Life is NOT football!

With a dedication to teaching which leaves me breathless (or is that just one of the symptoms of the cold that I am nursing) I staggered through my ablutions this morning and, with resentment leaking through every pore in my body, I joined the (reduced) number of hapless slaves making their way to work.

In school my coughing soon attracted attention and I made absolutely sure that everything within hearing distance knew that I “had made an effort” to get in.

The reason that I made it in was to fill in the gaps in the computer program which is the essential part of the assessment system which governs our every thought in this place.

My coughing was so convincing (because it was genuine) that my colleagues decided to split the first class between them and let me get on with putting my results in.

An astonishing number of kids have made the effort to come in today in spite of it being a Friday and despite their being on holiday on Thursday.  And Monday and Tuesday of this week as well.  I think that I was a fairly tractable student and obeyed most of the rules and was hardly ever absent – but I think that even I would have thought more than twice about coming in for two odd days in an obviously fractured week.  Especially when I was of an age to stay at home alone!  Ah well, perhaps they are merely coming in to make our teachers’ lives more miserable.  Now that is something I can understand!

The concept of a bed waiting for me in Castelldefels is, to put it mildly, alluring.  But, until I can made an indecent escape from this place, I am relying on the natural resilience of a teacher about to embark on the weekend to keep me going.

SATURDAY 10^th DECEMBER 2011

Home and bed, in short order.  That was the story of Friday evening.  And a restless night to round off a couple of delightful days.

During the weekend I can ponder on the coming week.  On Monday and Tuesday (two days, count ‘em) we have meetings at the end of school which are scheduled to last two hours each.  My Tuesday, therefore, will start with my getting up at 6.30 am; I will teach six periods and then, after a 15 minute gap I will go straight into a two hour meeting which will probably overrun and I might get home some thirteen hours after getting up!  What a delight!  And our local government is talking about reducing our wages.  Again.

Listening to the Spanish and the British news one gets a confused picture of what is actually going on in the financial and political world.  While “confusion” is probably the operative word and gives a fairly accurate description of the present situation, it does give me pause for thought about the future.

All my financial plans laid down more than five years ago now seem to have been made in a different sort of world – or at least in the sort of world that kept such inconvenient phrases like “sub-prime” to itself and no one really knew what was going on.  Now that far too much is out in the open it is obvious that what bankers have been engaging in is obviously no more real economics than Animal Farm is a guide to Horse Hoeing Husbandry.  We have to deal with the fact that no one appears to know what is going on and even fewer people seem to know what to do.

The effective isolation of Britain is surely the culmination of the whole French inspired plan for the European Community – or am I being paranoid!  The EU after all is all about giving votes on fishing rights to those countries which do not have a coastline; on giving countries financial jurisdiction over areas of financial services which in their cases they do not have; on isolating Britain because the noxious little French dwarf and the ungainly hausfrau are too frightened to take real financial decisions which could stabilize the present chaotic situation.

I am not anti-Europe, and voted in favour of our entry, but I do not think that the Union has developed quite in the way that I envisaged all those years ago.  There again, I was also in favour of Britain joining the Eurozone so that show just how profound my economic analysis is!

Each day I go to school I am greeted by the Business Studies teacher and, after a few sentences about what we have heard on the news, we are plunged into dark despair and shake our heads sorrowfully at the sad state of the world that we inhabit.

In spite of feeling like shit after an uneasy night and coughing my way through the morning I was determined to go out to lunch as we always do on a Saturday.

El Restaurante de los Jubilados (as I call it) was strangely empty but we sat down anyway and I had a completely self indulgent meal of spaghetti with a cream sauce topped by Toni’s fried egg which he didn’t want from his arroz cubana.  My second course was eggs and ham and it was topped off by a homemade tiramisu all washed down by vino tinto and Casera.  Very comforting for a sick man!

On our way home we called into the cheapo branch of El Corte Ingles which has recently opened in Castelldefels and I bought a blanket (for warming purposes) and a first aid kit for the car (or home) as my present kit dates back to the last millennium!  And well into the last millennium at that.  Having checked out the kit (9€ reduced from 36€) I will probably get another one for the house (or the car) one should not reject such good value when one finds it!

The rest of the day is now going to be taken up with television programme after television programme about El Classico (the Madrid v Barça game) which is over five long hours away!  At times like this one thanks whatever gods there may be for access to the back catalogue of the BBC and a merciful escape from the hysteria which always surrounds these matches.

Sports commentators are congenitally unable to “discuss” any aspect of the game.  They all talk at once and then talk louder if their point of view is swamped by all the other voices.  It is, in every sense of the word, unbearable.  And I will soon be taking refuge in my earphones as the only escape from the torture which is the Spanish approach to the game that we invented!

Even with the isolating security of earphone I do not think that I can stand five more hours of mindless coverage of a future game so I am going to throw things away.  This is going to be a cathartic experience.  Or not.  I have often voiced the sentiment of “clearing” but the reality lags somewhat behind.

I shall now settle down and wait to hear the explosions that greet a Barça goal.

Please god let them win.  My life is so much simpler when they do!