Through the drugs darkly

The trip to the UK in early July is now arranged and with the car hire is quite a chunk of money but what the hell!

Clarrie phoned yesterday from Waterstone’s telling me she saw the title of a book and immediately thought of me. 

The title was something that should appeal immediately to anyone who has an iota of historical knowledge and an ounce of national esteem. 

I shall delay giving away this excellent book’s name until it is safely in my hot little hands.  Clarrie has promised to wrap and post it and I am eager to rip away the packaging and feast my eyes on such a valuable addition to the jolly xenophobia that is such a gratifying aspect of our national character!

I have made an executive decision to drug myself even further to the eyeballs to get rid of the niggling lack of health that has dogged me this week.  Spain is not a country given to drugs of a few milligrams set in tablets of petite proportions, so I have taken a few torpedoes of medication and am washing them down with industrial strength concoctions of lemon and honey where the proportions are such that it takes two hands to stir the spoon!

I have completed my exercise for the day: removing the washing instructions label on the Polarvide (?) 130x170 blanket from IKEA with which I sometimes sit, like a hi-tec hag in the living room, with the Polarvide draped around my shoulders typing on The Machine.

As I have had occasion to mention before, our house is designed for the summer with open staircases that funnel warm air to the top of the house and away from where we might be spending the bulk of our time indoors so, in spite of heating, it is sometimes necessary to provide adjuncts to the inadequate heat sources that mock warmth when it comes to the winter.

But the sun has come out; it isn’t exactly warm but it is bright.  There is hazy cloud cover but the sun is indisputably in control of the heavens.

Lunch was taken (defiantly) in a part of a restaurant that had previously been off limits because it was devoted to smokers.  Now all public areas are available to those who loathe cigarettes.  The meal itself was light and expensive.  It consisted of a series of tapas ranging from jamon to carpaccio of prawns washed down with a pricy bottle of Italian sparkling wine (I can’t bring myself actually to name it!) and tiramisu and coffee to complete it.  Pleasant, but essentially unsatisfying.

And it’s started raining again.

I cannot say that this weekend has seen me at my bouncing with health best, with the only vigorous element in my makeup being my cough!  Toni, however has been laid even lower than myself and will probably go to the doctor on Monday.  I might well follow his example if the cough is not a part of the past by then.

The forthcoming week is one of edge-to-edge examinations with every aspect of school that is not tied down being subject to kids writing reasonably meaningless snatches of half literate gibberish about it.  I am convinced that global warming can be directly linked to our consumption of photocopied sheets of paper for the various examinations without which our school would falter and fold!

Of course all of this processed wood chip has to be looked at and a steady stream of stains added to it so that the kids can have their magic mark out of ten.

Our papers seem to be fairly late in the examination period and their marking will leach its way into the fiasco week which is soon to be upon us.

I would like to use the long weekends that we are going to have to get away to some of the other great and historic cities in Spain which I shamefully have not yet visited: ideally a Friday evening to Monday evening trip – but I am not sure how far this is a realistic possibility.  Certainly worth looking in to.

Anticipation is the way through a week of work!