It is not yet 11 o’clock but already the day is rubbish and to cap it all the sun is shining and I am most unequivocally indoors.
The day started with my “supervising” a seething mass of 14 year olds who were just about to deliver their speeches explaining and defending what they had done over the past week when they should have been working on a project.
I am now sitting in front of a denuded class which is composed of those pupils who failed the earlier exam. At least it is quiet, but the time in which they are completing this paper extends over the “patio” or playground time and the sensitive souls have demanded that the double glazed windows be shut so that they can concentrate more! Bless.
When this is over I have a meeting with the Directora, presumably about next year and then a segue my way back to the class that I started the day with who, by that stage will probably be in a heighted hysterical state as everything that they will have had to do will have been done. Snatching a quick lunch takes me up to my lunch duty (oh the shame of it!) and by that time the powers that be will have found something else for me to do.
The only (ONLY) thing keeping me going is the knowledge that we have three more days with the kids and then they are gone. Gone I tell you!
Tuesday the 22nd is the End of Course and is a school fiesta and, more importantly a half day for the kids. I hope. The staff then have a mariscada composed of various forms of shellfish all washed down with Sangria. The 24th is San Juan and we have a day off. You can tell the level of desperation by the adding up of these moments of freedom until the final release on the 30th in the broken week which, at last ends the term.
I do not pretend to know much about Association Football (except when I think I can get away with it) but the fear-gripped, boring incompetence that characterised the English “game” against Algeria (!) was of such stupefying irrelevance as an entertaining event that I stumbled my way to bed at the end of the first half completely uninterested in the eventual outcome.
I would be grateful if anyone could explain why Heskey was our striker, or indeed why he was playing at all. And why was Rooney placed where he was on the field? The five million pounds a year earning English manager looked like some bloke who had been tempted out of a local pub for a couple of hours to give it a go for the lads. I don’t know what a manager should look like but I am bloody sure that it should not be like Capello. I do know that one shouldn’t judge on appearance. So let’s consider last night’s game, oh yes, and the game against the US of A. We could build a school for what we pay him. And if we add to that the grotesque salaries that we pay to the players who cavort their way on a patch of grass sullenly kicking the ball to the opposition, then we can staff the new Capello Institute for Useful Things Other Than Football for the next fifty years. Bitter? Me!
And while I am in the mood; I am getting progressively more fed up with the sanctimonious gibbering of the American President as he mouths xenophobic popularism which puts one more in mind of a typical French president rather than an ally. If it does nothing else than finally put to rest the dangerous myth of the “special relationship” then at least something positive will have come out of this ecological disaster.
One is tempted to think of Union Carbide and the real disaster in Bhopal and the compensation paid out there by an American company to sense the hypocrisy of the present demands for the wealth of the Indies to be placed at the feet of a group of “Southern Gentlemen” who are going to milk BP for every cent they can get to scrub each grain of sand to pristine whiteness.
But the sun is out, the sea is calm and at the moment everything seems right with the world.
At the moment.
The day started with my “supervising” a seething mass of 14 year olds who were just about to deliver their speeches explaining and defending what they had done over the past week when they should have been working on a project.
I am now sitting in front of a denuded class which is composed of those pupils who failed the earlier exam. At least it is quiet, but the time in which they are completing this paper extends over the “patio” or playground time and the sensitive souls have demanded that the double glazed windows be shut so that they can concentrate more! Bless.
When this is over I have a meeting with the Directora, presumably about next year and then a segue my way back to the class that I started the day with who, by that stage will probably be in a heighted hysterical state as everything that they will have had to do will have been done. Snatching a quick lunch takes me up to my lunch duty (oh the shame of it!) and by that time the powers that be will have found something else for me to do.
The only (ONLY) thing keeping me going is the knowledge that we have three more days with the kids and then they are gone. Gone I tell you!
Tuesday the 22nd is the End of Course and is a school fiesta and, more importantly a half day for the kids. I hope. The staff then have a mariscada composed of various forms of shellfish all washed down with Sangria. The 24th is San Juan and we have a day off. You can tell the level of desperation by the adding up of these moments of freedom until the final release on the 30th in the broken week which, at last ends the term.
I do not pretend to know much about Association Football (except when I think I can get away with it) but the fear-gripped, boring incompetence that characterised the English “game” against Algeria (!) was of such stupefying irrelevance as an entertaining event that I stumbled my way to bed at the end of the first half completely uninterested in the eventual outcome.
I would be grateful if anyone could explain why Heskey was our striker, or indeed why he was playing at all. And why was Rooney placed where he was on the field? The five million pounds a year earning English manager looked like some bloke who had been tempted out of a local pub for a couple of hours to give it a go for the lads. I don’t know what a manager should look like but I am bloody sure that it should not be like Capello. I do know that one shouldn’t judge on appearance. So let’s consider last night’s game, oh yes, and the game against the US of A. We could build a school for what we pay him. And if we add to that the grotesque salaries that we pay to the players who cavort their way on a patch of grass sullenly kicking the ball to the opposition, then we can staff the new Capello Institute for Useful Things Other Than Football for the next fifty years. Bitter? Me!
And while I am in the mood; I am getting progressively more fed up with the sanctimonious gibbering of the American President as he mouths xenophobic popularism which puts one more in mind of a typical French president rather than an ally. If it does nothing else than finally put to rest the dangerous myth of the “special relationship” then at least something positive will have come out of this ecological disaster.
One is tempted to think of Union Carbide and the real disaster in Bhopal and the compensation paid out there by an American company to sense the hypocrisy of the present demands for the wealth of the Indies to be placed at the feet of a group of “Southern Gentlemen” who are going to milk BP for every cent they can get to scrub each grain of sand to pristine whiteness.
But the sun is out, the sea is calm and at the moment everything seems right with the world.
At the moment.
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