I cannot remember a less Christmas-like build up to Christmas than this one.
I will leave aside the unseasonal and careful sunbathing inside the house but with the French windows open. It is more the complete lack of ‘atmosphere’ I sense where I am at the moment. Many of the houses and flat by which we are surrounded are at present unoccupied so the number of windows with any decoration is limited. Only a few gardens have outside lights and our municipality had generously succumbed to the mood of festivity by stringing a single bedraggled twinkling message over one main road.
I suppose that the air of concentrated panic which characterizes the UK at this date is partly because there are so few shopping days left to Christmas Day. In Catalonia there are plenty of days left to The Kings on the 6th of January which is some households is the more traditional time for the exchange of presents. This also means that The January Sales get off to a slow start in these parts - and certainly not on Boxing Day, which is of course much better known as my Saint’s Day, ahem!
I have at least found my Christmas ties which, by a strange kink of quirky fate number two: just the same number of days that we have to work in the last week before Christmas! Talk about coincidences! My ties have now taken on a legendary life of their own in the life of the school with pupils keen to know exactly how many I have. To hide the fact that I have no idea how many I possess, I always answer “Seven” to this question when it is raised. To which the bemused pupils say, “No, that’s not right because there is the one with the Simpsons; the one with the mouse; the cartoon one; The Big Ben (the definite article is always used); the one with the man; the flower one – and so on. To all of which I give an enigmatic smile and disappear into the staff room for a cup of tea.
Our tea bags are supplied, but they are of the sort that would never sell in the UK. They are of such insistent insipidity that it takes two bags to make one halfway respectable cuppa. Lipton’s tea is very popular here and the stuff we have is Horniman’s: the names have a distant historical tinge to them and put me in mind of the worst excesses of Watney’s Draught Red Barrel. All of them have (or in the case of Red Barrel, had) a sort of zombie after-death-life in the coastal fringes of Spain. The sooner they are consigned to the dustbin they deserve and are replaced with Brains SA and PG Tips the better.
The next two days are going to be intolerable because no-one (surely) wants to be in school. The kids will all be there as their parents will not want them cluttering up their homes. The most we can hope for is that there is a mass exodus from the city as our well healed parents depart for their skiing lodges or ice hotels or wherever the rich go to celebrate a stable birth.
Talking of stable birth, I have now finished reading ‘Jesus’ by A N Wilson. In a revealing quotation Wilson writes, “Luke never states that Mary and Joseph were staying at an inn, still less at an inn where there was no room for them, still less that they were therefore obliged to sleep that night in a stable. He merely says that the particular room in which Jesus was born did not have a cradle in it.” What is truth asks jesting Pilate! Still my Belen is replete with all the traditional trimmings including the obtrusive (and typically Catalan) caganar.
It has been another gloriously sunny though cold day and the nights illustrate how good these houses are at staying relatively cool in summer but how bad they are at being able to be heated up in the winter. There is central heating, but it is pathetically inadequate. Monday will see me going out to buy a moveable radiator so that the future winter months are not too severe.
Toni who is with his family in Terrassa has told me to dress in many layers when I join him on Christmas Eve as it is bitterly cold there. Even though it didn’t settle, it had a good go at snowing there as well!
The Christmas meal has been booked and soon my tripartite holiday will commence: Terrassa, Benidorm and Cardiff. Not many others will be following that pattern I reckon!
I will leave aside the unseasonal and careful sunbathing inside the house but with the French windows open. It is more the complete lack of ‘atmosphere’ I sense where I am at the moment. Many of the houses and flat by which we are surrounded are at present unoccupied so the number of windows with any decoration is limited. Only a few gardens have outside lights and our municipality had generously succumbed to the mood of festivity by stringing a single bedraggled twinkling message over one main road.
I suppose that the air of concentrated panic which characterizes the UK at this date is partly because there are so few shopping days left to Christmas Day. In Catalonia there are plenty of days left to The Kings on the 6th of January which is some households is the more traditional time for the exchange of presents. This also means that The January Sales get off to a slow start in these parts - and certainly not on Boxing Day, which is of course much better known as my Saint’s Day, ahem!
I have at least found my Christmas ties which, by a strange kink of quirky fate number two: just the same number of days that we have to work in the last week before Christmas! Talk about coincidences! My ties have now taken on a legendary life of their own in the life of the school with pupils keen to know exactly how many I have. To hide the fact that I have no idea how many I possess, I always answer “Seven” to this question when it is raised. To which the bemused pupils say, “No, that’s not right because there is the one with the Simpsons; the one with the mouse; the cartoon one; The Big Ben (the definite article is always used); the one with the man; the flower one – and so on. To all of which I give an enigmatic smile and disappear into the staff room for a cup of tea.
Our tea bags are supplied, but they are of the sort that would never sell in the UK. They are of such insistent insipidity that it takes two bags to make one halfway respectable cuppa. Lipton’s tea is very popular here and the stuff we have is Horniman’s: the names have a distant historical tinge to them and put me in mind of the worst excesses of Watney’s Draught Red Barrel. All of them have (or in the case of Red Barrel, had) a sort of zombie after-death-life in the coastal fringes of Spain. The sooner they are consigned to the dustbin they deserve and are replaced with Brains SA and PG Tips the better.
The next two days are going to be intolerable because no-one (surely) wants to be in school. The kids will all be there as their parents will not want them cluttering up their homes. The most we can hope for is that there is a mass exodus from the city as our well healed parents depart for their skiing lodges or ice hotels or wherever the rich go to celebrate a stable birth.
Talking of stable birth, I have now finished reading ‘Jesus’ by A N Wilson. In a revealing quotation Wilson writes, “Luke never states that Mary and Joseph were staying at an inn, still less at an inn where there was no room for them, still less that they were therefore obliged to sleep that night in a stable. He merely says that the particular room in which Jesus was born did not have a cradle in it.” What is truth asks jesting Pilate! Still my Belen is replete with all the traditional trimmings including the obtrusive (and typically Catalan) caganar.
It has been another gloriously sunny though cold day and the nights illustrate how good these houses are at staying relatively cool in summer but how bad they are at being able to be heated up in the winter. There is central heating, but it is pathetically inadequate. Monday will see me going out to buy a moveable radiator so that the future winter months are not too severe.
Toni who is with his family in Terrassa has told me to dress in many layers when I join him on Christmas Eve as it is bitterly cold there. Even though it didn’t settle, it had a good go at snowing there as well!
The Christmas meal has been booked and soon my tripartite holiday will commence: Terrassa, Benidorm and Cardiff. Not many others will be following that pattern I reckon!
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