What day is it?

There is something intensely wrong in setting off for work in the dark.  It is unnatural and unsettling.  The sort of thing that necessitates a weekend for recovery purposes – which today at least has the appropriate ending to the day.  But what about all the other days to come in which I will be battling the traffic (and insanely suicidal motorbike drivers) in the dark?  Sigh!

We did have some clouds yesterday, but not of the stubbornly sun-denying British type – and today, yet again, is glorious with sunshine flooding everything.  It may be appreciably cooler, but to all intents and purposes summer continues unabated!  That sentence was tempting fate and the inevitable punishment of The Pathetic Fallacy has ensured that high level cloud is now diffusing sunshine in a much more autumnally way than I like.

Toni is a much happier bunny now that he has electrodes strapped to his extremities and he is as equally pleased with the large backlit display on the handset control as he is with the effects of the machine itself!  A gadget freak after my own heart!

My appetite has almost fully returned, though I still don’t ever feel like lunch and prefer to have a meal in the evening.  This has not gone unnoticed by my colleagues for whom eating lunch is one of the “free” perks that they delight in taking from the job.  I forbear from pointing out that there is absolutely no such thing as a free lunch – and do not join them.

The gruelling nature of my timetable, and indeed that of many of my colleagues is making itself felt as we progress through this interminable term.  What sort of timetabling ineptitude produces a day when a whole collection of colleagues are teaching six periods?  We are in school for eight bloody hours a day, how much more bloody time do the powers that be need to produce something which is just a little more teacher friendly?  Not forgetting the two teachers’ meetings scheduled for a Saturday morning! 

The ethos and working practises of our school would have a collective nervous collapse should they ever get close to the conditions that obtain in a normal secondary school in the UK!

 A shock development this evening is the reappearance of our hated neighbours of the summer.  The deal is that they come and make our lives a misery for the summer months and then they pack up and go back to Barcelona and do not come back for a year.  This is not the first time that they have paid a surprise visit since their official departure – marked by the opening of a bottle of our best Cava and whoops of joy.

If they are going to come back for the odd weekend then I am going to start looking for somewhere else to live.  With the Mad Woman and her dogs on one side and the inconsiderate rowing on the other life will be intolerable.  It is probably the extended summer that brings this detritus back.  I am sure that were the weather to be the same as it was this time last year we would see nothing of them.

Ah well, at least there are two days off!