Against Nature Again!

Well, we had the best of the weather in the morning when the sun did deign to come out and shine in a half-hearted manner.

I managed to stay away from the Third Floor and settle down to the horror of marking!  On a Saturday!

Although these are examination papers for the youngest pupils that we teach they are long and bitty and some of the questions have (as always in English grammar) variations in the answers that make marking a true delight.

The bulk of the marking (and especially the nasty bits) had been done in odd moments when I found myself able to get out the papers and beaver away for a few minutes before interruptions.  The sections left were of a more pleasingly mechanical nature and could even be completed on a Saturday (!) morning without too much personal angst.  Not too much.

I am now armed with the results on the computer which will be needed on Tuesday morning when everybody and his wife will be attempting to put in marks on an overworked computer system that goes down, as the saying has it, as often as a two bit whore.

The deadline for this piece of administration is self imposed and unreasonable which says something for management.  At least management in our place.  Perhaps everyplace!

I am comforted, as always, by the wisdom of my personal guru in school, who also works as the business studies teacher and is a mainstay of the English department, “Remember Stephen, this is not Britain” is one of his enlightened aphorisms which, together with, “It will get done, because it has to be done” has kept me sane in the unenlightened atmosphere of a Spanish school!

So, Tuesday with its panic and its horrific meeting will come and go and life will go on.  And get ever nearer to the end of the month and release!

The completion of one piece of school work encouraged us into town as I wanted to buy a cake tin and have lunch.

Lunch was in our usual place and we had to fight our way through the stumble of old age pensioners who seem to colonize the place to find a place to wait (!) before we were able to be seated.

As Toni will not wait anywhere for food usually, you can take his easy acquiescence with the airy instructions of the owner of the place to sit on the tall chairs by the bar as a sort of “holding station” until a table became available as a vivid indication of his assessment of the worth of the establishment we were patronizing.

I have to admit that the length and variety of the menu del dia is unparalleled in our experience and it is excellent value for money.

The cake tin was eventually bought in one of the larger hypermarkets and is one of those with a removable bottom and a clip side.  I’m not sure that I really need it, but I like the idea of needing it.

This was a necessary purchase for the making of Toni’s Name Day cake.  There is no cooking in this production and I only need to assemble the ingredients and mix them together and voila!  a cake!

As Toni does not like “dry” cakes this one should be perfect.

The only “fly” in the ointment is that (as usual) I have never made it before and I have only the sketchiest notions of quantities of ingredients.  But I work on the principle that if the ingredients in themselves are good then the end result is going to be OK at least.

As the basic ingredients in this cake are chocolate and cream what can go wrong?

The biscuit base took up a packet of digestive biscuits and some of the unsalted butter that I have left over from the making of the British Brownies.  I greased the inside of the tin and lined it with greaseproof paper and pressed the biscuit down to form a rough circle.  I do find that the paper gets in the way and the end result is not, as far as I can see going to be a perfect circle.  But what the hell!

For reasons I don’t understand, but it was an essential part of the instructions as I remembered them that I then froze the base in the tin.

Tomorrow the rest of the recipe which, to be frank, I am making up as I go along.