One should be satisfied with one reasonable
thing happening during a day but quite a few illuminated my sojourn in school
this morning.
The first satisfaction was one which
extended itself throughout the time that I was there and that was of
nothing. Nothing. No reaction whatsoever to my conspicuous
absence from one of the bone-grindingly tedious meetings that make up such an
important part of the life of the School on the Hill. No one said anything.
Most satisfactory.
It may be that the powers that be are
biding their time and will “have words” later, but I trust that this is a clear
indication of the way in which I can proceed for the sixteen or so weeks of my
time remaining in the institution. I
have not worked out the number of week with any degree of exactitude, but I
leave during the third week in June which is about four months with what must
be a couple of weeks of holiday, leaving fourteen weeks of work, or 70 days or
so – and counting!
My extended version of Chocolate Week has got off to a flying start with my home-made chocolates on Monday augmented by birthday chocolates from a colleague and extended today with home-made truffles with nuts, home made fairy cakes and a superb, exclusive shop-bought cake today. A source of considerable satisfaction! I only hope that other colleagues have been sufficiently shamed by the largesse which has been vouchsafed to them that they add their own offerings during the rest of the week!
Lunch (after my swim) was in our usual
“jubilado” ‘Com a casa’ restaurant in the centre of town. We timed our entry exactly and had one of the
last tables available. Although the
place must be an absolute gold mine positively coining money, it is difficult
to feel resentment (though not impossible, you understand!) because they offer
excellent value for money by providing more than adequate food at reasonable
cost. My meal was of moist rice
flavoured with chicken and rabbit, followed by pork, thinly sliced in a tomato
based sauce with cubed potatoes. The
dessert was a cake Tiramisu. This lot
was washed down with red wine and Casera with café con hielo. For about nine quid. And the sun was shining. Who can reasonably ask for more!
At the moment I am busily feeding the CDs
from “The All-Baroque Box” into the welcoming terabyte of memory on my
overpriced iMac. The quality of the
stuff that I am loading is excellent and I do not consider eighty quid for 50 excellent
discs to be excessive! This is a bargain
whichever way you look at it. Apart from
its title of course which is terminally naff and totally unworthy of Archiv and
Oiseau Lyre. However, I can live with
that. I wholeheartedly recommend this to
anyone who likes music from Monteverdi to Bach.
It’s all here! Including, of
course, people who are obviously insultingly famous of whom I have never heard:
Johann David Heinichen ? But I will get
to know them and then speak of them as though they had been the musical themes
for my childish whistles!
Marking has now built up into an
insurmountable wall of infantile scribbles which do not beckon with any degree
of allurement. I am hoping that their
combined weight will force me to do some marking if only to reduce the pressure
on the joints of my right arm as I lug my briefcase from building to building!
Tomorrow sees me in school for the whole of
a torturous day but, it is a Wednesday which is traditionally seen as the
“tipping day” when are over half way through the week and therefore nearer the
weekend to come than the weekend of past distant memory.
And at least I have one less distraction to
worry about as I have now finished all five of the published volumes in George
R R Martin’s interminable “A Song of Ice and Fire”, the latest read being “A
Dance with Dragons”. This vast novel has
come to no final conclusion and, as far as I can see, the series is destined to
go on for ever – or at least until people finally die from terminal
frustration. He has adopted the
frustrating convention of giving his chapter headings the name of a character
in the novel so you know before you start that you are going to bored witless
by the inane non events of some of his more fatuous creations. Even the interesting baddies have lost their
allure and I frankly couldn’t care less about where the rest of this baggy saga
is going. Which doesn’t mean, of course,
that I will not be tempted by one of the evil little Amazon inducements to get
involved in the next instalment. Time
might soften the memory of all that ploughing!
Who knows?
But, the fifth volume out of the way does
give me the incentive to turn to all those “scripts” (?) which I need to give
back to eager kids desperate for some sort of teacher scrawl on them. I after all, am waiting for my own tutor to
return my work for the OU, so I do share the impatience of see what someone
else has made of my innermost thoughts!
There is, however, the small but
significant question of my work on Dickens.
I have decided that I prefer to read the novel on the iPad, because it
is very much easier to highlight and make notes. We will then see if I have managed to
understand the instructions gleaned from YouTube about how to get my comments
printed out.
As usual there is not enough time in the
day for everything that one wants to do.
Which surely is a good thing!
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