My Present Day!

The Christmas Meal finally got underway after the eventual appearance of our more tardy diners and it proved to be an exceptionally delicious success. 

 Although raw cod followed by a selection of fish and shell fish is not everybody's chosen Christmas alternative to turkey and trimmings it certainly was mine and what wine there was (surrounded as I was by Catalans) flowed gently in my direction as they showed yet again their disgracefully negligent attitude towards the consumption of alcohol!

At the conclusion of the meal we started on a procession to visit various households: the refurbished flat of a cousin who has taken over his mother's old flat; the mother's new, smaller flat, and finally the nephew's abode for a film “Salt” (with English subtitles) and more food.

“Salt” was the sort of agreeable action nonsense which is perfect for a weary Christmas evening when everybody (with the exception of the nephews of course) is too dog tired to engage imagination, intelligence or even basic human understanding to tolerate anything more than a shoot-'em-up fantasy with a touch of conspiracy and world threat.

The film opens with the heroine being roughly treated by the North Koreans while being asked, “You are here to destroy our nuclear installations, aren't you?” To which the most reasonable answer is “Who isn't!” But let it pass, let it pass. Hokum it undoubtedly was but enjoyable hokum.

I am now finishing off my cup of Earl Grey tea (Toni's mum has been well trained!) and waiting for the succession of presents which should fall into my lap it being, as all know, St Stephen's Day and therefore my Saint's Day, my Name Day and a Day second only in importance to my birthday for the receiving of gifts of all sorts as the necessary recognition of a Day of such auspicious importance.

No-one can be unaware of the Day as just after midnight last night everyone (nephews included) wished me “felicitationes” in the appropriate manner. Gifts, therefore, “must follow as the day the night, and thou canst not then be mean to any man” as Bill very nearly said.

The final meal of this Terrassa trip is lunch today where in years gone by the highlight for me (apart from the gifts of course) has been a sort of savoury cake made with bread, prawns and mayonnaise which has both the attributes of the “naughty but nice”: it is delicious and messy to eat!

After lunch back to Castelldefels and the long deliberation to think about what to take to the UK in January.

Festivity!

The love of an aunt for her nephew can surely reach no higher point than she give him a drum set for Christmas. What that says for her relationship with her sister and brother-in-law is quite another question!

The traditional time for present giving in Catalonia is Christmas Eve when the log with a painted face, Catalan hat and two stick legs shits presents for the kids after being beaten with a stick. There are some things in foreign cultures about which it is better not to ask!

After floods of tears from his brother when it was pointed out that the drum kit was a present to one person and not both peace (after a fashion) was restored with the brothers taking it in turns to beat the living daylights out of a miniature drum kit. One of the drum sticks broke almost immediately and the foot pedal for the “big” drum never worked but neither of these setbacks had the slightest effect on the quantity of sheer noise that was produced.

Our presents to the kids were track suits with their favourite characters sewn and embroidered on to them, but these, of course got barely a glance in the frantic ripping and rending of wrapping paper to see what else was there.

A subsidiary present for one of the boys was a small Zorro figure with an “alternative” body into which he could transform. Usually these figures are so securely encased in impenetrable clear plastic that the hysterical urgings of the recipient for you to release the figure from its crystal tomb are more than matched by the despairingly futile attempts of the adult to get at them.

This time it was different. The outer casing was removed with deceptive ease only to reveal that the figures were securely attached to the back of the packaging with numerous pieces of twisted wire. I assume that these fiendish trappings were put in place by machine or even more fiendish orientals determined to make life a real misery.

With wire ties it is usually possible to use the extended ends and by using thumb and index finger gently unwind them. Not with these. These attachments were carefully twisted to a point so that it was only possible to find the ends by wiggling a finger on the point and allowing the metallic points to disengage themselves from each other by becoming embedded in the fleshy part of the finger tip. The end result is that I now look as though in a previous life I have been a Victorian seamstress with puncture marks betraying my profession.

Needless to say this selfless work of mortification of the flesh was completely ignored by the impatient recipient who snatched the figures from my bloody grip and immediately started ripping off the limbs with sadistic abandon.

The meal, however, made up for any minor inconveniences that are consequent on any festivities which take in kids: pasta fish soup to start, followed by salad with strawberry sauce and then the main course of fish and shellfish. The meal was finished off with a selection of biscuits and turron all washed down with wine and Cava. Delightful. Even if my glass of Cava was knocked over by one of the kids!

I was first up this Christmas Morning (just as I was the first to bed yesterday) and we barely have time to regroup and have the stipulated number of cups of tea before we have to gird our loins and shuffle our way to the restaurant for the Christmas Lunch.

As is traditional either Toni's sister or I suffer from some incapacitating illness during the festive season. Over the last five years Carmen and I have only had a celebratory drink together on one occasion at Christmastime. This year it was Carmen's turn to suffer and abstain from alcohol. No doubt next year it will be mine!

The holiday begins!

The great advantage of my new green and lilac watch is that it is no luminous.

This is not because of some outdated fear I might have about the radio-active nature of the luminous paint (though as a child scraping the paint from a broken clock face I should have been) because these days it is not made of the same dangerous stuff of yore, but rather because I cannot see the time in the dark.

After four months (dear god!) of getting up early this term for the damnéd grind of school and knowing before hand that a mere glance at the glowing watch face will determine whether there is time to add another chapter to the involved semi-coherent semi-dream that is proving to be such a delicious alternative to rising from the warm, comfortable depths of bed – it is a delight to have no way of knowing what time it is and furthermore of not caring because it doesn't matter.

The end result is that I didn't get up until almost midday today! Such guilty pleasures! And now, after muesli and my second cup of tea it is almost lunch time. This is what a holiday is really all about. That and thinking of one's timetable and gloating over the classes that one is not taking!

I have finally worked out why my downloaded suite of programs have disappeared each day: the moving of the download into the “Applications” folder ensure that it has a life of more than 24 hours!

Similarly with the “Dashboard” (whose useful elements also disappeared into the thin electronic air) I have now worked out how to use it so that, at the touch of a button, I now have an array (ranging from snippets of the BBC News, via “Word of the Day” to Wikipedia) of useful tools flash up onto the screen and at the click of a touch sensitive multi-use mouse pad can be consigned to their place on the shelf at the bottom of the screen. I am learning the ways of my new and as yet untamed computer.

I had, after a more than satisfactory lunch in our local Basque restaurant, slumped down in the chair and was beginning to feel the real need to vegetate when the call to arms for the buying of Christmas presents was sounded and I had to gird the proverbials and sortie out again into the maelstrom which is the consumer strip which flanks the motorway.

We have now bought everything which we need to buy for the immediate future which takes us up to St Stephen's Day aka My Saint's Day at which time I would like it to be known that I am ready to receive small or large gifts to celebrate this auspicious moment in the year!

Tomorrow off to Terrassa to start the celebrations for Christmas.

The end and the start

There are easier ways to end a term than taking fifty kids into the centre of the city in the rain.

To be fair it wasn't raining when we set off on the long trek downwards towards the ferrocarril which was to take us into the city. Then there was the walk from the stop to the Cathedral square where the fair was situated.

There was a time, a couple of years ago, when I was prepared to be delighted and impressed by this fair – but those days have gone! The fair consists of a number of stalls which sell the raw material for the Belens or nativity scenes that many Catalans (et moi!) put together for the Christmas season.

The basic elements necessary are a model stable containing the three major characters with a selection of animals and the odd angel. Outside the stable the next level of normal characters include shepherds and the three kings. After those, you are only limited by your imagination and budget.

This time of the year gives television companies the opportunity to show those slightly odd folk to take things to the extreme and give over whole rooms in their houses to nativity scenes which take in villages, hundreds of characters, running rivers and water wheels, bakeries, trees, grass and whatever else comes to mind.

My own Belen has various workers bringing geese, eggs, wine, wood and sheep to the young child but the feature which seems to be odd to the point of blasphemy is the inclusion of the caganer or shitting man. This is a squatting figure, trousers down and with a pile of poo under his bottom.

These figures are a Catalan institution and you know that you have arrived in the public imagination when you find that a pottery figure of you as a caganer has been put on sale. The Barça team, politicians, sportspeople and any figures of note are available for inclusion in your particular scene. Many of the stalls were selling quite expensive figures of this type. Hardly the sort of thing that children should be looking at!

Our supervision of the children took the form of sitting in a cafe and drinking coffee (or in my case a glass of red wine) and eating a baguette. It's a hard old life in the modern education system!

By the time had arrived to go on to our next port of call I had visited a book shop and bought another book to add to my growing collection of volumes on Catalan painters. The new purchase is on Sorolla; a painter of naturalistic scenes executed in an expressively painterly style which reminds me of John Singer Sargent. The more sketch like Sorolla is the better I like him. He is a painter worth getting to know better.

The long walk back to school, only partially augmented by public transport, was timed to perfection so that we could go to lunch.

Our school version of a Christmas meal comprised a pasta and meatball soup followed by turkey with cooked pear. Sweet was a selection of turrons washed down by Cava. It is a long way from the school meals that I was used to for a number of years!

The film in the afternoon for the equivalent of Year 9 was a disaster as the projector closed itself down; luckily I remembered that Wednesday was my early leaving afternoon and I left.

Traffic was heavy on the way back home, but my heart wasn't as the glorious realization that I do not have to go back to school until the 10^th of January next year began to sink in.

To celebrate, as we went out to buy Christmas presents, I bought a watch. This, of course, is almost a reflex action with me and the house has caches of timepieces in a number of drawers. This one, however has a green strap and lilac face: a striking little number. A good holiday choice. And one has to celebrate the holiday season!

Day three and counting down!

I am beginning to succumb to the traditional curse of Mondays.

I wake up early and turn back to doze for that delicious hour or so when reality shades into Surrealistic wish-fulfllment, when all manner of things appear to be possible.

The intrusive and terminally irritating wake-up jingle of electronic musak that serves as an alarm bell on my mobile phone drags me back to the quotidian necessities such as leaving the bed and getting ready for school.

As Mondays start at 6.30 am all of the resented tasks are completed in darkness with the harsh bolt of electric light (and the official start of the day) being delayed as long as possible.

The joining of the never ending stream of traffic on the coast road is always a calculated risk. The glare of oncoming headlights seem one long light show and one has to rely on the fact that Spanish drivers are well used to people pulling out in front of them in a way which would get them beeped in the UK but here passes without rancour.

The dark crew with me as part of the sombre parade make their way towards the city. I branch off by the airport and join up with another motorway and a succession of traffic jams and dawn begins to break over the snarled up and snarling drivers.

Arriving early usually means that there is a prime parking space available (as the only possible advantage to this unnatural starting out) which means that I will be well placed to get into the stream of traffic going home in the maelstrom of cars driven by parents from our school who look straight ahead and will not give an inch.

It is sometimes comical to see the steely determination not to let me out become compromised by the youngster in the back of the car informing their parents that the flashing light indicates a teacher rather than a mere member of the public!

But the sheer horror of having to turn up on a Monday is becoming more and more of a bind: though that could well be that there are only a few days left before the end of term and each day is almost unbearable in its grinding tedium. Neither kids nor staff actually want to be there – and it shows.

Tomorrow is a normal day and then there are differences for the last day. I am accompanying the 1ESO to a visit to the Winter Fair which takes place in the square in front of the cathedral in Barcelona. Please pray that it doesn't rain because that would mean teaching for the periods that would have been spent drinking coffee, sorry, supervising the kids!

These last two days are going to be hard going as it is patently obvious that everybody's mind is, to put it mildly, elsewhere.

Nevertheless life goes on and I am beginning to use my new, unjustifiable computer. It is a thing of great loveliness and it does a bit of computing as well. It is so much quicker than my last machine that I feel that its purchase is justified by that factor alone. Well, not quite if I am truthful, but I don't care.

Part of The Family came down to Castelldefels with Toni and I was able to distribute part of one of my purchases from last year: candles composed of gold, frankincense and myrrh! They were a purchase from M&S so they must be good: I am sure that they improve and mature with time.

I am trying to put off the horror which is the realization that I have bought nothing for Christmas apart from a superfluous computer. Which, think about it, is not bad going!

Now spiritual preparation for a day's teaching that I don't want to do.

 Again.

A day for musing

Another milestone passed: I phoned up the telephone company to complain about the lack of intent access. The telephone call was troubled with mutual incomprehension on both sides but the proof of the conversation is clearly indicated by the fact that there is now, irrefutably, internet cover.

It was depressing to see that the highly paid professionals of the telephone company could recommend little more than taking the plug out and putting it back in again. It worked so I shouldn’t even breathe a word against the struggling (if only in a linguistic sense) gentleman who made all things well.

If I had thought about it I would have done the same thing before I phoned him up, but I had dark thoughts about what might have gone wrong and I had no desire to exacerbate the situation.

Yesterday I went in to Barcelona ostensibly to look at the Christmas lights and take a few photographs and perhaps mosey round the shops and sneer at the lack of bargain opportunities which will, in retrospect be even more glaring when I waltz around the January sales in the few hours of spare time that I am going to get when I visit the UK just before the re-start of school.

I shocked myself by the lack of spending that I did and was congratulating myself on my positively unnatural sense of restraint when I just happened to go up six escalators to the electronic department of El Corte Inglés. There, after some intensively desultory searching I happened upon the Apple store.

There is a product made by Mac which is sleek and silver and elegant and ridiculously expensive. It was while I was drooling over the MacBook Air 11 that I was accosted by a young girl who, after admitting that she spoke a little English, spoke none at all and witch like with foreign blandishments urged me to buy the said machine.

And I said “yes” and she said “we don’t have one at the moment” and I took that as the word from god that I should not even think about one. No, not even when she said that she would take my name and phone number and let me know at once when she was able to get one. I resisted. I stood firm. I went down the six escalators feeling undeniably cheated and yet, at the same time, a more moral person.

By the time that I had reached my car which was two floors underground the moral superiority was totally gone and the feeling that I had been “untimely ripped” away from what was rightfully mine had taken over.

It was then that MediaMarkt (think Temptation in the Desert and you get some kind of idea of what kind of role this unprincipled store plays in my life) came whispering into my mind, telling me that they sold the machine and, what is more, they were giving away a disk drive free, gratis and for nothing. As long as you paid a king's ransom for the machine itself.

It was night (seeing the lights remember) when I set off for home and I decided to give god another chance to make his message clear. I would cut off the usual road that I took home from the city and go onto the parallel motorway. From this road it was but a matter a moments to go into the shopping mall in Gava and find out if the store was open and . . .

So I took the road and then, just as I was about to join the motorway I took the wrong turning (something very easy to do given the darkness and the appalling road signing) and found myself going back the way I had come. I therefore took another turning to right myself and found that I had got on to a one way road going in the wrong direction with a low wall down the centre to ensure that mistakes could not be corrected.

With the magnanimity for which I am famous I decided to give god a “best out of five” opportunity to stop me getting to the shop.

Eventually I found myself on a bit of motorway that I knew and, inwardly cringing at the distance that I had manoeuvred myself out of my normal course, I made doggedly for the shop which I knew must, by this time be closed.

It wasn't.

My last chance of salvation was that they did not have the model that I wanted. At first it looked, as two assistants looked, that the specific machine I had insisted on what not there. However, four cupboards later there it was packed in a box as elegant as the contents. Clutching my free disk drive (a sop to a guilty conscience if ever there was one) I staggered my way to the check out.

Where my credit card did not work. This was because the cost of the machine was so astronomical that my card was not authorized to the full amount.

The girl behind the till was not fazed for a moment. She knew what had happened and she knew (dammit!) how to deal with the situation, so that within a few thumping heartbeats she had done what was necessary and I, with faltering feet and slow, was making my way to the poetically just subterranean car park for my journey home.

Where I am sitting at the moment, on the sofa in the living room, I can see two other laptops that I own which, if you think about it, makes this purchase all the more inexplicable.

Except, the others do not have an Apple logo that light up on the lid when the machine is in use; they do not have the metallic gleam that this one has; they do not have a power supply lead where the tiny head that fits into the power socket of the machine is magnetic and they are so, so heavy. So there.

I don’t even have the courage to take it into school. I will wait for next year when I will have a proper case for it. At the moment I am using something which was given away free with the magazine “Muy Interesante” and is bright red and lacks the refined sophisticated aura of expense that this seductive sliver exudes.

Well, it is bought now so the least that I can do is learn to use the thing as it should be used.

Perhaps as expiation I should put the Christmas tree up. Good old fashioned misery as recompense for the gratuitous indulgence in conspicuous expenditure!

Paul continues to be bored in hospital as he waits for a bed to become available for his operation to take place. It seems strange to be sitting here and not visiting him: the practical problems aside it is impossible not to feel a little guilt at not being there. It seems likely that he will be in hospital over Christmas which is not something that you would wish on anyone: but better that than not being taken care of. At least I will see him in January.

Now the tree and the misery of decoration only partially lessened by the thought that there are only three days left in school.

Onwards to the tinsel!

Things to come

On the radio an announcer said that the coming cold snap in Britain could be long lasting and be as severe as that experienced in the early 1960s. If that is true then the UK is in for a considerable amount of disruption.



My sympathy goes out to my fellow countrymen, but that sympathy is tempered by the fear that disruption could extend itself into the New Year and especially when I am supposed to be travelling to the country to meet friends and to have a damn good evening meal and a robust breakfast the next day.


I am only concerned about getting there on the 6th of January; I think that I can cope with being stranded in my native land surrounded by blankets of snow – as long as my friends can accommodate me!


To be fair the weather here is cold too and even the sunshine seems a little more muted today; the skies a little greyer and the weekend looking as though it might (yet again) be something of an anti-climax after the blue autumnal days that we have had during the working week!


I have decided to put up the Christmas tree as I will be in Castelldefels for most of the holiday and so I will get value for the effort that it always takes to set the thing up.


I am disappointed with the range and variety of Christmas tree decorations that are on sale. Usually at this point in the year I will have identified grotesquely expensive decorations in a few shops which might be worth looking out for in the wonderful sales which are not (repeat not) a feature of Spanish and Catalan life after the Day itself.


I am pleased with the three metallic filigree angels that I bought in Zara for more money than I have paid for Christmas decorations for a long time, but they seem very much the exception rather than rule and the cheap shops have decorations whose tacky vulgarity I cannot even pass off as Post Modernist irony were I to buy some. Perhaps I have not been dedicated enough in the way that I have approached the purchase of new decorations.


My usual way of proceeding is to plunder the sales then put away the new decorations so that their rediscovery in late December comes as something of a surprise. Sometimes they come as a total shock as one year I put the things in another place and didn’t discover them again for a few years and I really had forgotten them by the time they saw the light of day again!


But last year (and the year before that) I found nothing at a bargain price to encourage me to part with my money, so I suppose I do have some justification in buying something new.


With the newly rearranged living room where the space is now more open and not so compartmentalized there is still a problem of where to put the tree as a revolving bookcase is where the logical(ish) site should be. A slight to negligible problem in the scale of things. But a problem nonetheless.


The Indian meal this evening in the regular place in Port Ginesta was, at the start of our meal divided into two. In the major part there was scaffolding and Indians painting the superstructure of the interior of the restaurant so that the heavenly scent of the food was mixed with the pungency of paint.


The food was well up to the required standard and the conversation with Caroline just as expansive and before we knew it, it was quarter passed eleven. Caroline returned home with a small doggie bag of boiled rice and curry for her husband: a small gesture of thanks for babysitting!


Tomorrow the Christmas tree!

The long slog of the last days

I really, truly and sincerely did not want to get up this morning. I was warm and comfortable and I had a sneaking suspicion that if I got out of bed then I would find that it was dark and cold.



And it was.


I drove to work in the dark with that simmering resentment that all teachers know so well.


Even the fact that there were only five more days to the holidays did not raise my gloomy thoughts.


Starting work at 8.15 am is no joke and I was still harbouring resentment about the fact that I lost a free period for a head of school to have a meeting yesterday. It would appear that four and a half hours of meetings outside school hours is insufficient for this organization!


The sun, however, did emerge from the gloom and although not hot there was warmth as long as you were in direct contact with the rays.


And, as I was taking over a patio (playground) duty from a colleague I was. I refuse to wander about disturbing the smokers and the pupils up to other nefarious wrong doings but rather take out a chair and sit magisterially and survey the kids from the vantage point of the terrace.


In normal schools a teacher on duty is left severely alone. Not in this one. My chair was soon surrounded by a variety of pupils from a range of years engaging me in conversation. I had been hoping to continue reading a trashy American murder mystery on my phone (I still get a kick from saying that!) but that was impossible with the demands of the kids.


During one conversation a girl reminded me that I had told her two years ago that a gentle tapping on a part of the body would result in bruising if continued for long enough. God alone knows what prompted that little nugget of information to be produced in a lesson; though given her recent marks it would appear that not everything that I tell her actually remains in her brain!


At the end of the interminable day I finally managed to slip out of school a few minutes early during the remains of a period devoted to a departmental meeting (don’t ask) to try and avoid the unholy congestion that snarls up the narrow street around the school.


Making good time I decided to call into our local shopping centre and get some more disposable fountain pens. That was all that I was going to buy: clear, simple and cheap.


When I finally emerged from the centre I had bought a rather fine wide china cup with a yellow interior to go with the green individual cup tea maker; three delicate metallic angel Christmas decorations; a pair of noise reducing earphones; a tray with a mosaic design of using small rectangular black and white retro views of aspects of Barcelona; a selection of food and a boxed set of toiletries.


The after shave purchase was an interesting one as I was accosted by a fearsomely cosmetically challenged lady who offered to help as I picked up a box of stuff. I asked if I could try the after shave and I was promptly taken in hand.


I was given a sample of the fragrance that I had selected on one of those strips of card which, being wafted under my nose gave me the impression of slightly suppressed flowers. I grudgingly allowed her to squirt some on the back of my hand and I was gratified to find that my skin was working with its customary magic.


On me the after shave smelled nothing like the impression from the strip of card. The rather effete flowers had given way to something altogether more musky and not unpleasant.


I was given another squirt of something from a bottle which looked like an exploded and fragmented square which was reduced to sheer vulgarity on contact with my skin.


Her last attempt was something which smelled inoffensive on the card but transmuted to toilet freshener on contact with my epidermis. The lady who had been sniffing my hand as the experimentation proceeded looked frankly shocked by this emanation and mildly panicked until she reverted to the original choice which by then had settled down into quite a good scent. So I bought it. After all her work it was the least I could do!


Having loaded all my booty into the car I finally made it back to the house where I expected to see a gap where the bollard used to be.


I was gratified to find that my worst expectations were not realized and that the metal post was still standing where it should have been!


My innate sense of suspicion immediately told me that the Guilty Party was merely biding her time for me to drop my vigilance to spirit the thing away during a dull hour on the back end of Sunday.


Perhaps I am wrong and, at the third attempt of the local council to establish these metallic defenders of our space she is prepared to concede defeat and abide by the rules.


I have just had a phone call from Paul 1 who told me that Paul Squared has been taken in to hospital where they have ascertained that he has had a “cardiac incident” which could turn out to be a heart attack. This could be a life changing moment if Paul responds to the message that such an “incident” can be.


Such things put grumbling about the stresses of school life into a different sort of perspective.

Crime continues!

Our local council have (bless them!) replaced the bollards which they erected along the pavements during one furious day of frantic construction a couple of months ago. Not all of the bollards, you understand, just the one that our neighbour keeps knocking gently enough to dislodge, so that one of her grown up children can wrench it out of its hole and place it in the rubbish!



This wonton criminal damage is done so that she can park her car on the pavement herself and she is so inept at parking that she needs to take a gentle sweep across our drive to get to her front gate.


I like the bollards as they dissuade visitors from parking on the pavements themselves and thus blocking us in. It is a typical piece of selfishness on her part which is on a par with the collection of mutts that she keeps and which she allows to bark at all hours of the day and night. Allegedly.


I suppose that I have to put in that last world to save myself from the fear of a totally unjustified prosecution. I have, however taken a photograph of the car parked within inches of the post and also a photograph of the gap around the base of the post where it has already been loosened prior to its removal I suspect. Before I go to bed I shall check that the post is still there as we have daily refuse collections and the item will be whisked away in short order.


The pevious post I rescued from the rubbish myself, having worked out how the criminal mind would work in this part of the world. I informed the local council that I had the post and would willingly surrender it to be replaced.


I realize as I type that I am sounding more and more like a retired military man in Cheltenham (or perhaps Hove would be a better example given our proximity to the water) fulminating against the petty irritations of “damned scoundrels” who simply do not “play the game” – but you only have to see the amazing disregard for all civilized standards of reasonable parking in the summer in this area to realize that the bollards are a local government godsend.


I confidently expect the bollard to be gone by the time that I come home from school tomorrow evening. If it has then I will go to the town hall at once and start making pretty unveiled accusations vaguely hidden behind my appalling Spanish!


School is still resolutely not feeling festive in spite of the fact that there are now only five working days left before the holidays. And yes, I am counting.


I have had a few Christmas cards and I realize that I have sent none, so this weekend will have to see me try and discover where I have hidden the lists that I made some time ago with names and addresses on them.


My attempts to recreate the festive email which I sent last year have so far resulted in no picture being attached to the electronic Christmas card. That is something else that I can work on during the weekend.


I am assuming that Toni will make the requisite purchases to keep the Family at bay and then I can relax with a good book and treat the holiday in the way in which they should be treated.


Not forgetting my resolution to do something about my post modernist library. A little more of the Classical and a little less of the Abstract Expressionist will work wonders for the ordering of the books into some sort of arrangement where I stand an odds on chance of finding a book I know I possess.

Time is dragging

Four and a half hours of after school meetings in two days!



Even the thought that they would never be able to get away with this abomination in the UK is of little comfort when you are actually sitting in the middle of one of the interminable tortures as they (I say nothing unless directly asked a question) pick their way through the tortured lives of our poor little rich kids who are not making the grade.


It is living torture and the participants seem to relish the whole bloody experience, while I gnash my teeth in impotent fury and think of book that I haven’t read because I consider them hard going and think that even they would be preferable to listening to colleague as they vacillate between Spanish and Catalan.


I would rather be reading “The Fairy Queen” – surely I can say no more for the level of desperate boredom that I reach within five minutes of the start of the meeting.


I look back on so-called “Curriculum Meetings” in my last real school with something approaching fondness – and those were meetings where colleagues sometimes watched me rather than listened to what was going on as they hoped that this would be the occasion when I actually burst into tears of hopeless despair rather than merely looking as if I was on the point of so doing.

Never mind, I keep telling myself, there are now only six teaching days to the holidays; and these holidays seem (at this point in the long drawn out term) to be of almost heavenly length and stretch from the evening of the 22nd of December to the morning of the 10th of January! O bliss!


I am still firm in my resolve that this holiday will see some sort of real attempt to bring order to my library: I wonder if this resolution will survive to the 23rd of December!


Although the dining room in school has sprouted a stunted Christmas tree and a few hanging decorations which are at my head level there is almost no sense of it being near the (or in the) festive season.


A few houses in the vicinity have at last put up a few lights and one or two flats have a Christmas tree ostentatiously in the window but it doesn’t even come close to the over-kill on British television and in British shops. Visiting Britain in early December was something of a culture shock: not only the remnants of snow but also shop windows filled with Christmas trash and aisles in supermarkets groaning with Christmas food and gifts (at all prices!)


Catalonia is not like that. Admittedly I am in a small seaside town rather than wandering about in the wonderland that is the centre of Barcelona, but one would still expect shopkeepers to be doing their level best to get the euros out of pockets. Even the weather is unseasonably warm: it was cold coming home (after another bloody meeting, sorry, but they do rankle) but the temperature was 11ºC – which was a considerable number of degrees warmer than the day’s high temperature in my home city! I should count my blessings!


In school our groups have changed. In the first year the class changes at some point in the term so that at the end of the year each first year English teacher will have taught the entire first year intake.


This is so that at the end of the year we will know the names of the whole of the year and we will be able to refer to children for the rest of their time in school by their first names.


Yes. Right. Good idea. But for me. I freely acknowledge that I have a sort of psychological problem with learning names which I have no desire to deal with at this stage of my career. I always feel that as long as I can usually get the names of my immediate colleagues right more often than wrong then I am doing as much as I can reasonably be expected to do. Any greater expectations will I am afraid be not met. The name neutral greeting of “Hello there!” has stood me in good stead for umpteen years and will see out my time in this school. I think.


Only one class has demanded that I know their names and that effort last year is still clear in my memory as a time of almost impossible intellectual effort!


So today I had another tranche of kids for my Media Studies class (last two periods of the day) and some of them I have taught before and some of them I am actually teaching now in their English class. So, some kids I will actually see for three periods a day for one day a week. Which is something to think about!


What changing classes at this stage of the term with only a handful of days to go before a longish holiday is that you start the introduction to your course and then the kids forget everything by the time they come back and you have to start again.


I have designed the course this time to be intentionally fragmented so that each of the “bits” can be taught individually so that there will still be some sort of continuity as we make our way through what I want to teach when you look back at the bits.


The other course I co-teach with Suzanne has also started. This is an introduction to modern art. This course too has been modified as last term a small group of students was taken out of the whole group and given the task of translating a children’s book about the disaster in Haiti from Spanish into English. This is (hopefully) gong to be published and sold in aid of the people of Haiti. So a whole group of kids did not join the main group until well into the course.


We started the course this time will the whole group together and them completing an exercise where they were give small colour reproductions of a whole range of paintings from our period. They had to make a selection of from seven to nine of the paintings for an exhibition, choosing one as a “masterpiece”. They were also allowed to choose five of the paintings and put them in a Salon de refusés on the back wall of their cardboard gallery.

Ceri will be gratified to learn that most of the groups chose one of his paintings to adorn the walls of the galleries, while Warhol, Pollack, Rothko, Cezanne etc all featured in the rejects!


It is very difficult to work up any real enthusiasm at this stage of term where all my colleagues (and the kids) are all jaded and exhausted. God help us all when we start the long slog in January to the promised land of the Easter holidays! With no half term!


Still, this is no time to think about that: six more working days. Ah!

A true Sunday

A day with marking!

Admittedly there was plenty of displacement activity up to and including hoovering! But, nevertheless, marking was done!


As part of the displacement activity a phone call to Dianne “reminded” me that Ceri’s significant birthday was in January and that, given the generous length of the Christmas holidays, I would be able to pop over and celebrate.


It is always envigorating to discover that with a few key strokes on the internet flight and car can be booked and, paid for this far in advance, it will appear that the trip is free by the time I go on it.


The actual celebration will take place in a Michelin Starred Restaurant in Monmouth, The Crown in Whitebrook and is certainly something which gives a warm comfortable light to the dark days of early January.

With any reasonable luck the snows will fall and I will be stranded in the UK unable to take up my duties in the institution on the hill in Barcelona. There must be a personal premium from global warming somewhere along the line!


The date on which I am leaving is the celebration of The Kings in Catalonia which allows children to get a sort of second Christmas as present giving is an essential part of the festivities after the kids have been pelted with sweets from the street processions which are also part of the spectacle.


I must admit that the possibility of taking part in the consumerism rush known as the British January Sales is more likely to engage my interest rather than an assault by boiled sweets!


The History of the World in 100 Objects continues to bemuse and stimulate as I strip, what are for me, shreds of fascinating knowledge from the pages. It also makes me want to revisit the British Museum and find some of the objects described in the book. I wonder if there is a “100 Objects Pathway” through the museum now, or if some of the cases have a sticker pointing out the individual article’s inclusion! I do hope so; virtually anything short of armed kidnapping is worth trying to get people through the intimidating portals of our museums.


In Spain all museums have an admission charge, although there is a cultural identity card that teachers can get which gives free admission to some, though not all, of the collections that are held by the state.


I think that the idea behind the “100 Objects” is something which should be taken up by other institutions and they could tailor the title to the strengths of the individual collections. As one of the foremost institutions of its type in the world the British Museum can easily accommodate the grandiose “History of the World” designation, but something more domestic in terms of Barcelona would be a great way to get people into the galleries of the city and it would encourage us to look more closely at what they contain.


There are ten days left in this term (eight, if you take out the next weekend) and then we are supposed to get our pay for December and also the “extra pay” that is an odd feature of the way the salary is considered in this country.


At Christmas and in the Summer you are paid an extra month`s money with your normal salary.


Disturbingly, I have heard from other people that the amount of this extra pay has been cut (The Crisis! The Crisis!) by up to 30% for some teachers. Nothing has been said in our school and so I am assuming that the pay will be as normal.


You have to understand that the Generalitat has cut the salaries of governmental employees by 5% as part of their “brave” approach to compensate for the criminally reckless activity of some callously selfish bankers. Part of our salary is paid by the Generalitat and was therefore cut by 5%. Our type of grant-aided school has taken the government to court saying that such action is not justified in our particular case, but, in the mean time (while we wait forthe equivalent of a Daniel come to justice!) our school has made up the salary to its normal amount. I hope that they will do the same for the “extra pay”.


Please note that even factoring in the so-called “extra” pays (surely just a way of delaying proper payment throughout the year) I have to go back a number of years in the UK to find a salary as low as the one that I am now paid! In terms of Unions and professional pay Spain has a considerable way to go before it reaches parity with the most mean of the more northern countries!


I do most solemnly swear that I will do something (leaving that word carefully undefined) about the chaos of my books this holiday.


I have attempted to find a few books over the last few weeks that I know that I have and they are mislaid as surely as the books from the 1970s that the British Museum Reading Room used to say were lost and unable to be produced “due to enemy bombing during the war.”


A library, if it is to be anything more than a random collection of vaguely interesting artefacts, has to be organized so that the aspiring librarian at least has a reasonable chance of finding a volume that he knows he possesses. “Froth on the Day Dream” still has not surfaced and that is an ongoing irritation which is a prod in the direction of order!


However before any books are “sorted” I am presented with two decisions that will have to be made: shall I put up the Christmas tree this year, and if so, where can I put it?


These are weighty considerations and something to think about before I drift off into oblivion.

Comestibles

I may have been wearing a jumper and a vest but I did have lunch on the outside balcony of our local restaurant on the beach. There was a brisk, blustery wind and the paper place mat had to be held down with the wine bottle and the knife and fork but the sun was in my face and it was acceptable.



I was, of course, the only person not wearing a coat and the only person not looking as though they were very much braving the elements sitting in the open air!


While the meal was perfectly acceptable the view over the sea looking towards the headland in the distance at the end of the sweep of the beach with the sun slowly sinking was breathtaking.


The incentive to leave the restaurant and go home was what had arrived early in the morning.


Having been brought up on Radio 4, I am a true disciple of the “unconsidered trifle” approach towards human knowledge. I delight in the squirreling away of unrelated facts, opinions and assertions like some sort of bookish magpie - and what arrived this morning feeds this need.


Having heard a few of the broadcasts I was eagerly awaiting the book which simply had to be produced to go with the series and Amazon (god bless it) afforded me the opportunity to get the book at cut price so that even with the postage and package I still managed to save almost ten quid.


“A History of the World in 100 Objects” by Neil MacGregor is published by an impressive trinity of The British Museum, the BBC and Allen Lane. It is a delight.


Where else, in one set of hardback covers, could I have found out that the blue colour in the Hokusai woodcut of The Great Wave is actually Prussian Blue and not a native Japanese pigment and therefore the print is a reflection of the opening up of Japanese society rather than a stylized statement of its otherness; that Lothair (he of the Crystal showing the story of Suzanna and the naughty elders and a descendant of Charlemagne) was King of Lotharingia a country squashed between the greater possessions of Charles the Bald in the west and Louis the German in the east. This country was devoured by his neighbours after his death but, and this is what I didn’t know, the name of Lotharingia survives in the name of Lorraine!


If things like that don’t interest you then I can only echo with Mr T and say, “I pity the fool!”


The book is a treasure trove, both literally and in a descriptive sense as MacGreggor’s writing is short and to the point and aimed quite clearly at the general reader.


The range, as you would expect if you could draw on the resources of an institution like the British Museum is astonishing ranging from the pebble looking stone sculpture of the Ain Sakhri Lovers Figurine of 9000BC to the much more detailed lovers in the rather surprisingly explicit Warren Cup from Roman times from some 9000 years later.


From The Rosetta Stone to a gold VISA card the objects defy expectation and the urge to read is akin to that I feel when I inadvertently open The Guinness Book of Records and lose myself inside. I fear that this book is going to make my everyday conversation even more unbearable than it is at the moment. After all Radio 4 listeners are few and far between in this part of the world so I have the field clear to drop interesting pieces of information into any conversations in which I happen to find myself!


Back to the book!

Seems is what is real!

We have all agreed that only teaching Thursday and Friday this week has not meant that the teaching week has seemed dramatically shorter. This is a well attested phenomenon that is a function of teaching late in the term and any teacher with more than a few days experience will assert the truth of the observation.



This is especially daunting as next week (a full week) starts off with one of our legendary and interminable meetings after school when ever single class is commented on and every teacher has to make some sort of fatuous comment.


Of course as we are taking about individual students and classes and not educational theory or curriculum everyone has something to say – apart from my good self when I only speak when I am forced to; and only then through gritted teeth.


We have now been told of the “final” arrangements for the so-called “White Week” or “Ski Week” or “Trip Week” that is going to take place in late February or early March.


We people who are not (emphatically not) going on any trips with any pupils have been told that, thanks to an arcane calculation we will be required to come in to school for three days in the week from 9 to 1 pm. Monday and Friday are both “free” making satisfyingly long weekends at each end of this fiasco.


To be fair the week is not the fault of the school but rather of an idiot of a minister for education in Catalonia making up policy on the hoof and then looking on bemusedly as schools tried to make practical sense of his mindless pronouncements.


The school does actually pay teachers a flat rate for each day that they go on a trip with the pupils, but this does not compensate for the woeful rates of pay for our full time services. This is just of academic interest to me as going on school trips is not something which I would contemplate however much (and it isn’t that much) extra that they pay.


A few Christmas trees have gone up in the school but there is precious little sense of the festive season around. In Castelldefels the main street is bedecked with furry coloured discs suspended across the street and our part of the town has sprouted a single forlorn Christmas greeting across one of the side streets. There is no evidence of Christmas trees blazing away behind net curtains and the number of external lights on houses is summed up in the single word “paucity.”


The single clearest indication that Christmas is imminent is the supermarket shelves groaning with the weight of solid slabs of calories in the shape of turron. This confection comes in all shapes sizes and consistencies and represents the total sugar output of half a dozen Caribbean islands. No festive home is complete without it and an unwary visitor is presented with a bewildering array of tooth rotting delight to eat.


One gets much more of a sense of Christmas from watching (as I now can) British television through the magical assistance of the internet and the Pauls’ “switchbox”. I don’t really understand the details but my birthday present of a complex program on my laptop means that I can infiltrate my televisual way into a house in Rumney and Cardiff and using their aerial in some sort of undefined way piggyback my way onto the airwaves.


I watched an episode of “Grand Designs” and realized how much I had missed intelligent, well presented, interesting television!


Time for a little more!

What next!

The trauma of going back to work after the too short/too long holiday of three days added to the weekend was made even worse by the fact that it rained as well!



In a comic re-run of our “self inflicted injury” approach to deadlines, no sooner were we back on the treadmill of lessons than we were worrying about the collation of examination results and the termly grades that are the be-all and end-all of the educational life of our school. Suddenly everything has to be done and dusted by midday tomorrow. A self imposed deadline which, as far as I can see has no real relevance to anything in the so-called “real” world as opposed to dictates of the fervid atmosphere of our institute on the hill!


I didn’t get out of school until 6 pm this evening after marking part of the sixth form’s mock exam which should have been marked by a computer but had to be done by hand as we do not have the optical reader which would have allowed me to leave way before darkness fell!


The fun and games continue on Monday when we have one of our periodic monster meetings of the entire teaching staff talking about pupils way into the same darkness that engulphed me this evening.


The stories of what happened today in the demonstrations against the imposition of increased tuition fees for university students is a disturbing indication of what is to come.


Even in my days in university all demonstrations were places where, mixed with the “normal” students making a shamefaced manifestation of their wishy-washy liberal sentiments, there were always members of the hard left or the SWP or Communists (in the days when it was still intellectually acceptable to feel something approaching toleration for that much abused system) or hangers on from some sort of more politically involved group than the overwhelmingly white, middle class and slightly diffident students making polite demonstrations that I was involved with.


Smashing shop windows in Oxford Street and splashing paint on the Roller of the Prince of Wales seems to be a taste of what is yet to come.


The cuts have not yet really begun to be felt by the general population and, it has to be admitted that student tuition fees is something of a side issue from what is going to affect the pockets of the people in Britain in the next couple of years.


The Lib-Dems, after swigging deeply from the poisoned chalice should not be particularly surprised that the party is now imploding to a chorus of vituperation from people who feel that they have been betrayed by the vacillating approach which is an integral part of the realities of being part of a government which is largely made up of people with whom you don’t agree. I am not sure what the Lib-Dems should have done, but I am blood sure that I will never forgive them for joining the government of Conservatives and I look forward to their being cast into the everlasting darkness (with burning sulphur ever unconsumed) there to gnash their organic, macramé brushed teeth in impotent agony. God rot them. And the Conservatives too. Don’t think that I failed to notice that the so-called Prime Minister of my country invited That Woman to come and have tea with him in Downing Street. God rot the lot of them!


Much as I despise those in the political ascendency at the moment in my country, I am equally disgusted by the violence which opportunistic demonstrators use which devalues the reasoned opposition of those with a valid case against the present shifting of the weight of payment for the present financial crisis away from those who are mostly to blame and onto those who lack the power to force the government to protect their privileged positions in the financial system.


I think that last paragraph has to be said all in one breath and with innocent eyed exasperation so that the cathartic effect takes away the reason that you might have said it in the first place.


What I should do is go back to my telephone and read another sci-fi story from the 1950s; start reading my book on evolution and make myself a nice cup of tea.


Ahhh!

The fun way to misery!

At the last second I switched my choice of book from the Dawkins’ hit on evolution and chose “Whoops – Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay” by John Lanchester.

This is a brilliant book. Lanchester, with a novelist’s sure touch in the writing, makes this a compulsive read. [If you haven't read it already then I thoroughly recommend his first novel "The Debt to Plasure" a very funny, very nasty and unforgetable story.] He doesn’t talk down to the reader but he acknowledges that what he is writing about is going to affect all of us for some time to come and therefore he feels that he has a mission to help us understand what he thinks has gone on and what needs to be done.

He writes, “The credit crunch was based on a climate (the post-Cold War victory party of free-market capitalism), a problem (the sub-prime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk) and a failure, that of the regulators. It was their job to prevent both the collapse of individual companies and systemic risks which ensured they failed. But that failure wasn’t so much the absence of attention to individual details as it was an entire culture to do with the primacy of business, of money, of deregulation, of putting the interest of the financial sector first.”

This sort of clarity is a key element in the narrative which he tells. His explanations are clear and easily understood and he links anecdote and allusion to illuminate his perceptions. He is very much a participant in this story and it is difficult not to be drawn into his world when he starts off chapter one with, “As a child I was frightened of cashpoint machines.”


Essentially this is a depressing book with his descriptions of (some) bankers and the activity of banks guaranteed to test the limits of the reader’s credulity while we the taxpayers fork out money to keep them in business.


This book should be required reading for anyone who feels short changed by what has gone on and wants a clear explanation of what has happened, is happening and what is likely to come.


I won’t waste my time suggesting that this should be compulsory reading for bankers as the ones that were most to blame are the ones still to blame and they are carrying on (with little or no governmental opposition) as though nothing has happened.


It is at times like this that I begin to think that our lack of participation in the radical jollifications that went on throughout Europe in 1848 might be made up for in a crusade against the guilty: we could always import suitable lanterns from the French.


Read it!


Last day of freedom and an 8.15 am start tomorrow: at least it is within a couple of days of the weekend!


I go back to a fury of assessment when all sorts of results have to be loaded into a creaking computer system for use in an after school meeting to discuss (interminably and impertinently) the details of students’ achievement. In Catalan. Sigh.


Lunch today was a deeply unsatisfying experience in a Turkish restaurant. The meat was doggedly tough and the wine tasted as though it had just been made. And not cheap either. To my bewilderment the restaurant filled rapidly and people seemed eager to eat the well displayed by culinary vacuous offerings.


Today was a fiesta and there was much blowing of raucous reeded instruments in the town square in front of the church and town hall. Stretching down our little Ramblas was a snaking line of small stalls staffed by people wearing approximations of peasant clothing to emphasise the home-made qualities of the produce they were selling.


Though they were undoubtedly quaint I was not tempted to buy anything and happily returned to my book. Many of the stalls were of what can only be described as the “frippery” type with ornaments, soap, pottery and highly priced bread. The prices were all encouragingly high and one wonders yet again where the financial crisis is in all this. There is supposed to be 20% unemployed in Spain; the construction boom has come to an abrupt halt; government employment seems set to take another cut both in terms of employment and in terms of the money paid – all should be doom and gloom but the shops are packed and people seem to have plenty of money to throw around. It is most confusing – though as few people seem to have shown any relationship with the reality of the situation I suppose that I will have to go on dancing on the rim of the crater until the ash begins to fall!


The one thing that I did buy in town was a further supply of Red Earl Gray tea – after all it is only sensible to stock up on essentials in times of trouble!