The Great Clear Out! Or not.

 

 

The Tidying thing.  It’s now become one of those irritating elephants in the room that simply won’t go away, and it has started trumpeting as well!

     The basic trouble is that there are ALWAYS better things to do than tidying.  As long as the chaos is relatively clean and there is no rodent community inhabiting the mess then the motivation to start ordering the disordered is limited.

    I once compared the actual working space on my commodious desk to the size of a dinner plate.  Sometimes that image is inaccurate and the comparison is more with a side plate than anything else.  At one point I was making a note and needed to consult something in the dictionary (vowels always trip me up and getting them the wrong way round always looks so childish) and I found myself pushing my chair away from the desk to allow me to balance the dictionary (it is large!) by cantilevering it over the edge of said desk. 

     It is clearly absurd that I appear to be working towards emulating some sort of nineteenth-century mezzotint caricature of a scholar working in a cramped attic.  It is true that on the third floor, the room in which I work has been carved out of the roof, so there is indeed a sloped ceiling over my head, and I have to be very careful about how I stand up otherwise I could slump back unconscious into my chair having knocked myself out by too precipitate an ascent!

     The untidiness by which I am surrounded is almost comic in its chaos – though I sometimes do detect a sort of narrative thread linking the different piles of detritus (which isn’t, it is all essential ‘stuff’) and the ancillary scraps of my life scattered about as a type of surface layer, or erratics (if I may be allowed to use a metaphor from geology) to give an air of mystery and suggest hidden depths and an underlying order to what is quite clearly The Mayhem of Objects.

     There are two reasons for writing this.  The first, and the most obvious is that writing about something like tidying is a way of ensuring that it does not get done, because you have already ‘done’ something by the mere act of writing about it.  And the subject of the writing would disappear if careless ordering were to destroy its unstructured, yet intentional randomness.  Even I think that the previous sentence is mere verbiage, no matter how seriously I might take it as a form of self-defence for indolence!

     The second reason for writing this is that the writing may act as a stimulus to do something about a situation that irritates me every time I have to thread my way through the maze of incommodiousness before I can get to my scrap of working space at my desk.

     I know that I often write notes to myself, usually during my post-gym/pool cup of tea, and I even draw in little tick boxes as a further incentive to get things done.  I am proud to relate that I am made of sterner stuff than can be cajoled into acquiescence by four small lines, and the empty space thus enclosed often goes unticked.  But . . .

     There does come a time when the joke has gone far enough, when the situation is untenable when Something Has To Be Done.

     This situation has, I think, been reached.  I find myself juggling a notebook, a sheet of paper, and a couple of books (a conglomeration that should be easily accommodated on a reasonably sized desk) with increasing desperation.  And once I (almost) said to myself, “I simply cannot work like this!”

      I may not have voiced it, but I have certainly meant it.  Though meaning something without doing it negates the whole imperative.

     I will have to look on this writing as both an appeal for help, and also a decision to act.  If the situation is untenable then it must not be allowed to continue.  Action must follow.

 

Look on this as Part I of the Great Clean Up & Out.  It will be interesting to see if there will be further instalments.  I can assure you, my reader, that I am as interested in the outcome as you are indifferent!

     Time will tell.

 

Before the bell rings.

Unease by proxy. 

That’s what I call this weekend.  The holidays are almost over.  Today is Kings when Catalan kids will expect their second (or third) tranche of presents, sweeping together the loot from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the sweets from the procession of the Kings and parental presents for the day itself.  And Monday, reality hits.

As a SRP, (BBLE) that is, Smug Retired Person, Baby Boomer Leading Edge, I regard the end of the holidays and the reopening of the schools as the start of the time when we can reclaim streets, shops, supermarkets and open spaces as the noisy neophyte life forms are herded back into the rightful (if all too brief) seclusion of secure institutions.

As a retired teacher, however I cannot fail to feel that familiar frisson of dread that comes with the looming opening of a new, long, school term.  In Catalonia the new school terms also comes with the deadly threat of Staff Meetings.  However awful you think your experience of meetings might have been, you have not truly suffered until you have undergone the trail by frustration of a Spanish staff meeting in a school. 

I have been to thousands of meetings during my working life and indeed before and after, and the range, complexity and variety of those meetings and the different sorts of people who managed them and participated has been exhilaratingly different.  I was just thinking about the range of ‘meetings’ that I have experienced and the proportion of time that must have been spent on them.  At every stage of my life committees and meetings have been a constant.  In school: clubs, societies, sports, library, Prefects, magazine, orchestra, brass band, charity, hobbies - all have demanded some sort of committee work.  In university: clubs and societies again, but this time with a more formal structure of committee work; student politics; senate sub committees; subject work; trade union activity.  Work: departmental meetings, faculty meetings, union meetings at school, local, regional and national level, educational meetings of all sorts, Heads of Department Meetings, Staff meetings and on and on and on.

And throughout my long and generally soul destroying experience of committee and meeting I have never, ever experienced meetings of such vicious vacuity as those that I have experienced in Spain.  Ever.

For me, the Patron Saint of Meetings is Girolamo Savonarola, (1542-1498) the Italian Dominican friar and Renaissance Florence troublemaker.  He was one of those historical characters where there was much to admire (his hatred of clerical corruption, his rejection of tyrannical government and the exploitation of the poor and his championing of Republicanism) while, equally there was much to be disturbed about (his ‘prophecies’, his iconoclasm, his extreme puritanism and intolerance).  However the element in his life that both appeals and appals is the concept of The Bonfire of the Vanities. 

This bonfire was literal and the flames were fed by the population, responding to Savonarola’s urging, throwing luxuries into the conflagration to show their rejection of the ‘vanities’ of the world.

I am no great supporter of iconoclasm, but the idea of a Bonfire of the Vanities is a powerful one.  Especially when you are sitting listening to people waffling on about nothing in particular in a meeting that is taking up hours of your life.

I am reminded of a Robert Heinlein story in which the ultimate authority in the known universe was a powerful female figure.  She was respected throughout the galaxy etc. and delegations came to her for advice that would be followed strictly.  I remember one example of her advice being that members of the delegation that came to see her be executed as the solution to their problems!

How many times in my life have I imagined a Bonfire of the Loquacious in various meetings that I have attended where selective burnings would have concentrated the minds and shortened the meetings (and all future meetings) considerably.  As well as giving real satisfaction at seeing the guilty burn.

As I’ve mentioned before, some colleagues were only able to survive the more infuriating meetings by watching me as the supressed fury that I radiated in the more boring sessions could (my colleagues hoped) suddenly burst forth in a glorious display of justified ire that would make attendance justified.

I never did ‘break’, but I came close on a number of occasions. 

The truly and unbearably awful meetings in Spain were only made tolerable by a stratagem that I devised for survival.  I took my MacBook Air into the meetings with me and wrote personal, unexpurgated and real minutes in which my true feelings found full expression through my touch-typing.  There is nothing more satisfying while looking and listening to some idiot waffle on while your eloquent fingers say exactly what you are thinking as you stare at the guilty!

Each piece of idiocy was loving described by my tapping fingers and each fragment of fatuousness was highlighted by venom infused description.  This literary scorched earth assassination made the meeting just about bearable, but there were dangers in such an approach. 

In one meeting, a member of the English Department was sitting next to me and she began reading what I was typing and laughing.  Each time something stupid was said she looked over at the screen to read my assessment: in this way we both managed to survive the meeting relatively unscathed.

The real moment of tension occurred at the end of the meeting when the person who was chairing (I use the term because I can think of no other, but what she did bore no relation to what I would understand even a marginally competent chair might do) the meeting said that she had seen me making notes and would it be possible for her to have a copy!  I explained, with a straight face, that the notes were personal and not for general consumption and were in English that she didn’t speak.  While I was convincing and composed, my colleague was convulsed by what might have happened if she had read (and understood) what I had written!

God knows, teaching is a demanding enough profession in the day-to-day interaction of teacher and pupil, without making the whole thing so much worse by having cruelly pointless meetings.

And we had one meeting on a Saturday morning!  Though that criminal occasion was years ago, I feel I cannot write about it, as the wounds are still too fresh to cope with!  Saturday morning!  I can neither believe that it actually happened, or that I actually attended!  The Horror!  The Horror!

So, I feel for my colleagues.  Today is Saturday and the real stomach churning will not get into gear (does that mixed metaphor work, I wonder?) until Sunday evening and the realization, as the bedclothes are pulled up to the chin, that the morrow brings work!  In a school.

The nearest I will get to a school on Monday is the pool where I take my daily swim.  Two schools are next to the centre and I have to admit that there is something deeply satisfying as I sip my tea, to hear young voices in the distance and know that I will not be teaching them and I will be paid for not doing so!


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