Another week to get through!

With the petty spitefulness for which he has become famous, god has ordained that today in Barcelona should be a day of glorious sunshine.

He had previous ordained that the weekend would comprise days of monotonous gloom and that eager sun-seekers lurking indoors in places like Castelldefels would be thwarted in their attempts to throw caution and clothes to the winds to get those extra moments of rays which had, after all, travelled some ninety-three million miles to get here!

The real trouble with this country is that sunshine is so natural a condition that one sunny day can wipe out the reality of a whole week of overcast resentment and one has to keep reminding oneself that this has been one of the worst winter/spring periods that people can remember. Summer’s coming.

Last night I went to the L’Auditori in Barcelona to hear Bach’s Mass in “si menor”. This was performed by the Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations conducted by Jordi Savall.

The building is modern and imposing with much light wood and glass in its construction but it also has an unfinished feel to it as, for example the foyer has squat columns supporting the wing-like roof and there are areas of unfinished concrete which put one in mind of the long discredited ‘Brutalist’ school which inspired the design of place s like the National Theatre, Hayward Gallery and the National Film Theatre on the South Bank. But those buildings have, almost literally, lost their edge and are surely now seen as old, comfortable friends in architectural terms.

The Barcelona building has not attained this level of cosiness yet and the inside is hardly more welcoming. The surfaces are finished in light wood, but its starkness reminds me of Nuremberg rather than the more humane appearance of St David’s Hall in Cardiff for example, where the wood embraces rather than repulses.

I assumed that the acoustic would be hard, but it was crisp and clean and not at all abrasive. Some sound was lost upwards, but the ensemble was powerful and defined.

I thought that it took a while for the ensemble to settle but chorus, orchestra and soloists seemed part of an organic performance which grew in strength through the evening.

Savall’s conducting was unobtrusive but authoritative and the performance that he coaxed out of the players was rounded and committed.

I was particularly impressed by the counter-tenor, Damien Guillan who gave a sweet and fluid performance. All the soloists, some of whom moved from the chorus to the front to sing some elements of this mass and then returned to the group, acquitted themselves with distinction with perhaps the tenor, Makoto Sakurada, producing the most pleasing sound.

The Cava in the interval was cold, delicious and very expensive!

The real downside to the experience was the cost of parking the car. I paid almost €14 for the evening which, on top of the ticket price of €25 makes for an expensive evening – though not, of course in comparison with the cost of a decent opera ticket – even including the cost of the Cava!

There is also the problem of starting times in this part of the world. The concert started at 9.30 pm, so I wasn’t until after midnight – and a school day today! Hopefully the sun will still be shining when I get home this evening so I can catch up on my lost rest on the Third Floor!

Before that I have to call in to a book shop! I need little prompting to do this, even in a country where I can read few of the books. For me the proximity of the printed word is intoxication enough. Almost! The book searching and buying is not (alas!) for me but rather for my invisible friend who will receive the book on St George’s Day which is also the National Day of Catalonia. I too should receive a book from my invisible friend.

The adjective is a fairly pointless one as the recipients make frenzied attempts to find out who their ‘invisible’ friend was so they can say thank you. To me this negates the whole point of the exercise. I have no desire whatsoever to find out who chose the book especially as I am more than likely to be disappointed! No, I don’t mean that; it is after all the thought that counts. And other lies.

The bookshop of choice is part of El Corte Ingles so there is always the possibility of mooching around other departments and window shopping to my heart’s content!

Buying will have to wait for the pound to become a little stronger!

I seem to recall, in the dim and certainly distant past, my mother having a washing machine which looked something like a cauldron with a top cover and in which the washing was done by her poking about a bit with a pair of long tongs. The water had to be emptied using a black rubber pipe.

The clothes were dried by being put through the mangle and then hung out to let the sun (which seemed to shine more in my childhood) do its work. Later on a Flatley (?) dryer was purchased which was essentially a metal box with removable slats at the top on which clothes could be fussily suspended while a heating element at the bottom of the box drove out the water.

In other words, washing clothes needed effort and usually fairly constant attendance until they were ‘done.’ This memory does not stop me from feeling both smug and long suffering as I put clothes into an automatic washing machine and then have to place them (by hand!) into the adjacent tumble dryer. Clothes do not (god rot them) fold themselves or put themselves away.

You will note that I have not mentioned the I-word. I have an altogether understandable aversion to even thinking of the i-word. Until it actually becomes as trendy in reality as the other i-words made more than acceptable by Apple, I will try and push it from my mind.

This does mean, however, that some shirts are too wrinkled to expect the ‘body heat’ technique to make them acceptable. I am fairly relaxed about just how crumpled I am prepared to look in school: I consider it a traditional sartorial accompaniment to the normal appearance of an experienced teacher! It does mean that my cupboard is filling with disgruntled looking shirts as I wait for the alternative technique of the ‘gravity effect’ (eventually) to come into operation and smooth out the cloth. Hope, as it were, springing eternal!

Yesterday, in the bright gloom of an almost sunny day, we have a foretaste of what the summer (when it finally arrives is going to be like. Our next door neighbours, who we are now convinced were the reason for the last people leaving and the relatively low rent of the house, have spawned a daughter of dubious niceness and who collects around herself a coterie of noisy adolescents. Their favourite meeting place where they sit, smoke and shout at each other is just the other side of our back garden fence which separates our little territory from the communal pool. Yesterday there they sat, smoked and shouted – even though the temperatures were not conducive to this anti-social behaviour.

I think that the neighbours who should not be here yet, and should be waiting instead until May before they inflict their pernicious presence on us are, I think, trying to break us in gently by appearing each weekend to allow acclimatization to their terminally irritating noisiness.

I have now given my permission for documents relating to The School That Sacked Me to be forwarded to the Consul General for consideration. A folio has been assembled detailing the experiences of past workers in that god-forsaken place and outlining just what appalling educational conditions we had to endure. As Tesco say, “Every little helps!”

The academically acceptable book that I finally chose was “Great Planning Disasters” by Peter Hall (no, not that one, somebody else) which gives details of such monumental awfulness as Concorde (with an ‘e’ – just how desperate were we to give in to the French to get into the European Union in those days!) and the Sydney Opera House. It also looks at London road planning (!) The British Library and other interesting, if unbelievable examples of human cupidity.

The book was first published in the early 1980’s and in 30 years some of those stories have had a few endings! I have used the new British Library and had a Champagne tea in the amazing roofed courtyard of the British Museum while gazing into the Reading Room. Concorde (with an e) flies no more and London roads are as horrific as ever. Terminal 5 (London’s mythical Third Airport was another chapter) opened to national humiliation . . . and so on.

Even in its dated form this book is a fascinating read and even after thirty years the spiralling figures of fantasy estimates became reality, the amount of public money expended with a cavalier disregard for just how much money costs, leaves one breathless! As an historical horror story this book cannot be matched!

Now to prepare for my night out with a dead composer!

Dull weather days!

Perhaps it is just me, but a neighbour using high volume baby talk to her dog early in the early morning may justify being called by the noun because of her proximity, but she certainly doesn’t merit any application of the abstract noun. ‘Neighbourliness’ to me (as an ex-dog lover) now means slaughtering all your canine dependants to attain the level of peacefulness conducive to a tranquil existence.

The Howling Dogs of Hell who live next-door but three scream like emasculated wolves every time another dog passes their gateway – and in this neck of the woods passing dogs are legion, as having a dog is regarded in much the same way as having an identity card. Disturbingly, every time I pass these disintegratingly old doggy degenerates giving them a pointedly baleful look as I sweep by, they do not bark but one of them promptly mounts the other! I don’t know whether that is a brave statement of the sexual urge still alive and well in their decrepit bodies or some sort of elegant insult to counter my hostile stare!

Today and tomorrow I have vowed to read something which has some level of intellectual respectability to counter act the effect of Mrs Meyer’s popular though undemanding books! Alternatively I have to go shopping.

I pride myself on being more than averagely observant, so it came as something of a shock to me to see (for the first time) that the symbol for the National Lottery is also a face as well as crossed fingers!

A case of seeing without looking. This is the sort of experience which makes you panic for a moment and wonder just how much carefully crafted visual information is blithely ignored by what I can’t even pretend to myself was a casual glance. I mean, just how many thousands of times have I looked at the symbol and just seen the crossed fingers.

It reminds me of the staff entrance to James Howells Department Store in Cardiff on Saint Mary’s Street. I must have passed this entrance god knows how many times since I was a kid, but it was only when one of my students was doing work experience in the store and explaining how his day started that I walked down and actually noticed the entrance’s existence. Not that it was hidden or inconspicuous - it was just that it was irrelevant to my shopping experience and therefore, with no effort, it was ignored.

I remember easily going into the university library when I was in Swansea and idly looking through a shelf of new acquisitions and selecting “Mental Maps” by Gould and White for closer inspection. This amazing book gave visual representation to cognitive maps which showed vividly peoples’ preferences. One map which I still recall showed a map of the United States overlaid with contour lines of ‘desirability’ showing where people wanted to live. I remember too that one of the Dakotas was a ‘sink hole’ of desirability where even the inhabitants didn’t want to be there.

One of collections of ‘mental maps’ that was illustrated in the book was related to people from different social classes who were asked to draw a map of the same part of the city and their resulting drawings were revealingly different. It’s rather like someone giving directions via pubs or another via churches or yet another via shops. What people included and what they left out spoke volumes!

Even though this book was published over thirty years ago (sigh!) I recommend it without hesitation. I wonder why my copy is. Probably it will turn up in the Great Book Sorting which will take place this summer. Possibly.

I am now committed to going to see a festive dramatic entertainment on Sant Jordi in our newish theatre in Castelldefels. As this will take the form of improvisations on popular literature in Spanish I only hope that the actual acting will be interesting enough to keep me occupied for the duration.

Sant Jordi (Saint George) is the patron saint of Catalonia and his day is celebrated by the gifts of books and roses. Each street corner sprouts a little kiosk or bucket in which single roses are available for purchase: in Castelldefels, going on the horticultural saturation last year, there is no excuse for any young swain, ageing Lothario, faithful or faithless spouse to fail to produce the required rose!

In school we have an ‘Invisible Friend’ for whom we have to buy a book. This year I actually know my victim and I have a good idea of the book which I think would be appropriate. The only trouble is that I know the book in English and am not sure if it is available in Spanish or Catalan. Never mind; the buying of the book is of minor significance compared to the horror of thinking of a suitable comment to put inside it! Toni will have to be galvanized into translation mode to help me cope!

The Game is now on computer and I must try and find my Respectable Book to while away the time before dinner can be started!

Tomorrow Bach!

Where is the sun?

Grim overcast days continue and I do not have lively expectations that the weekend is going to be any better. We had a tantalizing glimpse of sunshine at the end of the day, but not extended enough or strong enough to give much hope for the morrow.

For a small country at some distance from our northernmost extremity Iceland seems to have shafted us yet again. Not content with appropriating with considerable violence and scant regard to the natural order all our cod;, squandering billions of pounds of money placed in their banks by our naturally greedy and unrealistic investors and refusing to pay back their losses; they have now forced their thermal inconveniences into unusual activity so that all our planes have been grounded. And Bjork too!

One of my colleagues was expecting her father to visit this weekend, but these plans have been thrown into confusion by ash in the atmosphere. As one way wrote with seemingly guileless innocence on an internet site, “Was it the wrong type of ash?” People who have had dealings with British Rail, also have long memories and remember with startled vividness the company blaming various organic elements to excuse their own inefficiency.

My own travel today has been relatively painless with the actual motorways being reasonably fast flowing; though with the narrow streets around our school it took me twenty minutes to get a couple of hundred yards away from the place at the end of the day.

The work to the pavements and gutters looks as though it is set to be a feature of our lives for the rest of the term with the consequent chaotic under provision of parking spaces for the staff. Keeps us moaning – and what would a real school be without moaning teachers!

The School That Sacked Me has raised its twisted self from the depths of the educational abyss as a selection of shocked reminiscences from past survivors of that awful place are being collated and given to Those Who Should Know.

There is a sort of weary resignation about what we are doing as so little appears to have made any real impression on the laughable functioning of the school in the past. The only encouragement we had was from one official who said that what we were trying to do was right and, even if the efforts in the past had not yielded results that was not reason to stop trying as, one day, surely, right would prevail and Something Would Be Done.

The danger of course is to take this action too seriously: that way lies insanity. I regard it as a part-time hobby with an amusing possibility of achieving something, as Ruskin would say, “Availing to good.”

I did not manage to resist the lure of a new unread book and have now completed my reading of yet another book by Stephenie Meyer, “new moon”. It read itself; it is one of those ‘page turners’ where your brain does not really need to be activated to get to the end!

This volume follows the pattern of the other two that I have read and adds little new to the heady mix of vampire and werewolf and teenage love except for a jaunt to Italy and a visit from the more orthodox, old-style gothic horror with a visit to the lair of the three thousand year old ‘elders’ of the vampires.

I think that I am a few decades too old fully to enjoy this sort of undemanding junk.

Perhaps something more academic tomorrow and a Bach concert on Sunday.

How to spoil a day

Yesterday I watched with grumpy despair as the Head of the ESO section of the school, or at least the Head of Doing the Substitutions List seemed to be hard at work writing out an entire page of substitutions to be filled.

My grumpiness stemmed from the fact that due to the unnaturally long day we have to work; I have ended up with no periods to teach on a Thursday afternoon. I was therefore a prime target for cover – bearing in mind the fact that penultimate period yesterday I had to take a larger class as a colleague was doing in service training. This ‘collapse-a-class’ technique is the default situation that we adopt when a colleague is unable to do his normal work. And in my view qualifies as a period taken as least as much as a substitution.

Although the drive to school was less harrowing than usual as I had set out extra early to be in time for my 8.15 am class, I was still not best pleased as I had to park outside another building and then walk to my class, where I expected to see which (or how many) periods I had lost.

My inconvenient parking was as a result of building work which finished four days ago. Oh wait, silly me, I forgot: all signs in Spain are lies. The notices put up to advise the unwary that ‘construction work’ of some sort was going to take place also included the dates on them. The specific ‘start’ date lulled us into a false state of security and we were therefore unready for the actual date of commencement which was three days and a weekend before the date stated.

This work caused considerable inconvenience as many parking spaces were lost and the placement of the car meant that I would have at least 20 minutes more to wait to get out of the immediate purlieus of the school at the end of the day as our more than considerate parents scrambled to take their scions home.

The end date, we were confidently informed by the oh-so informative poster was the 11th. This was after a holiday, so the inexperienced among us assumed that much work would be done when there was no danger of being squashed by one of the passing juggernauts that take our kids home. How, some were heard to aver, intelligent and considerate.

The 11th came and went and there was no appreciable diminution in the activity of the few men working on the pavements which were being replaced.

A couple of days after the 11th deadline we noticed that the stickers which had given details of the days had all been ripped off every notice. A thing whose touching decency was a homage to truth.

The secretary and I laughed with the hard, bitter mirth of those who have experienced Spanish assertions at their worst when other colleague came whimpering forward and whining that the notices said one thing and behold! Another was being done! I may not have the experience of some of the others in this school but I for one had no confidence whatsoever that a printed completion date meant anything more than precisely delineated smudges on an otherwise pristine notice!

At the rate that the workmen are progressing I think it will not be too long before we have to make an effort of memory to remember a time when there were not bright yellow crash barriers stopping people using the pavements and stopping people parking!

So, not only was I unhappy that my accustomed parking space was still unavailable, but also I was disconsolate at the expected loss of a hard won non-contact period.

The fact that there was no list of victims pinned up on the staff room wall did not delude me for a moment that I had escaped. I knew from past experience that the list had a capricious way of finding its way onto the wall and that anyway, someone would sidle up to you when you were at your most vulnerable and with a look worthy of Uriah Heep inform you that your accustomed leisure is about to be interrupted.

I therefore went to my first class knowing that my return would be depressing as the sheet would be there. And there it was waiting for me. But, blessing of blessings though the list was long stretching through an entire page of A4 my name wasn’t on it and to celebrate I shall ignore a previous determination and read the missing volume of the Vampires and Werewolves that I said I wouldn’t bother with!

I know how to live!

Time for contemplation!

One of the many advantages of living some distance away from your place of work is that it gives one the spaciousness each morning to study one’s fellow man and woman as they make their happy way to their place of gainful employment. How I have enjoyed seeing the faces of my fellow commuters as they enthusiastically bring themselves ever nearer to their place of professional fulfilment.

Not today. Not in a traffic jam which extended for the whole of my journey along the Ronda de Dalt. I was glad to see that most of the people I passed (and pass them I did, you have to choose the right lane along that road to get ahead, and I know which one to choose) were as little satisfied with the situation as I. The fantastic expressions ranged from resentful resignation (if such a thing is possible – of course it is I am a teacher and that is our standard default response to things which make the job impossible) to outraged disbelief as we staggered forward in little spurs of a metre or so.

I am not sure if this is a sensible thing to do, but I do it anyway. If I can see that the Ronda de Dalt is congested as I sweep towards it along the curving link road from the motorway which joins Castelldefels with the airport then as soon as I merge with the static traffic (having chosen my ‘lucky’ lane) I then use a car or van in the other lane as my ‘marker’ and judge the intelligence of my choice by how many car lengths I gain or lose. Just in case you are interested, being level with a car counts as 0.5.

I am proud to relate that in a traffic jam that ensured that I took a whole hour to get to school and was only just in time to get to my class which was waiting plaintively on the patio to be brought in, I ‘made’ so many points that I stopped counting.

Another way to counteract the boredom is to ensure, when driving, that no other driver cuts in front of you. I am not unreasonable about this; if a car is indicating and seems to have a real need to enter my lane I am more than prepared to allow its entry. The thing I object to drivers who try and make sneaky gains by sticking to a lane dedicated to a turn off and then suddenly joining your lane. I admit that this does cause some commotion as I edge ever nearer to the exhaust pipe of the car in front, but it does keep me sharp.

Motorcycles are obviously exempt from these games as they have rules of their own which seem to mean that motorcyclists can ignore with impunity all other road users (including fellow cyclists) and drive as if the roads were empty. Yet again, on one of the few occasions when the three lane motorway was free enough to allow me to attain a reasonable speed, travelling in the middle lane with cars and either side of me, I was passed by two cyclists simultaneously on left and right as they zoomed by in the spaces between the cars.

As motorway driving (at least on this motorway) encourages the swerving in and out of cars from lane to lane as though they were involved in one of the more elegant and complicated dances of the eighteenth century, motorcyclists need to be of diva-like competence to be able to survive as they dance their own counterpoint to the major themes of the moving cars.

And, of course, many of the cyclists are only pretend-divas and their pretention lacks the foundation of real skill and ability and so they are ruthlessly mown down.

Now I have no objection to suicide per se which is what the expectation of buying a motorcycle seems to entail in this part of the world, but I do object to the delays that the mangled machines and bodies force on the motorists. And on motorways as busy as those around Barcelona the accident doesn’t even need to be on the side of the road on which you are travelling. Thanks to ‘rubber-necking’ a slowing down to see what is going on is all that is necessary for chaos to spread up and down from an accident.

I was told that the delays this morning were from an accident (who knows if a cyclist was involved) were from an accident early in the morning which had long been cleared up by the time I was setting out on my way; but the delay consequences of the event were still causing havoc hours afterwards!

I was unable to have my customary cup of tea when I arrived in school and had to jump straight into teaching. Only now, after a cup of the brew that makes life worth living and a small square of chocolate donated by a concerned colleague am I approaching the liberal humanitarianism for which I am famed. I am also in the staffroom of Building 1 which is much more conducive to quiet and contemplation and it also has power sockets attached to the underside of the communal table. Who could ask for more?

This lunchtime will be the occasion when I discover if my tummy is no longer the shy, retiring maiden aunt type receptacle throwing up its hands (or fili) in horror at the vulgar comestibles thrown at it or if it has reverted to its usual manifestation as a monstrous all-accepting maw.

At any event its alcoholic tolerances will be tested by the consumption of a bottle of Liberlis which is our (Suzanne and mine) preferred White of the summer. Or indeed of any month.

We are not meeting merely to drink a bottle of wine, obviously, but will be engaged on serious academic educational investigation. Which I am afraid is sad but true! I must be slipping.

So far there is no more news about the infamous holiday in spring of next year. I think that may be because I was just on time and therefore had no time to hear the latest developments: I will be very disappointed if I do not hear major changes in the way we are going to approach this problem which I am sure will, by next September, make the solving of Fermat’s Last Theorem look like doing a big piece kids’ jigsaw!

Two more lessons to go (interspersed with non-contacts) and an early finish, to allow enough time to take the wine from the fridge and put it in the freezer so that it is at the requisite temperature just above freezing for the arrival of Suzanne.

And yes, I do know that such a proceeding is vulgar. And no, I don’t care!

Situation - fluid!

I pride myself that my digestion is cast iron, copper bottomed and other metallic metaphors redolent of strength and vigour; it was therefore with something approaching positive depression that various ominous gurgling indicated that all was not well.

My unsettled (to put it mildly) evening – a result of unrelieved tension from the meeting called to consider the proposals for the February holiday – was followed by a morning of tentative gastric speculation as to whether my delicate digestive state was sufficiently sturdy to support a journey to Barcelona without an enforced stop. I was particularly conscious that the motorways afforded little convenience (and I do mean that quite literally) if I failed to be content to survey the passing scenery inside the car.

In the event I made it and resolved to take the day lesson by lesson and not make any hasty (or indeed do anything hastily) decision.

As usual the restorative effects of actually teaching came to my aid, and it was only when I was going from one lesson to another that the reality of my parlous situation came forcibly before my attention and I dipped a little. The next lesson, however, saw me revivimus: and so it has gone on for the whole of the day.

This is a single free before my last lesson which has given me time to meditate on my lunch of boiled rice and bland yogurt. I have fortified myself during the day with a couple of cups of manzana tea – disgusting! I sincerely trust that this malady will not last into tomorrow! Especially as I am taking a little wine in the evening!

The story of the new holiday for next year is of continuing interest. As I suspected it might be. The meeting which we had yesterday (yesterday) after school is now obsolete as, seemingly by the hour, new instructions and information are released to a bemused teaching staff.

Nothing as yet has been put in writing to the staff but the situation is fluid and I think that this particular aspect of the calendar for next year will run and run. I confidently expect that we will have a series of revelations about what is going to happen and then we will have a definitive outline of the dates and effects which, I just as confidently expect will have changed when we return in September and will change again by the time of the alleged holiday in late February or early March! “Remember Stephen,” as David keeps reminding me, “this is not Britain!”

Useful advice.

Everything changes!

I fail to see how such a poor day as today follows from such a glorious day as yesterday. There is almost a Puritan sense of equilibrium about the weather nowadays: fine has to be compensated with cloudy, otherwise we sun worshippers will get above ourselves!

At least it isn’t raining and that is a big plus!

Today has seen the culmination of my literary vandalism as I taught the eviscerated text of “Sredni Vashtar” to my pupils. My ‘edited’ version of Saki’s story removes just about everything that makes the story ironic and interesting, but it does leave the essential narrative. I have been far too frightened to do a close comparison between the two texts as I fear it would reduce me to tears, but I am strengthened in my resolve by the reaction to even this pale reflection of what Saki’s style is really like.

In our working day we have seven teaching slots and today I am teaching in six of them. It must make a considerable difference when timetabling that you have teachers with a weekly total of 35 slots rather than the more customary 25 of British teachers: that is a 40% advantage over the ordinary British system. I teach in 23 slots and have an English Department Meeting in an extra one making a total of 24. In Britain there are usually 25 periods in a week so in British terms my timetable is 96% full! Of course, given that we have seven periods rather than five in the normal day (note that I say normal!) there is a free period (at least) on each day – but I would much rather go home than stay until 4.45 pm which is the offrical end of the day.

It means of course that a meeting this evening for the whole staff will start at 5.00 pm and probably not finish until at least 5.30 pm (with luck) and that means that I will be home by about 6.15 pm having started the school day at 8.45 am and having got up at 7.00 am. There must be an easier way to make money! Or to put it another way: Quit moaning, it pays the rent!

All wrong! It’s been raining and the meeting went on until after 6! The explanation of what was going to happen next year was conducted in frantic Spanish with incomprehensible slides to illustrate what nobody understood.

As far as I followed what was being said, the upshot is that I will have to be teaching four year olds for a few days in February or March during a week when every other school in the public sector is on holiday. The gain is that nothing of our holiday will be taken away in July. I think. I will have to wait for tomorrow to get an overview of what people think they understood!

I have finished reading “Mad Dogs and an English Girl – A stranger in Franco’s Spain” by Caroline Waterman. This is an account of a year spent in Spain in the 1950s when she was in Burgos teaching English to the natives.

This is an oddly unpretentious book where the concern is to tell a convincing narrative and leave out some interesting points which would clarify some of the action! Nevertheless it is a beguiling book with a view of a repressed soci8ety held by the grip of a fascist dictatorship with the suffocating assistance of the Roman Church.

Our Caroline is, in comparison with the Spanish girls, outward going and assertive, but her story is one of essential guilelessness and, for me, it lacked real bite. It’s style is descriptive without being over perceptive. Too tame for me!
By way of a change I impulsively selected a slim volume from the bookshelf nearest to my desk and reread “The Flower Beneath the Foot” by the endlessly fascinating Ronald Firbank. I am tempted to say that the introduction by John Mortimer in the Penguin Modern Classics edition was better than the writing it introduced, but that would be to deny the dark fascination with an imagination run riot and yet seemingly at home in the world of slapstick as well.

This novel reminds me of the poems of W B Yeats – not in terms of content or style but because Firbank and Yeats both make me wonder if they are not perhaps perpetrating gigantic jokes on a gullible literary public. And if they are, are they necessarily the worse for that!

The television channels are still full of Barça’s victory over the Old Enemy and I am amazed at how much mileage can be made from one very ordinary football match.

Even if the result was quite satisfactory.

Summer space!

I count today as the first day of the summer.

Not because of the weather which was glorious, with a sky so blue that you begin to imagine wisps of cloud just to bring the azure infinity closer to something human and appreciable. The weather was summery but that was not the reason that I count this the first day of the new season.

It was the parking!

I should by now be used to the fact that Castelldefels is a seaside town and from time to time, especially at weekends, it is filled with visitors. These guests share a driving need that is not particular to Spain: the necessity of parking within a maximum of ten metres from their destination and the hell with safety or consideration or legality.

I had to give up my parking space to go and get lunch from the pollo a last and the drive to the place was a succession of obstacles formed by appallingly abandoned (to call them parked would be a gross distortion) cars. Outside the restaurant on a narrow road junction cars were parked half on the pavement and half off. Cars were parked diagonally across corners of pavements on road junctions and . . . this is what summer is like if you live in a seaside resort!

However unreasonable you might have thought the way that people park in any Tesco car park you might have been in; I have to say that you have seen nothing until you have seen the way that Visitors park. I do not think that it is merely a coincidence that this part of the world is planning to screen a remake of “V” about alien visitors invading the planet!

It is just as well that I have made the most of the last two days lurking on the third floor and taking what I can from the beautiful weather we have had over the weekend because the new week appears to be depressingly bad.

Tomorrow there is a full staff meeting. The topic of this unheard of coming together of the academic workers? Curriculum? Examinations? New equipment? Courses? No! Holidays.

There are plans for there to be a week’s holiday next February which, for state schools, is going to be clawed back and added on to the summer term. For us, if I understand correctly, this week is going to be a holiday for the pupils but not for the teachers and the term will end at the same time. This was the first plan; if we need a meeting then there must have been some changes.

Holidays are the sort of topic about which everyone has a point of view; I sincerely hope that this is merely an information giving meeting rather than an opportunity for some of my colleagues to speak. I have been in ‘evaluation’ meetings where I have prayed for death or at least for a direct act of god to smite the speaker to release me from unjustifiable torture.

I fear that tomorrow evening might see me reciting my orisons of retribution yet again!

The Match

Sitting on the balcony outside the staff room before my last lesson in school yesterday and lazing in the afternoon sun I was aware of two things about the scene which were oddly disturbing.

The first was seeing a palm tree framed by wayward branches of a May tree in full bloom. It seemed an odd juxtaposition remembering as I did the May tree which we had in the back garden of our house in Cathays where no palm trees grew!

The second unsettling element in this otherwise expensively panoramically startling scene was the scent of the May blossom. It certainly wasn’t as I remembered it. The same sickly sweet smell was there but there was an overlay of something more disturbingly human about the aroma which reminded me of a bodily function! Unsettling!

The three day week that we have had has been just as exhausting as a full week – at least that is how it seems. The end of the week saw a lot of hollow eyed teachers staggering home for the weekend wondering how they were going to cope with the prospect of a full five teaching days before the next weekend!

I went to bed at a reasonable hour to take full advantage of the promised day of sunshine that Saturday was supposed to be. I woke up at my customary time before dawn, realized that it was Saturday and thought that I could have an extra five minutes and suddenly it was 11.00 am!

With a British sense of bodily betrayal I belatedly fled to the third floor clutching a pot of tea and a book.

I have discovered that my high back swivel office chair is excellent for sunbathing! I can push a lever and have the back recline and laze in more than Oriental splendour. And with a cup of PG Tips in one of my grandmother’s cups – perfect!

The book I was reading, in spite of misgivings from my reading of the first in the series, was another Stephenie Meyer vampire and werewolf book entitled “eclipse.” The lack of capital letter is the author’s choice.

I have obviously missed one part of this series as there were references to what I can only describe as ‘more of the same’ as I ploughed through the reworking of much of the narrative ‘invention’ I had read in the first volume!

The only aspect that I liked was the concept of the Volturi, vampires from Italy who had a sort of watching brief on the ‘brand’ and wiped out those vampires whose drinking habits threatened to reveal to the general public the existence of a disturbing minority in their midst!

This novel is basically a romance with monsters and a heroine whose love of a vampire is slowly bringing her to the point where she is willingly going to go though the change so that she can stay with her vampire love for ever.

I suppose it is the sort of novel which you will like if you like the genre of vampire romance that Buffy the Vampire Slayer has made so popular. Not really my cup of tea and I feel that I have done much more than my duty by reading two of the volumes that school has bought to encourage kids to read. On the basis that any reading is better than no reading, I think that I can recommend them without reservation!

Meanwhile normality (as it is sometimes known) sees Toni dressed like a football terrorist in shirt and hat with a scarf wrapped round his face!

I find it difficult to believe that I have succumbed to the hysteria surrounding a Real Madrid-Barça game to the extent of putting on a Barça shirt under my normal shirt!

After a very scrappy first half (in which however Messi scored a goal) I am not looking forward to a further 45 minutes in which I will not be delighted by the quality of the football and be stressed by the antics of the Barça players – who do not seem to be settled at all. I look on it as one of the prices that you pay for living in Catalonia!

Lunch today was in our usual restaurant in town but was not necessarily at the standard that we expect. Admittedly there were more people there than usual, but still it was not quite as good as we have come to expect. They have also taken to giving us a carafe of wine recently rather than the bottle that we regard as our right. All things change!

Barça have now scored a second goal, which was greeted by someone in our area setting off a rocket. The last time that happened was when Real Madrid was knocked out of the European Cup! That gives you some idea of the force of feeling about this football match when these two teams meet.

And we’ve just won!

Thank god for that and now there are lots of fireworks going off around us!

How the week is dragging!

Up before dawn to get to school for my ‘early’ lesson and still there were traffic jams – though, thank god not of the soul screaming variety. I do find that looking like a Kathe Kollwitz drawing on your way to school as you battle suicidal motorcyclists and cutting cars is not conducive to looking as placid as a Zubarán when you finally get in front of a class.

The similes are obviously a function of my wandering fingers in the art section of my scattered library. These art books are volumes that I find particularly difficult to get into any kind of order as the temptation to turn the pages and look at the pictures (why they were bought after all) is overmastering.

The most disastrous piece of information associated with the paintings is the caption which tells you where the particular canvas or piece of wood is actually situated: the tug of foreign galleries is almost irresistible!

It has always been one of my ambitions (quite modest in the scale of things) to go and visit the Alte Pinakothec in Munich which houses the wonderful canvas by Gerard Terborch of “A boy picking fleas from a dog.” I first saw this painting in a volume of the Hamlyn history of art series of very small books which had large colour plates and small amounts of text and I have been fascinated with the paintings every since.

I once got out an atlas of Europe and looked at what I could cover by flying to Munich and then spreading out a way to see what galleries were within reach of the city. Needless to say in a few minutes I was a thousand miles away from Munich in my imagination drawing a cultural route on the map which made the eighteenth century Grand Tours look like Thomas Cook Day Trips!

There is something about a map which encourages a flight of fancy because you trace your fingers over representations of reality as you skim mountain ranges, lakes and oceans in a god-like overview of geographical space. I suppose travelling by map is the nearest we get to the Starship Enterprise concept of being beamed up to a location! Or perhaps it’s only me.

I would like to go to that gallery; but as soon as I say that, I immediately consider other places which also demand my presence. For someone who is much more at home in the pictorial representations produced by the hard edged Northern Renaissance than the soft sumptuous Renaissance of the south I have visited precious few galleries of north and what one of the gold-diggers in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ referred to as “the central of Europe"! Time enough in the future and the Prado does have a wonderful collection of the mystically disturbing and disturbed paintings of Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken or Hieronymous Bosch as he is better known – certainly better known to me – but it is wonderful what information one can palm off as one’s own with judicious use of Wikipedia!

Up to Terrassa after school to visit the recovering in hospital. Although he was in a fairly nice room sharing with only one other person when we got there the other patient in the room had at least three generations of his family chatting and running around soon to be joined by three generations of the family of the patient we were visiting. By the time we left it was difficult to remember that we were in a hospital and not in a grand family reunion!

Back home I realized just how tired I was. Still, Friday tomorrow and the hope of a decent weekend.

The tie says it all!

The roadworks around the school which were scheduled to be finished before our return are not finished. Again, my complete lack of surprise is a function of my new expectations modified by my stay in Spain.

The parking, given that spaces on the whole of one side of the school were taken up with roadworks, was horrendous.

Parents bring their precious cargos to school by car and then, having deposited them in the school they linger in their cars presumably bewailing their bereft state with a free child-free day in front of them – what a lack of imagination that displays!

One assertive member of staff now pulls up and signals to the lingering parent that they should leave and smiles encouragingly to get them on their way. And they leave! I think it helps that she is female. I am not sure that it would work so well with a male smiling in a way which I am sure would be taken to intimidatory rather than gently encouraging!

First day back was bloody. It always is. People seemed to be mildly resentful that I had managed to change my ‘pasty’ (for me) paleness to something more bronzedly acceptable. I think that they were incredulous that anyone would sunbathe in a month so far removed from what can be taken to be summer as March. It is vain that I protest that one should go on the temperature and the ability to shelter from blustery winds rather than a slavish adherence to a conventional acceptance of when summer is actually here. We British learn to take our sunshine when and where we find it – and if that is March then so be it. And if Johnny Foreigner is so hidebound that he cannot respond to tanning potential in an uncongenial month then ouff to him!

For almost the first time since I have been in the school the first day of term was not taken up with frantic conversation about examinations! I shall enjoy this temporary respite for as long as it lasts. Which I anticipate will not survive Monday of next week!

I also gained a free ‘free’ period. I take an extra lesson on a Monday and am compensated by losing one on Wednesday. This Monday was a holiday, but I still had my period off today. I take my gifts where I can find them!

On the other hand there is no May Day holiday. May Day falls on a Saturday and there is no alternative day given to us in the week. Disaster! There is only one long weekend between today and the end of June. I need to find strategies.

And quickly!

The finger of power!

Thank god for the off switch.

No matter how sophisticated the machine: when in doubt turn it off.

Probably my internet radio (made by Roberts, of course) is more sophisticated than the computers that took Man to the Moon, but that fact did not stop it going through a ‘difficult’ period in which the message “Network Failure” was displayed. Now this message would have been understandable if the network was not actually working, but for every other machine the internet was fine.

Far be it from me to question the working of a Roberts radio: like Rolls Royce and ERNIE they work in their own inscrutable way and, like those two, one’s radio becomes an institutionalized part of the home. The one fact about Roberts radios, which is why one is prepared to pay the premium for their purchase, is that they go on working whatever. They may get old and tatty and bits might, eventually, fall off – but they go on working.

The second day of “Network Failure” after turning off and on again had not produced the requisite results I became somewhat desperate. I was missing my daily fix of Radio 4 and it’s just not the same if you are listening to it on your computer through headphones. Desperation called for desperate measures so I pressed the “Menu” button on the radio.

Although computers and call centres have made us more than familiar with “Menus” (capital letter and inverted commas) they have also made us more than familiar with despair. “Menus” always have sub-menus and sub-menus have sub-sub-menus so that by using these “Menus” we are allowed a glimpse of the infinite. But the infinite we are allowed to see and experience is a cold, hard place where human wishes and desires are subordinate to the categorical imperative of the unfolding “Menu” which is to lead but not arrive.

It was therefore with nothing approaching faith that I touched the fatal button and was presented with a list of options. “Network Failure” suggested that the option “Network” might be appropriate. Further pressing led to a list of networks among which I recognized the name of our Wi-Fi monster, so I gleefully selected and pressed it.

Instead of seeing the happy word “Connected” my despair increased when I saw a flashing cursor and the fatal message “Enter network password.” Alas! I remembered enough to know that this was not a password but a string of numbers and letters that we had most carefully written down “somewhere.”

I turned the radio off.

And when I turned it on much later the “Network Error” was still there. Cursing the implacable gods of intractable machines, I considered my options. There were, I reckoned, three: the first would be to continue turning the radio on and off in the vain hope of something happening; the second would be to find the missing password (!); while the third would be, I suddenly thought in a flash of pure inspiration, to take the power lead out of the radio and turn it off properly.

Which I did. Yesterday. And today the radio is working perfectly and gave me the news of the election. I am glad to see that my technical know-how is still able to deal with the most sophisticated productions of advanced technology!

Lunch with Irene at the Maritime with the usual chat ranging from personality to pursuing dreams. Enjoyable none the less.

Tomorrow back to work. But there are compensations. Wednesday is my early finish. Wednesday is the hump of the week: it is all downhill after that. The weekend is encouragingly near.

Ever the optimist!

Young and funny?

When is the age at which those things which would be repulsive in an older child are not longer tolerated in a very young one?

I am not inclined to be indulgent about young life forms but Toni’s young nephew is engaging. He mispronounces my name in a way which would be irritating in anyone older; he peremptorily demands food and drink and we smile indulgently; he can’t talk and hold a cup of drink at the same time and tips the contents on the floor and we laugh delightedly; when he finally has a public wee we cheer; he eats macaroni with his fingers we are fascinated. In short he has us all in thrall. Even I, a fully paid up cynic, am captivated. But there again I don’t live with him day after day!

The penultimate day of the holiday saw us going up to Terrassa and having an excellent lunch with visits to two other parts of The Family. A phone was recycled and installed and various points of fashion advice were given to someone still decorating her first flat.

I even managed to do some more reading of a book which I bought some time ago about the experiences of a young British girl who came to work in Franco’s Spain.

Tomorrow will be the usual time for me to panic that I am not prepared for the new term, though the only thing that I have to ensure I do is to make sure that I wear my ‘traditional’ tie for the start of a new term: a version of Munch’s ‘Scream’ – which I always think is more than fitting for such a sad time!

Is the sun risen indeed!

I was woken by rain last night, which gives you some idea of my paranoia about the weather. I am one of those irritating people who lapses into unconsciousness almost as soon as my head hits the pillow and I usually remain in a most satisfyingly comatose condition until I resentfully accept that it is time to get up and go to work.

The gentle dripping of rain is not something which makes an impression on my sleeping brain, though it could add a background detail to a dream! But the sound woke me. I have to admit that once I had ascertained that water was falling from the sky I went back to sleep again.

The winter of 2009/2010 will live on in the folk memory of the Catalans for a long time to come. I found that my British sensibility to unexpectedly adverse weather was matched by those around me. Admittedly they did not feel cheated in quite the same way that I did - after all they had not moved country to get a bit more sun – but they too talked about the horrors of the winter as if the coastal plain of Barcelona had been transformed into the Steppes of Russia and that we constantly having to step over the frozen corpses of kulaks!

I may still be (for me) a pasty white colour, but at least I have been able to stretch out for a few hours and soak up what rays there were. I confidently predict blazing sunshine as soon as term restarts!

Which the sun signally is not doing at the moment. The only thing that you can confidently predict is that the bloody dog next door will, to greet the dawning day, bark his lonely triplets of noise to ensure that we are all awake!

There are two more days of the holiday left.

Just seeing those harsh words forces an icy hand to grip my beating heart. Although I have just thought too that there is the rest of today which counts, hooray!

It had to happen at some time or other. And it just happened today.

For the first time I read a Margaret Pym novel all the way through!

By page 7 of “A Glass of Blessings” I had come across “I was sure that Father Bode was equally worthy of eating smoked salmon and grouse or whatever luncheon the hostesses might care to provide. Then it occurred to me that he might well be the kind of person who would prefer tinned salmon, though I was ashamed of the unworthy thought for I knew him to be a good man.” Delight!

The novel is firmly in Pym territory with a comfortable middle class narrator with time on her hands writing about life which seems to revolve around the clergy of an Anglo-Catholic church. And it’s very funny, though rarely in a laugh out loud sort of way. It is one of those novels which reach their apotheosis in “Madame Bovary” where, when all is said and done, you don’t care much for any of the characters in the book including the narrator!

The action of the novel usually (but not always) stays this side of farcical caricature with a series of cartoon characters acting out sad but resourceful lives to the back ground of money and religion – or vice versa – if there actually is any difference!

There are irresistible moments in the book such as when the narrator, the wife of a fairly highly placed civil servant, speculates about the food appropriate to a religious retreat tea (the ‘tea’ is a particularly Pymmian touch) “with everything in dark colours; but the darkest greyest food I could think of was caviar, which seemed unsuitable, so I got no further.”

I particularly sympathized with a thought that Wilmnet had when debating whether to join a group to talk to the teacher, Piers, after a class in Portuguese: “I wondered if I should join the group but decided to remain aloof, for I could hear questions being asked about the use of the subjunctive and I did not feel equal to that kind of conversation.” It is the use of the word “aloof” that makes passages like this work. And it is often the mot (un)juste that makes an unremarkable piece of description or dialogue rise to the level of ironic, almost sardonic humour.

Only Pym (you see, I am writing of her as if I have been actually reading her rather than simply referring to her for the last x-number of years) would end a novel with the sentence, “It seemed a happy and suitable ending to a good day.” And use a full stop rather than an exclamation mark.

A thoroughly recommendable book to those who might like her. Which is a modified form of recommendation, but nevertheless heartfelt.

I will have to hunt through my books and see if I have another one!

You have to eat!

Yet another of my restaurant suggestions has crashed into the rocks of incompetence.

Lunch (courtesy of some winnings from a pools-like prediction game) was in a restaurant which I have been in before and had truly astonishing menus del dia culminating in the arrival of a dessert during one of them which I actually applauded!

Today, as they say, was different.

The restaurant occupies a prime site on a corner in the centre of the playa area of Castelldefels, next to a busy crossing and along an access point to the beach. Yet, inexplicably, it is closed for the greater part of the year, while restaurants next to it thrive throughout the calendar year and not just in the season.

It is such a large site and must have cost a fortune to buy or rent that its lack of use gives rise to a whole host of speculation about the financing. We tend to the most lurid explanations about the possible ways in which money is being used or channelled to explain the restricted commercial operating opportunities that the place takes.

Like the empty ‘palace’ across the road, there are plenty of properties which are not being utilized where you wonder about the financial mind behind their under-use. Millions of Euros are being ignored or being allowed to fester in properties which have remained empty for months or years. The financial intelligence behind this seeming idiocy is beyond me!

Last year the service and food was excellent this year the service was poor and the food unexceptional. The management have installed a temporary bar in the middle of the outside area of the bar/restaurant proper staffed by a strapping young man with designer jeans. I think that he is meant to be decorative rather than useful and his attempt at waiting was enthusiastic if ineffectual.

We eventually ended up having a series of tapas after a misleading notice suggested that we could have two for only €4. It turned out that they had left out that they had left out the single letter ‘o’ standing for ‘or’ which did make a difference!

Three other waiters came to our table to take our order which was lost in confusion. Things didn’t arrive and our asking for bread caused some problems and it didn’t arrive until three-quarters of the way through the meal. The potatoes were served with the wrong sauce and . . . you begin to get the idea. Eventually, to keep us sweet, we were given our drinks free; but the gesture (though welcome) had lost its power! We are not inclined to return. There are, after all, thirty or forty alternatives in the area!

Home and health don't mix!

Housework is dangerous and expensive.

One should always resist the urge to do something like dusting. I know from experience.

The predilection in Mediterranean countries for tile floors rather than fitted carpets has its advantages in the summer, when tiles are much cooler, but has a distinct disadvantage when dusting. Or attempting to.

The internet radio is in the kitchen so, unless I am prepared to turn the volume up to dog-owners’ levels of inconsideration I wear a pair of Wi-Fi headphones. I was wearing said headphones when the sight of a layer of dust caught in a ray of morning sunshine on top of an electric fan propelled me forwards in my chair to lean towards the offending surface and my headphones promptly fell off.

There is a particular kind of clunk that something which is not supposed to come into contact with a hard surface makes which tells you immediately that hope for the continuation of the products life has gone before the echo of the clunk has died away!

In the modern world where do you go to have something repaired at a cost which isn’t 70% of the cost of buying it new? I am sure (as only someone who has not idea at all) that the effect of the bump has been a disconnection of the power supply to the phones. I am sure (ditto the last parenthesis) that the repair will be simple rejoining of a wire. So all I need to find is an honest electrician who will not take me for a ride.

Toni! Do something!

And he did.

Sometimes it is simply having the confidence to pull things apart that is the key to making it better. The pads on the earphones responded to brute force and revealed that the batteries had become dislodged slightly and broken contact.

They are now working!

Which is more than can be said for the radio. When one is dependent on the internet radio for Radio 4 then one has to put up with inexplicable breaks in transmission - especially with Radio 4 for some reason.

This has been a leisurely day with me making an effort, from time to time, to rise from the recumbent to the semi-recumbent position so that I could read some of the short stories from 1922 which comprised the next electronic book I was to read.

My reading was interrupted by my attempts to take a decent photograph of the series of cooing bird life that lights upon the ariel and disturbs my concentration. I have been trying to get a decent short for some time, but as soon as they see me pointing something at them they take flight. Today was the first time that I got anything even half-way decent. I shall persevere.

All the stories from the Best British Stories of 1922 so far are of the comfortingly narrative persuasion with a little dose of morality thrown in. Nothing difficult and all, so far, competently written.

We went out for lunch and I paid my customary visit to a church to mark Good Friday. Our central church in Castelldefels is rarely open and I always take the opportunity to go in and look at the extraordinary series of paintings which fill the bays. There are no windows in the church but the wall space is filled with trompe l’oeil murals illustrating biblical scenes. They have been painted with vigour and are not as gruesome as some Roman Catholic ecclesiastical wall filling that I have seen!

As if to complete the rituals that I like to observe on this (in) auspicious day, the classical radio station of Catalonia has just played an extract from the Saint Matthew Passion. I can now relax.

I am acutely conscious of the days left which can be counted as holiday. I have taken advice and I am confident in the assertion that a weekend may be counted officially as holiday (and should be enjoyed as such) as long at the Monday is also a holiday. In our case the Tuesday is also a holiday so I have four more days of official holiday and then only three working days to the next weekend. And then we are well into April. You can see the way my mind is working!

Meanwhile, back to the stories of 1922: you never know when they might come in handy in educational terms!

Rest! Resist!

I imagine that the slaughtered beasts which had to die to give us the raw material for the feast that we had this lunchtime could have stretched to the end of the road!

It was the sort of meal where (afterwards) you contemplate vegetarianism with something approaching enthusiasm. It was of course, delicious: chunks of various animals mixed together with prepared meats all barbecued and dripping with fat. But it was all OK because we were eating vegetables as well.

The calçots were cooked on a second barbecue fed with the trees that were felled earlier in the week to give that special tang to the finished articles. I love calçots in all their messy glory. There is no clean way in which you can eat them if they are cooked as they should be – which is being burnt with live flames so that the outside of these appetizing onions are carbonized, and your fingers become progressively blackened as the meal progresses.

The sauce which goes with the calçots is also delicious and I thoroughly enjoy my participation in this Catalan orgy of food.

But the aftermath is a feeling that you cannot justify the sheer mountain of flesh that you are called on to consume and then there were the cakes for the god children which also had to be consumed the whole lot being washed down by semi-skilled use of the poron: the traditional Catalan drinking vessel which can be shared because there is no contact between glass and mouth. In theory. I must admit that I am getting quite good at using this implement – but delight in skill does mean that you don’t judge exactly how much you are taking in!

The others worked off the meal by going for a walk on the beach – I took to the sun bed on the third floor!

And finally read the rest of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (“Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis”) by Vicente Blasco Ibanez in my newly recharged e-book reader. It is the sort of novel which makes me wonder how many people my age have read the thing!

The first film version may have been a vehicle for the young Valentino, but the narrative seems dates and moralistic. The portrayal of the conflicts which brought about the First World War are more than slightly embarrassing and the book only really comes alive in some of the descriptions of the horrors of the battlefields. The book was first published in 1918 and the shocked response to the things that were seen is sometimes very effectively displayed. Desnoyers had “been accustomed to speak of (War) as those in robust health speak of death, knowing that it exists and is horrible” but he is forced to confront it in reality and immediacy and sees through the wounded soldiers just what explosive shells can do. He sees “wounded objects just beginning to recover their vital force who were but rough skeletons of men, frightful caricatures, human rags, saved from the tomb by the audacities of science.” You can think of First World War poets who also noted the dehumanizing effect of injury on returning soldiers who discovered that they were not returning to a Land Fit for Heroes but to a country which seemed to regard them with embarrassment and disgust.

I was particularly taken with the phrase “audacities of science” which has strong resonances in the present day discussions (if they ever reach that stage of informed debate) which centre of euthanasia and abortion, where the “not struggle officiously to keep alive” brigade meets in head-on clash with the born-again simplistic fascists who have obviously not looked at Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” and particularly at the sketch “Every Sperm is Sacred” to see how ridiculous their position is.

“The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” ends with an almost indecent affirmation of life as Chichi invites her war damaged husband to join her at the top of a grassy knoll in a field of rough graves where her brother lies: “As soon as he approached her, she flung her arms around his neck, pressed him against the warm softness of her breast, exhaling a perfume of life and love, and kissed him passionately without a thought of her brother, without seeing her aged parents grieving below them and longing to die . . . And her skirts, freed by the breeze, molded her figure in the superb sweep of the curves of a Grecian vase.”

The End.

I suppose that it is one way to end a novel which has stretched in a staggering panorama from the plains of South America to the battlefields of France and where people have found redemption in death in war. I love the image of “a Grecian vase” as life and culture are linked to the winning side!

Not a book that I would recommend, but one that I am glad that I have now read as it is one of those titles that you come up against in second hand bookshops and in surveys of popular literature through the ages.

A refusal to buy books for inclusion in the library of one’s electronic book do encourage you to look again at titles that in their shabby editions in shops never tempt one but, newly downloaded have a reborn vitality that encourages exploration.

One of my free books is “Best British Stories of 1922” – who can resist?

Certainly not I.

So Stacy Aumonier, Elinor Mordaunt, Max Pemberton, Roland Pertwee, Parry Truscott and Major Wilbraham are about to be read by a reader who has no preconceptions about these authors as he has never heard of them.

To be fair this collection also includes stories by Algernon Blackwood, Harold Brighouse, William Crane, A. E. Coppard, Richmal Crompton and Hugh Walpole of whom I have heard and indeed read.

This sort of reading is what holidays are supposed to be about!

Sun Wine Fine

The third floor came into its own this afternoon when three of us repaired to the eyrie and partook of a little chilled white wine in the sunshine. In March. Watching the Arsenal-Barça match, I couldn’t help notice that it was pouring with rain and the poor Catalan commentators made a point of saying that the temperature was near to zero. I shouldn’t complain!

Our afternoon chat was after an excellent lunch in the Maritime Club. We were served by one of those intimidating dyed-blond disturbing women who are unsmiling but have a twinkle in the eye. You know; the ones you wouldn’t want to meet alone on a dark night! And she was inefficient, having to be reminded to bring bread and forgetting to put the extra whisky on the tarta whisky! Some things are unforgivable!

Having listened to the steady diatribe against Ibramovic by a “friend” who brings up how much he cost and the fact that “we” gave away Eto’o free, gratis and for nothing as well; I now have an opinion on this player myself. In spite of the fact that he has just scored a goal his positioning on the field is inept and his kicking shocking. I would prefer ‘Bebe’ Bojam to play instead. Even as I typed that Ibramovic scored his second! This just shows what the hell I know about football!

Suzanne’s visit meant that the ‘library’ was cleared out so that extraneous impedimenta obscuring the books was removed and even the Third Floor was made a little clearer.

The barbecue waits for early tomorrow to be cleaned however!

What else is there to do?

After a more than blustery night the day dawned better than one could have expected with scattered cloud and the all important sun.

The sun has been present throughout the day but not always as assertively as I would have liked it to have been. This has not stopped me, however, from resorting to the sun bed on the third floor and taking what rays were thrown in my general direction!

The tidying of the Third Floor continues at a snail’s pace with extraordinary displacement activity including sorting out a chest of drawers – which has, perversely thrown up more material which has to find a place on the same Third Floor which is over laden with material at the moment!

Another Herculean task waiting for me is the cleaning of the barbecue in preparation for the calçots. Rather, I have been told, the barbecue is for the meat and the calçots (which have to have ‘fire’ to get them to the state in which they can be eaten) are going to be cooked on some sort of grill which, at the moment, we do not have.

As the barbecue has been languishing in isolated glory in an unconsidered corner of the Third Floor balcony for the greater part of the year, you can imagine how ingrained the accretion of mess produced by pigeons, pine trees and perverse weather has been. All of this has to be cleaned away so that fresh meat can be laid on the bars without imminent danger of death from microbes that have been mutating for months on undisturbed metal.

I am a great believer in the miraculous effects of the substance contained in a little green circular tub that I purchased some time ago. This contains an undistinguished lump of slightly gritty material of a hardened mud-like consistency which really does get rid of those hard-to-get-rid-of stains on stoves, taps and especially, the bottoms of saucepans and frying pans. I am prepared to go for anything short of elbow grease to get results!

My reading has ground to a halt, though, even as I type there are various books literally within reach which are calling to me: “A Farewell to Arms” is asking to be re-read; “Culture” by Raymond Williams – which I bought for title and author and should probably now read; Eliot, Fitzgerald (F. Scott and Penny), Fowles (for self indulgency) and Frisch (for astringency) are all there, out of place and an-alphabetic but reaching out! Perhaps a play: doesn’t take long to read and gives one a sense of completion. Job done: Frisch it is. Given where I am, perhaps “Andorra” might be appropriate!

Barça are going to play Arsenal – divided loyalties, though there are Catalan players in both teams!

Tomorrow will be decision time!

You're never alone with a dog!

Yesterday was the official start of the biting season as I now have a swelling on the underside of the lower wrist of my left hand.

With an almost superhuman strength of will I have not scratched and have even treated it to a small quantity of my jealously guarded supply of Savlon purchased on my last trip to Britain.

The swelling is, however, more akin to a horsefly bite than a mosquito and I have vivid memories of my last such bite remaining a nuisance for a considerable period of time.

We have seen mosquitoes throughout the winter and have been appalled that these flying fiends have managed to survive even the coldest (and it has been cold this winter) periods when they should all have died off. It bodes very ill for the coming summer. I can only hope that I have not becomes too acclimatized to the country and that the mozzies still go for Catalan rather than Celtic blood!

The Neighbours from Hell recently re-installed next door have been suspiciously quiet: no flaming rows; no smashing of crockery; no television outside; no concourse of spotty youths shouting and smoking. All quiet. Too quiet.

I realize that I am tempting fate by articulating this good news and that the neighbours may now unleash the full extent of their inconsideration – but two days residence and no complaints is a startling record!

Which is more than can be said for the dogs. Our other neighbours have realized that their animals are pests and they seem to have done something about it. The real dog who barked in a stentorian way has been suppressed somehow and we are left with the wheezy exhalation of the rat-dog who trundles about with his hind legs in a wheeled chariot. I am prepared to forgive him his noise as he looks quite as grotesque as anything painted by Bosch or Breughel. That surely is punishment enough!

Forgiving is, however, something that I am not prepared to do for the dog the street adjacent to us. This animal was left outside the house while his unthinking owners were elsewhere and, to show his desolation, the animal howled and barked incessantly. From my vantage point on the third floor I could see a procession of irate neighbours marching up to the front gate of the offending house and ringing the bell. They obviously got no answer and sometimes while they stared at the gate in frustration they would be joined by another neighbour on a similar mission. They would then have a conversation in which, even at a distance, one could tell that incredulous outrage was the key tone that they were adopting. I feel sure that the owners are going to get an earful sometime today!

The tidying of the third floor is stalled but, as a guest might arrive tomorrow I am sure that there will be a sudden boost in energy and things will be thrown into the cupboard, or even, if I am feeling strong be put away properly.

Lunch was in a restaurant which divides opinion: right from wrong; mine from Toni’s. In spite of an extensive menu Toni decided there was nothing he liked and so plumped for tallerinas and patatas bravas. He liked neither. I, on the other hand had macaronis putenesca (!) and the second plate was cheek of pork with potato and onions. It was delicious. Ah well! I don’t think we will be going back together, but, yet again I have had an excellent meal there!

Taking a short walk along the beach revealed houses for sale which met all my criteria: modern, on the beach with own swimming pool. So, if anyone out there has the €1.7 million that I need to buy it.

Anyone?