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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Bright but Cold


Today is the sort of autumn day that you do not want in March when summer is supposed to be just around the corner.

I am taking on the Spanish national obsession with the weather that I now realize was only partially developed by what I had previously taken to be our over-concern with the climactic conditions in Great Britain.

I think that the fact that the present Spanish weather is beginning to exhibit the idiosyncratic schizophrenia which has characterized our climate over generations has prompted the present monomania on the subject.

We are subject to a constant bombardment of vivid descriptions of climatic extremes on TV from flooding to landslides, taking in tornados and snow. This is not what I expected, having been brought up on a diet of sunny expectation fostered assiduously by the Spanish Tourist Board. The reality, I am rapidly discovering, is somewhat different.

The sun-trap on the third floor is now a breeding ground for mould and I think that the cushions for the sun bed have mutated into a new life form and I am hesitant to go out onto the terrace and battle with something which looks as though it is trying to emulate the hairiness of a pelt of penicillin without the benefits of being a wonder drug. I wonder what does grow best on a well used sun-bed. On the other hand speculation on this subject might well bring to mind my favourite quotation from the etchings of Goya!

Real Madrid are out of the Champions’ League and it is a function of the extraordinary passions that football raise in this part of the world that when the match had ended and the defeat was secure fireworks were set off around us in Castelldefels! To celebrate the defeat of a Spanish team by the French!

I have found that our traditional hatred of the French is more akin to passionate attachment and genuine affection compared to the real hatred by the Spanish and Catalans of our traditional enemy.

I even feel a sense of violation and demand that the French decide who best fits the role of Traditional Enemy. Finding out that the French have been flirting with the Spanish as an enemy seems to me to be something bordering on faithlessness and they should remember that all their best phrases of cultural hatred are directed against us. I bet that the French have never referred to the Spanish as Perfidious Iberians, Perfidious Albion trips off the tongue so much more convincingly!

This is the calm before the storm in our school as the full force of the examinations is waiting to be unleashed. This lesson (one of the many which have collapsed classes to compensate for the absence of a colleague) is supposed to be given over to study. Unfortunately that conflicts with the Prime Directive of the Spanish and Catalans which is to talk at every opportunity! However the growing sheets of paper clutched and waved about by the pupils are a visible sign that the examination period is nigh.

I think that our school must be one of the major users of highlighter in the world as anything and everything is highlighted in a variety of colours. When the pages of the text books have been super-saturated the kids then turn to their copious notes and highlight anything which looks vaguely significant. They may not be useful but they are colourful!

The real horror of this period starts when the marking has to be done. If these exams follow the course of the last ones (and the ones before that and the ones before the ones before etc) then we will suddenly be faced with a totally impractical completion date for all the results to be written in some sort of data base which will be part of a computer site which will not accept input when you need to make it.

Chaos, which is the normal element in the working of the school, will then reign supreme and the teachers will, paradoxically, breathe a sigh of relief as the SNAFU status of the period will have been established.

At least we have a real cut off date as the end of term is on the 26th of the month.

Not that I am counting the days!

Especially as I suspect that one of the ‘teaching opportunities’ may well be on a Saturday morning and I am still not well enough to give such an obscenity the full professional contempt which it richly deserves.

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