The doors opened and we loungers outside shuffled in and on our names being called out we stood roughly in line and waited. I thought we resembled nothing so much as a line of unfortunates queuing outside a soup kitchen during the Great Depression. We included the halt, the lame and the coughing and had all assembled to make our sanguinary deposits to give added information to our medical advisors.
As the blood-letting session was at 8.00 am I had to tell the school that I was going to be late. As it turned out the roads (until the end of the journey) were astonishingly clear and it was only the equally astonishing lack of consideration of wealthy parents ejecting their fortunate offspring from various large multi-terrain vehicles at various pricy establishments on our road that slowed me down.
My final parking site was a space where I was aided by a remarkable gap in the traffic which allowed me to navigate the car into the tight spot without the impatient writhings of Catalans seething behind their wheels watching me.
As it turned out I only missed a quarter of an hour of my class, but even this limited opportunity allowed my head of department who was taking the lesson to fill the blackboard with numerous gnomic hieroglyphics related to grammar to explain and correct the homework which I had set yesterday. Needless to say her elegant and confident grammatical explanations would never have occurred to me in my wildest analytical language moments. Luckily I think I was able to stop her in time before the class got used to such detailed and irrefutable explanations. I fear that she little resorts to the “because we do” form of grammatical explanation much loved by my good self!
As you can probably tell from my up-beat tone of typing, the sun is shining and that, added to my late arrival has given the day a different spin.
Perhaps now is the ideal time for me to look again at the rabid letter of complaint which I penned yesterday to The Worst Bank in the World. I should keep telling myself that I do want the money back and that BBVA has the resources to elongate this dispute into a life-long pilgrimage of grace for me at very little cost to themselves – but where is the fun in being the reasonable one when dealing with the large bank that simply doesn’t care about what its customers think? I think that ‘spleen’ or possibly ‘splenetic’ is the operative word when dealing with an organization this useless!
The sun has now gone, as if the mere thought of BBVA is sufficient to draw clouds and muzzle the life enhancing qualities of our nearest star.
Time to drip a little more poison into the letter and the hell with restraint!
As the blood-letting session was at 8.00 am I had to tell the school that I was going to be late. As it turned out the roads (until the end of the journey) were astonishingly clear and it was only the equally astonishing lack of consideration of wealthy parents ejecting their fortunate offspring from various large multi-terrain vehicles at various pricy establishments on our road that slowed me down.
My final parking site was a space where I was aided by a remarkable gap in the traffic which allowed me to navigate the car into the tight spot without the impatient writhings of Catalans seething behind their wheels watching me.
As it turned out I only missed a quarter of an hour of my class, but even this limited opportunity allowed my head of department who was taking the lesson to fill the blackboard with numerous gnomic hieroglyphics related to grammar to explain and correct the homework which I had set yesterday. Needless to say her elegant and confident grammatical explanations would never have occurred to me in my wildest analytical language moments. Luckily I think I was able to stop her in time before the class got used to such detailed and irrefutable explanations. I fear that she little resorts to the “because we do” form of grammatical explanation much loved by my good self!
As you can probably tell from my up-beat tone of typing, the sun is shining and that, added to my late arrival has given the day a different spin.
Perhaps now is the ideal time for me to look again at the rabid letter of complaint which I penned yesterday to The Worst Bank in the World. I should keep telling myself that I do want the money back and that BBVA has the resources to elongate this dispute into a life-long pilgrimage of grace for me at very little cost to themselves – but where is the fun in being the reasonable one when dealing with the large bank that simply doesn’t care about what its customers think? I think that ‘spleen’ or possibly ‘splenetic’ is the operative word when dealing with an organization this useless!
The sun has now gone, as if the mere thought of BBVA is sufficient to draw clouds and muzzle the life enhancing qualities of our nearest star.
Time to drip a little more poison into the letter and the hell with restraint!
Restraint is what one needs when faced with a known absence of three days by a colleague and no effort made to get a substitute to fill her place. No, classes will be collapsed again and, as a major concession, colleagues will be asked to substitute! And we permanent teachers are complicit in this! Not even a whisper of getting a supply teacher. Why? Why are we underpaid teachers saving money for a highly expensive institution mostly packed with the scions of the rich?
I think these are real questions and not rhetorical, but no one seems to articulate them. Certainly there are teachers with kids in school at cut price and half the staff seems to have relations in the student body of the school. But I don’t. But I am a lone voice crying in a Union wilderness in an environment which will sack at the sound of a union membership application being unfolded!
Tomorrow the excitement of an electro-cardiogram: there is truly no end to the delights with which my life is surrounded!
Ceri and Dianne have given me ideas for the design of the booklet (how did they know that I was going to produce one?) for the Catalan Wine Tasting on Saturday. I need to get started on the cover. My confident choice of image was dependent on Lidl having the bottle of wine I needed: which they do not now stock! That is one of the delights of the shop; it encourages you to think of it as a normal store, the next time you go there it doesn’t have what you want.
But I will think of something else. The one thing that I do not have is a book of Catalan quotations: that is going to be a challenge!
Keeps my mind off school work!
I think these are real questions and not rhetorical, but no one seems to articulate them. Certainly there are teachers with kids in school at cut price and half the staff seems to have relations in the student body of the school. But I don’t. But I am a lone voice crying in a Union wilderness in an environment which will sack at the sound of a union membership application being unfolded!
Tomorrow the excitement of an electro-cardiogram: there is truly no end to the delights with which my life is surrounded!
Ceri and Dianne have given me ideas for the design of the booklet (how did they know that I was going to produce one?) for the Catalan Wine Tasting on Saturday. I need to get started on the cover. My confident choice of image was dependent on Lidl having the bottle of wine I needed: which they do not now stock! That is one of the delights of the shop; it encourages you to think of it as a normal store, the next time you go there it doesn’t have what you want.
But I will think of something else. The one thing that I do not have is a book of Catalan quotations: that is going to be a challenge!
Keeps my mind off school work!
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