Another week

To get up at 6.30 am might be regarded as unfortunate; to get up at 6.30 am to teach the unresponsive members of 3ESO is little short of disaster!

In the increasingly light mornings that see me slogging up the northern orbital motorway I can feel my mood lighten at the same time.  It still does not entirely compensate for the pupils who are waiting for me, but it helps.

The sun, god bless it, is out again and we have had to lower the shutters to ensure that the conditions in which we work are acceptable.  Once again the depressing quality of the weather forecast for my home country has given me a little boost as I realized that the morning starting temperature in Catalonia was higher than it was going to get during the whole day in the UK!

 

I have now booked flights for Grand Canaria in April during the Easter break and I am looking for places to go for the two long weekends.  There is little point in earning the money if you don’t spend it; especially in a time when the feckless idiocy of mendacious bankers devalues your savings while you watch!

It does seem particularly poignantly ironic that the only time in my life that I have savings is the only time that it doesn’t pay you to have savings!

I was only ten when what should have been a more formative experience occurred.  Viv Nicholson, one of the most famous pools winners, uttered her infamous dictum in response to a newspaper’s enquiry about what she was going to do with her winnings: “Spend! Spend! Spend!”

If left to nature I would follow such obvious wisdom with the all instinctive devotion of a rabid stag in full bellowing rut; but since my early youth I have been surrounded by people who have fed me the pernicious doctrine of so-called “saving.”  My indoctrination started with a Post Office Saving Book whose rate of interest only becomes less than risible when compared with the rates at this time of absolute crisis.

I should have been warned off such evils by the fact that my local branch of the Post Office in Tewkesbury Street in Cardiff was closed after a robbery – presumably committed by someone looking for a decent return on his money!

In the following years my fecklessness with money was constantly berated as one of my most pressing and deleterious faults.  No sooner was money in my pocket than the spirit of Keynes came upon me and urged me to spread it around and keep western capitalism going!  Far from being condemned I should have been encouraged to think that such an approach was the first step towards an OBE at the very least!

Today and tomorrow are the calm before the storm of examinations that will soon take over the rest of the week.  This is a time of considerable tedium, stress and unending marking: cui bono indeed!