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Thursday, April 22, 2010

It's the waiting!




The fever of expectation about Sant Jordí shows itself in a growing dread about the organization of the event in school. Already horror stories are beginning to be circulated about the chaos which attends any event which needs the entire school to assemble in one place at roughly one time.

The day is an important one and prizes will be distributed. There has been a frenzied book buying by all the language departments as they are rewarding the successful candidates in the ‘literary’ competition which marks this day. The winners have to read out a section of their winning prose so I will listen to a variety of kids look terrified and whisper foreign nothings into the microphone.

It is also the day on which the results of the photography competition will be announced. This is all very interesting but not gripping. Our efforts to complicate the end result of the competition for the teaching staff may or may not have succeeded. We have not had even a sniff of the possible name of the winner and we have convinced ourselves that our photos are much, much better than the established teachers who have been here since St Paul himself came unto this very place and planted the staff of learning that we all might partake of the fruit thereof and thus refreshed impart education to all and sundry. We have discussed ways in which we might make our protests at the grave injustice when the ‘wrong’ name is announced! My colleague and fellow participant’s suggestions while certainly colourful were frankly pornographic so I feel that my more restrained suggestion of calling out “Shame!” as a member of the Old Guard is announced as the winner is much more dignified!

Whatever happens I feel that the two of us will be near to hysteria by the time the announcement is made as we have been keeping up a “conspiracy theory” approach to the competition ever since it started. This will be the culmination of weeks of hilarity the cause of which has only been known to the two of us!

The ‘event’ goes on for almost two hours and will extend into a non-contact period for me! I know what I would rather be doing.

I have started my next book which is “The Telling Pool” by David Clement-Davies. Not only was I drawn to the faux-Medieval woodcut which graces the cover together with the distressed golden lettering of the title, but also to the content. The name of the author and the name of the hero of the novel, Rhodri seemed to point to a Welsh flavour and as the action of the novel is set in the time of Richard called the Lion Heart I was already hooked.

Opening the volume I was confronted by an extract from The Second Coming by Yeats and an Old English Plaint: and this was before the opening chapter! The heading of the opening chapter “The Teller and the Smith” was immediately followed by the opening lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover”: some pretention you simply have to go with, any other attitude would be churlish! He seems like my sort of guy!

Sunday is Marc’s Name Day and so I have been seen to go into the library and purchase a book called “My first words and pictures: Animals” It is a splendid book (which I have read) with photographs of many animals, but not alas either of my favourites: the penguin or the duck-billed platypus. The cover picture of this book features a giraffe – a creature in which I have decided not to believe. In spite of the fact that I have actually touched one! I think it was when I saw footage of the giraffes running or galloping or whatever it is that they do to get from one place to another quickly that my belief finally failed!

By comparison belief in the crocodile, zebra, rhinoceros or indeed the duck-billed platypus is relatively easy!

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