What's the next dish?

I am beginning to measure my life in a series of decent meals at low prices.  And that surely cannot be right.  There are more meaningful ways to evaluate a continuing life than in terms of food.  Surely.  But this lunchtime we, with Irene, had an excellent meal followed by a glass of mediocre iced coffee.

            The meal, however, was a mere prelude to the action of the day: buying Irene another computer.

            It is always a delight to see people other than my good self-indulging in repeat purchases of the same item.  Because of course, the item is never exactly the same.  You can buy, for example, watches – but the delight is buying a timepiece which is unlike the previous one in some way or other.  They may have the same function, but they display different design solutions to encapsulate those problems solved.

            Having seen what appeared to be an excellent buy in a less than excellent shop, both Toni and I were eager for someone (anyone) to buy it.  The it in question was a 10.1” laptop computer with 500GB hard disk and other bits and pieces, together with a touch sensitive screen.  And all in an attractive package at a more than attractive price.  Luckily Irene appeared just when it appeared more and more likely that I would have to buy the damn thing for myself!

            Irene was immediately smitten with the machine and even bought a more than stylish bag to go with it.  All for €300 and a bit.

            Toni leapt into action and helped Irene set the machine up and, after the usual frustrations, without which you could never be sure that you had bought an authentic Windows machine, it was ready to go.  Toni, with the Puritan insistence of a born-again-program-for-freer also installed Open Office via our Wi-Fi and the machine was fully operational.

            I have a universally recognized knack of getting other people to spend their money.  In a different life I am sure that I would have been a totally unscrupulous entrepreneur, but in this one I am merely a vicarious expenditure fiend, feeding off the spendthriftiness of others.

            It is very hard to see others enjoying the delights of purchasing up to the moment electronic equipment, especially of the computer variety, without thinking back over the vast sums of money that one has spent over the years and the development of these infernal machines and then thinking how unfair it all is that someone today can spend a fraction of the total sum of money that I have spent and get substantially more for their money.

            I still remember buying a laser printer which cost (in those days) four hundred quid.  I must have been insane!  The only thing that it did was print pages of type.  Nicely admittedly, but solely.  And the cost of the cartridges was unbelievable.  Where is that machine now?  Junked!  The double sided printer that I have downstairs does everything other than fold the paper into neat origami shapes, has a colour touch screen, individual ink colours, is Wi-Fi operated and links to god knows what media – and cost a quarter of the amount for the laser printer.

            As Toni keeps telling me, as if it were an insult, I am a prime example of a buyer caught up in planned obsolescence idiocy.  To which I reply that virtually everything I have is Mac and Apple which shows, to say the least, a certain imperviousness to commercial masochism.

Tomorrow is weigh-day and I have no high expectations from that event.  I have not been able to go swimming for a couple of days and have been told that the pool will remain out of action until Monday at least!  So much for their protestations of speedy clear up!  I will therefore be able to blame my lack of loss on the unreliability of pool management.  There is always someone who can take the rap other than oneself!  And anyway, there are other weeks for fat evaporation until April Fools’ Day and the final weigh in this part of the Great Experiment.

Time?

I have been to the swimming pool three times today.  And not swum a single length.  I got changed at my usual time and attempted to go to the pool, but was met by a locked door and a notice which I had presumably ignored the day before informing me that the pool would be closed for essential maintenance.

            The rest of the day was taken up with abortive attempts to get the pool to give me a realistic time of when the pool would be open again.  Foolishly, and forgetting what country I was in, I believed the time that they said it would be open.  It was not.

            Neither was the second time that it was supposed to be open and my next visit confirmed that the place would not be open until the next day.  It shows how little I have accepted the way that this country works that I believe that the pool will actually be open tomorrow.

            This means that I have not had my swim today and over the last few days and for lunch tomorrow I will have eaten far too much to be on course for my weight loss.  Ah well, next week is another opportunity to turn from the alluring highways of calorific delight to the austere slog of the mud-heavy winding lanes of cottage cheese deprivation!  I am not looking forward to my weigh-in on Sunday morning.  Action will have to be taken!

            Meanwhile the phoney war of waiting for my results from the last assignment continues.  I have worked out a strategy for the rest of the course, but the strategy does depend on the results of the assignment.  If all goes according to plan then I will probably enjoy the rest of the course.  If there is a problem then there will have to be a radical rethink.

            Whatever, I am looking forward to the rest of the course whatever strategy I have to adopt.  There are only three months of the course left and there is a great deal of work to be gone through before the end!

Old Times!

Sitting by a floor to ceiling window on the first floor of a small restaurant looking out on to the square which contained the church of Santa Maria del Mar was, I suppose, a prime position.  It was cold though.

            This was my outing with Suzanne, who I haven’t seen for some time, so there was a lot of catching up.  My contribution was based on life in the real world; Suzanne’s was to do with education.  I love listening to people talk about education and teaching (not, by any means the same thing) because of my practical distance from it.  My only concern is with the children of the UK becoming tax paying citizens and therefore helping to fund my pension.  The kids around the world can do as they please; they are nothing to do with me, O Vienna!

            This is not absolutely true obviously.  How can a teacher of umpteen years experience say such things?  I do understand that what happens in the rest of the world effects what happens in the UK and therefore has a direct influence on my pension.  But it is hard to sympathise with the pampered youth of today without thinking of the indirect taxation they pay as they spend their parents’ money.  The more the merrier, say I!

            Suzanne and I talked non-stop, often at the same time and, to be fair to the pair of us, we ranged far and wide in our topics – though, also to be fair, it the topics did tend to come back to teaching more often than not.  But that is something that you have to accept if you talk to a teacher – education is life and life is teaching.  It is simple and unassailable and has to be accepted because that is how it is.

            It was difficult to hide my delight in various instances of schadenfreude that were offered by Suzanne’s descriptions of life in the school.  O the joy of not being there to act like my curmudgeonly self.  Victor Meldrew has nothing on me when I get going about the inadequacy of management in Education!

            If that sort of revenge were not enough, I also gave Suzanne a copy of the poems that I have written as part of the course.  These were presented in a booklet, the scars of which production are still with me.  The booklet was wittily entitled “Poems, of course” and she will have to read them and give me some sort of feedback.  My friendship comes at a price!

            As Irene will find when she comes to lunch on Saturday.  She too will have a copy of the booklet and that will wipe the smile off her face!

            Meanwhile the days pass and the latest mark will be revealed – and my strategy for the remaining assignments.  I am already making plans for the rest of the course, but the plans will be as nothing unless I can see a productive way forward.  The hell with experience and the joy of learning: it is all about the marks!

On a different, yet related subject.  I have been searching for a particular book which I am beginning to suspect I gave to Oxfam in the decimation of my library before I left the UK.  I sincerely hope that I have not and that the volume is lurking behind some unrelated books which I have not yet moved.  But the feeling is growing in me that it is one of the spurned volumes.  This, more than ever, reinforces my belief that no book, no matter how tangential to my life, should ever be thrown away.

            I have run out of places where it can be and the partial organization of my remaining books which took place some time ago makes it even less possible that the one that I want is ‘hidden’ in some way.  It is, however, a very pleasant and enjoyable frustration to go through my library trying to find what I want.  I am always amazed, and not a little disturbed by the strange juxtapositions that I discover as my eye sweeps along the spines!  I would be sad to have everything arranged in a totally logical way.  A library should be full of surprises!  And mine certainly is.

            To hell with Dewey-decimal and laud above all the Heath-Robinson approach to book classification!

Technology Strikes Again!

YouTube, as is generally accepted, in the fountain of all wisdom.  I have now been trained by Toni to stop asking him questions about, well, anything and to turn to YouTube instead because, simply, all the answers are there.

            And indeed they are – as long as you ask the right questions.

            My latest attempt to give myself a nervous breakdown was to try and set up a booklet.  Now this has been a bane of my professional life for as long as I can remember.  I am very much a booklet teacher.  If it is worth doing, it is worth making a booklet to put it in.

            One of my truly great achievements in the School on the Hill was forcing the powers that be to buy me (not the bloody school) a long arm stapler.  This amazingly important element in life made my booklets just that little bit more professional by having the staples vertical to the line of the spine.  The usual effect is of a slanted staple because the arm of the thing is far too short.  Not with a long arm version.  I jealously guarded it and never, but never loaned it out.  Some things in school only survive through the caring selfishness of determined individuals!

            So, I attempted to put the poems that I have now written as part of my OU Creative Writing course into a booklet.  This should be easy.  A few clicks and the job should be done.  Having never (never) managed this successfully before I had a certain gritty determination about doing it properly this time.

            As part of the scheme I have bought a printer which prints on both sides of the paper.  The perfect accompaniment to booklet production.  My previous attempts have all been on the cut out and stick on previously constructed templates with page numbers carefully written in to avoid confusion.  This time it was all going to be done by the computer.

            So YouTube was prodded into action and I made notes and printed out instructions.  Thus primed I went to my computer and found that I had a different version of Word.  A later and more sophisticated version possibly, but certainly not the one in the films.  So back to YouTube, and remembering to mention this time around that this was Word for Mac.

            Low and behold, no sooner asked for then, as if my magic, some hapless music teacher promised to tell all.

            My heart sank when he started his little lecture by saying that Mac had no facility for making booklets.  He then compounded my depression by saying that all could be made well by simply downloading a program.  This is always the prelude to hours of frustration as the program hides itself away or is haplessly corrupted or simply doesn’t work.  Nevertheless, goaded by desperation I put all my faith in his hesitant delivery and empty of hope I typed in a wan request for the program to appear.

            Much to my astonishment it existed and downloaded.  So far so unnatural. It was then time for it to work.  And it did.  Up to a point.

            It took me five hours to get the sodding thing to print out in the way that I wanted it to.  Five hours.  Not, admittedly constant effort – part of the time was Toni trying to calm me down as yet another set of pages came out of the machine wrongly.

            The only thing that is keeping me sane is the determination that the next time I have to make a booklet it is going to be easier.  Please god!

            And the staples.  I ended up using a pair of dividers to poke holes in the spine and then fitted the individual staple in them and pushed the ends down with a ruler.  So much for technology.

            But I do have a booklet ready to give to Suzanne when I meet her tomorrow after school.  She asked for the poems and it will take the restraint of a person who is not like me not to moan about the length of time that it took to make the booklet.

            I think that she is expecting me to read them out while we sample a few tapas and a bottle of Cava.  I hope that there are no other humans listening to us as I do so.  Though my poems are not really the reading out loud in a public place sort of stuff – but what the hell, culture is culture after all.

            The next assignment if Life Writing – and that can be addressed in poetry as well.  As I keep thinking, a lot is riding on the outcome of the present assignment.

We are also getting nearer to the moment when I have to decide on my next course – which will start in October.  It has to be a third level course and I need 120 credits to finish my degree.  In effect that means two years of study at level three and then I am done.  My Modern Art course will be 60 of those credits and then I have to do something else.  It might even be literature – a reversion to type!

Our lunch today was in the little restaurant opposite Lidl.  I had a small slice of tortilla followed by lightly fried calçots with special sauce; medallions of hake in a creamy sauce with asparagus, peas and peppers; flan de mató, with red wine and Casera – for €8.95!  Toni’s meal was even cheaper – nothing.  This restaurant has a loyalty card which means for every ten meals at ‘full’ price you get one free.  In effect it means that each meal costs about six and a half quid, with wine.  And it was sunny.

It was a pity that the meal was before the struggle for the booklet.  But the memory of it lessens the pain a little.  And I had a good swim – even if somebody had the effrontery to come into my lane to do a bit of swimming.  It only lasted for ten or so lengths and he departed to waters calmer.  It is a good thing that I was not wearing my glasses or I could hold a grudge.

Tomorrow we are promised rain.  And I will have to wear shoes to go into the centre of Barcelona.  Life can be hard.