Sundays are always bad days for teachers, unless of course they occur in holidays. There is a sort of flatness about a Sunday, even after the stranglehold of the church has been relaxed a little allowing us to whistle on a Sunday if we choose, there is a deadness to the day which does not encourage happy thoughts.



Of course in these more enlightened times, the whole concept of the “weekend” invented by the British has been hijacked by modern entrepreneurs and turned into working opportunities. Contracts, especially in the retail sector, now routinely contain a section taking away the sacred weekend for many workers and turning it into an ordinary working part of the week.


The weekend for teachers is the one factor which keeps (most) teachers on an even keel, or at least makes our stumbling progress to the Nirvana of the summer holidays possible.


I am still having counselling for the meeting which was scheduled for a Saturday last year. I think that the supine acceptance of this abomination infuriated me more than the obscenity of its being called in the first place.

Next month sees what is supposed to be a General Strike. Given the laughable organization and power of the unions in this country (especially in the teaching sector) it will be interesting to see exactly how this momentous event plans out.


Many government workers, including teachers, have been given a pay cut of 5% and a pay freeze. VAT has been increased and inflation, as far as I can see in the little oasis of prosperity in which I live, is on the up and up. In other words the scene is set for a major confrontation with the ludicrously inept government which purports to govern Spain at the moment. But . . .


The employment law in this country, which makes Byzantine complexity look like an IKEA construction leaflet – I`m not sure that image is quite what I thought it was going to be, but I am far too intellectually lazy to change it now! The end result is that the “power” of the unions seems at best compromised by the structure in which they have to operate.


It will be very interesting to see how my school reacts to the General Strike (you can tell I am a trade unionist by the way that I put those words in capital letters and feel just a shade of historical guilt about the event) and what measures they put in place.


The school has behaved quite decently about the foolish meanderings of the government so far and they have protected teachers’ wages as far as they say they are able, but if the strike goes ahead then there will be transport chaos in Barcelona.


I have no intention of sitting in a traffic jam for a couple of hours getting to school and then doing the same trying to get home: I don’t mind sitting in a jam in school time, but I am damned if I am going to do it in my own!


The obvious solution would be to close the school for the day – but we have parents who pay a lot of money for us to act as childminders and they would not be best pleased if they have to look after their progeny again so soon after the summer holiday!


There is also the response to the half term break in February next year the details of which still have still not been finalized. Some colleagues will be with kids on trips and the children I teach will simply not be in school. There have been a whole variety of solutions to the staffing problems but I wait for further variations at stages intervals up to the time of the holiday itself!

Basketball is, I concede an a lively sort of sport when it is being played at full tilt but that only happens between what seem like interminable stoppages and that gives one time to note all the irritations which make it so difficult to watch.


The players are clearly freaks whose early deaths are clearly signalled by their ridiculous height. For some of these players scoring a basket only necessitates their launching themselves a couple of inches from the ground – and that is just as well as they look as though any further height and the stadium would be destroyed with the force of their landing. One critic once asked what was the point of actually playing the games when all you had to do was measure the teams and then give the result to the one with the greatest number of units of measurement.


But the real absurdity is the wholesale adoption of the nauseating American attitudes to the game that the players demonstrate from group hugs, high fives, the whole touchy-feely thing, and the breathtakingly arrogant way some players score and most importantly don’t always score because of the theatricals they demonstrate.


Then there are the ‘time-outs’ when coaches use etch-a-sketch boards to demonstrate to players that it is important to get the ball through the hoop, glittering girls come on and cavort while Spanish television manages to broadcast even more adverts than the already illegal limits to which they normally work.


Some sort of basketball world cup is taking place somewhere and, as the Spanish team is usually quite good at this sort of thing, we are being saturated with hour after hour of tall men bouncing balls. It is positively purgatorial and I am sure that I will be far more vituperative by the end of next week if this torture continues that long.


Meanwhile Chandler leads me along the dangerous roads of Los Angeles and the winding ones up to imposing mansions in Beverly Hills whose immaculate lawns and clipped hedges give little indication of the corruption behind those facades they lead to. I am almost, but not quite persuaded to join his characters in a drink of bourbon, rye or whiskey (which for all I know might be the same thing) no one seems to drink wine and I know that any reference to “beer” is not bitter.

But how can a reader not forgive Chandler for his sheer inability to treat his reader with anything less than respect. And still hundreds of pages (large print) to go!


But only two more days of holiday!


Sigh!