A bad day to do the right thing eventually

A bleak day with Barcelona lost under a thick blanket of smog based cloud.  Aesthetically it is quite attractive with buildings looming out of the mist with their foundations lost in greyness but I like the sun and I miss it every minute it is supposed to be shining.

There is a parallel greyness about my colleagues who are looking somewhat drawn and haggard, as the awful prospect of unbroken teaching days becomes an un-escapable continuing misery; where the nirvana (if I may be allowed a cross-religious allusion) of the Easter holidays seems distant indeed.

I am at present being bullied by one of my colleagues.  This is not as negative as it sounds as the bullying is at my instigation as her task is to remind me of my stated intention of going to have a swim each day.  She vaunts her prowess on her Wi-Fi fitness board while pointedly reminding me of my non-swimming status.  She tells me that my lack of brownie points is matching the state of the National Debt and that there will soon be no way back. 

I have taken the first step and put the swimming bag into the boot of the car, but I have not checked to see if all the necessary impedimenta are in place for the swim to take place.

In the Municipal Pool it is essential to wear a very unbecoming swim hat; to wear sandals to the pool; goggles to protect the eyes and earplugs.  The clothes have to be placed in lockers that only lock if you buy a lock to secure it, so lock and key have to be in one of the pockets.  A glasses case is essential too because there are simply too may health and safety issues connected with lodging them in a shoe for the duration of the swim.  Then there is a towel and soap.  And of course the card to get in.  What used to be a fairly casual visit has now become a major journey!

This is merely an excuse and not a convincing one for my lack of effort.  I know that, just like banana yogurt, I will like it when I try it.  I do enjoy swimming and all I have to do is allow the car to continue on to the next turning on the motorway and I’ll be there.  Perhaps this afternoon is when the correct approach to exercise re-asserts itself.  Meanwhile there are still two teaching lessons and a departmental meeting to get through before the freedom of the open motorway and home.  Or a swim, as I should say!

Which I actually had!

Slipping into the comfortable waters of the pool had a delicious sense of re-entering a natural element.  I could tell that I had not had a real swim for some time by the growing ache in my shoulders, but this will not last and as long as I keep it up I should be back to normality in a few days.

The only downside to the experience was forgetting to put in my earplugs.  I only remembered when I was at the pool side and I simply couldn’t be bothered to go back in to the changing rooms; unlock the locker; dig out my swim bag from the pile of clothes under which it was buried; go through the pockets to find the plugs and then traipse all the way back to the pool.

 

I made an executive decision to suffer the consequences of water in the ear.  This was fine until I shook my head at the end of the swim and only managed to unblock one ear.  The other remained stubbornly waterlogged and I had fears of having to live with it like that for a couple of days – which has happened in the past.  Gingerly prodding it with a perfectly shaped index finger finally broke the dam and hearing was restored.

Restored in time to go to Sitges to reclaim my glasses which had a wisp of metal masquerading as an arm of my specs fixed to the lens: so much paid for so little!

 

For our evening meal Toni (for it was he) had a yearning to go to Burger King with which I complied.  He now has a vivid recollection of what the food was like and I do not think that we will be repeating this eating experience any time in the near (or indeed distant) future!

To compensate for the awful meal we called into a pastry shop and bought a custard-filled pastry confection topped with a glorious selection of fresh fruit.  It may have cost more than the meal for two in Burger King but it was a bloody sight more tasty!  

And there is some left for tomorrow to lighten the dark start of an early class!

Higher things

The welter of paper tedium that is at the heart of examination marking is slowing down so that the steady flow of class marking can now surge forward and be considered.

What is left is the group of people who missed the examination and will have to be accommodated at some time in the future.  This means that odd papers will suddenly appear from nowhere that you will be expected to mark.  I have kept all the mark schemes but, as is always the case in these situations when you do not have a room of your own, it is the putting your hand on them that is the important point.

In terms of time expended, the maverick examination papers take a disproportionate effort when you consider just how much (or rather little) time was spent on the bulk of the marking!

This too, as they say, will pass.

 

I am at present in an empty library doing a “library duty” listening (because I can and there is no one to disturb) to Mozart.  If push came to shove then I could probably justify playing Mozart in a school as his seems to be the only music that actually aids pupils’ concentration – or at least that is what we are told by various spurious “scientific” studies which I can’t name.

I don’t know whether I should be surprised, but I am enjoying listening more to Mozart than to the other composers that I have downloaded.  It may be that I am using his music as it was supposed to be used – as background noise for other activities.  Divertimenti and Serenades are perfection in subtly adjusting the ambience upwards on the pleasure scale.

I haven’t got to the church music or the operas yet when a little more concentration may be called for!

Another cold day with flawless blue skies; I hope that this weather continues to the weekend so that we can accommodate the numbers of people who will be eating long onions cooked on the barbecue.

I will have to go into Castelldefels to spend more money.  Although I need little incentive to do this, there is an actual reason behind this little jaunt.  Last night I knocked the Bodum tea thingie into the sink and it broke.  That is the glass body of the thing shattered; the plastic holder and the plunger are fine.  All I need is a replacement body.

And I know that I am going to have problems.  Firstly the chichi little shop that I got it from is only going to stock the whole thing and the torn jean wearing and spiky haired affected person who usually serves me is going to look at me in bewilderment when I ask him for another.

Then, even if I do manage to get a replacement, there is the major problem of fitting the glass into the holder.  To say that the glass fits snugly is an understatement and I am convinced that in fitting it myself I will not only break the thing but also take a chunk out of my hand in doing so.  And even if I do not break it by forcing it into the holder, I will find when I have completed the insertion that the spout is not correctly aligned with the handle and I will have to start all over again and break the glass in the adjustment.

And it has to be replaced as I have now got thoroughly used to brewing exotic and flavoursome cups of tea by a judicious mismatching of various teas to obtain something unique.  I rather like the fact that I am mixing one of the most expensive teas that I have ever bought (the Earl Grey Rioja) with a cheap black tea from Lidl’s: delicious.  And the Bodum thingie is easy to use and jolly and encourages me to experiment, so without it I am back to the PG Tips triangular teabags – it’s just not the same!  If necessary I will buy another one just so that I can (eventually) find the glass to replace and have a spare so that I will not have to suffer the horrors of real tea withdrawal symptoms again.

There is a real variety of teas on sale in the shop and I am thinking of branching out and trying another one – perhaps something a little more subtle.  I remember drinking a Formosan Oolong in University that I quite liked, but when the tin from Fortnum and Mason was finished I kept ordinary tea in it.  Perhaps I should revisit old taste paths.  I am certainly inclined to try some of their muslin tea bags packed in fetching individual sachets with the most outré flavours!

I was right.  My presentation of the plastic holder in the coffee shop was greeted by the boy with open incredulity.  He did not, of course have a replacement glass container but did offer to “ask” about getting a replacement and he also took my phone number.  We shall see.

In the meantime I asked for another cafeteria and lighted upon a shining metallic little number that was also a thermos flask.  The revelation of the price evoked a gasp of horror from me, whereupon the boy hastened to inform me that the price he had just told me was the “normal” price, but that it was on offer at a price a few euros less: so I bought it.  Never let it be said that I failed to fall for a transparent sales ploy.

 

By way of compensation the boy gave me a sample of coffee to try, a single sip of which has woken me from my usual evening torpor and will probably keep me awake for the rest of the night!

I have replenished my stocks of the exorbitantly priced but delicious Early Grey Rojo and also bought some Oolong Fancy – which in its raw state looks exotic indeed!

Stewart has sent me the “perfect” recipe for Bolognese sauce and I intend to try it out on Saturday: shopping in the morning for the ingredients and the rest of the day for the cooking.  The recipe actually says, “and cook for at least 3 hours (4 is even better) until the meat is very tender” and this is not something that I normally do – I am more of an “instant” cook and demand visible and edible results almost immediately.  It will be an exercise in restraint for me and I only hope the meal is worth it!

The nightly task of feeding CDs into The Machine is well underway, but I am still not even a third of the way through the Mozart collection and already there are 41.5 GB of music electronically tucked away in the innards of The Machine. 

I continue to trip merrily along unfrequented Mozartian melodic roads listening to the odd little kontretanz, gavotte or menuet.  The more I listen the more ludicrous the price of this amazing set of CDs becomes. I urge people to buy it: Mozart – Complete Edition - Brilliant Classics.

A number of years ago I read that of all the people in the world who have ever been capable of playing all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas the majority are alive and playing now.  In the same way how many people have been in the position of having all of Mozart’s music at the press of a key.

Before the advent of recordings the only way to get to know Mozart was via the score or going to a performance.  People who were able to read scores would probably have a piano score rather than the full score of many pieces.  And anyway what sort of person would have the scores of the whole of Mozart’s oeuvre?  My ownership of this set of records means that I will shortly have heard more performances of Mozart’s music than many experts on the composer in past times!  It becomes something of a privilege.  I suppose it should also be something of a responsibility: shouldn’t my appreciation of the Music become more profound with such exposure to the totality of the production of the composer.  Or perhaps I should just wallow in the luxury of ownership!

In terms of cost: if I think about the first LP records that I owned which cost just over a pound (bought by my parents I might add) allowing for inflation, if I had bought the set of Mozart then it would have cost the present day equivalent of about two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds, whereas it actually cost me just under fifty quid! 

Admittedly this amount was after taking into account the 3 for 2 offer in El Corte Ingles – but still, remarkable.

Happy sigh!

Yearning

There is no substitute for having your own teaching room.

In our school (apart from gym, art and science) the teachers go to the children rather than vice versa.  This makes everything much more difficult.  We are supposed to be using technology in our teaching, but only the most naïf of teachers relies on equipment working when someone else has been using it just before you.  And it’s worse if they haven’t been using it because then it has to be set up and it is a golden rule of life in the classroom that problems multiply with an inverse relationship to the complexity of the technology employed.

 

God knows it was difficult enough in the days of the spirit duplicator.  Teachers wandering around with beatific smiles on their faces and trailing behind them the slightly antiseptic scent of the alcohol heavy liquid used to transfer the image to paper with this method of reproduction. 

What wonderful ideas the term “Spirit Duplication” raises in the mind: illicit experimentation in producing a clone of the soul; unlimited booze or perhaps the general spreading of zest for living.  How banal the reality: smudged images and print on unpleasant paper.

Then the Roneo machine; that voracious eater of paper.  I once left a Roneo machine unattended as I had a vast number of copies to produce.  While I was absent a piece of paper concertinaed and each succeeding sheet concertinaed in turn, with the result when I opened the door to the room on my return I was met by a paper flow of biblical proportions!  Luckily I was able to find plastic sacks and dispose of the evidence before anyone found out.

Luckily in that instance the Roneo “skin” was not damaged and I was able to print out the full run that I needed without too much further fuss!

My great discovery was to find out that there were special books, which could store the skins for re-use.  After careful cleaning off the ink from the skin it could be placed in the “book” on a numbered page and then catalogued.  I eventually had quite a collection of these books representing a monumental quantity of work.

Then came the photocopier.  The first one I came into contact with lived in a portacabin of its own and was tended by a deputy head who understood the mysteries of its use.  The primitive system that it adopted was akin to photography with positive and negative sheets of paper that had to be peeled apart leaving a grey image on shiny paper that sent shivers of disgust down your spine every time you touched it.  Even thinking about it is creating the old reaction and I am shuddering with what can only be partially explained by the cold!

Xerox was a revelation.  A massive machine that produced single copies in black and white.  If you were lucky.  These machines had “key holders” who were able to get inside and sort out the inevitable paper jams.  Mere “users” could only load the paper – always remembering to “fan” the ream before insertion for gnomic reasons never divulged.  I always assumed it was simply a propitiatory ritual to the paper gods who always had to be appeased.

And Xerox was the harbinger of the modern age of school technology.  The BBC-B computer; Sinclair and the QL; my first Apple; my Fall from Grace and turning to the Dark Side of PC ownership and the torment of Windows in its most tortuous form, through a multitude of increasingly powerful computers - which I continued to use as if they were typewriters with attitude – to the present day and The Machine.

 

Then there were the OHPs. for many teachers the last piece of “hi-tec” equipment that they knew how to work and knew how it worked.

I must have been one of the few teachers who used an OHP in his student teacher days and went on using one throughout his career.  For dependability, easy of use and effectiveness for money I still think that OHPs cannot be beaten.  I am not so Luddite that I do not recognize the amazing capabilities of computers; but in the classroom they so often go wrong that they are a positive liability.  Whereas the old OHP just goes on and on – and I had one which had a built in spare blub which came into play at the movement of a simple lever!

But the idea of carting one around (even the so called portable version) from classroom to classroom is guaranteed misery.  You have to have a base.  Preparation of material and its presentation is so much easier if you don’t have to take everything with you at the end of each lesson.  Space is at a premium; my cupboard in the staffroom is full and claiming a space on the two tables for personal work is sometimes difficult.  There is no space for silent work and piercing, female Catalan voices can cut through the keenest concentration!

Meanwhile the loading of Mozart into The Machine continues apace with the only problem being the finding of the music when it is locked in the electronic innards.  However much I scoff, I think that the only solution to find some of my favourite pieces is going to be learning the K numbers!  Soon I will be able to listen to Radio 3 without feeling like an imposter!

I am, at present listening to K 525, the Serenade No 13 in G, which is not the title by which I knew it when I listened to it on my EP.  I was always losing it because it was a different size to the LPs and was engulfed by them.  The version I am listening to now is by the Kurpfälzisches Kammerorchester Mannheim conducted by Florian Heyerick (neither of which I have heard of) but a very sprightly version it is; perhaps a little too sprightly for me, but energetic certainly.

I am thoroughly enjoying my forays into the more obscure (are there any?) corners of Mozart’s music and have listened with condescending amazement to the early symphonies and various odd pieces that I have never heard before and, to be truthful, probably will never hear again!

I am almost 25% of the way through loading the discs into The Machine and I am now listening to K 250, which I feel I should know, but I don’t.  I think that I am going to find that a lot in my future listening – and not only to Mozart!

Work frustrated

Not only have I forgotten my reading glasses but also I have left my school keys in one of my coats.  This is because my shirt does not have a breast pocket.

Small changes in one’s normal routine have grave consequences in the way life is lived.  The breast pocket in normal times houses my blue and red disposable fountain pens and my mobile phone.  Wearing contact lenses means that there is not room for the mobile phone, as my half-moon reading glasses in their tube have to be lodged there.  The mobile phone is consigned to my pocket.  The pocketless shirt therefore, by it very absence, does not remind me that I should be carrying extra things for my day.

My pocket is then overstuffed with wallet; phone, handkerchiefs, miscellaneous coins, chewing gum and the keys that should be noticeable are then lost in the general bulges.  Until they are needed when their loss is acute.  We lock everything in our school and to be without keys is a pain, to put it mildly!  And not seeing the locks properly without my glasses is also a pain – though not one I care about much.

I have now redistributed the personal luggage that a normal day requires: car and house keys in the front section of the outside of the brief case; wallet inside the briefcase; pens ditto; phone in a pocket of its own; gum in briefcase; paper handkerchiefs relegated to the bin.

I have availed myself of Mad Lewce’s wisdom that, “Nothing is lost until you have looked for it three times” and that “No bag is checked until everything has been taken out”.  The practical result of these proven aphorisms is that my school keys have emerged Venus-like from the depths of the outside pocket of the briefcase and are now lodged securely in the internal pocket in my trouser pocket. 

This valuable addition to the mundane garment means that the metal does not jangle when you walk and the keys are safely segregated from anything else that might be snagged by the bittings.

The discovery of the keys goes some way to mitigate the resentment I feel on having the first free period of the week taken away to supervise two candidates who failed to sit their exam last week.

Later in the day I will get the final (I hope) instalment of the Mock Examination marking which seems to have lingered over our lives casting its dark shadow for some time now.  If things go according to plan I should be able to start the first tranche of marking in part of one of my free periods and then complete the rest in the lunch hour.  I refuse point blank to take the damn things home with me so the rest of my day is going to be rather full with some frantic periods of activity.  And even some teaching!

This little period is a calm before the storm where everything is potential rather than actual and I am stymied by the lack of material on which for me to put my red mark.

Next weekend there is a Grand Gathering of the Clans and we are going to have a colçotada but this time without the mountain of meat that has accompanied the delectable onions in the past.  This time just the veg and a few sausages – all in the best of Catalan taste.

This school is a transcendent example of the examinations tail wagging the educational body of the dog.  We examine!  We test!  We fell vast forests of trees to feed our voracious appetite for photocopied sheets with little gaps for the pupils to fill in.  Our pupils are either waiting to take a test; are recovering from taking a test, or are preparing for a test.  That is the life of the school!

School was hell, with my cunning plan to get the marking done frustrated at every turn.  I am ashamed to admit that I responded to my time being taken away by giving one of my classes a “reading opportunity” and marked like fury, then filled in the results after school and thereby missed most of the chaos that marks the departure of the students in the fleets of cars that they need to transport them back home!

At home the irritation of a defunct microwave – but there again, the opportunity to do a little light shopping.  I have very definite ideas about what qualities a microwave should have: reasonable size; grill; convection oven and one or two microwaves as well.  These requirements cut down the number of machines that one has a choice of, but I found one in the second shop we went to and money was duly spent.

The instruction book is in Spanish and Portuguese so it may take me a little longer than usual to familiarize myself with the details of how to work the thing.  All the various buttons, however, are marked encouragingly in English!

I have started the Herculean task of feeding the Mozart disks into The Machine.  I have been doing this all evening and I am not yet 10% of the way through.

The first piece of the collection that I listened to was The Jupiter (K.551 – as if I know Mozart by Köchel numbers!)  This was a mistake as I was trying to listen to the earliest symphony in the collection and I selected the wrong one from the list.  But, what the hell, that will come later!

Delight!

Curs and culture

The moronically selfish cow who lives next door has so endeared herself to her canine captives that they mourn her absence, no matter how short it might be, with a series of precisely timed yaps.  What Sunday morning would be complete without this accompaniment of barks delivered in what Dickens described as a tone of melancholy madness!

I have to keep telling myself that dogs bark, it’s what they do.  They cannot be held accountable for what is instinctive and natural.  No, the person (not dog) who is to blame is the idiot owner who thinks that imprisoning descendants of the wolf in a human habitation is anything less than barbaric.

She is not alone the humans in this area obviously find companionship of their own kind insufficient and resort to the friendship of the various kinds of muck spreading rats on leads that infest this district.

 

The prevalence of poo on the pavements has led the local council to blather on about exemplary fines for those owners (and they are legion) who allow their coprophagic companions to litter and smear the streets with their stools without clearing up after them.  The council has even encouraged Outraged Citizenry to use their camera phones, capture the shit shirkers and denounce them to the authorities.  As if!

The problem (apart from the monumental inconsideration of “pet” owners) is that there is no realistic enforcement of the non-fouling legislation, just as there is no enforcement of the “no dogs on the beach” rule, or “no dogs on the grass” rule and “dogs should be on leads” rule and every other dog rule that dog owners think do not apply to dogs.  And don’t get me started on bloody cats!

The witch next door has now returned and her familiars have settled down into blissful silence where the only sound is the whirring of the disk drive as the next bit of the complete works of Beethoven finds its way into The Machine: only another 35 discs to go!

Beethoven is fully loaded,  No matter how trivial all his music is available at the click of a couple of keys!  From some laboured musical jokes lasting under a minute, through the kitch horror of the so-called Battle Symphony to the sublimity of the 7^th Symphony: it’s all there.

I’ve now started downloading Brahms as that is far less daunting than the infinity of disks that make up the Mozart collection!

Today has been an orgy of listening acting as a sort of indulgent period so that I can get my strength up to load the 170 discs of the Mozart.  It has to be done and there is plenty of room on the hard disk so the sooner the better!

Spending

A bright start to the day and up with the lethargic lark rather than his earlier brother.  By the time that we were up and doing it was time for lunch.

My spag-bol was undoubtedly the worst meal that I have had in our “local” restaurant on the sea front.  It was tasteless and the meat (if that it what it was) was pallid and innocuous at best.  The beer was OK - hoppy brew from Galicia.  And the view.  The view makes up for it all.  The sea was sparkling and the waves were big enough and the light bright enough to make them deliciously translucent.  On the beach a lone photographer with an absurdly long lens taking pictures of two valiant water-ski idiots as the only people in the water.

Barcelona was cold, very cold – and it was an urgent necessity to get into shops to avoid the inclement weather.  Two bookshops later I was able to face looking for the Picasso Museum for the exhibition that we failed to see the last time I was in Barcelona.

There was no queue this time: there was no exhibition either.  I had obviously misjudged the length of time that the Picasso/Degas show was going to be open and I had to make do with the permanent collection.

There are some excellent paintings in the museum, but the Blue and Rose periods are not really represented and there are only one or two masterpieces.  There are ceramics to throw after the dogs and paintings from his later periods, but the quality stuff from his youth is a little sparse.

They do have very early stuff and they had mounted a special exhibition around his large early painting of a sick room entitled "Science and Charity."  Painted for a competition and on the advice of his father who thought that such a subject would be just the thing for the judges to pick.

And in the exhibition a real treat: the Luke Fildes painting (that I have often seen in reproduction but never in the frame, so to speak) of The Doctor.  This was completely unexpected and an absolute delight.

 

The painting looks very different when seen as a 2cm by 3cm reproduction than when being looked at in a gallery as a large, impressive painting.

It is a very engaging painting with much freer brush strokes than are apparent in small reproductions.  The handling of the light is masterly and there is even a small section of flowers and flimsy curtain material that gives at least a part of the painting an almost Whistler-like appearance.  Yes, it is Romantic and the hard-edge Social Realism that shocked and delighted viewers when it was first exhibited in 1887 now seems mannered and contrived, but the vitality of the composition and the modelling of the doctor’s face and the almost Symbolist other-worldly face of the sick child give a compulsive interest which the Picasso signally does not have.

I visited a second museum in the aftermath of the elation I felt after seeing an unexpected painting.  This was the “Mammoth” museum that is apt and a lie: there is a mammoth there but the museum is tiny.  I had to pay a child’s rate to get in (thanks to my teachers’ card) and now that I’ve seen the place I have no lively expectation that I will repeat the experience.

By way of compensation I returned to El Corte Ingles and the classical music department.  My recent copy of the BBC Music Magazine (which I cannot recommend too highly, etc.) has a review of one of the box sets that I seem set on buying nowadays.  Brilliant Classics (awful name!) produce box sets of CDs of spectacular value and I have already purchased Grieg and Dvorak.  The review in the BBC Music Magazine was for the Mozart set of a vast number of CDs for around a hundred quid.  

That may seem like a high price but not for 170 CDs!  As El Corte Ingles has the 3 for 2 offer I was tempted (and duly fell) and bought Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms (the Brahms being the cheapest and therefore “free”) making the cost of each of the CDs I have bought about .5 of a euro or about 42p!  And just before the sceptics among you start assuming that at such a low price the musicians and orchestras must be of contemptible obscurity, I have to tell you that I do not consider the Guarneri Quartet, or The Borodin Trio or The Academy of St Martin in the field or a selection of other soloists and orchestras of similar quality.

 

I may have to spend the rest of my life listening to them!

Who are we?

 

The recognition of national characteristics is perilously close to racism, but even the most liberal and right thinking of people can rarely resist the temptation to make sweeping generalizations and think that they are eternal verities.

Such thoughts struck me as I tried to make a substantial dent in the marking that is gradually becoming less of a mountain and more of a gentle foothill.

Due to the paucity of spare rooms the only realistic place to get schoolwork done is in the staff room.  Normally this is a compromise as your colleagues, being teachers are naturally gregarious and that conflicts with the necessity for silence which produces the best work.

If a staff room is a difficult place to work in Britain, it is virtually impossible when the room is in Spain.  Spanish people talk.  They talk a lot.  And they talk at the same time.  Sometimes (rarely) they listen.  Mostly, and loudly, they talk.  And talk.  Loudly.

I marked with my grip on the pen getting ever tighter and my strokes of the nib getting ever more firm.

It was a positive relief to have to go to the other end of the school to do a duty.  The back of the marking is well and truly broken and it only remains for me to enter the marks into the computer.  It means that Monday will be a day in which the next load of marking (two loads actually) will not be an unbearable accretion but rather an irritation which should be dealt with relative ease.  Though “relative” as its name suggest is always, um, relative.

Although cold the day is bright; the sort of wintry day which is bracing rather than depressing.  This is also one of the days in which I seem to spend my time travelling from one of the school to the other so I have an extra intake of the clearer air that comes with the height of the exclusive neighbourhood in which our school is situated.  Hear we breathe a purer air than those dwellers in the rest of the city whose polluted atmosphere we can clearly see from our elevated position.

The clarity of the air gives an almost surrealistic appearance to the city.  Its outlines are usually softened by the gentle smog that blankets the city, but today the buildings are crisp and clear and Montjuic, which can be seen from the staff dining room, seems nearer than usual.  The sea is the sort of clear blue that looks inviting, until you realise that the temperature is somewhat bracing!

The unfortunate effect of this bright view is to emphasise the fact that one would rather be outside looking in than inside looking out.  It makes one count the hours!

In a clear act of spite my head of department marked her 3ESO papers in the time she had spare waiting in school for a meeting yesterday evening.  No one marks papers before I do; it is a sort of unwritten rule in our school.  I only mark them with dispatch because I know that if I don’t do them at once then they will linger and become a looming burden until the actual date when they have to be completed and then they will be marked in a lather of frenzied, hysterical concentration.  I only ever mark in self-defence: never because it is my professional duty!

My only consolation is that my head of department has yet to start marking her share of the mock examinations whereas I have finished my share – almost.

The horror of marking of course is but a prelude to the unimaginable horror of school meetings.  Unfortunately the horror is all too easy to imagine because I have vividly painful memories of previous periods of torture when people with nothing to say didn’t shut up!

But, when all is said and done another week has been worked and that means that there is one less to suffer before the distant Easter holidays.

I live to mark!

In a day, which is a close parallel to the one where I left the Sacred Machine at home and duly suffered deprivation symptoms, today I have had The Machine with me, but I have had not a single opportunity to use the thing.

The school has given itself over to the Ecstasy of Examinations and the futile thrill of photocopying page after page of fill-in-the-gap questions on (at least) recycled paper to make our kids’ lives just that little bit fuller.  One of my colleagues remarked that the pupils seemed a little bit subdued, while I thought that shell-shocked would have been a better description. 

Within days of returning from the Christmas Holiday the kids were hit with the start of the extended testing period which, in English, comprises not only a mock examination for their external exams, but also a regular test which goes towards the final mark of the term.

The marking of this lot means that members of staff are looking a little weary, the weariness tinged with desperation, as there is a timetable for the completion of these things, which, though self-imposed is seen as an absolute cut-off date when everything must be done and be seen to be done.

In spite of my moaning and groaning I am totally confident that I will get everything done in plenty of time; the great trick is not to let anyone find out that you have finished.

So every available moment today has been taken up with marking with the end result that I am actually ahead of myself.  Such confidence is obviously a prelude to some form of educational disaster, which will ensure that the final finishing of the marking is done in a lather of frantic pen wielding.

 

Our school looks as though it might want to participate in a UNO sponsored Iberian version of the General Assembly: a conference which would take about a dozen of our kids and, suitably prepared, set them in a multi-school context for a series of debates on important issues.

That the organization takes itself very seriously can be seen from the details of the dress code that has to be adhered to by the participants.  This includes the maximum distance that skirts should be allowed to rise above the knee – and that’s only for the boys!

Although passingly interested in this as a concept I am also worried by it.  I fear that there may be a role for me somewhere in this project and I am not altogether sure that would be good news for me.  Still, I shall do a bit of investigation and bide my time.

When tomorrow is done, we will have completed 20% of the term – which sounds a damn sight better than knowing that 80% is still to be done.

I am more than ever determined to get more boxed sets (3 for the price of two) and feed the discs into The Machine.  I have listened to more enjoyably obscure music by Grieg and Dvorak since I bought the last two boxes than in the last umpteen years of conventional listening.  I shall look on it as an educational experience and I shall also buy more of the lavishly produced and gloriously arcane medieval music championed by the Catalan Jordi Savall.

 

The first three records bought for me in 1959 or 1960 were on Pye Golden Guinea records which cost £1 1s 0d – hence the name of course.  The one that I had asked for was The March from the Nutcracker that I had grown to like as it was played on our BBC Music Programme broadcasts in school.  The short suite from the Nutcracker was complimented by the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor and The Ritual Fire Dance Music on the other side.  The other two were Grieg’s Peer Gynt suites and the last was “Immortal Melodies” which included Ave Maria and a Humoresque by Dvorak.

 

I played these discs until they were almost transparent – and that was something because these records were solid and when placed on the automatic changer of my portable record player fell to the turntable with a very satisfying thump!

But let us talk realities.  If that pound in 1960 were thought of in terms of its purchasing power then it would be worth something like fifteen pounds today!  Which means that I could easily justify paying full-price for Jordi’s esoteric music – without the added inducement of one out of every three being free!

Roll on Saturday!

The marking is about to reach critical mass.  Added to the mock examinations, which take in virtually the whole school, I have media studies, art history and an exercise on question tags to mark.  On Monday there is a “Control” examination for the 3ESO – and so it goes on: exam, test, mark, meeting.

Needless to say I am getting more and more frustrated with what I see as almost totally pointless and educationally nugatory activity, but activity which requires my active participation, and I am thinking more and more of the hard earned money which a grateful government is lavishing on me to allow me a life of idle ease bathed in luxury.

The last bit isn’t (unfortunately) true or I would have been out of the doors of the school with a hop and a skip and a whoop of joy, but I am regarding the next 85% of the term with something approaching weary dread.

Now I am well aware that I am not alone in this attitude.  I know that the vast majority of my colleagues with some partial claim to sanity are thinking the same.  I know that the dead days of the middle of January are not necessarily the most conducive to positive thinking; that has to wait until well after Easter.  But, getting up this morning was a real struggle and going to work in the dark is not my idea of fun.

I wonder, when the days get longer and longer and I look back at this moan whether I will consider it merely January Blues or something more significant.  The payment at the end of the month (pittance though it is) also concentrates the mind!

 

I am unsure whether my mood was helped or hindered by the music to which I was listening while typing the preceding grumble.  From my amazing value box set of everything that Dvorak wrote I am listening to a favourite of mine, the Dumky Trios.  I got to know these on a Deutsche Grammaphon recording (bought in a sale) with a cover with some tastefully photographed feather on it.  I thought that they could best be described as “tea-room passionate” and I loved their domestic playfulness.  My new recording has a piano with more than a touch of honky-tonk and the whole things sounds as though it was recorded in the nave of an empty St Paul’s church.  The resonant acoustic gives it an almost symphonic sonority that, while not quite what I expected, does give a different dimension to very familiar music.  I wonder what other surprises I will find, especially in the later symphonies!

 

The other box set of vast quantities of music that I bought in the same expedition to El Corte Ingles was that of the music of Grieg.  For such a populist undertaking the little booklet that accompanied the discs is quite candid about Grieg’s limitations as a composer for large orchestra and concentrates on more domestic elements in the music.  I have, therefore been listening to a whole series of chamber pieces and various folk music inspired compositions while I have thoroughly enjoyed and discovered that there are quantities of music that I know but could never have given a name to!  Always a pleasure!

I am inclined to go back to the shop this weekend and find out if there are any more boxed sets.  As there is an offer of buy two and get one free it seems churlish not to take it up and respond to new versions of things I know.  I do have the discs of other, older recordings to which to resort should any of the present slew of versions prove to be too outré.

 

Wednesday is regarded in our school, well, our department, well, by Chris and Myself as the “tipping point” of the week and we officially assume that the relief of the weekend is immanent.

It also looks as though the cold wintry weather that we were promised has not crystalized and while it is not by any means hot, we have had a degree of sunshine and the weather is still relatively mild for this time of the year.

Long may it continue!

Oh, and the American Quartet of Dvorak sounds much more conventional, though not as self-indulgently languorous as I like!

It's only money

At last, a piece of preparation which has paid off!

If the condition of spectacles at the end of the day are an indication of the sort of experiences that a normal wearer has then it would not be unreasonable to assume that most spectacles wearers work underground in conditions of filthy squalor that the UNO would consider totally unacceptable and a denial of human rights. 

I started cleaning my glasses, which were almost opaque with the detritus of the day in a way which only glasses wearers can tolerate and non-glasses wearers find impossible to envisage seeing out of, this morning in the staff room just before the start of the day I was appalled to see one of the arms of my specs neatly break off. 

My glasses hardly exist: the lenses which should look like the base of milk bottles are specially thinned; the glasses are rimless and the arms are mere wisps of highly expensive metal which do not fold down but which are pre-sprung to touch the head lightly and hold firmly in place.

One of the arms has broken before and it costs a king’s ransom to replace: every day and in every way I get poorer and poorer!

I am now reduced to wearing one of my old pairs that, with foresight that still shocks me, I keep in the car “just in case”.  They feel heavy and clumsy after my others and the vision is not as good.  I can see the rims and there is a fish-eye lens effect to make my seeing just that little bit more exciting: squares have become trapeziums.

I take this as a sign that god wants we to wear contact lenses.

I have used up my normal supply of lenses and I am now reduced to wearing some of the lenses which were given to me as an experiment to see what my eyes would tolerate in trying to get a compromise between distance and reading.  The experimentation will have to continue because I hate wearing the old fashioned type of glasses now and I know that repairing my lighter pair will take time.

The glasses are now safely in the hands of the grasping optician in Sitges.  My fond hope that they might be under guarantee was shattered when it was revealed that that particular arm was over two years old.  How time flies when looking through pieces of thinned plastic!

To further justify being in Sitges we went to a Basque restaurant and had their version of the pinchos we enjoy so much in Castelldefels.  I think I made a better selection than Toni, but we did not think that it matched the quality of the ones that we were used to.

 

The method of choosing the tapa is to select what you want from a series of plates laid out along a counter or from chilled cabinets of various tasty constructions held in place on a piece of bread by overgrown toothpicks and your bill is calculated by the number of sticks you have on your plate.  In our restaurant in Castelldefels there are two lengths of stick with the longer being indicative of a more expensive tapa, though this was not the same in Sitges where the length was irrelevant.  It was an expensive meal but I found it tasty and interesting.

In spite of the cold and it being clearly out of season, Sitges was lively with plenty of people wandering around.  This may change over the next few days when the weather is supposed to take a change for the worse and become much more wintry than it has for the last few weeks.  This is depressing.

 

As is the growing mountain of marking which is looming over me in school.  Class after class takes paper after paper and over the next couple of weeks I will have marked examination papers from 90% of the secondary section of the school: a daunting thought.  There is not enough time to complete this marking but, by some strange educational quirk of space-time continuum it will, somehow be finished in time for an Interminable Meeting (the sordid blight of my life) in which the most positive thing that I will do is pray for a swift death!

I comfort myself by thinking that each examination period past brings us relentlessly nearer to a holiday and the end of the year and the two-month reason why it is worthwhile teaching in Spain!

Things can only get . . .

We have been back a week and a day and already the length of time before another holiday is beginning to oppress our hearts and minds.

At least today has been a time when I have read (re-read) Susan Hill’s “I’m the King of the Castle” a bleak book which I am going to have to teach to an unreceptive 3ESO class – I am not sure that I am looking forward to that but it will at least be playing to one of my strengths and is Literature and not the hated Grammar and all its evil tentacles of incomprehension!

I think that January must be the low point in the school year (though I am aware that we have not got into February yet) when spirits are low because of the fact that we are only a third of the way through the year.  Though with Easter being so late this year the summer term will be encouragingly short.

When are we in education going to recognize the absurd tyranny of the mystical date of Easter in determining the length of an academic term?  I really see no problem about disassociating the date of Easter with the organization of more equitable terms.

The only “problem” is Good Friday, which is a Bank Holiday and could remain so.  Easter Day is always on a Sunday so there is no problem with that.  The religious observation of Holy Week could be accomplished by worship before or after normal working hours.  And perhaps regularizing the dates of the “Spring” Holiday could also see a move to a four-term year.  Most European states are not theocracies and we should not let ourselves be dictated to by the dates of absurd Christian festive days that in turn were hijacked from pagan originals!

If Christians could be pragmatic in the placement of their major religious festival, where the one certainty about their choice of dates was that the event commemorated did not happen on that particular day, then I see no reason why we should abide by their arbitrary dates to the detriment of normality.

Tomorrow we are back on the examination treadmill and I get to loose some free periods to get the exercise done.  I am sure it is good for the soul because it is no bloody use for anything else.