More than anything else (with the possible exception of behaviour in a supermarket queue) this is as clear an indication of real character as you are likely to find on open display.
It is impossible to for me to find any further derogatory comments to make about the selfish, dangerous and the-world-only-exists-for-me attitudes that predominate in the mornings when the affluent deposit their offspring at our school.
Today I saw an example of double parking over a parking space – which has to be something of a first, even with the grotesque approach to parking that our self-centred parents have!
I think that it is a deleterious part of the journey to school that I have to pass parental parking before I start my day. We should be paid extra for the emotional wear and tear that comes with observing the truly selfish approach to road use that characterizes some of the more thoughtless clients of our establishment.
While the rest of the day was exhausting the evening was truly stimulating. When Irene called we make for our usual watering hole which is the local restaurant on the sea front. To our horror it had stopped serving meals by 8.30 pm. Disaster faced us until I remembered an almost forgotten determination to visit the Indian restaurant in Port Ginesta. This turned out to be an unexpected delight: from the spicy popadoms to the fresh juicy prawns in the biriani it was all excellent. And spicy. That probably explained why we were the only two people in the restaurant for most of the evening.
Our waiter seemed equally uncomfortable in all the languages that we could muster and I suspected that he was a relative of the owner who had just paid him a visit when we arrived and was pressed into service as they actually had customers! He did however, answer “Yes!” in resounding English to all our questions and orders. A place to return to!
I have now finished the next book in the summer reading library of one of my colleagues. “The White Woman on the Green Bicycle” by Monique Roffey.
This is set in Trinidad and the four sections of the book are dated 2006, 1956, 1963 and 1970. They chart the fortune of a couple, George and Sabine Harwood, as they cope with and in Sabine’s case fail to come to terms with living in Trinidad as white settlers.
The political overtones and the discussion of colonialism were interesting, but the book reminded me strongly of “Wide Sargasso Sea” and I am sure that there was a direct quotation from the novel at one point. The book uses multiple narrators and also the device of quoting from a series of unposted letters that Sabine writes to the charismatic political leader and eventual prime minister of Trinidad, Eric Williams after the British hand over power.
The echoes of “Wide Sargasso Sea” do this novel no favours as the power of Rhys’s work is through powerful selected detail, searing characterization and suggestion. There is too much in “Green Bicycle” which is derivative and overwritten. This novel takes over 400 pages to make fewer points than Rhys.
And it’s yet another reason not to visit Trinidad!
The pupils who have spent a month in Canada returned to school today and will rejoin my English class tomorrow. It will be interesting to see and hear what impressions they have brought back from this first attempt at a one way exchange with a foreign school.
Meanwhile we are that much nearer the weekend. Which is a good thing!
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