two weeks.
Once you are in school you are not expected to leave. Lunch is provided and you are expected to take it in school and stay. It gets a little claustrophobic and I sometimes yearn to get out and sit somewhere not surrounded by students and staff. There is, in fact a convent within walking distance which has a cloister and quadrangle with convent garden which is an oasis of tranquillity in the expensively crowded hill that we and a host of other institutions occupy.
We are all ready for our little mini holiday and we are counting down the days to the start of the Christmas holidays.
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