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Saturday, April 10, 2010

The Match



Sitting on the balcony outside the staff room before my last lesson in school yesterday and lazing in the afternoon sun I was aware of two things about the scene which were oddly disturbing.

The first was seeing a palm tree framed by wayward branches of a May tree in full bloom. It seemed an odd juxtaposition remembering as I did the May tree which we had in the back garden of our house in Cathays where no palm trees grew!

The second unsettling element in this otherwise expensively panoramically startling scene was the scent of the May blossom. It certainly wasn’t as I remembered it. The same sickly sweet smell was there but there was an overlay of something more disturbingly human about the aroma which reminded me of a bodily function! Unsettling!

The three day week that we have had has been just as exhausting as a full week – at least that is how it seems. The end of the week saw a lot of hollow eyed teachers staggering home for the weekend wondering how they were going to cope with the prospect of a full five teaching days before the next weekend!

I went to bed at a reasonable hour to take full advantage of the promised day of sunshine that Saturday was supposed to be. I woke up at my customary time before dawn, realized that it was Saturday and thought that I could have an extra five minutes and suddenly it was 11.00 am!

With a British sense of bodily betrayal I belatedly fled to the third floor clutching a pot of tea and a book.

I have discovered that my high back swivel office chair is excellent for sunbathing! I can push a lever and have the back recline and laze in more than Oriental splendour. And with a cup of PG Tips in one of my grandmother’s cups – perfect!

The book I was reading, in spite of misgivings from my reading of the first in the series, was another Stephenie Meyer vampire and werewolf book entitled “eclipse.” The lack of capital letter is the author’s choice.

I have obviously missed one part of this series as there were references to what I can only describe as ‘more of the same’ as I ploughed through the reworking of much of the narrative ‘invention’ I had read in the first volume!

The only aspect that I liked was the concept of the Volturi, vampires from Italy who had a sort of watching brief on the ‘brand’ and wiped out those vampires whose drinking habits threatened to reveal to the general public the existence of a disturbing minority in their midst!

This novel is basically a romance with monsters and a heroine whose love of a vampire is slowly bringing her to the point where she is willingly going to go though the change so that she can stay with her vampire love for ever.

I suppose it is the sort of novel which you will like if you like the genre of vampire romance that Buffy the Vampire Slayer has made so popular. Not really my cup of tea and I feel that I have done much more than my duty by reading two of the volumes that school has bought to encourage kids to read. On the basis that any reading is better than no reading, I think that I can recommend them without reservation!

Meanwhile normality (as it is sometimes known) sees Toni dressed like a football terrorist in shirt and hat with a scarf wrapped round his face!

I find it difficult to believe that I have succumbed to the hysteria surrounding a Real Madrid-Barça game to the extent of putting on a Barça shirt under my normal shirt!

After a very scrappy first half (in which however Messi scored a goal) I am not looking forward to a further 45 minutes in which I will not be delighted by the quality of the football and be stressed by the antics of the Barça players – who do not seem to be settled at all. I look on it as one of the prices that you pay for living in Catalonia!

Lunch today was in our usual restaurant in town but was not necessarily at the standard that we expect. Admittedly there were more people there than usual, but still it was not quite as good as we have come to expect. They have also taken to giving us a carafe of wine recently rather than the bottle that we regard as our right. All things change!

Barça have now scored a second goal, which was greeted by someone in our area setting off a rocket. The last time that happened was when Real Madrid was knocked out of the European Cup! That gives you some idea of the force of feeling about this football match when these two teams meet.

And we’ve just won!

Thank god for that and now there are lots of fireworks going off around us!

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