Blow, blow thou sunny wind!

The bedroom windows facing north always give a moment’s pause on waking as to whether the sun is actually shining.  It is only when I go into the bathroom and look at adjacent trees through the little window that I can tell whether or not it is a fine sunny day.

It was a fine sunny day.  Though, as it turned out, it was quite a windy one.  But to a man hardened on the cold sun beds of Gran Canaria it was as if it was summer!

Toni was indisposed and kept to his bed but I had a holiday to fill and so was not prepared to while away my precious holiday hours by doing nothing.  It was time, I decided, to try out the new music system for swimming.

It is now so long since I immersed myself in water for the purpose of arm and leg propulsion I did have a few doubts about my actual ability to move through that medium at all!

At least the swimming pool was open today and I found myself a bench on which to sit when once inside to prepare myself for the watery fray.  As I was just in shirt and shorts undressing was relatively uneventful but dressing in my full swimming gear was a much more complex operation.

Attaching the Device to the swimming goggles took minutes and then was finding of the bloody swim hat which is rotting away week by week.  Remembering to wear swim slippers was the next irritation followed by searching out the lock and key for the locker.  When everything was ready I marched into the pre-swim shower and worried about fitting the augmented goggles.

This was not easy.  The thing was too tight and it was difficult fitting it over the ears and making sure it actually fitted round the back of the head.  Eventually, clumsily and with growing panic about the length of time that I was standing by the side of the pool without entering the water, I eventually made an undignified splash and I was in.

I have to admit that my swimming to the sound of music was not an unqualified success.  It does work, and it works best with a sedate breaststroke; crawl tends to take the earpieces out of my ears.  It works more than it doesn’t, but it is very much a work in progress.

I also have to admit that I am a little self conscious about swimming while having a pink mp3 player with a flashing blue light attached to the back of my head.  But is worth it to listen to the selection of 80s classics that Toni has put on the machine!  There were even two Mecano tracks to help me on my way.

My first note left for Toni about my going swimming was unread when I cam back and so I decided to go and check out the new swimming pool that was supposed to have been established near the British School of Barcelona.  It exists, but it has not yet been given all its certificates by the authorities so it cannot be used.  I was show it via another building through two sets of windows.  I joined the sports centre and was given the first moth as a gift as the swimming pool was not ready.  I have no intention of using the Torquemada like machines in the gym, but I am tempted by the Padel courts.  An explanation of this game will have to wait for another day.  I now have two cards for competing swimming pools.  I have been told that the new swimming pool may become available over the next two weeks.

The new swimming pool is, I think, an excellent investment for me as it is on the way home from school and is within minutes of the house.  I could even think about going there on my bike – though that may be a ride too far!

My second note to Toni was also unread on my return and I discovered him languishing in bed, thoroughly unwell and refusing food and drink.

This lasted throughout the day but he was able to eat something I brought back from our favourite fast food place after an evening chat with Irene where we talked of great plans for the future.  As we always do.

Tomorrow, Easter Sunday – which means that there will only be a few days of the holiday left.  I really should do some school work, but the work I want to do is so time heavy that I cannot bring myself even to start doing it.  Such is life.

But there is an absolute minimum that I need to do.  Probably.  We shall see.

Some sun at last!

A day of clouds but not of rain. 

I found myself watching for the little patches of blue hoping that the sun would link up with one of them and shine on me!  It reminded me of my Christmases in Gran Canaria, stretched out on a sun bed in uncertain warmth but staying there because each minute was expensive and each fragment of sunshine had to be used to get to the required shade of brown sufficient to infuriate the pale stay-at-homes in Cardiff when they saw me at the start of term in January!

With such a short break at Easter in this country every day is equally important and with the rain and cloud I am getting quite panicky as the holiday drains away.  Still, there is the “gained Sunday” to look forward to as we do not start the summer term until Wednesday of next week.  And that means that I will have missed eleven lessons and a lunch-time duty which make up my Monday and Tuesday: result!  It also means a short week until the weekend.  But there is a price to pay.

Guess what we will be thinking about instantly on our return – examinations! 

I sometimes think that what we teach is totally irrelevant as long as we can divide it up into examinable chunks.  We have to get two complete sets of exams in before the end of term so that we can also have our last tranche of pointlessly long meetings and, then, O Joy, the longed for summer holidays – even if our “extra” pay is going to be ravaged by the rapacious government taking 3% of our total annual salary out of the money.  Bastards!

Thinking further about the Goya exhibition I saw yesterday, I find several responses vying for attention in my memory.  The first was amazement at the quality of exhibits and the number of iconic paintings which are now in Barcelona – albeit only until the last week of June.  The second goes to the centre of one of my problems with the paintings of Goya his use of painterly technique.

The series of cartoons for the royal tapestries are of various scenes of folk around Madrid.  “The Parasol” for example is a striking arrangement but the quality of the painting seems to be reminiscent of theatrical scene painting rather than the brush of a master.  His trees are particularly vapid looking more like a green cross section of a sponge than of any leafy matter!

The portraits were striking.  A couple of studies (?) of the King and a prince were amazingly sensitive with a real sense of the personality of the sitter being caringly brought out through the application of paint.  This portrait of the king as an elderly man is warm and generous and not the searing portrayal of him in the famous group portrait dominated by the King’s mother.  I have seen Goya portraits of the princes too which make them seem like ungainly toys, but this portrait of a prince is also of a boy and was touching, even loving.  With paintings like these it is easy to see why Goya was respected and admired by the royal family which in other paintings he seems to paint with a restrained savagery that you would not pay to have created!

The etchings are the etchings: they define a whole sphere of human inhumanity and they are timeless.  May favourite this time was the one from La Tauromaquia where the rampaging bull with a human impaled on its horns is caught at the far right of the picture which in the pens below the humans panic.  It is an eerie drawing with a surrealistic (perhaps too easy a word to use with this artist) sense of emptiness with the bull on a visual plane that takes the viewer a while to work out.  A wonderful work.

The madness and the irrational in Goya’s work attract me the most.  The Disasters speak for themselves but even the playfully disturbing compel attention.

This exhibition has a full title of “Goya – Lights and Shadows” and from the 90 or so works this can be taken literally and figuratively, and both aspects are a delight to follow through a career in which the personality of the painter is one which encourages and challenges.

This is a real treat and I must return – and perhaps reconsider my rejection of the idea of buying the vastly expensive catalogue.

The Delacroix exhibition (a few steps through the rain to the other large exhibition hall) was a less challenging experience but perhaps more uplifting.  I can’t say that I cam away with a different view of the painter but I did enjoy the sketches for paintings that were on display.  My favourite was a study for one of the Arabs on horses attacked by lions series and this sketch was quasi-abstract, a whirlpool of splashes of colour with the faintest outlines of clues which indicated the representational limits of a conflict of speed, colour, line and power.  It was a glorious canvas, and one I would quite cheerfully have walked off with!

Again this is an exhibition to revisit – though this one finishes in the third week of May so I mustn’t relax and tell myself that I have plenty of time otherwise (like exhibitions in the past) I will have to be content with a single visit.

I finally made an attempt to go and have a swim and was frustrated by the fact that the pool was closed, it being Good Friday.  I am tempted to go into town and watch the foreigners (the Spanish) labour through the streets carrying their idols on heavy rafts of carved wood, but I am not sure that I can be bothered especially as every fibre in my Anglican-Atheist being rebels at the idolatry of it all!

Four more days of the holiday left.

A good day despite the rain!

Two superb world-class exhibitions in one day!

The Goya exhibition to celebrate ten years of existence of Caixa Forum and the exhibition centre in Barcelona.  Brilliant paintings that I didn’t expect to see there.  Yes, there were the usual etchings but The Clothed Maja portraits and other paintings that must have left serious gaps in many collections.  Cartoons for the tapestries; “Black” paintings.  It was a joy to wander round.

The Delacroix was equally unexpected with major canvasses on show.

The only downside was the price of the catalogue for each exhibition, which I considered exorbitant.

Lunch was with Suzanne and pica-pica and delicious.

Rain!

Today I woke up to the sound of rain.  The weather forecast was accurate, god rot it!  The sound of the rain also reminded me that I had not brought in the sun bed cushion which is now having a well-deserved wash courtesy of the climatic conditions.

Looking at the forecast I see that it will be the weekend before it has a chance to dry out!  What a holiday!

Braving the elements we went out for lunch seeking for a different restaurant from our usual clutch of dependable eating-places.  We went down to the other end of Castelldefels and, after finding (yet again) that one small restaurant on the sea front that we liked was closed for logistical reasons that we have never managed to formalize into any coherent timetable for opening, we decided to range further afield.

Toni’s eagle eye spotted a place offering an €11 menu del dia and after a cursory (on my part) and extended (on Toni’s part) view of the menu went in.  This was Restaurante El Mastil, Paseo Maritimo, 299 bis, Castelldefels.

We were guided to a part of the large premises which had a view of the sea and sat next to the large windows.

The view was, it has to be admitted, somewhat bleak: the sea a forbidding grey; the sand damp and dun; the beach totally deserted – and rain sporadically spitting into the pool which had formed under the plastic kids' slide blocking part of the vista of the Med.

It reminded me of nothing so much as sitting by the unforgiving sea of my childhood and watching my parents have a cup of tea from a battered tin teapot (or was it aluminium?) that was a highpoint of the culinary offerings in Barry Island from the café on the front. 

What really captured my attention more was the sodden sand, thinking to myself that damp sand held together better than dry and that this time I really could build a bastion that would withstand the incoming tide. 

And the sea.  On damp days, and so many holidays seemed to be damp, the sea was a brown smudge in the distance which at least game one more time to build.  Swimming was never a pressing temptation until the castle walls were breached and there was nothing left to lose!

Let me not give the wrong impression.  I loved going to Barry Island.  We would load up the Bon-mini (don’t ask) with my parents in the front and me in the boot (don’t ask, but not as cruel as it sounds!) and off we would tootle and not worry about the steep hill to get onto the A48 towards home until the end of the day!

We would park on the cliff top (before Butlin's took over the ground) and I would scamper down over the rocks to the virgin sand and start digging.  Bliss!  But damp sand, grey skies, grey-green sea, rain in the wind and coldness sum up a typical British day by the seaside and that was the view I had from the restaurant window.  I could have been at home!

The “dish of the day” which headed the list of first course choices turned out to be Russian salad which we both like and so we both ordered it.  When it arrived it was set into two artfully arranged squares with small piles of shredded carrot and corn while the whole edifice was surrounded by a swirl of balsamic vinegar.

And it had no taste.  One has to remember that the defining ingredient in a Russian salad for Brits is missing in Spain: no beetroot.  Instead it is a sort of potato, egg and tuna salad with mayonnaise.  In this version the potato was that regular cube sort which suggested that the ingredients had been bought frozen and then assembled later.  No tuna, precious little egg and, as I said, no taste.

Toni’s second course was butifarra.  As Toni has not bee entirely well recently with a form of stomach upset he invited me to try a piece of it as it did not seem entirely right to him and I think he wanted me to share any future gastric illness that he might have rather than to get my expert cooking judgement!

Toni left it unfinished.  As he left his salad unfinished.

My second course was eggs in the style of Manchego.  Neither of us had any idea was this might be and I waited in pleasurable anticipation – after all, as long as it wasn’t tripe I was going to eat it.

Well, the exotically named dish turned out to be fried eggs with chips.  The only “exotic” part of the dish was that three cloves of unpeeled garlic had been fried with the eggs!  What culinary daring!

This was, without a shadow of doubt, as Toni stated, “the worst menu del dia we have had in Castelldefels”.

We skipped the choice of desserts and took the coffee option instead and left as soon as was decently possible.  A dispiriting experience and one that we will not be in a hurry to repeat.

On a more positive note I am reading sci-fi downloads on my I-pad with a passion that suggest that they are all suddenly going to evaporate and disappear in a puff of electronic impulses.  China is figuring more and more in the fantastic suggestions about how the near future is going to develop.

The most rewarding and stimulating book in this genre that I have read recently is by Cory Doctorow called FTW or “For the Win”.  This centres on computer games and how their real life implications work.  The collecting of virtual gold becomes something which “gold farmers” or packs of young games addicts accumulating the “gold” which they manage to convert into real money as other players in the game need this “precious” metal to “buy” advantages for themselves to boost their game status.  Doctorow describes brokers, bosses, big business and all the trappings of large-scale international finance – but all based in things called The Mushroom Kingdom or some impossibly pronounced Teutonic mythic rubbish.  I particularly liked a reference to a Vorpal Sword as a weapon of massive power in one of the games!

Its real power comes from the fact that Doctorow is able to describe the big power play of firms and countries as they stamp from a great height on poor and powerless workers.  It also raises hope that the Internet is also a way of uniting the powerless and creating a worldwide community which has never been so well informed and turning groups of isolated workers into a powerful Union of the connected.  A stimulating read.

The rest of my reading has been of derivative and enjoyable rubbish where the fun is working out which literary antecedent or fairy story has played the greatest part in the narrative “creation”.  I’m loving it!

Tomorrow real culture and the sight of some of the productions of the person I consider to be Spain’s greatest painter, Goya.  Not a very controversial choice perhaps, with Picasso his only real rival.  And Velasquez.  I have to admit that I like Goya’s darker paintings (or “black” paintings as he termed them) and his portraits of the talentless trash that ruled Spain at his time.  And of course, the dog buried in sand.

As we are in Barcelona we do not get the top grade exhibitions (they go to Madrid) so I expect that this Goya exhibition will be heavier on the etchings of The Disasters of War than of oil paintings.  But we will see.

I want my money back!

I have now made the made the ultimate mistake of looking at the weather forecast for the holiday week.  Unrelieved gloom with cloud and rain throughout.  Only at the end of the holiday is there a little glimpse of warmer weather.  Some irony is too hard to bear!

But I have made as much as I could out of today, greedily taking in as many of the rays as is humanly possible from the Third Floor and the garden.  I have done my good deeds by getting the lunch and cleaning the car – who can ask for more!

It is hard to believe that the flawless evening skies are going to degenerate into rain sodden horror.  But that is what the weather forecast threatens and I am in the right frame of mind to believe it!

More than ever I hate dogs – or at least their barking.  Quite apart from the obnoxious curs next door, today was made notable by the monotonous, squeaky yapping of some rat-dog in the flats to our left.  Dog owners, generally speaking, do not have the consideration of a dead slug.  Dead slugs (or even live ones) after all do not leave mounds of shit on pavements and they are certainly not raucous in any way shape or form.  Whereas the debased and etiolated dog derivatives that people in this area parade at the end of a string are an insult to canine kind and the mutants take every opportunity to bewail their disgusting in-bred state. 

And that’s just the people!

At the moment it is dark.  A Sunday evening.  And it’s wonderful.

To understand why, you have to be a teacher.  Sunday evenings are technically part of the weekend but for teachers the pleasure is poisoned by the thought of the morrow when the hapless educators have to return to their toil. 

Consequently a Sunday without the misery of a teaching day following is a gained day and a delightful night!

Tomorrow, tasks and writing.  This evening, praying that the weather forecast is wrong!

Why do I bother?

There was something so quintessentially bourgeois about my Thursday morning.

I got up, appropriately, at the time I would have started teaching: 8.15 am, giving me a lie-in of one and three quarter hours!  I started by Day of Action by making a cup of Earl Grey tea and taking it and an Internet radio to the Third Floor where I sipped my tea listening to the dulcet tones of the presenters and guests of the Today Programme.

As the sun grew in warmth I decided to put my years of English expertise to the test and I wrote a poem appropriate to the occasion.  It now follows:

SONG OF THE STINKING SCABS

(To be sung to the first part of the tune of “Lead Me O Thou Great Jehovah”

Chorus

Stinking scabs deserve our loathing!

Stinking scabs deserve our hate!

Stinking scabs deservèd low life!

Stinking scabs deserve their fate!

Can you see him sitting pretty?

Safe, self-satisfied and smug,

Letting others take the action

Proudly thinking he’s no mug!

Chorus

Suddenly he’s found his “ethics”

Moral codes to “do what’s right”

Pity that he can’t apply them

To a real in-house fight!

Chorus

He has “higher duties” pressing

To the kids within his care

Couldn’t ever think of striking

Such a crime he could not bear.

Chorus

Loss of money’s not important,

Or the frowns of management

He’s prepared to be upstanding –

But he has to pay the rent!

Chorus

He has family commitments

Food to buy and kids to raise;

These are real, pressing problems –

Strikes put off for “other” days.

Chorus

Days that never come for someone

Who can’t think beyond today;

Men whose fights are fought by others -

Those on strike for better pay!

Chorus

Just for us the bigger picture,

Grime of politics, the fight.

Just for us the risks and struggle

And the prize for doing right.

Chorus

Scabs are quick to take what’s offered,

No compunction, guilt or pause,

Strikers, though, they should remember

Won’t forget their selfish flaws!

Chorus

I may be a tad childish but it did give me some pleasure, and there was something so totally bizarre about singing such a thing to the tune I have heard reverberate (and indeed help reverberate) around the National Stadium, to sing the thing sotto voce as my small votive offering to the Power of the Strike.

We had lunch out and then it was time for me to go in to Barcelona to join the procession.  Lunch was on the beach looking at hordes of children with their parents, reminding me that there were some schools which did have the strength of their convictions and did the right thing.

My plan to go into Barcelona by train was frustrated firstly by the fact that the station was closed until 4.00 pm and then secondly by discovering that the first train into Barcelona (on the strike approved minimum timetable) was at 5.30 pm – the same time as the start of the march.

Plan B meant that I drove my car into the city and at the top end of the Diagonal I met a small group of workers marching and effectively closing the road.  I think I was the only driver held up who lowered the window to give a thumbs up sign to the marchers.

I got down the length of most of the Diagonal but had to turn off before the junction with Gracia – which is where I was supposed to meet my colleagues.  I did manage to find an underground parking space and then made an unsteady and hesitant way towards the meeting point as my direct route had been frustrated by police cars blocking off certain parts of the road.

I did, eventually, get there well before time and found none of my colleagues there.  As a march of an associated union set off (the UGT) I set off with them until my nerve broke and I went back to the original meeting point to find the right union.

I never really did find them, but at least I found other people who were part of the Union the CCOO and that was good enough.  I acquired a plastic flag and a couple of stickers and I was ready to destroy the system!  Well, I walked a bit and then decided that, as I had become a statistic, it was time for me to go home.

After paying an extortionate amount for my shortish sojourn in the underground car park and making my way through road blocks to the motorway, I gained my home and entered flag-waving and filled with delight at the thousands upon thousands of people men, women and children I had seen marching peacefully towards something or other.

This was not the way that the demonstration was portrayed on the television.  They hadn’t been very many of us and we had smashed bank windows and violently threatened shopkeepers strike-breaking!

I did, I have to admit, take a few pictures of banks with broken windows and regretted having passed a branch of BBVA which had been splattered with paint without taking a lasting memento of this more than justified act of contempt!

FRIDAY – THE LAST BLOODY DAY OF THIS BLOODY TERM AT BLOODY LAST

Coming into school this morning I first looked at the substitution list and saw that all my classes had been covered by my colleagues.  Thank you very much for that act of support!  I felt strangely distanced from those colleagues – let’s fact it, most of them – who had shown themselves to be nothing neither more nor less than scabs.  I felt, more than anything that I simply didn’t fit with these people.  It is at times like this that I begin to despair.  But, this is nothing new.  How many times have I felt like that in schools in Britain!  Nothing changes.  Nothing.

I have, however, taken a photocopy of the substitution list and I will speak with the other colleagues who went on strike, to find out exactly what they want to do.  Their classes too, were covered with no expression of hesitation as far as I can tell.

The email we were sent asking if we could inform the management if we were going on strike, prefaced, as it was by a statement that the school would stay open, can now be taken as intimidation.  The school has behaved abominably and we have to decide if we take this further and report the school to the relevant authorities.  I will be all in favour of taking more action because I think it is important that the management of the school realizes that they cannot act with impunity as a completely separate entity from the rest of the world in education!

We are finally, at last, at long last coming towards the last period that I have to teach (or at least be around for) in this impossibly long term.  And, as is traditional I have been informed that the glorious weather that we have been luxuriating in inside the school will not last beyond this weekend outside the school!  Nothing changes.

SATURDAY – THE FIRST GLORIOUS DAY OF THE SUPERB HOLIDAY

I reverted to British Tourist Mode today and the first thing I did this morning was look out of the bathroom window to see if the sun was shining!  It was and I consequently spent the rest of the morning lazing on the Third Floor.

My “little rest” yesterday afternoon extended its way through the night until this bright morning.  If only the rest of the weather during this holiday could be relied on to be as good as today, it would be perfect.  But we have been told to expect a change in the weather after the weekend, so I am making the most of it.

Toni continues ill, so I went to have a start of holiday celebratory lunch alone – though it did give me the opportunity to sit in the sun, something Catalans will not do by choice!

I am still waiting for the English version of the handbook for the car and I am also hoping that there is something simple I can do to get more information on the display when a CD track is playing rather than simply the number.  This problem does seem to be intractable.  But I live in hope.

I have made my traditional list of things to do during the holiday, though this list is even more unrealistic than my usual ones!  This one includes the equivalent of writing two books and those are just the first two items on the list!

Ever the optimist.  

A Day To Go!

 

There is a nervous excitement about today as people wonder what is going to happen tomorrow.

It may be my imagination but I think people are fighting a little shy of me as they realize that I will be taking action tomorrow in defence of their conditions of service, their futures, their wages, their way of life.  One doesn’t like to overstate such selfless actions, but if the medal fits - wear it!

I have to admit that I do think much less of my colleagues for not taking part in the strike.  Though I do not think that they realize just how much less I think of them.  In the circumstances in which we find ourselves I do not see how, with honour, they can excuse their inaction.  There are unlikely to be such pressing forces to encourage their participation than these.  What the hell has to happen before my colleagues realize that they are under a very real threat and their inaction will come back to haunt them. 

Or, rather, I will be very much alive and I am more than prepared to remind them (in many and subtle ways) of the action they did not take. 

Perhaps I should Photoshop a copy of the famous First World War recruiting poster and entitle it “Colleague, what did you do in the General Strike?”  Perhaps a little too near the knuckle for some of the staff!

I continue to be amazed by the attitude of my colleagues who have done everything from wish me “good luck” to “have a nice day”!  What do they think I am doing and why?  This is not a little holiday!  Do they really think that my actions are divorced from what they can expect from employers in the future when the actions of “those that have” are going to be endorsed and strengthened by a government which is gleefully skipping along the road of employee repression!  Just what does it take to activate the social conscience of these people!

I am now stuck in the last lesson of the day while 3ESO finish off the work which has been necessary for the completion of the dossier.  Tomorrow they make their presentations – though to who is an interesting question. 

I have made it as plain as I possibly can that anyone who takes any of my pupils or my classes is actually breaking the law.  And to some I have intimated that I would be quite prepared to report the school to the requisite authorities as soon as I have information that they have infringed by Constitutional Right to Strike by taking my classes.

But now to bed with the prospect of a lie in.