What is everyone else doing?

I think that I have shown exemplary restraint as it is now the 5^th of September and I have not marked the start of the educational term with an extended gloat.  And, indeed, I will do not such thing now.  It is cruel and unnatural to take pleasure in the gloom of others, especially then they are doing essential work for the continuation of . . . .

I can’t keep that up! 

I am finally and irrevocably retired - and life is good! 

I am ashamed to admit that it is not sufficient for me to be happy; others must be miserable and be seen to be miserable for my pleasure to be unalloyed!  I might pay a visit to my old school – no, that is a step too far.  I suppose.

I do see one of my previous institutions every time I go for a swim in my local leisure centre.  This week only the teachers are in school; next week the onslaught of customers will fill those empty corridors and down the silence in a thousand piping voices!  As the weather is fine, the roof of the leisure has been retracted and there is a clear sight of the site of the school in which I have spent a few very pleasant weeks. 

But it has to be admitted that swimming (with the accompaniment of my exclusive choice of short pieces of bone conducted music) is better than being in the classroom.

I should add at this point that after my swim I sit and sip a cup of tea while reading my phone or Kindle, book or newspaper (thank god for the electronic media).  I should add this, but, thanks to Paul B, I no longer read – I play “Candy Crush”.  How are the mighty fallen!  Classic literature and The Guardian to a glorified game of Tetris!

And it is compulsive.  And clever.  Not in the structure of the game which basically consists of lining up similar objects and blasting other objects out of the way, no, that isn’t difficult to understand.  What is really clever is the setting of almost impossible objectives and offering little “cheat” moves for real money.  You want a few extra goes to get rid of the last pesky little objects?  They are yours for 89p.

The game also utilises the social media, urging players to send a life to a friend!  Or get one in return.  All this so that you can watch badly drawn graphics jerk their unconvincing way across your screen and then walk a few steps to get to the next location on what seems like an interminable path to . . . ?  To nowhere.  Just another numbered location on an arbitrary path.  But paying real money to get an edge to get to the next meaningless level.  It is both evil and very clever!

On a more positive level, even the displacement activity magnet that is “Candy Crush” did not managed to stop me completing the last OU essay for this course.  I am now left with the revision for the examination on the 10^th of October and worrying about the essay for which I had taken a rather different point of view from that which would have been the obvious way to approach the essay title.  You see, in spite of what I always say to pupils (sorry, should have got the tense right there, “You see, in spite of what I used to say to pupils when I was teaching and not retired”) that they MUST ANSWER THE QUESTION; when I am put in the situation where I have to put my advice into practice, then I am always looking for the road less travelled and making my work that much more difficult by trying to find a wrinkle that makes it different.  We shall see.

Part of the displacement activity entailed Irene, Toni and myself going to a meal in an expensive Italian restaurant called “La Tagliatella.”  This is a chain and Irene had eaten in two other restaurants and was not prepared for the generally low standard that we experienced in the Anec Blau establishment.

Our first waitress was a sullen little girl who acted as though her work was part of Community Service.  To be fair the second person to serve us was excellent, bright, intelligent and responsive – though that did not stop the kitchen getting the meals mixed up.

The food: I have never, ever, in my life ever been to an Italian restaurant where they said that they did not have any more Bolognese sauce!  It was like a bad joke!  When the first course of Provoletto arrived after we had been told that it had been enthusiastically recommended by friends of Irene we started in disbelief at a plate of melted cheese with a few chopped vegetables on it.  For €8.90!  The pasta dishes were OK, but not for €15.20!  A grossly overpriced meal.  Though the sweet was excellent – as well it should have been at €6!

And now we await the general departure of our obnoxious neighbours as September demands their presence elsewhere.  We hope.  The bottle of Cava is cooling waiting to be mixed with the lemon sorbet to try and recreate the excellent refreshment we had in Irene’s barbecue.  It is the only way I can think of to encourage Toni to drink more than a thimble full of Catalonia’s national drink!

And now to phone teachers!  Cheap entertainment!

It was the best of times, it was . . .

Breaking a cardinal rule of Creative Writing, I shall start with the weather.

It has not been good.  It has rained.  Rained!  And August is still with us.  Just.  There is an end of summer feel and there is a distinct chill in the air.  Well, chill is perhaps putting things a little too strongly, but it did merit a thin sheet on the bed last night.  All of these things are not significant, but what I saw at the poolside yesterday surely is.

Along the side of the pool under a cloud filled sky and perched malevolently on flimsy loungers, the hags of the area ignored the less than equitable temperatures and sat there busily smoking as their version of the unlovely ladies who surrounded the guillotine knitting.

As I made my way up and down the pool, my ears carefully stoppered and the music pumping through the bones of my cheeks with my head underwater for a lot of the time, I was at least spared the penetrating cackle of those carcinogenic cows.  They did however, even in the open air, manage to channel their opprobrious exhalations so that each in-breath I took was polluted with their noxious nicotine!

Even my relentless up-and-down approach to swimming failed to move them as the doggedly ignored the obvious inclement weather and stayed there as if defying the end of summer.  It comes, my dears!  You can no more hold it back with your reeking breath than you can get me back into a classroom!

September looms in the very near distance and with it the culling of the juvenile population of the area.  We retired people cannot wait for the shops and streets be returned to the people who have bloody well paid for them.  The penetrating voices of the little emperors will be consigned to the classes where my ex-colleagues will have to do what they can with kids who have been solidly and relentlessly indulged for the last two months.  God help them and god bless them.  The teachers I mean!

The last OU essay of this course drags on and it is now about half way through the drafting stage.  I have decided to change the title to suit myself and write as if there is no word limit as I know what I want to say and I also know that I am very good at editing – when I have to.

I am ashamed to admit (which, of course, I am anything but) that I have bought another watch.  It is a long time since I have been struck by a timepiece – and that, surely is justification alone for buying it.

This one is by the well-known watch designer Kenneth Cole of New York.  Yes, and neither had I until this afternoon.  Anyway, it is brown metallic with a face which looks as though the watch is set in a disk of glass with only the central circle of the watch face of solid colour and with the numeral indicators radiating like spokes encased in glass bound by the metal rim.  And it is luminous and waterproof.  Elegant and original – though a little more expensive than an impulse buy should be.  So sue me!

Like a plague carrier Paul B. breathed the words “Candy Crush” into my shell-like before he left and, like a fool, I explored a little and have now become addicted to a game which plays on one’s desire to cheat and actually offers “help” but at a price in real money to allow the inexpert player to bend the rules and have a little extra to get to the next level.  The game is of generally mindless imbecility, the graphics are of Captain Pugwash sophistication and there is no reward.  What more can you ask!  I have even neglected my beloved patience.

One of the fiendish elements in “Candy Crush” is that you are only allowed a certain number of lives before the game stops you while offering the opportunity to buy (with real money) a full set of lives or to go on line and ask friends for lives.  I am not quite sure about that because it asks for you to do so on Facebook – a social media I spurn as I would a rabid dog.  After a certain number of minutes the lives are restored, but they are restored one by one and over hours.  I can well imagine a person thinking that eighty-nine pence a small price to ask for the ability to continue to indulge an addiction!  I, however, am made of sterner stuff.

Tomorrow a tutorial with the dreaded Elluminate (if it works) and a draft to finish so that I have time to tart it up with accurate references and construct a bibliography to impress.

Then revision starts leading up to the examination on the 10^th of October.  This time I am not going to be able to rely on well-established personal knowledge and I am going to have to do a certain amount of hard learning.

Driving Art

Sometimes, when reading a book a sentence leaps off the page at you.  There is a moment’s pause for reflection and then you murmur something like, “I wish I had written that!”  Occasionally the sentence will be a pithy aphorism, or a piece of illuminating insight; but there are other times when the writer will have inadvertently touched some part of your psyche (or what you think is your psyche) and all your pretentions are suddenly laid bare.  But only, of course, to yourself because, if you are wise you keep such revealing spotlights private.

I once told one of my better A Level students that one of my favourite collections of short stories was “Stalky and Co” by Rudyard Kipling.  She instantly procured a copy and read it immediately and in the next lesson (by which time she had read the book – she was that sort of student) she looked at me in the withering way that she had and in her most condescending voice she told me that she wasn’t at all surprised by my choice and that it told her a lot about me.  Which it did and does.  And perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut.  But that is not a realistic possibility for me!

So, having read one of those revealing sentences this very morning while waiting in the post office to send off an artistic hint to my painter friend while protecting my sanity by reading my mobile phone, I can no more keep it to myself than I would be capable of saying, “I have no opinion on that subject!”

I am frolicking my way through a digital collection of three “Classic” books by Christopher Hitchens called “Long Live Hitch” and am at present reading through his authoritative book reviews and have reached his writing about The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Memoirs of a Revolutionary, by Victor Serge.  The second paragraph of this review starts,

After Dostoyevsky and slightly before Arthur Koestler, but contemporary with Orwell and Kafka and somewhat anticipating Solzhenitsyn, there was Victor Serge.

Now that is what I call a sentence! It doesn’t take much analysis to see what I responded to there, but I almost squeaked out loud as I read it sitting on an unrelenting window ledge in a hot, stuffy and overcrowded waiting area in the Post Office. 

A large part of the delight is in the fact that I have read books by all the authors mentioned except for Victor Serge, the focus of the review!

That is surely almost a perfect “hit” for a reviewer: to lasso and flatter the reader with a list of common reads and then tacitly assume that you, the reader, are acquainted with the author under discussion.

You can guarantee that I will find something by Victor Serge because I would not like to disappoint the reviewer by not being the reader he thought I was!

Yesterday was taken up with a trip to Figueras, in the province of Girona to pay a visit to the Teatro-Museo Dalí.

This is an artistic centre that I have long wanted to visit – though with a certain degree of the Masochistic about such a desire because I am very much with André Breton who dismissed Dalí by reworking the letters of his name into the accusation of “Avida dollars” arguably the most famous insulting anagram in modern art!  With the exception of a few exceptional canvasses I have always regarded Dalí as a fraud.  So I did not anticipate that the geodesic dome topped, reclaimed ruin of a theatre with a bread-studded façade would necessarily change my mind.

Having to queue in scorching sunshine for far too long and then push your way through heaving masses of tourists who were there because they had been told to go was not my way of enjoying myself.  However, the experience (because experience it certainly was) was at least interesting.

The quality of art on display ranges from the compelling to the embarrassing – though I am sure that true Surrealists would say that was as much as they could hope for!

I bought a guide in the bookshop on the way out and I will read that in a more leisurely way than the visit itself.  Perhaps I will be tempted to return at a more out of season time to reassess!

Lunch was a triumph of the Internet, as Toni scoured that source to the full to find a place off the tourist beat and where for €10 we got a thoroughly satisfactory meal.  I would give you the name of this establishment but the information I took as I left later became a featureless piece of cooked pulp as the heat and humidity of the day turned my pocket into a steam oven!

I used the GUC to take a few decent pictures and I think that I am getting closer to knowing what I am doing when I press the button.

There was a lot of driving in the day and I did not so much fall asleep when I went to bed as fall into a coma.

Today was supposed to me the day on which I started to draft my last OU essay of this course. 

This has not happened, but the day isn’t over yet. 

And anyway there is Sunday.

And furthermore, what the hell, I have until the 5^th of September to get it done.  I think.

Eating, Views and Art

Triumphing over the vertical approach to Irene’s house I was met, as usual, by the baying of hounds.  Included in the intimidating pack was one fearsome looking dog who, to add to the discomfort of the putative visitor, was thoroughly muzzled.

It is only if you are regular visitor that you know that the bark is the whole of the “attack”.  Any advance of a visitor results in an equally swift retreat by said dog.  The muzzle is there to protect other dogs not humans!

Among the many animals (apart from the two ladies) who live in Irene’s home, the most interesting is the blind dog.  This extraordinary animal shows alternating bouts of uncanny prescience about obstacles in his path and then bumps his head on a chair leg.  He is, however, happy in his inexplicably perilous world and his guiding light (so to speak) is any movement of his beloved mistress.  Watching him go down stairs is heart-stoppingly tense, but every move for his aged limbs is a triumph.

He is friendly to a fault and, as a card-carrying dog person; I duly rewarded his nearness with unrelenting scratching.  My activities were closely observed by the misnomerly named cat, Blossom.  Tiring of my complete indifference she meandered towards me uttering was I understand cat people call “plaintive” cries.  Which I ignored.  She then crawled over the sofa on which I was sitting.  Which I ignored.  She then retreated and regarded me with a glare as malevolent as any I have seen a feline display – and I have seen many!

By the time we had to leave the dog was weak with ecstasy and when I sent to the loo he followed me and waited like a lost soul outside the door for my return to scratching.

The driving to Montserrat was straightforward motorway until the last windy bit, so we made good time.

Our first duty was to book a table (with view) for one of the celebrated lunches that you can get in the restaurant.  Not the self-service one, though we did give a pitying look at the huddled masses queuing for their meal when we later came to claim our table!

Off to kiss the Idol with the taking of many pictures on the Grown Up Camera along the way.  The queue to Kiss the Idol was stretching way out of the church so we knocked that on the head and decided to look at the Idol from the vantage point of the nave.

The church was packed and I quickly realized that this was nothing to do with piety but rather the fact that the famed choir of the church was about to sing.  And sing they did to a chorus of clicks and whirrs and a blaze of light from the audience (“congregation” would be going a level of sanctity too far!) as cameras, iPhones, iPad, tablets and video cameras snapped into record mode.

The singing was pretty and instantly forgettable and then it was time for lunch.

Which was excellent.  Our buffet salad starter was one of the most delicious I have ever had.  The lamb in the main course fell off the bone and the lemon sorbet was superb.

Duly stuffed we wound our way back to the Church of the Idol and went down (by lift – I said we were stuffed) to the art gallery.

The Caravaggio of St Jerome Penitent is excellent and outshines everything else in the room in which it is displayed, though I have to say that the little El Greco they have is remarkable for the almost monochrome, quasi-abstract background.

The real treasures here are Catalan and the collection rivals that of MNAC in some of its aspects.  My favourite painting is by Casas and shows a young woman preparing for her bath.  This is a subtle study in pastel tones and has a misty delicacy which I find breath taking.  It is not a spectacular painting but it is one that impresses itself on the memory and always repays a visit because no reproduction does it justice.

An excellent day out which thoroughly justified the lazy day on the beach today to compensate for all the effort of eating and looking yesterday!

The ways of our University System are gnomic to say the least.  I have been trying to get out of doing a foundation course in my present OU degree because I have already done one.  Admittedly it was some 32 years ago in the early eighties, but I really didn’t want to do it again.

I was told when I started this OU degree that everything that I had done previously was “out of date” and I would have to start anew.  The phone call today raise and then realized the possibility that I could be reinstated on the course that I started all those years ago!

So, in one telephone call, the six years that I was going to have to study for my degree has been cut to three!  I will wait for the confirmation of what I have been told before I start making any plans because living in Spain makes one wise in the ways of bureaucracy and the little mind games that they can play. 

But, on the face of it, the OU has done the decent thing and I am very impressed by the fact that I had the phone call (in response to an earlier query) and a decision about my status was decided in hours and an email sent immediately. 

The OU is truly one institution where they place students first!  God bless them and Harold Wilson too! 

And that must be a sentiment which is not often typed nowadays!

In what was surely a barely veiled political comment the lady from the OU referred to “our dear government” cutting money to the OU and demanding that students pay higher fees more in keeping with students in conventional institutions.  Perhaps my reinstatement is a reflection that I have paid (much, much lower fees) for a variety of other courses and that has to be part of my time-extended course.  Who knows!  Who cares!  My studies have changed for the better and the cost of my degree has been lessened by almost eight thousand pounds! 

All things work together for good!  And who am I to disagree with Candide!