The clocks are now firmly forward and I am getting up in the dark again. There is something truly depressing about starting one’s day in darkness. I know that this is the start of a short period of adjustment and that soon daylight will lighten my way to school so that I can illuminate the minds of my unfortunate charges!
And the evenings are lighter longer; so yesterday after having a snack “dinner” in town we were able to stroll back to the car after 8 pm in gently darkening sunshine.
The Most Expensive Tea and Coffee Shop in the World is an almost irresistible draw for me. I am fascinated by the impedimenta of tea and coffee making where the shop seems to have cornered the market in excruciatingly expensive tea pots, cups, mugs and tea making equipment - which it sets out in alluring displays with small, carefully hidden price tags.
I presume that they make their money by potential customers handling the goods, finding the price tag and then immediately dropping the article in shocked disbelief – and then having to pay for the broken pieces. I have grown wise to this and now only look at the price tag when the article is firmly and safely located on the display shelf so the only damage that I do is to other customers when I shy away from the pot or jug with a startled whiney of pain and collide with another potential dupe!
The tea, however, is delicious and well worth buying as long as you never look at the receipt and simply put the change you are given directly into you pocket without checking how much things cost. To do otherwise is to court madness and despair!
Talking of M & D there are now two weeks and four days left to Grand Canaria. Not, of course that I am counting.
I am not sitting in my accustomed place in the staff room of building 1 and am now located at the foot of the table around which colleagues work. I am also facing the wall on which notices are placed and one in particular has caught my attention. This is the one which lists those unfortunates who will have to do a substitution for a colleague. I know that I gain a period tomorrow as the 3ESO are all out on a trip, but I also know, as sure as night follows day that I will gain precisely nothing. Even from a distance of twenty feet I can see the rising curve of the “S” and the descender of the “p” which shows my name is among the damned condemned to another class. Though thinking about it, it could just be normal paranoia there are, after all, other names with the same sort of outline as my own.
Indeed that last statement is true! It is not my name – but I still do not hold out any real belief that I will keep the period free: the school is too small and we never seem to have supply teachers so all the burden of any disruption in the staffing is carried by the staff. The true pessimism of an experienced professional!
The New Device continues to cause problems, especially with the loading of electronic books. There seems to be no rhyme or reason behind the skittish attitude that The New Device has towards acceptance or rejection. The same format books loaded in exactly the same way do not have exactly the same response from The Device. “The Girl of the Limberlost” – of book of which I have heard but do not necessarily want to read – has loaded without a problem, but “Queen Lucia” which I do want to read when I want to read it, refuses to form an essential part of my electronic library.
Music, however, which is usually a more difficult element because everything I have is tainted with the exclusivity of iTunes adheres to the electronic innards of The New Device with the enthusiasm of the blue rinsed ladies of a certain age for any public school educated leader of the party that opposed the foundation of the national health system!
I shall persevere as The New Device’s small size makes it ideal for the future holiday in the sun – which I might have mentioned is two weeks and four days away!
Dinner this evening was decided on an instant whim and comprised a delicious selection of the pinchos from the Basque restaurant in the centre of the playa of Castelldefels.
And now, time to subside!
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