A Day To Remember!

A day which starts with an extended dream taking its inspiration from a combination of Midsomer Murders and The Walking Dead is never a good sign.  And, even though I survived (naturally) the carnage, it left me weary and, at the tail end of the dream, trying to convince a sceptical reporter that I knew “all the facts” and that “I could tell him so much that his career would be made!”  Things were getting progressively more complicated when the blessed alarm went off and more mundane realities truncated illusory slaughter and its aftermath!

The action may have been unreal but the weariness is with me now and that sense of other-worldliness stays!  Though I am sure that such whimsicality will be dissipated by my first contact with the clients!

There was a glorious sunrise as I came to school this morning with a burning, searing blaze from the low rising star.  That magnificence has been moderated into a much more hazy day with brightly-dull weather.

I am feeling quite alienated from what is going on in school and this is exacerbated by the fact that I arrive early and my first lesson is not until 10 o’clock.  I therefore sit facing the door and watch successions of people come in and out, fussing about their own business.  And I sit impassively watching the world go by.  This gives me time to settle in and become more disgruntled (because a lesson delayed is a lesson threatened) until the pressing concerns of adolescent youth deflect my own introspection into something more responsive!

The most productive thing I have done so far is to have an internal debate with myself in “And do I dare” T S Eliot style about having another cup of my individually packaged and blended tea mixture.  I have eventually, after prolonged and indolent internal discussion decided to forego the pleasure and wait, allowing delayed gratification to make more piquant the flavour of the tea when I finally drink my second cup!

MARGARET THATCHER IS DEAD!

The news that I have been waiting to hear for years has finally been broadcast!

I am the first to say that the illustration I have chosen is cheap, inappropriate, unfair and crass.  And frankly, my dear, I couldn't give a damn!

Yes, I know that rejoicing at a human’s death is demeaning at best and bestial at worst.  But this is Margaret Thatcher; a woman whose policies I have loathed ever since that milk-snatching bitch was made Minister of Education. 

Her use of the Falklands Conflict to bolster her retention of power was sickening in its self-seeking indifference of any concept of morality.  Her denial of community, her treatment of the Unions, her disgusting approach to the Miners’ Strike, her promotion of self, her anti-cultural, anti-BBC, anti-anything that I care about attitude means that I can feel little sympathy for her passing. 

Obviously I feel for her family, but for her – I feel nothing but . . . and there is the problem.  I find it difficult to find the right word to express my long-standing something or other about her life, policies and politics!  I suppose I could dedicate my life to finding the right word to encapsulate my feelings for That Woman!

I have, at last, lit the Margaret Thatcher candle that my mother bought be so many years ago.  As I look at her slowly burning on the table, her blue bouffant hair has gone and she looks as though the Holy Ghost has sliced the top of her head off and taken up residence in the middle of her cranium!

I have washed out my unfeasibly long millennium glass and filled it with my favourite Cava.  And I have drained it many times.  Even Toni has taken a token sip of Cava to “Celebrate good times, come on!” (thank you Kool and the Gang) and we are planning to go out and “ditto” before I fall into bed and try to get up tomorrow morning! 

Margaret is burning steadily.  And just how much I hate her is surely shown in the fact that the candle could have raised near to €100 or even one hundred quid on e-bay, perhaps even more now that the bitch is dead.  But there was not way on earth that I could have gone back on what I have told so many people: namely, that I would burn her as soon as she died.  And that, my friends, is exactly what I have done.

Of course I extend the invitation to everyone to come and visit me and partake of a glass of Cava to celebrate her passing.  And no one who is right thinking (not in your way Margaret!) would be denied a drink of the bubbly stuff should they come calling and say that they have seen the video of my lighting the candle that Toni says he has put on YouTube!  Well, he is still working on it and the uploading seems to have taken an age, so I am not confident that the finished article is going to be available for viewing!

He has also suggested that I put the video in this blog, but I am not sure how to do that.  Something new to try and it couldn’t be tried for a better reason!

And now out we go for a celebratory meal!

I think that the link to the little video about the demise of Thatcher on YouTube recorded by Toni is: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zescW4c1Q0

Click on it and share my pleasure.  Guilty pleasure perhaps, but real nevertheless!

The meal that we eventually had was in our third choice of restaurant - we had forgotten that Monday is not a good day to eat out - but we had a good meal and I had another bottle of Cava!

A new world!

Calculations!

There is no way that we have been in school only since Wednesday.  Why, oh why is it that a mid-week start never seems as easy as it should be with a couple of days less?  Not that I am asking for all mid-week starts to be abandoned, you understand.  I am not that stupid, but it is a psychological problem worthy of ig-Nobel research!

Today, rain is forecast – but true to form the weather actually looks relatively fine.  This is usually just one of god’s little tricks to build up my expectations and then cruelly dash them when I finally get out of school and find vindictive rain spitting at the windscreen.

After my over-long, meeting filled day yesterday, I am looking forward to the relatively early release today when I flee at the start of lunchtime.  Admittedly, lunchtime starts at the unearthly time of two o’clock, but there is still a long afternoon (courtesy of official summer time) to relish.

Part, probably a substantial part of the weekend will have to be taken up with a more systematic form of revision than I have been doing heretofore.  I have highlighted words and phrases, now I have to bring them together into a more coherent listing of the OU “official” language that must be used in the answers.

Julie’s flat was excellent; a wonderful buy and very well done up.  Good position and something which will prove to be an excellent investment.  We had lunch in a restaurant in Sitges that we have passed time after time, but never actually eaten in.  The meal was €15 and very good.  The drinks afterwards were in another place that we have passed and never patronized – another discovery.

Watching television in Spain nowadays is almost unbearable as various self appointed experts vie with each other to shout down everything that they say about the systemic corruption which is displayed for our derision each night.  Each new piece of information damns yet more of the establishment so that an unbiased viewer begins to think that the entire system is corrupt.  Which it might well be.

It is something of a relief to turn to revision and I have decided to use Excel to facilitate my organization of key words and phrases using the different aspects of our study to link the ideas together.  Well, it’s working in my mind and tomorrow I will try and make it some sort of reality.  If my method does work then it will be an approach that I will adopt for future modules in my continuing study.

And it’s almost Sunday, the day before the start of a full week of work!

I don’t quite know what happened to the evening of Saturday, but a little snooze turned into a full sleep and suddenly it was the next day!

The weather forecast threatened rain and sun, but what we have had is sun and wind.  It was possible to lay oneself out on the Third Floor but this afternoon it was something of an ordeal as the gusts of wind reminded one that this was April and not June!

The new Excel revision has started and I am gathering in the OU’s language to sprinkle on my answers when I come to do the exam.  The exam or should I say The Exam is now near enough for the jokes to stop and for it to be taken seriously.  There are now two weeks to go and that now seems a remarkably short time.  On Thursday there is our last tutorial which I am steeling myself against, as I fear it is going to contain barely supressed hysteria about the forthcoming trial.  It is a sad fact that the more the OU tries to reassure its students about the examination the more the students feel bereft of hope and confidence!

I am aiming to “enjoy” the examination “experience” but I fear that this laudable attitude will have been destroyed long before I put pen to paper in The British Council!  It shows how sad I am that I have bought two new disposable fountain pens just for this occasion!

I have ten more weeks in school; two and a half months – and then I am done.  Ten weeks is fifty teaching days – minus May Day and a day for the Second Easter (don’t ask), so 48 teaching days.  It sounds much more doable when it is put like that!

Doesn’t it?

Days pass

The threatening clouds, dark, menacing and filled with rain prompted me to take in the sun bed from the Third Floor last night on my return from getting my glasses in Sitges.  The lowering (really the only word to use) cloud cover over Barcelona was almost biblical in its portentousness and I had visions of a rain soaked, mould covered cushion inviting me into its slimy grasp when I next found time to relax with my favourite star.

This morning, the first day back in school after our ludicrously short break, is of course gloriously sunny – just the sort of underhand, cheap jibe that one would expect from a recently resurrected god bullying hard-pressed professionals!  Our misery is exponentially expanded by the fact that the hot-water machine is not working and I wasted a hand-made teabag in what turned out to be cold, milky water.  Cruelty can go no further.  And we have to teach.  All day!

Our next time off is May Day and then the so-called Second Easter later in the same month.  Hardly enough to compensate for the derisory and fleeting so-called holiday we have just whizzed through.  But the month of May is next to the month of June and that month marks my departure.  In faith and fear!

Having just visited our tutor group forum I sense a little edginess in our tutor’s comments about the non-return of the work that we have done.  According to my calculations she has until the 5^th of April to return the work to keep to the timetable of the OU, so she still has time and is on course.

In fact the work was returned later that day (the rigors of getting back to school took its toll and I could do little more than bask in the wonder of my essay and watch the TV when I got back) and I wrote a lickspittle email to the tutor to thank her!  There are no depths that I have not plumbed.

The continuous assessment part of the course is now over and psychologically I can now prepare myself for the exam – which frankly cannot come too soon.  Toni also had a tutor-assessed piece of work back yesterday as well so we went out to La Fusta and downed a bottle of Cava to celebrate our joint success!

But this morning is a grey reality of a five period morning – though the sky is trying to turn blue and confound the prognostications of rain for today.

As term has started I have resolved to get back to my swimming and yesterday, after debating with myself during the whole of the drive back from The School on the Hill, I found that the car had driven itself to the pool and so I had a fairly leisurely swim in which there was more breast stroke than normal in the lengths.  Today it must be crawl, crawl all the way – and thus normality is re-established.

On Saturday we are going to see Julie’s Sitges flat: bought from a bank and refurbished, a nice little pied a terre, and a foothold in a place where, eventually Julie would like to settle.  It will be very interesting to see what the money can buy and it will give me food for thought.  Though prices will have to fall much further before I can think about buying anywhere halfway reasonable in this country!

Another bloody day!  And this time a meeting.  A meeting!  I went to a meeting!  The whole day destroyed!

And it’s still not the weekend.

More sun!

Here in Castelldefels we have been afflicted over the past few days with the Five O’clock Cloud Syndrome.

This refers to the continent sized cloud which appears at the stated time each afternoon in an otherwise flawlessly blue sky and blocks the sun’s rays to the terrace of The Third Floor.  Having established its presence it then breaks up into an archipelago of island sized clumps which then taunt the sun seeker by giving a brief glimpse of the burning star and then hiding its light as another island, trailing a foam of hazy rolling breakers, sweep into place to block the vitamin giving rays.

At least here in Catalonia the cloud does move and not, as I remember from my youth, stubbornly stay in place vindictively keeping you in shadow while taunting you with the view of unlimited sunshine everywhere but where you were.  Or was that merely the view of a jaundiced, very young sandcastle builder, I wonder!

This is the last day of what was laughingly called our Easter Holiday.  The “holiday” consisted of seven working days of which two were Bank Holidays, so the school has actually allowed just five working days for the “holiday”.  I am not sure what that shows, but I think it demonstrates a woeful lack of rest time for hard working teachers.  I am just glad that I did not realize on the Friday afternoon of the start of the Easter “holiday” period that the time off was so limited.  The way of ignorance kept me blissfully ignorant of my lack of space while I enjoyed a specious spaciousness of apparent freedom!  Sometimes ignorance is the only thing that keeps us sane!

After being told that our OU work would be returned to us “at some time” during the weekend one of my fellow tutees wrote in a guileless question on one of the Forums asking if she had been overlooked for the return of the material.  Our tutor has responded by saying that the work will be returned in two batches of which the first will be up “soon”. 

She should realize that she is not dealing with happy-go-lucky students in the relaxed environment of a university but crazed monomaniacs who centre part of their paranoia on responses from distant academics!  She is living dangerously – though I have to admit that we who live in the far flung parts of continental Europe are hardly likely to make the trip to the North of England to confront her! 

Still, I too would like my work back so that the part of the course which takes in TMAs can be safely put aside and I can concentrate on the forthcoming examination.

The miserable rituals of professional preparation are now complete: my shoes are polished; my shirts set out; shocks and pants are checked; trousers are hanging; my Munch tie is ready to be worn and the bloody alarm is set.

The onset of Summer Time means that I will be getting up in the dark again, but each new day should be that little bit lighter than the last and waking up to the light means that the end of term is drawing inexorably closer. 

And we all know what that means.

In spite of widespread scepticism, I am determined to turn my back on full-time education for ever and look towards the shining example of my Uncle Eric who, as I never tire of telling people, has now been retired for longer than he was teaching!  Sigh of unmixed admiration!

At least I have got my proper glasses back.  A telephone call at quarter to eight in the evening informed me that the glasses had been returned to the optician in Sitges – and I was also informed that the shop closed at eight-thirty.  Needless to say I immediately sprang to the car and retrieved my glasses well within the opening time.

The replacement of the very thin arm which had snapped cost €75!  Dear god!  Yet again I realise that I chose the wrong profession.

Talking of which – time for bed, because I have to get up so early in the morning.  For a whole day (!) of work.

Roll on the weekend.