If only we could trust each other!

The most difficult decision that any working person has to make is whether or not to link personal keys with work keys.

Let’s face it, it is after all a decision of crucial importance. On the one hand putting the two sets of keys together makes it less difficult to find yourself with the wrong set and vainly trying to open the car with a classroom key and cursing the fact that you have put the other set in your case.

On the other hand separation means double the opportunity for mislaying the damn things.

I freely admit that I am not the most tidy of people and the fact that I do not have a teaching room base means that in my frantic peregrinations around the school and my equally chaotic progress from one teaching space to another there are numerous opportunities for the keys to go missing. And they do.

At the moment my losses have been compensated for by the reality behind the homely wisdom of my head of department who sagely says in a calming sort of way when I am frantically turning over books and searching cupboards, “They always turn up.” Not, please note, “usually” but the infinitely comforting “always!” So far that has been the case and my keys have always been found in the places where I have left, ignored, discarded, dropped or otherwise dispensed with them.

As doors have to be locked after use and opened to let the pupils in, it would appear to be possible to trace where the keys were last used. Appearance is not reality. Sometimes one takes over directly from another teacher and sometimes the room is not locked. Such combinations lead to panic on my part when the clanking comfort of the chatelaine-like bundle is missing.

I have found my keys lying ignored on otherwise clear desks; placed carefully in my pigeon hole; dumped unceremoniously in the centre of the staff room table to join the jumble of stationery and other impedimenta; handed back to me; hidden deep in one of the pockets of my briefcase and only found following Mad Lewce’s dictum that things have to be cleared out entirely three times before they can be classified as lost; hidden under other people’s books – and once, horrifically, on the floor. But they have always made it back to me. So far!

I thought long and hard about the separation of the sets of keys, but it was becoming something of a joke to take out a combined set which looked as though I was the jailer of some maximum security installation!

I have now tried to adopt a policy where I put my house keys in the same spot every time I come home. And, amazingly, so far it’s almost working. Which I think I have to classify as success. For me.

During the winter months I utilize my overcoat as part of my key filing system. The car keys go into my coat pocket and then the coat is locked in the cupboard which we use for coats. The school keys then go into my trouser pocket. The only thing I have to remember is to replace my school keys in my pocket every time I lock or unlock a door. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But it is more difficult that you think.

Classes are not empty rooms and, almost as soon as you are through the door (and often when you are not) the kids regard you as a resource to be tapped at once and it is all too easy to drop the keys in an absent minded gesture as you cope with the thousand questions that our needy kids always have to ask!

It is now 11.00 am and, given the bloody meeting which we have to endure this afternoon and evening, we still have eight hours of school business ahead of us.

I used to think that Curriculum Meetings in LHS were the absolute nadir of human experience, but these meetings in Catalonia are not only as boring, but also have the added ingredient that most of the talking is in Catalan.

I used to think that not knowing the language in which self important non entities were mouthing off platitudes would be an advantage – giving you obvious scope for infinitely more interesting day dreaming. Not so. We all sit around a square island of tables and there are too many people watching you for you to be able to drift away to the Isles of Oblivion and ride the gentle waves of tedium until real life drags you back to reality and the delicious possibility of escape.

An hour has passed and there are now seven hours for purgatorial time life in school until the delights of the ring road claim me and show me the way to oblivion and an early bed!

And just in case you are wondering about the spacious time I have to type in school then I might point you to our ridiculously long day where spaces for teaching are available from 8.15 to 16.45.

At least it makes timetabling somewhat simple and it usually offers at least one “free” period a day – hardly surprising when you consider that the number of slots in a normal week (though god alone knows what is normal in this place) is around 35, compared with a normal British school which would have 25 slots. And in a British school at least some of those periods would be non contact periods. I have 23 teaching periods in my present school and a weekly scheduled departmental meeting, taking my total to 24 allocated periods leaving as many as nine “free” periods in the artificially long week. In the British system I would be suffering from only 1 free period in a 25 period week.

So, not only am I teaching more in the Spanish system but I also have to consider my personal time as so-called free periods. And I am paid less. But it is money. Though not much. And so on ad infinitum.

It is at times like this that United Nations Day seems both very far away and very close!

And there is always the National Lottery and Euro Millions and the ONCE and a random act of munificence . . .

There is always reading!

The intriguingly titled “The Marriage Bureau for Rich People” by Farahad Zama was a Christmas present (somewhat delayed) from Aunt Betty. I read it as an antidote to the vulgarities of “Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer – and I ended up enjoying it.

Its style reminded me of “The No 1 Women’s Detective Agency” novels by Alexander McCall Smith. Zama’s book set in Vizag in south India concerns the retired Mr Ali’s success in setting up the eponymous agency.

The first part of the novel is episodic and different with the same mix of banality and exoticism that characterizes McCall Smith’s books set in Botswana. There is a picaresque quality to Zama’s book which is reminiscent of the sort of writing which you find in a magazine columnist with a settled weekly audience fascinated with his take on a foreign oddity cantered on an unfashionable cultural institution like the concept of the arranged marriage.

As soon as the central love story takes off then there is a completely different dynamic to the story line and it becomes, inevitably perhaps, more conventional. Though not necessarily less enjoyable for that.

Mr Ali becomes a figure of considerable authority and insight and someone who seems to embody the common sense of experience to an extraordinary degree. Perhaps one should treat the book as a fairy tale! I recommend it as a fairly easy and spasmodically funny read.

St Valentine’s Day came and went. It was enlivened this year by television showing a group of Muslims burning the rubbish associated with the commercialization of the day. It was bizarre watching some bushy bearded elder rather maladroitly attempting to burn a big pink heart - obviously constructed by the zealots specially to be burnt!

I must admit that it rather an endearing thought to imagine some embittered imam buying pink cardboard and cutting out a heart. It was rather depressing watching fluffy toys singeing in the flames as well, watched by heavily veiled girls whose sparkling eyes watched the carnage!

I do, of course agree with the rejection of the more garish aspects of commercialization, but I also object to demonstrations by religious fanatics devaluing my position by throwing blind faith and mindless prejudice at my carefully thought out political position!

Tomorrow one of the interminable meetings after school that our institution likes so much.

And I don’t.

First blood?

The Vampire book failed to keep me interested on a tired Friday evening, so I had to finish it this morning. How is it, one asks in parenthesis, that other people can dispose of books half way through.

Many a time I have finished a book thinking that it was absolute rubbish; a judgment I had formed a great number of pages earlier – but the idea of not finishing it had not entered my mind!

“Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer (The International Number One Best Seller) was just such a book: absolute rubbish but I kept on doggedly reading it.

It started well with a very brief Preface and with some effective scene setting. Indeed the novel worked fairly well right up until the entry of the Vampires. Meyer is obviously trying for a new take on a very old theme and attempting to update the old mythic quality in a literary response to these monsters from the pens of Polidori and Stoker and make them appear more ‘reasonable’ in their modern life.

The novel is set mostly in the north west of the USA in a damp and cloudy part of the country where the vampires (who have adjusted to a diet of animal rather than human blood) are able to live and walk around in generally sunless skies in the company of their normal ‘food.’

Meyer tries too hard to re-work the legends and she seems curiously reluctant to come to terms with the major selling point in the novel, that vampires exist and are an unobtrusive part of society!

The main character is a seventeen year old girl, Bella and her (eventual) vampire boyfriend is too often described as god-like and looking like a model and a Greek statue for him to be taken too seriously. The actual action of the novel is fairly slow until danger in a real form (from other more bloodthirsty vampires) eventually transforms an adolescent coming of age novel into something nearer to an adventure story.

I have the sequel and the sequel to the sequel in my locker in school but I do not think that I shall be rushing to read them. I understand there is also a film. I not going to rush to see that either!

I have also been reading The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, one of the free e-books which I downloaded more for the promise of the title than anything else – and a vague memory of having seen faded volumes of that title in virtually every second-hand shop with a large unsold stock. It turns out mainly to be screed against the German militaristic ambitions of the years leading up to the First World War with much moralistic discussion and a lack of compelling story line.

Such a disappointment for a book that has held a fascination for so long. Perhaps the fact that the film gave a little known actor called Rudolph Valentino to be a Latin lover and dance the tango that ensured its popularity because I don’t think that the author, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, is necessarily a name to conjure with! Though, to be fair, I do think that I have heard of ‘Blood and Sand’ though I don’t know what it is about. Yet.

We appear to have new neighbours; not, unfortunately, the Scumbags (as they are affectionately known by one and all) but on the other side where the solitary Frenchman now has departed and what appears to be a young couple are moving in. Certainly work is being done in the house and garden. Toni has seen a god but I am praying that it belonged to a visitor and not the owners. We have a superfluity of canines in this area all of whom feel the need to defecate on the pavements. And their cretinous owners don’t clear up after them.

I have now taken the final photograph for my entry for the school’s maths photography competition. My final photo was of some cones which I am sure are organized on some mathematical system. When I was young I had the Big Hamlyn Book of Mathematics and so knew all about the Fibonacci Sequence from an indecently young age, and I have spoken about the numbers of plants and seed pods and twigs on trees and leaves with absolute authority by shaking my head sagely and mouthing something about that famous series - though I could rarely see how it applied!

Last year only one teacher entered the teachers' section of the competition, I am determined to make it more of a struggle for the only competitor this year and have encouraged another member of the English department to enter as well. The latter has recently won a competition for his photos and so the end result should be interesting.

Even if I don’t win!

Bloody Carnival!

Carnival always takes place on the same day at the same time each year, but in my school it always seems to bring with its advent total surprise.

This theme for virtually everything linked to the outside world in our place is in some way associated with Biodiversity. In an astonishing display of lack of comprehension about what teachers would do a sheaf of photocopied pictures of various examples of wildlife were placed on the staffroom table with self adhesive stickers and the indication that it might be a good idea for members of staff to cut out the animals they liked and stick them to their clothing!

One member of staff brought in a Rasta wig to which she attached, at the end of each lock, one of the photocopied pictures! She looked, as it were, striking.

My concession to the gaiety of the day was to wear a tie which featured penguins in Bermuda shorts. More than appropriate, I considered.

My lower sixth also entered into the spirit of the day and turned up for school (boys and girls) sporting ties. When asked what they were dressed up as they replied, “Stephen!” It is always difficult to work out whether something that our kids do is either an elegant tribute or a self assertive piece of condescension, but for the sake of my own arrogance I will assume the former!

The secondary children generally did little, while the primary kids adopted a whole range of costumes so that when I went to an early lunch the bizarre scene of an army of midget mannequins was like, as a colleague pointed out, walking into a late sixties film by Fellini after taking a generous number of mind altering drugs!

The things that ‘had’ to be done for school were most emphatically not done as I not only lost a free period but also had to take candidates in my lunchtime for a practice for their upcoming oral examination in an exam next month.

Today was one of those totally unsatisfactory days in school when nothing really went well. A planned essay writing period which had been prepared for by an introductory lesson yesterday was completely disrupted by the whole class having to go for a medical check up. The school has a computer system to facilitate internal communication but . . .

The Carnival gymkhana was distractedly chaotic with teachers standing outside staffing various stations. I, unashamedly followed the sun and unconcernedly left the management of the station to two delinquent boys (one recently returned from an expulsion for putative drinking) who had been gifted to me to ‘help.’ This help was not disinterested as they were trying to boost their Citizenship mark by being responsible. Which they achieved. Up to a point.

Now home and relaxing into a book – not necessarily a good book as it is one which appeared mysteriously in my pigeon hole and presumably was something which I thought would be a good idea to read at the recommendation of the bookseller who sometimes visits the school. I assume.

What the hell, it’s a book and I’m half way through. And it’s about vampires. Read on.

The trials of life

The next shirt on the rail to be used for school was one with fold back cuffs. By the time that I had one appendage through the arm hole and realized that I couldn’t see my hand, it was too late to consider changing the offending article. At least I knew where my cufflinks were and so I am now supporting two miniature car gear levers at the cuff catching the light as I type from the sunlight flooding into the staffroom. It’s cold but bright, bright, bright.

My shirt is snowy white and therefore it showed up to advantage the tiny (but noticeable) grounds of coffee which flew from a teaspoon I was washing. Hurriedly dabbing at them with a paper towel soaked in water I discovered what an excellent type of blotting material my shirt was made from. Within a few seconds the cotton of the shirt had developed that skin-sticking translucency that makes wet T shirt competitions so popular. Praying that my animal heat would dry out my clothes before I started teaching I donned my coat and fled to the car.

While waiting for a gap in the continuous line of traffic to offer itself to my increasingly impatient car (I tend to divorce myself from the horrors of Spanish driving and pretend that I am actually commentating on a documentary of myself going to school) I pondered on the Tiny Things Which Make Life Difficult.

The coffee grounds weren’t even from my coffee. Such is the price for disinterested consideration.

I ran over in my mind the most pressing of the unimportant things which irritate.

There is the water in the soap dish which effectively dissolves your soap giving a bath life of about a week rather than the longevity which is associated with air dried blocks. And yes, it is too much to expect to tip the water away after each shower.

The slight sticking of the base of the electric kettle which half rises when the kettle is removed and clatters back into place with a sound which destroys the funereal hush of the morning cup of tea.

The impossibility of successfully pouring milk from a one and a half litre carton into a cup of tea without having one gout of milk slop (thanks to perverse air pressure) anywhere but into the bloody cup.

The fact that my little computer is small and portable but the power lead and transformer which go with it could be for a full sized computer.

All those things which irritate and which make life more difficult.

Let alone tomorrow which seems to be getting more complicated by the day. Today we were told that we have to make computer comments on all our students for a meeting on Monday. A meeting which will stretch well into the evening. And about which I do not want to talk. Also tomorrow is our contribution to Carnival which has us staffing ‘stations’ at which happy little students attempt to answer subject related questions.

And I have a doctor’s appointment at the end of school.

A full day to look forward to.

Occupation by Books

The stage is rapidly being reached where all of my books will be out of boxes and available to view. You will notice that I have not been rash enough to assert that they will be in order or even on shelves – but a real stage in the liberation of my books has been reached.

Let the winnowing commence!

Even I can see that I am preserving books and monographs that are dead space: I’m never going to look at them again. Pass Notes can surely be consigned to the bin in which they richly (except of course for my effort with Dylan Thomas) deserve to languish before their destruction.

Yesterday I built (please god!) the last Billy bookcases for some time and all are now filled to overflowing. At least I can see what is there and start making decisions. Probably.

The school was hellish today with all the pupils having returned from the various visits that they had been on during the last week. The fact that some of the teachers brought in chocolates purchased during a school visit to Belgium were little compensation for the ignorant hordes storming through the erstwhile silent corridors.

And the weather has been bloody awful as well. Driving rain and a thoroughly northern feel to the weather – though the temperatures remain higher.

But enough of this! Setting out the books has meant the displacement of a whole load of stuff which will have to find a new home.

The struggle continues!

This morning I was lulled into a false sense of security as I negotiated the lead up to the motorway which takes me to school. The traffic was heavy and the variable speed signals indicated something was up but apart from reducing speed the traffic was moving. Something the traffic on the Ronda de dalt (the northern ring road of the city) certainly wasn’t.

I had to phone-a-friend in the middle of a traffic jam who phoned the school to let them know that I was on my way, but, rather like Zeno’s arrow was unlikely to make it to the destination and therefore as Tom Stoppard put it in ‘Jumpers,’ Saint Sebastian died of fright!

As far as I could tell the traffic chaos was fermented by a combination of poor weather (it’s been raining for what seems like months) and a stopped car just (as fate would have it) before my turn off to get to the school.

The car looked suspiciously undamaged and the police man parked by it suspiciously officious so that to some of us, whose senses had been heighted by the frustration of watching a slowly moving line of traffic occasionally stutter to a halt, it looked as though there had been some of macho car chase.

With teeth firmly ground together I finally made it to the approaches of the school. The traffic chaos here was augmented by the fact that too many cars, buses and the odd pedestrian were all behaving atrociously on a one in one slope.

By the time I got within a couple of hundred yards of the school I was imbued with the collective spirits of Genghis Khan, Dame Shirley Porter, Attila the Hun and That Woman – a pretty noxious mix – and I was waiting for some ‘caring’ parent to get in front of me and execute one of their typically unselfish manoeuvres the successful completion of which requires every other road user to be a mind reader. That would have been the signal for me to unleash the frustrated fury of a deliriously delayed driver.

Luckily for all concerned the antics of our parents were just within the bounds of normal inconsideration and I was able to park in the single remaining space and stump my way to my class.

The head of English (we look after our own) was taking my class and even offered to complete the lesson but I was far too frightened to allow that to happen. That was all I needed, hopelessly late and someone teaching my kids grammar who actually knew what they were taking about! I was terrified that they might go on expecting comprehension from their teacher even when she had left!

The afternoon staff room was abuzz with the news that Action Had BeenTaken against the naughty pupils who had attempted to drink gallons of alcohol while on a school trip. Sixteen pupils have been expelled for two days. Presumably the servants will be directed to look after the wastrels while they languish at home!

There are many aspects of this condign punishment (some of my colleagues think that it is unreasonably hard!) and the way in which it has been administered that confuse me. As this infraction took place last week, why wasn’t the punishment administered at once on their return? Why weren’t the kids told that they were going to be given detentions for the rest of the year or something at the time that they were on the trip? But mostly why do my benighted colleagues think that this tap on the wrist is harsh!

I am happy to admit that, basically, I couldn’t care less. The school can do or not do what it likes as long as it doesn’t interfere with my life in the place. Staff have been wandering around looking as though they had just heard Mr Chamberlin say that he had not heard from Herr Hitler and that consequently etc etc. Roll on the time when I can wave this amazingly self obsessed place goodbye!

We are building up to Carnival. I am not dressing up. That humiliation is reserved for Class Teachers. I am prepared to play a more decorous part and merely present teams of pupils with the questions I prepared for the English department section of the ‘treasure trail’ set up for the pupils to follow as part of the giddy celebrations. For reasons best known to itself our institution has labelled this ‘trail’ a Gymkhana.

My Greek is a little rusty (or non-existent as some would have it) but doesn’t the word gymnos or something like it mean naked?

I shudder at the mere glimmer of the distant thought!

The Curse is Come Again!

The imminent arrival of visitors is a great incentive to tidiness. Even tidiness that they are unlikely to see.

The third floor is like some unreal set for ‘unpacking chaos’ artfully created by an art teacher for a class still life examination. Dismantled Christmas trees jostle for space with the final unopened boxes of Pickford’s packed books; Christmas decorations spill from plastic cases to land incongruously on chairs which are orphans from the living room; miscellaneous electronic equipment sits on sheaves of papers which encompass almost the whole of my professional life. Chaos personified.

The solution (leaving aside Toni’s repeated encouragement to feed all extraneous material to the flames) is of course more bookcases. To fit into spaces which do not really exist.

And it is that word ‘really’ that gives one hope. ‘Really’ does not mean that there is absolutely not a single space into which a bookcase could fit.

So I went (alone) to IKEA and bought more. Bought more after measuring carefully (admittedly using a tie rather than a tape measure) to ensure that they would fit in their magicked ‘spaces.’

It was at that point that magic deserted me. I constructed the first of the Tardis cases and gently placed it into position. Where it didn’t fit. So I pressed gently to ensure its easy slide along the tiled floor into position. And gouged out a chunk of the ceiling. I then attacked the top of the book case with a knife, a fret saw and a file. It only, I assured myself, needed the slightest of adjustments and it would fit perfectly. The loss of another chunk of the ceiling assured me that it was not the case. I attacked anew and the case eventually fitted. Though it’s going to take another lump of mortar to release it from its snug fit!

Hurriedly fitting the shelves and even more hurriedly filling them with books allowed me to jettison four Pickford’s boxes from the terrace and clear space in the maelstrom of sheer things cluttering up the floor.

The next bookcase was a half size version and much easier to assemble apart from the flimsy back of the unit which was supposed to fit into the pre-formed grooves to accommodate it. It didn’t and it took someone with the professional patience of Toni’s sister to show me that with gentle persuasion and a belief that it would fit, that everything was possible.

Two shelves up. Books laid out. Still boxes to go. So the final bookcase on the third floor was constructed. This is a full height but a half width thing. It was supposed to fit beside its ‘snugly’ wedged full sized partner, but I felt that pushing another unit into that space would result in structural damage.

It now stands in front of one of the French doors onto the terrace – and all books from the boxes at this level are now out; or out and about to be more accurate. There are clearly books which h I am unlikely to use now; books which are only useful if you are teaching a literature based examination course at GCSE and AS or A2 level. And the chances of that are, to put it mildly, remote.

So the books have to be, or could be, or must be disposed of.

I can foresee an almost endless trundling of a collection of books whose use (even in Britain) is limited, all around institutions in Barcelona.

Perhaps I should simply bite the bullet or break the conditioning of a lifetime and (tell it not in Garth!) simply throw the books I don’t want away.

Almost any other solution is going to mean that I end up with all the books that I have earmarked for destruction or selling or whatever other euphemism I can think of, staying in heaps somewhere in the house.

But to throw away a book!

I seek steely determination. A dark night. A heavy gauge black sack. A near dump.

When the silence stopped!

An odd week of echoing classrooms and silent corridors is over and next Monday is going to be a moment of considerable horror when unaccustomed faces of pupils pop up all over the place in erstwhile areas of tranquillity and peace.

Back to normal and preparation for the next exam! Already some of my colleagues are starting to write the questions which the hapless pupils are going to have to answer in a couple of weeks – or less! The sound of the relentless rumble of approaching grammar exercises will wipe off the semblance of calm that has settled on the faces of my colleagues as we cheerfully ignored the school bell (actually a particularly repellent siren) as it called us fruitlessly from the staff room to tend to empty classes.

In spite of the fact that I have been able to get my marking done and even complete some satisfying (!) English work and in spite of the fact that I only had contact in the latter part of the week with less than a dozen unfortunates who didn’t go on holiday and choose to stay in school – I was still exhausted by the time I came to leave on Friday afternoon.

However tired I was, it took only a quick wash, a change of clothes and a squirt of aftershave to revive me enough to meet a friend who I had not seen for some time.

It might have worked out that we, who live in Castelldefels, could have met in Cardiff, as both of us were visiting Wales over the New Year. But alas it was not to be and we were forced to accept the mundane and meet outside one of the most expensive supermarkets I have ever known in the area of Castelldefels in which I used to live.

Our chat had a tinge of hysteria to it as we had so much to say to each other and we have made yet another pledge that we will not leave it as long before our next meeting. This is one pledge we intend to keep!

The short, but intense, meeting over, I got food for the evening and film. The food was the more digestible.

Knowing Toni’s penchant for the gruesome I chose a ‘horror’ film from the woefully inadequate video shop in the centre of Castelldefels playa. Chosen on the title alone I came home with ‘Antichrist.’

Within a minute I had stopped watching it and taken up my book. In a couple of minutes more Toni had also stopped viewing and was openly saying that he thought it was even worse than the last ‘Mosaic’ film we had seen.

That last sentence perhaps needs a little clarification. The video shop in Rumney in Cardiff had a fairly large selection of films including latest releases. We sometimes were a little adventurous and ranged outside the normal landscape of recognizable stars and directors and went home with something which often turned out to be remarkable viewable.

Sometimes, but not always. We began to note that the real rubbish was often produced under the ‘Mosaic’ trademark. We spurned such fare and our contempt was shared by the manager of the store who actually refunded us our money after I returned one film with a scathing denunciation of all of its production values. He wholeheartedly agreed and said that there was some sort of agreement that they had to hold a certain number of these duff films, but I thought that repayment was a more than adequate apology. After all, how many times have you heard of a refund given because the film was rubbish?

‘Antichrist’ was not a ‘Mosaic’ film but in some ways it was worse than that because its production values were higher. It had money and no excuse!

I took to my bed in high dudgeon as I felt that I had been cheated and especially as I realized that I had read scathing reviews of this film and I should have put title and vague feelings of disquiet together more appositely.

Ceri and Dianne are almost about to visit and the third floor is an absolute tip with Pickford’s boxes lying around in disorder and the ‘library’ looking as though it has been shelved by a maniac. Something must be done.

And done it undoubtedly has been. Almost. I have been back to IKEA. Book cases have been bought and I sort of know where they are going to be put.

The window in the ‘library’ is never used so one is going to be placed in front of it and I will have to slim a bit if I am going to be able to circumnavigate the full extent of my book room. What is already a snug room is going to be that much more restricted.

The third floor if going to have a re-think and the useless desk which came with the house is going to be thrown. Or at least parts of it are going to be relocated.

This could mean that there will be space for one large full sized Billy (for it is he!) bookcase; one full height skinny Billy bookcase and one full width, half height Billy bookcase. And this will not be enough.

When these bookcases have been built and filled, I have to admit that we will have reached saturation point. Any further bookcases and Billy will start having to pay part of the rent!

It will then, however, be more than clear that the hard decisions which I have been putting off for over two years will have to be faced: book will either have to be placed back into some sort of storage or they will have to be disposed of in other ways. And my heart goes cold just typing those joyless words.

However, for the moment I can relax in the Phoney War self-delusion of not having to do anything because nothing has happened. When the last nail has been driven (yes, there are nails even in an IKEA Billy bookcase) and the last shelf slotted into position. Then we will see what we see.

And there will always be an examination to set, mark or fear to keep my mind away from Fahrenheit 451!

Right again!

The A-list audience resplendent in staggeringly cut gowns and elegantly modish dinner jackets are hushed. The world famous film star has picked up the golden envelope and is about to speak. There is an expectant hush. The moment for which all have been waiting has arrived. After a contest in which so many have seemed to be within reach of the ultimate prize, we are at last to know which one has reached further and dared more than any other.

A slight clearing of the throat and that warm, plumy voice, known throughout the planet (if only from his commercials where they never dub but always use subtitles so that his spoken, incomprehensible words can caress the tympanic membrane of hundreds of millions who have no knowledge of his language) starts the magic litany the result of which millions have been anticipating.

“Tonight, in a night of prizes, the main and most closely contested of the awards for “The Absolutely and Unutterably and without a Scintilla of Doubt Award for the Worst Bank in the World” goes to . . .” That little dramatic pause; the heightened tension; the indrawn breath, “BBVA for the Umpteenth Year in Succession!”

To a chorus of snarls and twisted looks of derision and contempt the Managing Director of BBVA minces his way coyly into the spot light to accept his award – a beautifully hand crafted cut glass globe entirely filled with customers’ tears.

Wiping a dry eye with a €500 note and letting it flutter gently to the ground, he looks around at the sea of joyously hostile faces and starts his speech.

“I knew that we were in with a chance when our contribution to the complete destabilization of the global monetary market was appreciated; but I feel it is our complete lack of customer care linked to our cavalier disregard for petty distinctions between clients’ money and our own that I think swung it for us. I also like to think that our unsocial opening hours; our inability to communicate adequately within the organization; our arbitrary imposition of charges and our thoroughly unpleasant call centre staff all played their part.

I would also like to thank our customers – but why break the habits of a lifetime! No, seriously, we really appreciate this award and I can tell you that we are going to work damned hard to retain it.”

And if you think that was heavy-handed then all I can say is that I needed some sort of release after my morning visit to BBVA in Castelldefels.

What would you call the taking of money for something you are not providing (leaving aside religion and Ronaldino) I think we know what word is most appropriate!

It turns out that the peremptory demands for money from the shrill voiced Harpies from Madrid is because they had misappropriated my money in the first place. The have been charging for the servicing of an ‘aval’ which I have not had since June, but money draining away from my account in an almost unnoticed way because the charges are only levied quarterly! Deceitful, devilish, dubious, disgusting, distasteful, detestable, displeasing, despicable, dreadful and damnably wrong! (Please rearrange those words in ascending order of anger!)

Wrong indeed! Though no word of apology. I am told that Spanish banks do not apologise. Do any of them!

With Toni at my side lulling the bank people into confederacy by speaking Catalan, I managed to keep my temper and we eventually left the bank after filling out a ‘reclamation’ form to try and get my money back.

So far there has been no hint of legal action on my part, though the wisdom of my colleagues is that it will be shocking if any money by way of recompense actually makes it into my still open account.

One of the advantages of being a member of a union is the legal assistance which is extended towards its paid up associates: of which I am one. I would prefer to go straight to the police shouting “Stop thief!” and point them in the direction of the Castelldefels branch of BBVA, but I fear that such histrionic gestures will not achieve much. But the lawyer in the union can exert influence even on a not-fit-for-purpose, ramshackle collection of incompetents that comprise BBVA.

For the present I am prepared to wait and see what the bank will do. I now have a new bank book so that I can keep tabs on the Jesuitical Gerrymandering that I am sure will be the bank’s preferred form of defence.

Seconds away! Round 2!

Here we go again!

How well schools work when they are depleted of students!

I once had this remark made to me in a slightly different form when I was in University and taking to a member of the Registry staff during one of the vacations. And he said it in complete seriousness.

But these last couple of days do illustrate vividly what he means. We have been reduced to seven students from the lower secondary forms and one single solitary student from the upper secondary school!

And the amount that we have been able to do! My marking is complete. I typed out some work for the English department’s contribution to an aspect of Carnival. We have had an English Department Meeting (all capital letters for that) and I have got together some more information about Salinger for my sixth form class. I have chatted to my colleagues: those few that are left in school. I have had a delightful lunch (with wine) and many cups of tea!

It is the sort of educational life to which I could get used very quickly indeed. But reality is only two working days away and we will immediately get swept up in the preparations for the next examination.

My relaxed day however came to an abrupt end when I went to pay in some money to my dying account with BBVA (The Worst Bank in the World.) Foolishly (as it turns out) I did not finally close the account when I moved to another bank. I have a ‘device’ which shoots out electronic signals so that I can sail through the pay stations on the motorway, while other, lesser mortals have to dig into their purses or scrabble about in their wallets for money or cards.

My ‘device’ had to be bought and then serviced by a bank. I decided to leave enough money in the account to pay for the occasional debits that would come from normal motoring. This has not worked out perfectly. Partly because I think there are still some organizations who still think I bank with BBVA but mainly because it looks as though BBVA has been taking money by false pretences.

Incomprehensible phone calls in both Spanish and impenetrable English from BBVA seemed to indicate the need for me to pay money into the account. This I did, only to find that BBVA had increased the amount I owed them threefold. And the amount I paid in was not visible credited! It further looks as though they are still charging me for the notorious Aval Bancario. This is an amount of money held in trust by the bank to show a potential landlord that you can pay the extortionate rent charged for properties near the sea.

You pay the money to the bank and then the bank proceeds to charge you something like €300 to set up this iniquitous method of legal theft and then €117 a quarter to service this money and to compensate the bank for the risk (?) involved in holding your money.

In Spain the web is full of people like me who ask plaintively why this evil form of bank rip-off is allowed. Answer, of course, came there none. Hardly surprising from a bunch of ill principled gangsters who between them brought the entire economy of the world to its collective knees.

However, far be it from me to pre-judge the amoral institution which I will be visiting tomorrow replete with documentation and with a trusty fluent Catalan and Spanish speaker at my side.

I am even taking time off school (which I think should be chargeable) to go to my branch. You must understand that in keeping with the abyssal (‘abysmal’ is simply too weak a word, I am thinking Marianas Trench here) level or depth of service offered by this so-called bank that it restricts its opening hours to mornings. On Thursday evenings every other branch of every other bank in Castelldefels stays open until fairly late in the evening. Not, of course, BBVA: it closes as 2.00 pm.

It will be very interesting to see what they say when they are presented with the evidence tomorrow.

Perhaps I will have to eat Humble Pie.

But I doubt it.

Battle lines have now been drawn!

Lord Have Mercy! †

To some the novels of historical romance written by William Harrison Ainsworth are of passing interest only; at most a literary curiosity – but for his devotees (if you can call people who have only read one of his books) are passionate in their defence of arguably his most famous work, “Old Saint Paul’s.”

This is an extraordinary book and if for nothing else (and there is much more besides) it should be remembered for the classic creations of the revolting figures of Chowles and Judith: two lowlife characters who live like vultures preying on the weak and vulnerable in the 1660s in the teeming metropolis of London.

It was this book which first gave me a dramatic introduction to the effects of the Black Death in Britain and I had read and enjoyed the vivid description of The Great Fire of London in the pages of “Old Saint Paul’s” long before I discovered the diaries of Pepys or the remarkable “Diary of the Plague Year” by Defoe and long before Philip Ziegler’s masterly description of the ‘real’ history of the disease in “The Black Death.”

If I thought that anyone would understand I would chalk a great cross on the door of our school and the inscription, “Lord have mercy!” as tomorrow our school should look as though it had been hit by the jumpy passengers of Rattus Rattus!

All years have been herded together and packed off on trips to the snow to culture to heritage. In theory I should have no lessons tomorrow and thus have an ideal opportunity to get my final tranche of marking completed. Marking, I might add, which I signally failed to get done yesterday and which I managed to avoid today by doing other things which seemed more interesting.

I have now produced a little booklet comprising a variety of obituary notices (in Spanish) of J D Salinger whose famous novel I have just started with the equivalent of my first year sixth. I still find it difficult to reconcile my understanding of the personality of the writer taking into account the half century of isolation and literary silence which characterized the last 50 years of his life.

Salinger always seemed to me from “Catcher” and the short stories to be the sort of person who would enjoy talking about his writing and letting you share the process of literary gestation. But no: not only silent, but almost vindictively possessive of his work, refusing all offers from various artists to film the novel. Even the BBC came under fire from his solicitors when it dramatized part of “Catcher” for a programme that they produced.

I well remember that period in college when I read everything that Salinger had written (that I could get my hands on) in one long orgy of reading one book after another. I can also remember having a conversation about his work with another student and browbeating my companion with the range, detail and vitality of my references to Salinger’s writing. I came close to being his number one fan! But it didn’t last.

It never did in the sort of degree that I experienced. A chronological approach to English Literature means that you are constantly being crushed by the Juggernaut of Literature with a capital L that you just have to read – and there is never enough time to keep up – usually being crushed beneath the weight of the hefty tomes of the nineteenth century!

Tomorrow I am determined to print out a mass of information on Salinger (in English) and produce another booklet that might encourage our more than indolent readers to try something for themselves. And enjoy it!

And there is the ever present shadow of unmarked examination scripts.

One colleague said, “Don’t worry, Stephen, you have all week to complete them.”

Words which always come back to haunt!

To say that I was sluggish in my preparations to wing the desolate abyss twixt my home and the school would be something of an understatement. There is something essentially indecent in getting up before dawn to be underpaid by an institution which actually thinks it is teacher friendly!

When will they work out that it is not how many whiteboards there are in classrooms; or different types of tea there are in the ‘staff room’ or whether one has calçots for school lunch – it is and always will be about the money.

If you pay good wages then you will have a happy staff. For over thirty years I have listened to mealy-mouthed appeals to teachers’ professionalism as a reason not to pay them what they are worth. I have heard assurances given that teachers’ gestures of good faith and dedication to their students will be matched by management’s consideration. And time after time I have seen teachers treated with contempt.

Our school is outside the normal union structure – whatever that means in Spain. My union has an educational section but it does not operate like the NUT or the NAS/UWT. In Britain my union membership is classed as being a membership fee to a recognized professional body. Here I have been advised not to tell anyone that I am a member of a union. In The School That Sacked Me the full fatuity of the present union organization is borne in on one. Unions here are organized on an institution basis and the election for union members is decided by a vote by the whole of the workforce no matter what job they do. You cannot stand for union representation until you have been in an institution for six months. You have to set out a ‘raft’ of person for whom to vote and management can set out an alternative one.

I have no idea who is a member of a union in our school and I have been told that if I put my head above the parapet then my career is going to be short and sweet. My colleagues say, “They’ll sack you!” with a smile and with an attitude of weary resignation! And I am horrified! Though at least I am a member of a union and I know and have talked to officers in the union and god help anyone who steps out of line in treating me in a casual manner.

People moan and groan and whimper and snivel – but they do bugger all about it. They accept a ludicrously long working day; incomprehensible meetings on a Saturday morning; a complete lack of consideration with absence known in advance; inadequate staff room facilities; inadequate toilet facilities and so on. And nothing is done.

Our school is a ‘private foundation’ yet is also subsidized with state money. Our school fees are very high and the school is popular. What do they do with the money? Who does the accounting? Where, indeed, are the accounts? Who gets to see them? Who gets to question them?

My discontent is growing in inverse proportion to the lack of active (that’s the key word) concern I see around me. Something is going to give soon.

I had two possible gains from the first forms going on a skiing trip today and I lost both periods. One of them because I was the unfortunate sod who picked up the phone in the staff room at the wrong time. The last period of the day (one of my losses) added insult to injury because the film (which was being shown to the rump of children who had not gone skiing) was actually mine!

Tomorrow our ‘Snow Week’ continues and I am sure that the suppressed hysteria that characterized today will continue as well. In spite of everyone knowing that this change to our working conditions was going to happen it seems as if they have only just realized that it upon us!

We have been left to our own devices to ‘amuse’ the pupils for the eight (yes count them) hours that the hapless pupils who have not gone on the trip spend in our school!

And guess who has drawn the lucky ticket to take the pupils for the last hour on Friday?

It’s a good thing that I don’t believe in conspiracy theories and that I don’t harbour bitterness!

And this self-pitying winge is the thousandth blog entry!

It may not be profoundly uplifting or inspirationally incisive - but it is characteristic!

Weekends are too short

Sometimes the brain gives you a little present and yesterday I was the grateful recipient of its gift.

Saturday felt like a Sunday. I therefore had, last night, the delightful realization that there was an extra day to the weekend. Not only that but also as Sunday was a ‘gained’ day it lost the stigma as being the day before Monday - which for teachers usually takes away the relaxation that a non-teaching day can bring.

All of life is checks and balances and the gain of the day seemed to be augmented by the addition of bright sunshine! Didn’t last of course and now the day is overcast and even if I didn’t know that it was a Sunday I would have been able to guess by the shoddy, slightly resentful weather which is characteristic of the lead up to a working day!

Rather than do the marking which I had set myself for this weekend I have resorted to my usual default indolence position and re-read one of E F Benson’s Lucia novels, ‘Trouble for Lucia’ which has the eponymous heroine on the ropes as all her snobbish structures seem to fall and her friends crowd round like a group of avaricious vultures ready to tear into her flesh.

Lucia’s faults are deep and wide but one can’t help feeling a sort of grudging sympathy for her predicaments - which are usually of her own making. And the novels are very funny and make me laugh out loud. I wonder if Jane Austen would have liked them. I think so.

Our weather is becoming more and more fractious. A good start degenerated from sunshine into sporadic rain and the temperature dropped again.

Tomorrow poor weather will have to complete with the fury I feel when my supposed free periods disappear in taking care of the rump of kids who are not going on the ski trip. I think that I am going to start keeping a record of just how many periods I loose. My conspiracy theory approach to school is invariably more accurate than an easy assumption of fairness!

The week following is Fiesta (with a capital F) when all schools make some sort of nod towards the anarchic chaos which should be a function of such a festival. Our contribution to these jollifications is a sort of race with stations which ask the pupils to complete some sort of academic task and move on. I can hardly wait.

And I am not dressing up!

And that is final!

The seasons change eventually

With the flimsy protection of a sheet of glass the early afternoon sun is streaming warmly into the room. The dappled sunlight is just on the point of making the surface of the pool sparkle and the wisps of cloud merely emphasise the blue infinity of the sky.

At times like this it is not impossible to believe that summer will exist. This simple leap of faith has been difficult to make during the vindictive weather that we have had recently. Three days of rain is little short of a national disaster in these parts and temperatures dropping down to single figures reduce grown men to tears.

Spanish television usually laughs as the LEGAL restrictions on advertising on television. To my knowledge there is a maximum limit of twelve minutes advertising time for each hour, but on some channels this is laughable. The government makes noises about coming into line with the LEGAL requirement and then quietly seems to do nothing about it. Now, one Catalan channel has voluntarily decided to do something about it.

The result of this was that we were able to watch ‘Casino Royale’ on TV last night without feeling that we had sat through an artistic even with the length of the entire Ring Cycle. During one commercial break (with the emphasis on commercial) I showered, got changed and made dinner with there still being enough time to have a leisurely glass of wine before the break (or ‘break’) was over!

On this channel there was at least the opportunity to enjoy the film with the breaks being of a duration which did not encourage you to lose track of what was happening in the programme you were supposed to be watching.

For what is supposed to be mindless entertainment with chases and gratuitous violence thrown in, ‘Casino Royale’ is an up-market piece of work. I think that it is too long and it’s a tad self-congratulatory in its complacent use of existing knowledge: when Bond is asked whether he wants his Martini shaken or stirred he replies something to the effect that it makes no difference! How times change!

I think that ‘Casino Royale’ is an elegant film with dark overtones which fill in the back story and gave a sardonic view of the development of James Bond.

Out to lunch in a restaurant in Gavá, La Finca, which is a little off the beaten track and has a decorative style in the main dining room which can only be described as Bad Taste Catholic Grunge. Plaster saints vied with pictures of old Gavá with a few concessions to design which were frankly poorly chosen. The food however was excellent with the signal exception of the sweet which was a dry sacher dessert inadequately defrosted. I should always listen to my own advice and stick with the coffee as a sufficient termination to a meal!

Toni and I had one of our occasional arguments about the definition of ‘fussy eater’ which, as usual, ended with recriminations, misunderstandings and our usual dash of acrimony! Luckily it didn’t take away the taste of the food!

I am almost in the mood to tackle unpacking some of the books which litter up the third floor – though there isn’t actually anywhere to put them: all shelf space is accounted for.

Breaking News! The Scumbags who live next door for some months of the year have reappeared and parked their cars across our drive. To our total horror it looks as though they are moving things into their house preparatory to their actually taking up residence there. They have, over the last summer, acquired the official designation of ‘Bane’ as their behaviour is consistently appalling.

Our one hope is that their ‘popular’ daughter is now2 too old to contemplate spending the summer with her parents (with whom she had explosive and vitriolic rows last summer) and therefore will not attract the pimply, salivating adolescents who pant around (and lots more prepositions) her, creating unacceptable levels of sound during anti-social hours of the night.

With any luck they are merely here because someone pushed the gates open and, though we have closed them each time we see them gaping, perhaps someone has informed them that their house is open to intrusion and they have merely come to check and then (most importantly) go!

The afternoon advances and no books have been unpacked; no arranging of shelves; no selection of important tomes to be displayed prominently and dispensable tomes to be . . . No, it’s no good, I can’t even bring myself to write about what might be done to those books which I haven’t even glanced at for a couple of years. You never know when they might become essential. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing.

So I will now try and get the eight gallons into the small wine glass which is the only image that fits my trying to get my books into some sort of display for the house.

No harm in trying.

How to ruin a perfectly good Friday

The Iberian peoples are a tactile lot. And that extends to the pupils I teach too. Accepting for a moment that they actually qualify as people.

I have tried in a professional and fairly vindictive way to keep my distance from the life forms that I teach, but this is much more difficult in Spain.

I first noticed this tendency to march straight through the “forty inches from my nose where the frontier of my person goes” by the primary pupils who were positively clingy and draped themselves around me in a manner which would have done irreparable damage to my Scrooge-like demeanor which had been painstakingly built up over the years of my time in British schools.

One would think that one would have been safe in the secondary sector of education, but this is simply not the case.

Today, for reasons which are not immediately apparent, one of my strapping first year sixth pupils picked me up and walked a few (I would like to say faltering, but he was too strong for that) steps to demonstrate that he could. Having done it, to popular acclaim he repeated the feat. Now I have to admit that, much like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, “hardily, I was nat undergrowe” so to lift me with consummate ease demonstrated that he was a strong lad – though why he did is still not entirely clear. He, unusually in Spain, plays rugby and he managed to extract a shamefaced admission from me that I endured many a cold day in the arid ranks of the second row. Perhaps he feels that it is a cultural link between us, though I have to admit it is an unsettling one.

I tried to cast my mind back to those distant days when one could still take an unalloyed pleasure in the extent of the map of the world which was still painted pink, when we New Boys in The Cardiff High School for Boys were lined up in order of height to be put into houses. I was one of the tallest boys in the school at the age of eleven and even at that age would not have been picked up lightly!

I think I have to go back to when I was in single figures to recall the last elevation!

A couple of the boys in that class have now decided that we have to adopt a ceremonial way of greeting with a sequence starting with open palm followed by knuckle meet leading to fluttering fingers and finally chest bump I have only done this twice and I have felt a total fraud on both occasions. In my wildest nightmares I cannot imagine this having happened anywhere in my experience in Britain. Though that may well be a function of my over-developed sense of innate authority rather than anything else!

The unbelievable story of the missing examination continues.

I left school yesterday evening secure in the knowledge that my revised examination paper was in the head of English’s pigeon hole together with my letter explaining that the paper had been found and we could stay with the paper that had already been printed.

Not so.

When I arrived this morning the head of department informed me that while my paper might have been safe, the kids had acquired an examination paper from last year and were eagerly distributing it around the playground to interested parties.

In a use of logic whose well, logic, did not strike me immediately as sound, an executive decision was taken to remodel my already revised paper. With my fingers poised over the keys we commenced to slice away sections of the paper that we told the kids would be there and add things which we had not told them about.

One of my colleagues was very upset about the unfairness of it all, but I, on the contrary couldn’t care less. The kids in our school have raised the noble art of cheating to a positive science, so anything that keeps them guessing is fine by me!

The kids were, of course, horrified. Although their revision is minimal they recognize anything which has not been ‘studied’ instantly. The picked up on the word ‘ailment’ and were stumped by the request to find three separate meanings for the word ‘story.’ They have the attention span of Homer Simpson so all their hysteria will pass. Especially with the mind wipe of Snow Week starting for some of them on Monday.

And we are not to take examination papers in the rooms until the kids are actually sitting the exams.

All things change.

The wheel is an idea waiting to happen. Again.

In a school whose raison d’être is glorification and deification of the examination today was marked by something which can only be regarded as a sacrilegious act.

I was taking the equivalent of a year 9 class and going through the details of the examination that they would be sitting the next day and fielding the multitude of questions that any class in our school is capable of asking on something as trivial as how to write the date on the top of their notes, let alone something as complex as an examination.

After a challenging session in which I explained more phrasal verbs, common phrases and the difference between words like ‘glimpse’ and ‘glance’ and ‘totter’ and ‘hobble’ I was ready for the relative tranquillity of our scheduled English Department Meeting but . . .

Horror of horrors! The examination paper was missing! I searched the desk, the floor, my bag and everywhere else that I could think of, but the conclusion was inescapable: a child, eager to boost his mark had purloined the sacred pages of one of the Most Important Documents in the Universe – an exam paper.

We were, at first, inclined to disregard this. Watch the results and the idiot who suddenly, for no apparent reason rises from ignorant obscurity to the dizzy heights of double figure achievement in his mark out of ten, might well be the culprit.

I was happy to leave it at that, but the mind of our head of department yeastily considered all aspects of this heinous theft and considered the possibilities. Meanwhile another member of department appeared and helped me check again the places where I had been and looked surreptitiously at pupils’ desks to check that the incriminating papers were not lurking there.

She also asked me if I would mind rewriting the paper: a request from the absent head of department!

Now, in a twisted sort of way I rather enjoy that sort of thing. In our school you quickly become something of an expert in taking carefully crafted sentences from the text books which are obviously the product of some poor anorak wearing hack’s midnight oil burning life’s work and by changing a John to a Juan and London to Barcelona to produce a new and school specific question.

Sharpening my fingers and prodding my trusty little computer I was soon at word and weaving my linguistic magic and producing something that I hoped would at least confuse the putative miscreant when he opened his exam paper and saw questions looking (at least) radically different from the ones that he had purloined.

Job done and the pages printed out and checked I placed the finished magnum opus in the tray of the head of English.

I took the opportunity of a free period to try and bring some sense of order to my brief case which in recent weeks seemed to have assumed the physical properties of a black hole and the weight of the damn thing seemed to be increasing exponentially.

The more astute reader has, undoubtedly, already worked out what this paragraph is going to relate. And, of course, you are right. In the middle of a group of papers related to the equivalent of the sixth form there were the missing pages of the examination. In an envelope that I am willing to swear I didn’t . . . but then all hysterical justification is pointless.

The sorry saga has few redeeming features. The only positive aspect which allows me to salvage some shreds of self respect is that at least I told someone about what I suspected and didn’t try and pretend that nothing had happened! Small comfort!

And I have to face my colleagues tomorrow!

At least I am going out later tonight to have a few drinks with a couple of friends and I am sure that the lingering effects of alcohol will get me through the last day of the week!

Life can surely offer more?

In a more than usually flamboyant back flip wrist gesture I managed to take out a chunk of my chin while shaving. This, of course, is one of the penalties doing something with knives (I use the Gillette Fusion Electronic Six Blade Shaver) while doing something else, namely showering. With your eyes closed.

In Catalonia you are discouraged from shaving in the bath because you use more water than if you shaved in the sink and managed the water with more economy. This would be fine if the process of getting up was at a more civilized time in the day. As it is, rising before dawn, necessitates closed eyes otherwise the sheer horror of such early rising would leave one paralyzed with disgust at a way of life which demands such demeaning actions from a thinking human being.

The truly unfortunate thing about a shaving cut (or slice in my case) is the distressingly copious amounts of blood which gush forth. Staring morosely at the mirror (such things force one to open one’s eyes) you feel yourself to be a poor and pallid reflection of the noble Homer as you vainly press quantities of toilet paper to the apparently gaping wound and watch it turn bloodily soggy!

In the way of these things (even god is not that cruel) the bleeding always stops just before you finish your cup of tea and start off for work. The only thing you have to remember is to dispose of the sanguinary scraps of unsightly paper before you leave.

Not being directed related to His Majesty the late Tsar of All the Russias the chunk of missing flesh has now been most satisfactorily compensated for by normal coagulation and the healing process will continue until tomorrow morning when my wielding of the stubble scythe will rake over old wounds and start the bleeding afresh!

My electric razor, which would be the solution to the problem, has become positively skittish in the way it approaches the cutting of extraneous hairs. As indeed has the battery which although placed firmly in the charger seems to have developed a taste for electricity from a different venue than my house. Its performance is distinctly episodic and wayward and not something with which I can easily cope in the dark moments of consciousness early in the morning.

The latest examination is just being completed as I type and in a rush of organizational efficiency I have not only created a file for the results, but I have also put the necessary computational thingies into Excel that will count up the marks and convert them into a figure out of ten. Such preparation was made more attractive because the paper looks relatively easy to mark. This is always a thought which is a hostage to fortune and there will be difficulties engendered by the kids that make the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone look like Janet and John Book 1!

I did indeed speak too soon. The paper was a horrific drag to mark and the black despair that only markers know settled firmly in the middle of my drooping shoulders and yet another massacre of the English Language was acted out in front of my palsied fingers as I fought the good fight for intelligibility by wealding my red pen with reckless contempt!

We live a life or irony. I have been smugly watching my colleagues over the past couple of days as they struggle to finish marking the vast paper waste of the mock examinations that we have been inflicting on the kids.

My portion of this examination jamboree was to mark the ‘Reading’ section which meant that I had to do the job that normally would have been done by an optical scanner. Nice to feel that the full extent of my professional experience is being utilized by my present school!

I regard such demeaning mechanical tasks as a challenge. I try and discover the most time and effort efficient way to get the bloody job done. I made myself a template and got down to the tedious task of getting the pages of little ticks and crosses out of the way. Working like a proverbial Trojan I got class after class out of the way and I soon had completed my section. I even helped a colleague with his marking.

Completed - as I thought.

Writing in the results on the school list I soon discovered that one whole section had managed to elude my dripping fountain pen. Today, after school, therefore I was stuck to the staff table frantically marking.

Marking, knowing that I had yet another class of papers to mark from an examination taken earlier in the day. There is another examination tomorrow and a further examination on Friday. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken!

The only thing keeping me going (apart from the insultingly low salary) is the fond hope that there will be a slackening in the teaching load when droves of our kids leave for the slopes.

Meanwhile I am packing an extra red pen for the struggle ahead.

The merging days

Monday was not a good day for me. I have a succession of difficult classes which drain all reserves of energy that have been built up over the weekend.

My classes on each day are relentlessly the same: I have five classes to teach and, apart from a Thursday, I see them all every day. The only thing that differs is the configuration that the sequence of lessons takes.

Monday is not good.

I arrived home and after a little light, domestic shopping I thought I would have a little lie down.

Tuesday came as something of a shock as I had not set my mobile phone to get me up as Monday evening had blended into Tuesday as my recumbent form snored its way into to coma that I call sleep.

I was ‘late’ getting up; though that actually means that I was five minutes earlier getting up than the usual time that I rose at the same time last year. If you see what I mean.

Also, in spite of my tardy joining of the band of the damned, or morning workers as we are known, I seemed to be ready to leave the house at the same time as I normally do. There is something about the flexibility of time on a dark morning which I do not feel that Einstein covered adequately in either of his explanations of Relativity.

Marking and further examinations have now reached a sort of orgiastic frenzy with teachers meandering around the buildings like superannuated corybantic acolytes to the Dark God of the Multi-Choice Answser!

Tomorrow and tomorrow bring yet more marking as further examination papers are relentlessly issued to punch-drunk students.

The only bright spot is that we are approaching White Week. This is not some form of Roman religious mumbo-jumbo where those rather disturbing KKK-like figures wander round wreathed in incense and holding flaming black candles, but rather Ski Week.

Many of the families of our kids actually own places in the mountains near the ski runs so that they can pack the car and disappear for a jaunt to the slopes whenever they like. The tradition is, however, that the school organizes a week for the kids to go en mass to the hills.

Having inherited my grandmother’s fear of sliding, I regard skiing as little short of cold lunacy. I am however delighted that so many of our charges seem determined to court death and injury in the glistening slopes of enticing ice.

With an eagerness that is purely professional I am wondering about the composition of some of my classes. The equation is simple: students on the slopes = students not in classes.
I know that some teachers will accompany our students and that means that classes will be bereft of their normal staff. Our school does not consider that an extended absence known in advance means that they should consider getting a supply teacher to do the work of those colleagues who are not there. Why indeed should they when they can look around and see colleagues still in school?

I am putting my trust in those kids who are not going skiing (and there are some) berating their parents to take them on holiday somewhere else as their classmates will be having the time of their lives in hospitals around the skiing area.

I was not in this school at this time last year so this particular period of upheaval is terra incognita to me. But I foresee much of the “this is the time to Get Things Done” jolliness which will eat away at any spare time that we might reasonably expect.

I put my perennial (or should that be habitual) moroseness down to the unsettled weather we are having at the moment. We have had much more rain than we should have had and we have even had mosquitoes flying around in the house.

That, at least, is according to Toni who has a quite reasonable paranoia about the things as they make a bee-line (that can’t be the right word) for him and drink his Catalan blood while generally spurning my pure bred British vintage. This, as they say, is fine by me. But I do question the justice of having the bloody (accurate use of adjective) things flying around in January. Surely they all ought to be dead of the cold, or at least flying with a vitiated languor which should make them easy targets for the mammals on which they feed.

This weekend I shall start looking to replenish my stocks of electronic wizardry and chemical poison to deter these foreign females (only the females sting) from our humble abode.

Begone! I say.

"The Heart of Darkness" & "Hatteras"

Old habits die hard. And a literary puzzle still has the power to concentrate my thoughts.

Reading through some short stories by AEW Mason (author of The Four Feathers and Fire Over London) I came across “Hatteras” - its form and content immediately reminded me of “Heart of Darkness” by Conrad.

Both stories are ‘stories within stories’ and both are told on ships at a time when “the air had grown chilly with the dusk, and the sea when it lost the sun took on a leaden and a dreary look.” (Hatteras) Both stories are set in Africa and both concern themselves with ‘civilized’ men becoming too concerned with aspects of native life. Both have elements of horror and both have the character that has ‘gone native’ dying.

I do not pretend that the two stories are of equal interest. “The Heart of Darkness” (sic) was the title of the serialized version of the story when it was published in three parts in Blackwood’s Magazine around March 1899 and as Conrad himself said, in what one biographer described as “one of the literary understatements of all time,” he felt that this story was similar to his “An Outpost of Youth” but was “a little wider” in its scope!

By contrast “Hatteras” by AEW Mason is much more limited. It was published in 1901 in a collection of short stories with the title of “Ensign Knightly” but I suspect, but do not know, that the story itself could have been published in magazine form before that. Black and White: A Weekly Illustrated Record and Review was a British illustrated weekly periodical established in 1891 was a magazine which published stories by AEW Mason and it could have appeared here or in one of the other literary magazines that flourished at the turn of the century.

“Hatteras” is not a common English name and in the 1890s it might have been linked in the literary mind with with Jules Verne who had published The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras) an adventure novel in two parts: The English at the North Pole (Les Anglais au pôle nord) and The desert of ice (Le Désert de glace).

In Verne’s novel the story of an expedition to the North Pole ends when Captain Hatteras and his crew find a volcano with the exact location of the Pole being in the centre of the crater. Hatteras throws himself in and dies. In a rewrite of the original version Hatteras survives but is made permanently insane by the intensity of the experience and loses his “soul” inside the crater. He is brought back to England and walks the streets around the asylum where he is placed but "Captain Hatteras forever marches northward".

The novel was published for the first time in 1864. The definitive version from 1866 was included into Voyages Extraordinaires series (The Extraordinary Voyages). These were successful and widely known, so AEW Mason may well have had the name of this explorer who ‘lost his soul’ in mind when he came to write his own story of a man who felt drawn to the darker aspects of native life in Africa.

By the end of the 1890s Conrad was fully involved in the literary life of Britain and a number of prominent visitors came to his house in Pent: Edward Garnett, Ford Madox Hueffer, Glasworthy, HG Wells, William Rothenstein and Stephen Crane. Not to mention visits to Henry James in Rye. It would seem to be highly likely that Conrad would read all the latest literary effusions from his colleagues and competitors.

I can find, with my limited literary resources, no evidence to suggest that Conrad and Mason were acquainted with each other, though it is more than likely that they knew each other’s work. I wonder who read whose story first!

“Hatteras” will never be more than a literary curiosity, though it does try to bring horror to the situation where a classically educated young man is forced by circumstances to go to Africa and there becomes fascinated by the life of the natives in the dark forest. He blacks himself up and with his fluent command of the native languages is able to immerse himself in the darker aspects of the native life. Hatteras says "It's not only the things you care about, old man, which tug at you; it's the things you hate as well. I hate this country. I hate these miles and miles of mangroves, and yet I am fascinated. I can't get the forest and the undergrowth out of my mind. I dream of them at nights. I dream that I am sinking into that black oily batter of mud. Listen," and he suddenly broke off with his head stretched forwards. "Doesn't it sound wicked?"

Jim Walker the ‘decent’ Englishman is appalled by what he hears from Hatteras and urges him to find a wife to give himself stability. Although Hatteras takes his advice it does not stop his nocturnal excursions and he eventually confesses that "It's like going down to Hell and coming up again and wanting to go down again. Oh, you'd want to go down again. You'd find the whole earth pale. You'd count the days until you went down again. Do you remember Orpheus? I think he looked back not to see if Eurydice was coming after him but because he knew it was the last glimpse he would get of Hell."

Which is all good stuff; but it is far from the suggestiveness that you find in Conrad’s story. Mason is too literal and the horror of his narrative is always contained with the institutions of the white man. At the end of “Hatteras” there is a terribly English public school sort of execution: "Good bye, Jim," said Hatteras, and he climbed up the bank until he stood in the light of the lantern. Twice Walker raised the rifle to his shoulder, twice he lowered it. Then he remembered that Hatteras and he had been at school together.
"Good bye, Dicky," he cried, and fired. Hatteras tumbled down to the boat-side.”

There is a tidiness in “Hatteras” that is not present in “Heart of Darkness” which is why “Hatteras” remains a horrid story set in Africa while “Heart of Darkness” becomes more of an allegory which transcends its African setting.

I also cannot find any linking of these two stories, but I find it difficult to believe that no one else has seen the similarities and commented on them. The internet while offering much has been more frustrating than informative and the chaos of my books has meant my looking more and more like some crazed bibliophile as I flit from shelf to shelf trying to find something to help my discoveries.

I think that the most that “Hatteras” can prompt me to do is re-read “Heart of Darkness”.

Which is a good thing.

In spite of what Chinua Achebe said in his famous (or infamous) talk: "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness” – though something to think about!