Days

Friday, in terms of weather and time allocation, did not go well.

My marking had to take second place to supervision and general faffing around after students.  Moving from building to building in sheeting rain is not, and never has been, my idea of fun – but that is what I did for most of the day getting more and more pissed off as my idea of how the day should have gone was pushed further and further back.

I gained virtually nothing from collapsing classes and even the last day of Chocolate Week was somewhat devalued by the final person buying two packets of good quality biscuits rather than making something chocolaty herself!

The end result of the day was that I did not do what I wanted to do and it means that Tuesday (when we return to work) is going to be a day of considerable horror as marks are frantically put into a computer system that I cannot access from home.

To my complete horror I can see no other alternative than to have to spend some of my holiday finishing off the marking!

These things cannot be thought of with any degree of composure so I will turn instead to something much more agreeable – eating.

Irene and I had one of our long delayed gossips.

We have been going to my “local” Indian restaurant but Irene did not seem enthusiastic so I suggested we try an Argentinian restaurant that we had vowed never to return to.

Our apparent U-turn is, in fact nothing of the sort, as we made our decision based on the ridiculous amount of cigarette smoke than ruined the otherwise excellent food we had.

Now that we Puritan non-smokers have just about taken over the world we can revisit previous smoke-filled dives and breathe the fresh-ish air of our local restaurants and laugh at the addicts huddled in furtive corners next to the traffic.

We did have an excellent meal of shared salad followed by meat – it was, after all an Argentinian restaurant – and, in my case by some elaborate ice cream creation and iced coffee.

As I like my steak “blue” if possible, this took a little explanation as such things are not second nature to a Spaniard.  It turned out that the kitchen described my (our) cooking preference as “in the English style”!  Who would have thought that we had achieved such racial gastronomic sophistication!