It's only money

At last, a piece of preparation which has paid off!

If the condition of spectacles at the end of the day are an indication of the sort of experiences that a normal wearer has then it would not be unreasonable to assume that most spectacles wearers work underground in conditions of filthy squalor that the UNO would consider totally unacceptable and a denial of human rights. 

I started cleaning my glasses, which were almost opaque with the detritus of the day in a way which only glasses wearers can tolerate and non-glasses wearers find impossible to envisage seeing out of, this morning in the staff room just before the start of the day I was appalled to see one of the arms of my specs neatly break off. 

My glasses hardly exist: the lenses which should look like the base of milk bottles are specially thinned; the glasses are rimless and the arms are mere wisps of highly expensive metal which do not fold down but which are pre-sprung to touch the head lightly and hold firmly in place.

One of the arms has broken before and it costs a king’s ransom to replace: every day and in every way I get poorer and poorer!

I am now reduced to wearing one of my old pairs that, with foresight that still shocks me, I keep in the car “just in case”.  They feel heavy and clumsy after my others and the vision is not as good.  I can see the rims and there is a fish-eye lens effect to make my seeing just that little bit more exciting: squares have become trapeziums.

I take this as a sign that god wants we to wear contact lenses.

I have used up my normal supply of lenses and I am now reduced to wearing some of the lenses which were given to me as an experiment to see what my eyes would tolerate in trying to get a compromise between distance and reading.  The experimentation will have to continue because I hate wearing the old fashioned type of glasses now and I know that repairing my lighter pair will take time.

The glasses are now safely in the hands of the grasping optician in Sitges.  My fond hope that they might be under guarantee was shattered when it was revealed that that particular arm was over two years old.  How time flies when looking through pieces of thinned plastic!

To further justify being in Sitges we went to a Basque restaurant and had their version of the pinchos we enjoy so much in Castelldefels.  I think I made a better selection than Toni, but we did not think that it matched the quality of the ones that we were used to.

 

The method of choosing the tapa is to select what you want from a series of plates laid out along a counter or from chilled cabinets of various tasty constructions held in place on a piece of bread by overgrown toothpicks and your bill is calculated by the number of sticks you have on your plate.  In our restaurant in Castelldefels there are two lengths of stick with the longer being indicative of a more expensive tapa, though this was not the same in Sitges where the length was irrelevant.  It was an expensive meal but I found it tasty and interesting.

In spite of the cold and it being clearly out of season, Sitges was lively with plenty of people wandering around.  This may change over the next few days when the weather is supposed to take a change for the worse and become much more wintry than it has for the last few weeks.  This is depressing.

 

As is the growing mountain of marking which is looming over me in school.  Class after class takes paper after paper and over the next couple of weeks I will have marked examination papers from 90% of the secondary section of the school: a daunting thought.  There is not enough time to complete this marking but, by some strange educational quirk of space-time continuum it will, somehow be finished in time for an Interminable Meeting (the sordid blight of my life) in which the most positive thing that I will do is pray for a swift death!

I comfort myself by thinking that each examination period past brings us relentlessly nearer to a holiday and the end of the year and the two-month reason why it is worthwhile teaching in Spain!