Free!

A fine summer’s day.  Well, almost.  It is after all December and one must take what one can get at this time of the year.  Inside the house, sitting in a puddle of sunlight it is more than pleasant – but move out of that puddle and you realise the month!

This is a holiday day: Bank Holiday for the natives tomorrow and the start of Stupid Week for we teachers.  Tomorrow is not a teaching day, but Wednesday and Friday are.  A pleasantly disjoined and educationally worthless week!  I am however concentrating more on the fact that it is a two-day week rather than on the pedagogical usefulness of it!

I have one a modicum of housework though I find that it does not sit very well with my general approach to life!  At all.

Lunch was in a new place: Restaurante Marbella at the other end of Castelldefels, in fact it was probably technically in Sitges as the other end of the town is claimed by a resort ten minutes away by car through tunnels!  Remember Stephen that you are not in Britain!

The meal was 10€ including drink and bread, though we did have to pay another €1.35 for a cup of coffee.  The best thing about our eating experience was that we sat outside (me in short sleeved shirt) and had an uninterrupted view of the beach and sea.  Delightful!

There are a number of jobs that need to be done, none of which I feel like doing.  They range from sweeping the front garden path free of pine needles from the trees which do not grow in our garden to getting the artificial pine needles out which bedeck our tired old Christmas tree.

As there was nothing in the January sales in this country that I wanted to buy last year I have been into one of the cheap shops and bought some new Christmas decorations at a more than reasonable price.  I have also bought a tinsel star topping for the tree in the foyer in school: it may only have cost me €1.50 but I expect a refund!  There’s dedication and there is stupidity.

Talking of stupidity, the government is floating all kinds of money saving ideas including cutting government employees’ salaries; cutting subsidy on public transport; raising VAT (that evil German concept); paying to see the doctor and all the other usual politicians’ penny-pinching proposals.

I wait in breathless anticipation for the Perfect Storm that will accompany the pronouncements of the President (either national or local) to cope with the crisis.

I am taking to heart old A J Smith’s cry of “Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day” from the General Strike.  It does look as though we are going to be attacked and have our pay cut.  I wonder what the reaction of my colleagues will be when this happens?  Our school has been “decent” and made up the reduction that the government imposed - but I fear that it will not make up any future cuts.  And then I will have to make a decision. 

When I last checked, I did not see that my working life was classified as charity work!  Whatever I might think about my present rate of pay!

I can foresee a time in the not too distant future when all of my colleagues are going to have to make a decision about where they stand in relation to our school’s response to how the crisis is affecting the way they operate.  I won’t hold my breath about their rising up in righteous indignation and marching for their rights!

After an exhausting visit to our local shopping centre all the immediate Christmas shopping is now done!  Being a Channel and a couple of countries away from my own, my personal Christmas shopping for Brits is severely limited.  And as I am not visiting the UK this holiday my “guilt” presents do not have to be bought! The Catalans, are catered for and I can now wrestle with the knotty problem of how to put a picture into an email without its being an attachment.

It is true that, following the development of modern communications, if a person is only known to you by a snail-mail address they do not, to all intents and purposes, exist?  I know that I have been meaning to write to the wife of the son of a friend of my mother in Australia for the last five or six years.  I have carefully preserved the address and have had true and honest intentions to write, but you know how it is.  The best laid plans etc.

Perhaps this year will be the one during which I reach out to the people who have been cruelly ignored as I have used the excuse of moving to a foreign country to excuse my indolence in communication!

Who knows.