Grim overcast days continue and I do not have lively expectations that the weekend is going to be any better. We had a tantalizing glimpse of sunshine at the end of the day, but not extended enough or strong enough to give much hope for the morrow.
For a small country at some distance from our northernmost extremity Iceland seems to have shafted us yet again. Not content with appropriating with considerable violence and scant regard to the natural order all our cod;, squandering billions of pounds of money placed in their banks by our naturally greedy and unrealistic investors and refusing to pay back their losses; they have now forced their thermal inconveniences into unusual activity so that all our planes have been grounded. And Bjork too!
One of my colleagues was expecting her father to visit this weekend, but these plans have been thrown into confusion by ash in the atmosphere. As one way wrote with seemingly guileless innocence on an internet site, “Was it the wrong type of ash?” People who have had dealings with British Rail, also have long memories and remember with startled vividness the company blaming various organic elements to excuse their own inefficiency.
My own travel today has been relatively painless with the actual motorways being reasonably fast flowing; though with the narrow streets around our school it took me twenty minutes to get a couple of hundred yards away from the place at the end of the day.
The work to the pavements and gutters looks as though it is set to be a feature of our lives for the rest of the term with the consequent chaotic under provision of parking spaces for the staff. Keeps us moaning – and what would a real school be without moaning teachers!
The School That Sacked Me has raised its twisted self from the depths of the educational abyss as a selection of shocked reminiscences from past survivors of that awful place are being collated and given to Those Who Should Know.
There is a sort of weary resignation about what we are doing as so little appears to have made any real impression on the laughable functioning of the school in the past. The only encouragement we had was from one official who said that what we were trying to do was right and, even if the efforts in the past had not yielded results that was not reason to stop trying as, one day, surely, right would prevail and Something Would Be Done.
The danger of course is to take this action too seriously: that way lies insanity. I regard it as a part-time hobby with an amusing possibility of achieving something, as Ruskin would say, “Availing to good.”
I did not manage to resist the lure of a new unread book and have now completed my reading of yet another book by Stephenie Meyer, “new moon”. It read itself; it is one of those ‘page turners’ where your brain does not really need to be activated to get to the end!
This volume follows the pattern of the other two that I have read and adds little new to the heady mix of vampire and werewolf and teenage love except for a jaunt to Italy and a visit from the more orthodox, old-style gothic horror with a visit to the lair of the three thousand year old ‘elders’ of the vampires.
I think that I am a few decades too old fully to enjoy this sort of undemanding junk.
Perhaps something more academic tomorrow and a Bach concert on Sunday.
For a small country at some distance from our northernmost extremity Iceland seems to have shafted us yet again. Not content with appropriating with considerable violence and scant regard to the natural order all our cod;, squandering billions of pounds of money placed in their banks by our naturally greedy and unrealistic investors and refusing to pay back their losses; they have now forced their thermal inconveniences into unusual activity so that all our planes have been grounded. And Bjork too!
One of my colleagues was expecting her father to visit this weekend, but these plans have been thrown into confusion by ash in the atmosphere. As one way wrote with seemingly guileless innocence on an internet site, “Was it the wrong type of ash?” People who have had dealings with British Rail, also have long memories and remember with startled vividness the company blaming various organic elements to excuse their own inefficiency.
My own travel today has been relatively painless with the actual motorways being reasonably fast flowing; though with the narrow streets around our school it took me twenty minutes to get a couple of hundred yards away from the place at the end of the day.
The work to the pavements and gutters looks as though it is set to be a feature of our lives for the rest of the term with the consequent chaotic under provision of parking spaces for the staff. Keeps us moaning – and what would a real school be without moaning teachers!
The School That Sacked Me has raised its twisted self from the depths of the educational abyss as a selection of shocked reminiscences from past survivors of that awful place are being collated and given to Those Who Should Know.
There is a sort of weary resignation about what we are doing as so little appears to have made any real impression on the laughable functioning of the school in the past. The only encouragement we had was from one official who said that what we were trying to do was right and, even if the efforts in the past had not yielded results that was not reason to stop trying as, one day, surely, right would prevail and Something Would Be Done.
The danger of course is to take this action too seriously: that way lies insanity. I regard it as a part-time hobby with an amusing possibility of achieving something, as Ruskin would say, “Availing to good.”
I did not manage to resist the lure of a new unread book and have now completed my reading of yet another book by Stephenie Meyer, “new moon”. It read itself; it is one of those ‘page turners’ where your brain does not really need to be activated to get to the end!
This volume follows the pattern of the other two that I have read and adds little new to the heady mix of vampire and werewolf and teenage love except for a jaunt to Italy and a visit from the more orthodox, old-style gothic horror with a visit to the lair of the three thousand year old ‘elders’ of the vampires.
I think that I am a few decades too old fully to enjoy this sort of undemanding junk.
Perhaps something more academic tomorrow and a Bach concert on Sunday.
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