A New Age!

Primary school children are so small!

This should not come as a revelation; but to someone used to teaching the brutish organic life forms of a secondary persuasion, it does come as a revealing surprise!

As I recall my primary education, I was taught everything except for Welsh by the same teacher. I have a form group which is composed of children from two year groups, while my English and other classes are different arrangements of students. So I have at least three distinct, if overlapping groups – something which I did not expect.

There are two other teachers of Years 3 and 4 who, from a short acquaintanceship seem to have completed a vast amount of work. Planning is detailed and vast: from long to medium to weekly and individual lesson plans. The amount of paper generated is colossal and seems to be a weekly chore of monumental proportions to complete. I am well and truly daunted!

The number of duties that members of staff are expected to perform (including lunchtime duties) is startling. I had thought that the battle for a duty free lunchtime had been fought and won: apparently I was wrong. I expect to find a number of other popularly held delusions quite exploded!

The school is very small (especially after overcrowded buildings housing more than a thousand pupils) and the students seem polite and responsive. Time, there, will tell!

I have done my first preparation in trying to find pictures and information about Rusiñol and his circle in Sitges – a small price for the mass of lesson plans and information given to me by my colleagues.

Tomorrow to subjects and stresses new!

Almost the day of reckoning!

All dressed up and nowhere to go!

What is the point of buying a cheap nylon suit if you can’t show it off to your putative colleagues? Or to put in another way, when is an INSET Day not an INSET Day? Answer: when you are the only person in the school.

I will be charitable and say that it was a question of mixed messages: I thought that there might be some information about what I am supposed and who I am supposed to be teaching before I actually get to see a class in front of me. Wrong!

Tomorrow will be a baptism of fire as a school noted for the meticulous quality of teacher planning has a stand-up-and-do-it practioner pas excellence usurping the place of a true professional!

Having a startled look at what was probably my timetable I couldn’t help noticing among the splay of subjects which are as second nature to a polymath of my pretension, there were lurking substantial blocks of time labelled ‘Spanish’ and ‘Catalan.’ If nothing else gives me pause for thought (up to and including the teaching of ‘Maths’!) a lurch towards teaching three languages is a vocabulary too far!

Documents were eventually found for me, but their detail was too depressing to contemplate at short notice, so I opted to deal with them at even shorter notice tomorrow when confronted by a completely new class! I rely, almost exclusively, on the educative powers of adrenalin! Don’t fail me now or more importantly, tomorrow.

Toni continues under the weather and even took time off from work to go to the doctor! This continues a tradition that we have established while spending time in Spain that while one is working the other finds an excuse not to work. Tomorrow might see that arrangement smashed for ever!

And I have a lesson in the evening too!

It’s all too much!

The world of work.

A world that I thought was behind me is now just a few hours away.

My responses to the immanent change in my life style are modified by the lack of information that I have concerning what I might be asked to do in the way of teaching for my class. In some ways the open area of speculation is quite encouraging as it allows my active imagination to work rather than tie me down to any practical expression of professional interest. Like lesson preparation!

Last night was spent in Terrassa watching the procession for The Kings. This was much more impressive than I expected with hundreds of people taking part dressed in colourful pastiches of cod Renaissance costumes with the colour scheme tilted towards the gold, red and blue. In Terrassa’s version there was a fair selection of horse riders too. The part of the procession which seems strangest to a foreign observer is the use of sweets. As each contingent passes showers of sweets are scattered into the spectators.

Children and parents line the streets and are well prepared with a variety of gaping containers to contain the sugared loot! Carmen had a child’s back pack to ensure that she was able to accumulate the colourful results of the family’s scrabbling on the pavement!

The members of the procession had their own techniques for sweet distribution. Most just scattered a partial handful in an expansive arc, but others were more vindictive and there was a certain calculation in the trajectory and aim. Paul Squared was clipped on the mouth, Toni at the side of the eye, and the rest of us had sweets bouncing from a variety of less sensitive parts of our bodies!

The wander through the cold streets of Terrassa after the end of the procession did no good for either Toni’s cold and sore throat or my arthritis. I look on it as being just punishment for being late for Carmen’s lunch – though it was (grudgingly) reheated – and very nice it was too!

Today, Sunday, I was able to return the favour of a meal and provide lunch for the family, so I think all is forgiven and forgotten.

Roll on the next meal.

A lesson to learn?

Some lessons are learned by hard, expensive experience. Such lessons should be respected, and more importantly, should become a practical guide to future behaviour.

I blame the Pauls!

After a hard day travelling to Barcelona and entering the collection of regional architecture which is the basis of the Poble España on Montjuic. Each region of Spain is represented by buildings which form a small village with restaurants, hotels, exhibition spaces and churches. They are not like St Fagan’s because the buildings are not authentic in the same way with only the façade or a particular feature being from the original site. They form an interesting collection, however and, even with many of the restaurants and coffee shops closed there was enough there to exhaust us.

A particular point of interest was an exhibition of contemporary art. Most of the exhibits were depressingly bad with hardly an original thought to motivate the viewer’s involvement with the art. Many of the exhibits were sloppily executed with what looked like casual application of paint masquerading as vitality! The high point of low imagination was a repainted version of Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ presented as ‘Guys d’Avignon’ with a very prominent example of masculinity in the bottom right corner!

The collection was saved for me by the upper floor where there were one or two works which were actually worth stealing! One collage in particular interested me. It represented a few pieces of fruit and a cloth in a Cezanne-like arrangement, but with a very muted palette. I could imagine living with that, unlike the works in the basement which were startling examples of photorealism together with deeply unsettling sculptures. The most threatening sculpture was a bronze of a helmeted naked man crouching balanced on a metal plinth with arms outstretched. I have rarely seen a piece of sculpture which was more immanent!

Our obligatory walk down the Ramblas was the finishing touch to our desire to walk any further and we eventually succumbed to a taxi to the station for our train back!

Toni was still coughing and gruff and didn’t want to go out for dinner and settled for a burger from the café on the corner to eat in the flat while we went to the restaurant on the other corner.

Everything was going well when one of the Pauls suggested that we visit a bar. The Elvis bar was open and, in homage to Paul Squared’s Aunt who has an Elvis fixation we went in. The place was virtually deserted and didn’t sell wine. This precipitated the first mistake: I began to drink gin and tonic. There was a pool table and, in spite of my protestations, we played a game. Other people arrived; the games proliferated as did the drinks.

And here is the lesson to be learned: pay for your drinks as they arrive. Do not, under any circumstances, allow the bar man to ‘keep a tab for you.’ I am too ashamed to mention the total sum that we finally paid at the end of the evening in the early morning. But it was substantial. We prefer to think that we paid over the odds rather than actually drank that amount of money.

Learn the lesson!

It's old and cultural- so there!

Reputation is a precious and delicate little thing.

Since the late fifties Spain has been the Mecca for sun seeking vitamin D starved Brits.

Admittedly the couple of weeks in Benidorm or Magaluff when drink sodden bodies lie in an alcoholic coma for the hours of daylight festering from the abuses of the night are not the best advertisements for the healing power of sunlight. When the revellers finally stagger their way to the airport, red raw and harbouring god knows what additional microbes, leaving a trail of peeled skin behind them their memories of the ameliorating effect of their annual vacation may be a little difficult to distinguish from the physical pain that overindulgence brings. Their vision of the sun may be more in its guise as Destroyer rather than Healer!

But for those of us who reach for the sun with the slippery help of lotions, balms, salves and unguents while wearing hats, t-shirts and sporting healthy respect, the (affordable) sun for a grey country is found in Spain.

It will therefore come as a shock to hear that the first purchases (apart from meals out) that the Pauls made in Spain were of two umbrellas. These were bought in the pouring rain in the ramblas market in Tarragona after we had gazed with an indifference bordering on contempt on the sea side rain soaked Roman amphitheatre.

I only hope that the reputation of Spain does not suffer in the retelling of the shameful purchases when the travellers return to Wales!

The dreaded cry to any host of, “What else is there to do in this place!” gave an added piquancy to the brimming resentment that had built up with each new toll station we had to go through on the motorway from Castelldefels.

When in doubt: eat. We followed this dictum and eventually discovered a neat little restaurant on the edge of the main square which advertised an appetising menu del dia. I would have described how we all steamed slightly as the accumulated moisture on our persons gradually dissipated in the homely warmth of the restaurant – but we were sitting near the door. Each new couple who arrived had a length discussion about whether to eat with one partner in the open doorway communicating with the other while allowing stray rain and a cold damp draft to ensure our personal humidity stayed high.

The meal, however, was excellent and fortified we sallied forth and soon found ourselves facing an Obvious Wall of Antiquity. As our interest was in inverse proportion to precipitation, and as the rain had abated its fury we (I) indicated that, after our epic and expensive journey we should at least show willing and cast a cursory glance at what Tarragona is famous for.

It was a good thing that we did.

Our first advantage was finding a loquacious, English speaking guard/curator who engaged us in conversation and shocked us by not only knowing of the existence of Caerleon, but also of wanting to visit it! His experience of British cities had been confined to Nottingham – a city I remember for the personal vindictiveness of its one way system. After our conversation with him it was incumbent upon us to purchase tickets for the rest of whatever it was we were on the edge of.

Tarragona was the major Roman settlement and administrative district for the whole of Spain and the jumbles of rubble we were looking at was once an extraordinary, three terrace scheme of buildings which included local and regional administrative buildings, a circus and the previously viewed amphitheatre.

The Roman ruins had been vandalized, or rather, utilized since medieval times and it was fascinating to see a line of an excavated wall broken by a modern road, but the line of the wall continued exactly in the medieval building opposite. Our first contact said that the buildings surrounding the site all had elements of Roman stonework in them, some of them incorporating Roman arches up to their third storeys!

The vast extent of the site would mean that much of Medieval Tarragona would have to be demolished to reveal the Roman original and, except in a piecemeal fashion, this is not going to happen. Some buildings have had plaster removed so that the Roman stone work has been revealed, but any more invasive archaeology will have real social consequences!

From an exhausting climb to the top of one building you are able to get a bird’s eye overview of the extent of the original Roman plan. From its proximity to the sea (though I imagine that the coast has moved somewhat since Roman times) the view from the sea of the three stepped terraces reaching to the highest point in the city must have been remarkable.

It was, therefore, something of a relief to find that our journey (accompanied on the way back by tropical force rain) had been worth the effort.

I only hope that Barcelona today lives up to its international hype and retains the interest of my ADHD compatriots!

Roll on the Ramblas!

Compare and contrast

Out of season what, really, is there to separate Barry in South Wales from Sitges in Catalonia.

The palm trees lining the Sitges sea front may give a slight clue, pointing in a fairly clear direction that there are indeed differences of a fairly basic nature between these two resorts!

Even at the best of times the fun fair in Barry looks like a fairly decrepit, faded set for some B movie horror pic. The decoration always seems forced, lacking the glitzy superficiality of other fairs that I have been to. The seedy penny arcades seem more of a cheap defining characteristic of the place than the frothy inconsequentiality they should represent. There is a hard edge to Barry which is raw and repulsive and it takes all of my childhood love of the place to mitigate the cold grasp of the modern version of a lost dream!

Sitges is slick and rich and confident. As Paul Squared said as we walked past closed shops, restaurants and bars, “I expect it’s buzzing at night.” There was a clear sense of expectation that ‘closed’ was momentary and that there was money for the taking! In Barry, out of season, ‘closed’ looks permanent; you half expect to see tumbleweed to drift along the sandy streets and to hear the irregular slap of a half open shutter to complete the soundtrack. But Sitges in the dead months seems to be resting to spring back at the tourists to siphon more and more money from the unsuspecting.

I am always surprised at how much care and attention beaches need. The little bay in Sitges that we usually use had shrunk. The sea had claimed the beach for itself and had cut a shelf of sand around the cliffs, which was all that was left of a once expansive stretch of sand. It was hard to imagine the pocket handkerchief sized beach being the same as the packed expanse of the summer. Presumably, just before the season starts, the bulldozers will get busy and the ‘natural’ expanse of beach will reappear and access to the other coves will be re-established. How sad that Nature needs to be given so many helping hands! There is more information about the real cost of the changing sand patterns at http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://geographyfieldwork.com/Sitges14_small.jpg&imgrefurl=http://geographyfieldwork.com/CoastalManagementSitges.htm&h=337&w=450&sz=13&hl=es&start=27&tbnid=6h_Al7HmFhmMdM:&tbnh=95&tbnw=127&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dout%2Bof%2Bseason%2Bsitges%26start%3D18%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D18%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Des%26sa%3DN in Sitges.

Our own beach (if only!) in Castelldefels is also showing signs of wear and the profile of the sands is changing. The early morning and late evening sound of the sand movers and the sand sifters no longer interrupts the thump of the waves and the crust of shells shows just how lively our waters are!

Our walking in Sitges exhausted us and we had a lazy evening in which the most active thing we did was curse the video club for issuing us with a duff DVD.

It was dark and raining (sic.) so there was no change of our taking it back last night. This means that I have the delight of wrenching my limited linguistic knowledge into ever more fantastic shapes as I try and get a rebate from the owner.

Keeps me fit!

Festering Festivity!

At least seeing in the New Year was one festivity which did not see me in bed before the end of the celebrations.

I have decided that my repeated illness on Christmas Day (now in its second great year) must be some sort of psychosomatic psychiatric rejection of festivity. Perhaps my ‘Inner Scrooge’, so long suppressed by my grasshopper-like joie de vivre, is manifesting itself in gastric prostration. I’m sure that there is a PhD thesis waiting on the development of my dyspepsia!

The claustrophobic family gathering started with sedate restraint but, egged on by an uninhibited two year old, it soon degenerated into a most satisfactory, what shall I say? Saturnalia? It does alliterate nicely, but given the Catalan refusal to overindulge in alcohol and the British Behaviour (that alliterated and is accurate) which would come with deep drafts; it had an innocence which seemed sadly out of keeping with the occasion!

The meal was, as usual, excellent and there was plenty of drink – though it was there more for decoration than for use. As I was picking up the Pauls on New Year’s Day there was little opportunity for me to do more than open the bottles of Cava rather than sup my way steadily though them! If Spanish police, I reasoned, were anything like their British counterparts, they would be lurking on motorways ready to breathalyse any stupid motorists who had convinced themselves that liquid indulgence until the early hours would be magically resolved by a few hours sleep, during which time all the alcohol in their bloodstreams would softly and silently vanish away!

So it was an unnaturally frisky and alert driver who eventually tore himself away from a rapidly developing fideuá in Carmen’s kitchen and set out to pick up the Pauls.

The baggage handlers of Barcelona airport ensured that the good time made during the flight was dissipated in the unworldly stasis which is the luggage reclaim area.

Of all the inhuman arenas of human conflict, many of the most perniciously soul destroying are found in airports. Luggage reclaim is a particularly ‘trying’ dimension of other worldly existential angst.

In theory baggage reclaim is designed to allow and encourage passenger ease. The conveyor belt system is sinuous and allows maximum passenger access on both sides; the speed of the system allows easy ‘sight and take’; television screen inform passengers of the location of their belt; buzzers warn passengers of the start of the process; the areas are large and light and airy.

So why are they always places of frustrated misery?

Well, let’s start with the television screens which so often misdirect. And lie. You see your flight number and the moving graphic of little cases indicating that everything is working. Yet the belt on which the real cases are apparently moving is stationary, inert and has the sort of final lifelessness of a blank screen computer. I am not working, it seems to say, I have not worked and I will never work. Especially not for you. And not now.

And when, unbelievably, the noise of the buzzer scythes though weak hearts by its sheer unexpectedness, the belt does not move. When it does move it is only for a few moments and then it stops. When it finally starts again, rather like an Escher drawing it gives the impression of multi dimensional endlessness and futility. No bags appear. Then bags do appear and nobody, absolutely nobody claims them. Hordes of people look at these ur-bags and nobody takes them. They circle endlessly, a domestic refutation of hopes and desires, a Sartre-like joke, a little hell on earth.

At the point just before mob hysteria threatens, real bags appear. The first bag is always taken by someone you have not noticed before; a person unrecognised from the check in, the departure lounge, the aircraft, the disembarkation and the eternal wait for the baggage to appear. I have always assumed that this person is a plant, a stooge of the baggage handlers, a sort of joke that they never cease to find funny. Let’s face it, have you ever known anyone say, “Ah yes, I remember that flight, my case was the first on the belt!” I don’t think so. They like their fun do baggage handlers!

And how we laugh in retrospect! It’s all part of the delight of modern transport: quick, easy and stress free.

And 2008 will be a year in which peace will blossom and flourish.

And talking of peace and blossoming: today is the day I go to my new school to get the information I need for the coming term.

It will, as they say, be revealing

All good things etc

What have I missed?

Like a character in some fantasy story who finds out that he has been ‘away’ for longer than he thought and he has to undergo a period of catching up, I am discovering that life has gone on unremarked by me in the old country!

Thanks to the miracle of my LMB and it being the end of the calendar year I have been glutting myself on a surfeit of reflective programmes looking back on the past year. Only absent since June and in spite of the fact that Spanish television does occasionally feature items from the United Kingdom (especially if they concern the royal family!) I felt that these programmes were detailing a country which had somehow passed me by. Who are the major officers of state now? What disasters has Brown had to deal with? Who are these people?

Who cares?

There has to be a fulcrum of involvement somewhere in my personality where the concerns of Catalonia and Spain are balanced with the concerns of Britain and Wales. An interest in one is obviously not exclusive, but at some point I have to realise that I am not living in Britain and, while friends, family, memory and the bulk of my wealth are all still firmly in the UK, I no longer live there and no longer intend to live there.

I wonder how my future job (now only six days away!) will influence my attitudes. I expect to agree with the persistent Mr Barkis in ‘David Copperfield’ and find that my perceptions of reality are materially influenced by the partnership of the Spanish Government in the proceeds of my remuneration. You will remember that he said, "It was as true . . . as turnips is. It was as true . . . as taxes is. And nothing's truer than them."

When you pay taxes you belong. By right!

But the New Year will have to see me take a much more serious approach to the learning of Spanish. At the moment I am relying on the osmosis method of language acquisition. This always seems to work in novels and films, but in real life it is a little more problematical. One of my favourite episodes of The Simpsons is when the True Hero of the series, Bart, is sent to France on what is supposed to be an educational trip. In fact he is forced to work as a slave in the vineyard of two unscrupulous brothers who treat him in the way that most of Springfield would like to see him punished. However, our Intrepid Hero escapes and during a traumatic walk along a single street he changes from being a monoglot American to fully bilingual in as clever a few seconds of animated film as you are likely to find.

The drawback is, of course, that it builds up expectations that, in spite of my repeatedly walking up and down streets in Castelldefels, do not transfer.

It is a salutary experience to discover that The Simpsons does little more than tell untruths!

Another illusion shattered!

Still new beginnings, new hopes, new job, new colleagues, new prospects, new country, new . . . so much.

I ought to get going!

And Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation

I have now purchased an unassumingly small metallic box. It looks like a featureless rectangular tea caddy. To me it is a little object of desire. And, more importantly, it allows me to do something which I have sorely missed for the last few months.

For a confirmed addict like myself arriving in Catalonia was the start of a period of ‘cold turkey’ which made settling in to my new adopted country, well, unsettling.

Of course there were ways to feed my habit; deals were done, but they were expensive and the product was often ‘impure.’ Invariably a fix would go wrong and I had to deal with the frustration of partial satisfaction and then having what I wanted snatched away.

Some days better than others. But they were generally dark days.

Eventually I found a supplier who could give me constant access, but the final product was often unsatisfactory, often degraded and simply not what I really wanted.

Now, I am satisfied. I am happy. My addiction is fed whenever I want. And the product is gooooooood.

I am talking, of course, about listening live to Radio 4.

Only other Radio 4 enthusiasts (aka fanatics) will understand the horror of the prospect of indefinite withdrawal from the finest radio station in the world by finding yourself in a foreign country.

Yes, I know that you can go to the BBC web page and get a live feed; that you can get podcasts; that there are ‘on demand’ programmes. All this I know. But the true enthusiast just clicks on and allows the programming wash over him as he is taken from Gardening to Ghana; from Shoes to Stocks – the Radio 4 range, unequalled anywhere else in the universe!

A laptop is portable, but drifting around the flat and plonking a laptop next to the kettle is simply unsatisfactory and too showily technological.

And now my restrained little metallic box is with me.

I have an internet radio!

I can make a cuppa and my little metallic box (LMB) in the kitchen doesn’t look out of place. A hop and a skip into the living room and the simple elegance of the LMB enhances the room design while relaying the well modulated tones of a Radio 4 pundit. Where ere I go (within reach of our broadband wifi) there goeth Radio 4 with me.

Home at last!

Though, thinking about it, wasn’t ‘Home at last!’ something that St John Rivers said in ‘Jayne Eyre’? That chilling personification of higher selfishness would have been a far better person if he had had an internet radio tuned to Radio 4. And he would certainly have had a better chance with Jayne!

But I digress.

What, I hear you ask, did I listen to first?

It is a measure of how much I have missed Radio 4 that I sat down and listened to The Archive Hour.

That in itself is not surprising: that sort of programme is one of the delights of the radio station. The fact that it was written and narrated by a Living Legend, the broadcaster Ray Gosling makes my listening to it almost unbelievable. Gosling’s lovingly preserved and displayed regional tones; ethos and aged gravitas nauseate me. His drawling delivery and faux naivety create in me the same skin crawling irritability that ‘Down Your Way’ with the even more unutterable Brian Johnston created for me years ago back in Cardiff.

While we are on the subject of BBC Radio Heresy, I also hate the Late Night Shipping Forecast and loathe the ‘Sailing By’ music. You will realise that these admissions are totally unacceptable to the real devotees of Radio 4 who actually buy recordings of ‘Sailing By’ and excitedly send in their nominations for the Person They Would Most Like to Hear Reading the Shipping Forecast. Sad buggers! I may be an ‘enthusiast’ but I have my limits! Just!

I would not be surprised to find out that Stephen Fry was born immaculately out of Radio 4, he is so quintessentially a representation of what Radio 4 dedicated listeners would like to think themselves to be: urbane, witty, sophisticated, learned, articulate and omnivorously interested and interesting! How we like to kid ourselves!

In the early days of radio connecting to a radio station was much more of an adventure than instant pleasure at the flip of a switch. Then, once one had turned the power on, one had to wait (so I’ve been told) for something or other, possibly the valve or the crystal, to warm up. When that was done there was an action called ‘tweaking the cat’s whisker’ to get the thing to work. Laboriously, over a cumbersome pair of headphones you might be lucky and eventually get to hear the distant voices from Ally Pally.

Plus ça change!

With my new internet radio there is something which characterises the ethos of the Radio 4 middle class listener: ‘delayed gratification’!

A switch turned on is merely the prelude to a process closely allied to the ancient manipulation of feline sensory apparatus. Slowly the machine searches, refines, finds and buffers and then, eventually and gratifyingly, the voices from the Great Institution.

Today is Sunday. The Archers Omnibus.

I have been in Spain since late June and heard nothing of The Archers. Yet one Omnibus and it is as if six months of missed episodes are nothing; the seamless slotting back in is as if I had never been away.

BBC Radio 4: it’s the way you live!

It's a far better thing I do etc

Sydney Carton is the character from literature that comes to mind as I contemplate what the New Year will hold for me.

To enter a Primary School as a class teacher is a daunting prospect to one who, armed only with a briefcase and wearing a suit caused total panic in one such school by entering with an air of authority and asking to see the Headteacher. The staff immediately assumed that I was a member of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (that shows how long ago it was!) whereas, of course, I had merely arrived in the wrong school. How we laughed! Though I have to admit that the teaching staff was on the verge of opening a new chapter in ‘The Madness of Crowds.’

Now I am to be part of the hysterical melee who great each new face with suspicion and fear. And I’m talking about the kids!

I’m hoping that it will reignite the enthusiasm I had for producing and trialing new material.

We will see.

Not content with the prospect of a life changing job experience in the near future I have also decided to start painting in acrylics. The localish supermarket provided (at low cost) a series of four canvases, tucked one into the other like blank and unimaginative two dimensional Russian dolls. Actually, thinking about it there was a Post Modernist? Absurdist? Vortacist? artist who created paintings called ‘Battle of Negroes in a Cellar During the Night’; ‘Harvest of Tomatoes by Apoplectic Cardinals on the Shore of the Red Sea’ and ‘First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls During a Snow Storm’. I suppose that my four blank (soon to be riots of colour) canvases could be seen as a series based on those anaemic young girls.

My style is best described as Representational Abstraction with broad brush strokes and impasto taking the place of sensitive consideration. It’s a good thing that acrylic dries so quickly so the next layer can be added! I do not have the patience for anything which requires more time. Toni can stick with watercolours – not for me!

The sweet taste of home?

“What do you miss?” is a question asked by friends back in Britain and also by my new neighbours.

I suppose that the people who ask the question are not really interested in the obvious answers of ‘family and friends’ they are waiting to hear of those small, seemingly inconsequential losses that were unconsidered trifles when in the home country.

For reasons that leave me speechless, some people say they miss food which I would have needed to have been paid large sums of money to eat while in Britain: Bovril, Marmite, revoltingly flavoured crisps, plastic white sliced bread and, in Cardiff a disgusting entity known as a Clarks Pie.

These truly revolting creations are a Cardiff institution http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/expats/expats-newsletter/page.cfm?objectid=15527792&method=full&siteid=50082 with dedicated followers some of whom eat one of these delights every day. If you have ever take the lid (or scab as I prefer to call it) off one of these pieces of (apparently organic construction) you will find a congealed sludge of grey slime which is (allegedly) a combination of meat (sic.) and vegetables. The taste is even worse than the appearance.

I do not miss the pies. The pink of SA or Dark of Messrs. S A Brain that accompanied it I do miss. But Cava and Rioja are adequate compensations!

The thing that I miss the most in my language.

Given the jaw dropping awfulness of Spanish television with twenty minute advert breaks, one realises the worth of British Television. There’s something I didn’t expect myself to write! Although having had some experience of American Television in the eighties I did have some low expectations of television free of a licence fee! I am not competent to comment on Spanish radio but there is no way that it could compare with the excellence of the BBC.

Radio is something which I really do miss. I have discovered a classical music station http://www.catradio.cat/pcatradio/crSeccio.jsp?seccio=cm but this is more like Classic fm than Radio 3. I have put all my hopes in an internet radio which should give me access to the BBC in all its glory using the wireless broadband connection.

One lives in hope!

British newspapers are ruinously expensive and I have been looking around for alternatives. I should, of course, be reading Spanish newspapers but, well, you know how it is! I have however discovered (thanks, yet again to Caroline) a freebie magazine called ‘Metropolitan’ and on my own I have found a weekly newspaper called ‘Catalonia Today’ –both of these are in English.

From the latter I have extracted the following which I thought piquant at this time of year as it deals with a view of religions. In a review by Germà Capdevila in Catalonia Today of ‘La vida després de Déu’ by Matthew Lee, he writes of:

. . . the old comparison of religion with people’s lives that says that each century of existence of a religion corresponds to a year of human life. Thus oriental belief systems are already in their thirties, and therefore mature and free, allowing their followers a wide range of freedom and without the need to interfere in their lives. Islam, by contrast, is in full adolescence, with its hormones boiling over, leading it into the fanaticism and calls for the extermination of the infidel that was such a feature of Christianity’s teenage years in the Middle Ages. Christianity meanwhile finds itself at that age in which it seems like a responsible adult but is still living with its parents.

Makes you think!

Is suffering good for you?

St Stephen’s Day – My Name Day

To have had a tummy bug for one Christmas meal might be regarded as unfortunate. To have a tummy bug the next year as well smacks of personally malicious bacterial viciousness.

At least last year I managed a few spoonfuls of food as well as numerous glasses of pacharan at the end of the meal which I took to be of medicinal value. And indeed it was for a couple of hours after the feast, then the temporary alleviation of symptoms was reversed with a vengeance.

This year, however, nothing! Not a spoonful, not a morsel, not a crumb, nor even a whiff of alcohol. Just the partial oblivion of troubled sleep. When not on the move – if you see what I mean.

Nothing, however could take away the sheer pleasure of Toni buying me a book! This is surely the equivalent of my buying a hagiography of That Woman. The fact that the book was about Picasso (an adopted son of Catalonia) I suppose made it easier for him to purchase; but still, a book! Toni bought a book!

It was a good year for me, with not a duff present among them all! I am, however aware of the spiritual significance of the celebration of this time of the year and . . . I’m not quite sure where that sentence was going, so I’ll just let it fade away in another ellipsis . . .

Christmas Eve, this year was made a little different by my having an interview for a teaching job in Sitges. My little navigator machine guided me to ‘almost there’ as it often does when you do not have the exact number or post code of the place you are trying to find. I ended up outside a sports’ complex with, what looked like a nursery component attached.

After some futile, desultory driving finding me back where I started, I did what I should have done in the first place and asked for directions in the sports’ centre and was given vague indications to a road around the corner.

The school was modern and generally well appointed with an excellent drama space. The interview was with the headteacher and was fairly informal but one in which the headteacher made her own educational philosophy clear.

There was at least one other candidate so the decision was to be relayed to candidates later that evening.

There was no phone call that evening and so I assumed that the job had gone elsewhere, but when I returned to Castelldefels there was an ambiguous message on the answer machine which gives me hope. Tomorrow will decide. I think.

Christmas Eve did, however, have its positive side as the traditional family meal was held in Carmen’s house with the usual profusion of edibles and drinkables. The more cynical among you might say that my tummy trouble the follow day was digested the night before in over indulgence.

But my tummy has dealt with more than was served at that meal with what might be said to be insolent ease, so such ponderings are nothing more than contemptible at best and logical at worst!

Feste lente!

There is (hasn’t there been always!) something immensely satisfying about being right.

Driving in Spain is a frightening experience. Driving in Spain is bad.

On the roads you are accompanied by racing ‘aces’ who exist in the blinkered comfort of their vehicles, oblivious to other road users who may as well not exist as these self-styled driving ‘experts’ weave in and out of streams of traffic.

In a circus the antics of ALL motorcyclists might be amusing and amazing: “See the death defying carving up of fast moving traffic! Thrill to the adrenalin pumping experience of sensing a blur of machine weaving around you as you travel at speed! Gasp as you pass twisted metal illuminated in the flash of blue lights!” But on the road these drivers are barely believable as they death wish their way along, treating cars as if they were the merest wisps of gossamer which will spin away in their slip streams!

Spanish pedestrians have a truly humbling faith in the absolute truth of their own invulnerable immortality as they blithely stride out onto poorly lighted, vehicle obstructed crossings. If they can see you: they are safe – this seems to be their road sense!

For someone from Britain, where God knows we have our driving faults, the driving in Spain is a revelation of awfulness. Inconsiderate, rude and suicidal are adjectives that I would apply to the more reasonable drivers, the rest are just plain murderous.

And now I have the proof to back up my own empirical research from driving on the slaughterways of Spain. Forbes.com http://www.forbes.com/2007/12/10/drivers-europe-dangerous-forbeslife-cx_ll_1210driving.html has completed a list of twenty eight nations in Europe and listed them in order from the worst drivers to the best based on the number of deaths per million in each country.

The worst countries are dominated by Eastern Europe and the new Baltic states where new money, consumerism and cars are ahead of infrastructure and concern for safety. But in the list Spain is listed as the 13th worst and good old Britain as the 23rd. We must be doing something right at last!

Most galling for the Spanish is that the French are listed as the 19th worst country and yet all Spaniards know that French drivers are worse than they are! It is wonderful how refreshing statistics can be.

Barcelona has imposed a zone in which the highest legal speed for cars has been cut to 80klm an hour. It has been said that Barcelona has greater air pollution than the centre of London! Something is therefore being done. From the first of January 2008 the new speed limits will be enforced (they are already in operation) and fines will be levied on those miscreants speeding. I will be interested to see how this new speed limit is administered because Catalan Traffic Police are an unobtrusive lot (except when pouncing on youthful late night drivers in carefully orchestrated ambushes near night spots!) and they will have to be much more visible if this new limit is to be obeyed.

Toni is still in Terrassa. This morning was his uncle’s funeral (he died yesterday) and he was on his way to his aunt’s house. If I understood Toni properly, the speed with which the funeral has been arranged is staggering.

I continue to work my way through the verbiage of National Curriculum speak to find out what I ought to be talking about in the interview tomorrow for the job in Sitges. It is a soul stunting experience reading descriptions of intentions rather than getting to grips with the actual substance of lessons. After reading screen after screen of words, words, words you begin to wonder what English is all about. I must have looked at scores of screens of information, apparently specifically designed for teachers and not one of them has had the name of an author (except of books of educational philosophy or pedagogy) or the title of an imaginative book or a poem or play. I probably have not pressed the right buttons to get to the good stuff where I can be enthused rather than depressed by what I am reading.

I will soldier on and hope that I find just a few nuggets of something I recognize as English before I have to go into the interview only clutching desiccated phrases of the educators of educators.

Backbone? Wishbone?

A weird amalgam of a scene from a Robert Pullman novel and the Spanish inquisition characterised the televised draw for the Spanish National Lottery, El Gordo (The Fat One) in which hundreds of millions of euros are splashed across the country into lucky grasping hands.

A jury sits stage right, while centre stage is taken up the lattice work of large balls of bent metal like a spherical bird cages, connected to a Heath Robinson like contraption which eventually disgorged small wooden balls. A quartet of uniformed schoolchildren marched on stage: two to turn the handles of the cages to release the balls and the other two picking up and singing (yes, singing!) the numbers and the amount of the prizes as each ball was examined.

Each time a prize of more than a paltry thousand euros was discovered the children triumphantly marched towards the judges singing as they went, showed the balls and then proceeded down stage to sing the number and the prize amount three times more.

I am at present reading Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake and the scene could have come straight out of one of his chapters where the ancient rituals of the Earls of Groan were enacted following the description of rites laid down in the dusty volumes of the immemorial Law.

When people buy a ‘ticket’ in El Gordo they do not usually buy the number which is on their ticket, but just a fraction of it. Each number is divided into many parts so that the winning number could refer to scores of people all over Spain who, if they have the number of El Gordo itself win €3m or £2.1m. Which is a lot.

Needless to say we didn’t win. I didn’t even manage to buy a ticket – mutual incomprehension to blame there I think. But Toni did win his nephew’s raffle and won a panadela (?) or breadbasket. This, of course, wasn’t a breadbasket, but rather our vision of a hamper of Christmas goodies! These ranged from the traditional leg of cured ham complete with hoof to bars of turron. There appear to be a fair number of bottles there too, so I will look at Toni with puppy dog eyes and see what happens!

On a more sombre note there has been a death in the family, so I am not sure what difference this will make in the arrangements for Christmas. I have deposited Toni in Terrassa so that he can make the family visits unencumbered by me. Anyway, I have work to do looking through documentation on Key Stage 2 in preparation for the interview on Monday. My ‘passing interest’ in the National Literacy Strategy will have to become a little more focused now I might actually be teaching it!

I am also getting all the necessary documentation together for employment as I am sure that the usual frenzy of photocopying will ensure should I be offered the job.

And there is a concert tomorrow as well.

Time will be found for everything.

Probably.

Questions! Questions!

How long do jellyfish take to die? Out of water I mean.

This is not one of those ‘Notes and Queries’ type questions, but one to which I need a genuine answer. I went for a walk on the beach and, as the weather is slightly rough the sand was littered with half hidden, shimmering, transparent globules of stranded jellyfish.

As I am much given to ‘doing my good deed’ as early as possible in the day so that I can revert to my more normal and usual sardonic contempt for all living things for the rest of the time, I kicked a few of the hapless members of the phylum Cnidaria (pronounced ‘ni-dair-re-ah’ coming from the Greek word ‘cnidos’ meaning ‘stinging nettle’) back into the foaming shallows.

As they were washed out to sea I wondered whether I was reuniting semi transparent families or providing more food for sluggish fish. If it was the former then I hope they have the good grace to remember their Classical education, recall the story of Androcles and remember not to sting me in the warmer waters of next summer!

Even through the weather is not good at the moment; it can hardly be called harsh. The waves pounding the shore indicated that elsewhere in the Med there must be weather a damn sight worse than ours. The waves were more domestic and tasteful rather than fierce and majestic. I’ll settle for the equitable!

We have watched a couple of films recently: ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Ratatouille.’

‘Planet Terror’ (written and directed by Robert Rodrigues; USA, 2007) was the sort of bad film that gives bad films a bad name.

Whatever your reaction to so-called Grindhouse movies, the blood, gore (I know it’s the same thing, but there was a lot of it!) severed limbs, cruelty, etc. etc. the shining feature of this farrago was its sheer laziness. While purporting to be a self consciously affectionate ‘homage’ to 50s horror, this is actually a self indulgent, unfunny pastiche. It knowingly uses techniques such as scratches on the film; missing reels and melting film to delight the audience by involving them in the arch joke of a new film made to look like something from years ago. This is not funny or clever; it is merely irritating. And when linked to such poor production values; poor acting; poor script and poor effects, the effect is one of anger at having been hoodwinked into renting the film.

When I first saw ‘The Devils’ (Ken Russell, UK 1971) it seemed to me as if a group of spaced out actors led by a spaced out director had just happened to have come across a fantastic set (Production design: Derek Jarman!) and, while no one was looking, made a film! With ‘Planet Terror’ there wasn’t even a decent set, just a group of people who thought that, as they had Quentin Tarantino as one of their number they could do what they liked and sicko suckers would pay good folding stuff just to see it.

I think that there is a story of someone like Lord Northcliffe who, when he was running a popular newspaper found one of his professional newspaper writers bringing him a ‘women’s romantic’ story that he had produced. Northcliffe read it and then tore it in two and handed it back to the reporter and said something like, “The Romantic stories we print are written by people who are writing the best that they can: you are writing down to what you think the audience wants.” ‘Planet Terror’ is an extended, badly executed joke by people who could do better. Don’t waste your money on this condescending trash.

‘Ratatouille’ (Director, story and screenplay: Brad Bird, USA 2007) was thoroughly enjoyable. The enjoyment had a guilty tinge to it as I felt that the audience for this animated film was adult rather than child. The basic story line is simplicity itself: outsider finds fulfilment and success after a number of obstacles. The fact that the outsider is a rat and that the rat is a chef manqué gives the story a certain piquancy!

We have come to expect from present day animation a professionalism and eye for detail that would have left Old Walt staring with disbelief and, generally, ‘Ratatouille’ does not disappoint. There are a few sequences in this film which left me open mouthed with admiration at the quality of depiction. A simple image of raised glasses in a toast became a thing of breathtaking quality when animated!

The characters were rather hackneyed, from the clumsy and inept hero who was well out of place in a kitchen, through the fat and dim brother of the rat little chef to the ‘baddie’ who was a melodramatic person of restricted growth. The real pleasure in the characters was the magnificently voiced food critic Anton Ego. Here Peter O’Toole brought the character to all its sinister life. At least for adults. I’m not sure how much kids would get from the position of a food critic – not something within their experience surely! The end of the film, from the point where Remy the rat makes a simple ratatouille for the critic which is so good that it takes him back to his boyhood, right up to his final words of “Surprise me!” are brilliantly well done. But it will be a very astute child who actually grasps what is really going on!

Ego’s review is beautifully worded and a perceptive analysis of the critic’s role and temptations; but it surely flew over the heads of most of the audience.

A delight of a film and well worth watching.

Meanwhile my painting continues to develop. Almost done! I think a metallic frame is called for!

And now for this . . .

Something of an achievement for me: I have managed to work at a job for an hour and not be sacked!

A small class of eleven and twelve year olds learning English. I must admit that I rather enjoyed it all. And by the end of the lesson my whiteboard was its usual crowded self filled with my impenetrable scrawl. Because it has been such a long time since I had a class I was able to recapture some of my old enthusiasm for having eager minds in front of me!

Monday creeps towards me with its interview for a full time job in a primary school in Sitges. An interesting time. I have downloaded the ‘easy’ reading version of the national curriculum (I refuse to type those two words with capitals!) for Key Stage Two. Just reading the fatuous edu-speak again caused a lurch in my stomach, but I will persevere and see what happens!

The keyboard arrived today. It was delivered by a singularly disgruntled gap toothed driver who was horrified to find that someone (i.e. me) in Castelldefels lived in a flat. In case the irony is lost on anyone, it is only the very rich or the very lucky who live in houses in Castelldefels Playa!

The size of the two packages delivered took me somewhat by surprise. I had been expecting something only a little more substantial than my Casio. Instead of this small augmentation I saw what appeared to be cardboard covered sarcophagus being unloaded unceremoniously from the van.

The extravagant expressions of wild despair from the delivery man as he saw the size of the gateway faded into insignificance when he saw steps which had to be surmounted.

With toothy mumblings of indecipherable Spanish and a rather pointed telephone call to The Powers That Be, he eventually indicated that the two of us would Do Something with the package.

The package was extraordinarily heavy and, as the delivery man fled from the scene of his exertions I began to wonder how difficult it was going to be to construct my new instrument.

The obvious answer was, of course, very difficult.

The unpacking of the pedal board indicated that there was not way in which the new keyboard was going to fit in the place of the other. It was also obvious that the easily portability of Casio plastic had given way to the solidity of German wood.

I have no intention, even in the relative comfort of memory, of describing the physical contortions I went through to get the bloody thing built – suffice to say it needed two people. As Toni was in work and as I was eager, the manipulation of unwieldy, heavy equipment made my assembly of the piano look like an event in The Krypton Factor! I finally achieved it but, as they say, “at what cost!”

Now for the promised practice.

Honestly!

Frame it!

“Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy”

I don’t know which one of the two events looming on the horizon is the more intimidating: the arrival of my new keyboard or my interview on Monday.

The keyboard is going to have weighted keys (I think) so that it will feel more like a piano. It comes with a new piano stool, three pedals and a pair of headphones. The intimidatory part of its arrival is that I will no longer have any excuse not to make an effort to improve my level of piano playing which has never risen above a very slow faulty version of Fur Elise. In my tearful visit to The Lost Books of Castelldefels (in my storage facility) I found a book I purchased some time ago in a fit of single minded determination to improve.

This wonderful book takes you from how to recognize a piano and open the lid to playing the Moonlight Sonata in eight lessons! Admittedly, from my cursory examination I have noticed the number of times the author has stressed practice. Not something I have been given to in the past. But the future, the future will be different. I have always found that abuse of the sustain pedal gives your stuttering efforts at piano playing a lingering sheen of professionalism that can sometimes compensate for lack of ability!

The interview is also intimidating as it will centre on my unproven ability to teach pupils under the age of eleven. My working knowledge of key stage 2 is somewhat limited, so the internet is going to come into its own during the next few days when I attempt to emulate Helen in becoming a world expert in the minutiae of curriculum-speak by Monday.

It will be the first time that I have gone for an interview on Christmas Eve! And that for a job which starts in January!

Toni has said that his mother and sister want a painting to put up in their living room. Toni’s attempts to render a waterfall have gone through a number of transformations and have just about reached the point of total rejection. My sweeping assertion that I could produce something in acrylic to fit the space was greeted with muted incredulity so today I took matters into my own hands.

Having bought some ready made canvases I then found that there were no handy and cheap sets of acrylics anywhere. Having made the decision to produce something by the time Toni was collected I became ever more frenzied in my attempts to find something with which to make an image.

As is often the case in these situations the paints were found in a shopping centre near the flat.

My creativity took a hard knock when Clarrie phoned me up to announce that she was speaking to me on her new iphone. This near to Christmas this strikes me as personal vindictiveness of an unseasonable quality! I have been resisting the whole concept of an iphone as a possible gadget acquisition for reasons of cost and, um, well, cost really. Obviously I do have a mobile phone and numerous ipods which have music and photos and some names and addresses, so the addition of an iphone would, obviously, be unnecessary. But Clarrie has one!

How right Our Oscar was when he wrote that he could resist everything except temptation.

And who am I to resist the import of his words!

Teach? Me?

I never really know whether to be appalled or uplifted by seeing a ranting fascist dictator meekly (surrounded by television cameras and military security) plodding his way around an ancient stone building of which the claimed provenance is questionable to say the least. Such vainglorious parading of meekness (seven times around counter clockwise and a little stone throwing) is at best nauseating and at worst cynical justification for the most perniciously repressive views.

I feel the same repulsion for the self lacerating piety that motivates some of the pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago as they crawl their bloody way to the door of the cathedral on bleeding knees.

Strange gods indeed that these people have created!

Today was a day of almost work. I joined a class of youngsters that I am going to be taking for two hours a week to improve their English. The money is risible, but the contract that I will sign will give me the fabled Number which will mean that I exist as far as all government agencies in Spain are concerned.

Just to complicate things I yesterday received a missive from the Generalitat enclosing a health card with a Number on it! Which I should not have until I have worked. Strange are the ways of Spanish and Catalan bureaucracy!

Today I visited my exiled books.

They need assuring from time to time that I have not lost them from the care of my memory. They languish in my cramped storage space which is too small for me to sort them. With the advent of my new keyboard I went in search of the music which I knew that I had had packed.

I have to admit that was just an excuse. I really wanted to find the rest of my art books and some more of the more esoteric non fiction.

I have also convinced myself that I can capitalise on the care which my packers took in boxing shelf by shelf, rather than mixing the books indiscriminately. The normal procedure is to fill the available space in each packing case with a selection of books that fit. My packers filled the space with waste paper packing. I therefore reasoned that, were I to go through the boxes and repack them more fully then I would be able to cut down on the number of boxes, give myself some space in which to operate, and find the books that I want.

After only a few hours work I have managed to create a space in which I can stand. You have to have seen the way in which the space was crammed to appreciate the achievement of this!

My expensive storage facility is one of those places of endless corridors with identical yellow roll top doors. It also gives you the facility to act the messianic progress of that bloke in the TV advert who, as he walks along, his mere presence turns on lights. As you walk along dark corridors they magically lighten and this prompts you (well, me) to take a few detours to your ‘room’ just to experience the power of a sort of ‘prepare ye the way’ feeling.

Except in my corridors and by my room, where darkness reigns supreme. There is something touchingly sad in staring through the gloom to find hidden treasures: two volumes of the Gormenghast trilogy, a few of the Great Museums of the World, a few more books of quotations; the two volume photographically reduced Oxford English Dictionary; my music books (gosh! That I really did not expect); a few cookery books (including Angela’s); more poetry books and few addictive Nigel Rees productions – good for the loo!

And what is left is a three deep ten high wall of boxes. I now have a mission, which is to go through the cases and take the jewels out. Unfortunately my library is now in a quid pro quo position: anything I bring from storage will need a corresponding sacrifice from my present shelves.

The future promises to be pure torture!

Lighten our darkness!

The advent of cheap, low-power LED lighting bulbs in illuminated Christmas decorations promised a whole new age in widely available vulgarity to mark the festive season.

Multi light icicles, once a simple, effective and striking illumination for select stores are now cheap clichés.

Moving lights, something like a waving Santa, once the preserve of large companies and institutions are now within the most restricted of budgets and available from cut-price stores. The Brave New World of domestic festive light pollution, viewed by Aunt Bet in the super affluent commuter belt outside New York years ago, has now come to the most straitened inner city ghettos around Europe.

The hopes for municipal magnificence in terms of Christmas lighting were therefore high. And they seemed justified as sheets of lights replaced staid decorations. The lights may have been smaller, but there were more of them and they gave the impression of plenty.

The overall effect is still good and, as long as you don’t look too closely, the impression that you get from endlessly repeated strings of lights is one of expense and opulence.

But look a little more closely and you begin to see that those same lights which were guaranteed thousands of hours of life are not living up to their promise and in every decoration that I have looked at there are the tell tale spots of black which indicate failure.

In most it is not just black spots but whole sections that are not working. In Castelldefels the decorations lining the main road parallel to us had malfunctioning sections of the decorations within one night of their being switched on!

I feel myself imitating a desperate clergyman looking around for something topical on which to base his sermon when I see the creeping failure of gaudy Christmas decorations as a metaphor for the whole of capitalist society.

You have it all: flashy outward show, but look closer and the cracks of failure beginning to show. Even in the public demonstration of governmental care, the festive bread-and-circuses of pretty lighting to keep the people quiet the basic contradictions of our unequal society are illuminated by the darkness of the malfunctioning lamps.

There’s a lot more where that came from as my mind gathers up the unconsidered trifles of everyday experience and finds more and more parallels between cheap, cheerful and shoddy decorations and the vicissitudes of modern life.

But mental exhaustion prompts silence!

Now that I’ve noticed this glaring lack of perfection, I am seeing tawdry failed showmanship in all the decorations everywhere: real and imagined; concrete and metaphorical.

Just the sort of spirit you need to celebrate!

The Catalans are a ‘careful’ people (in the West Walian sense) and are proud to term themselves so. When it comes to wrapping Christmas presents they avail themselves of the facilities which are provided by the main supermarkets. At this time of the year a section of the space outside the tills is given over to the provision of tables set out with rolls of free paper and sellotape dispensers. There are also pairs of scissors for trimming off the excess that I for one always seem to have in abundance at the ends of the semi wrapped present.

Carme has shown me the way here by drawing off yards of paper, rolling it up and stowing it safely away for use at home! Caprabo in Sant Boi is obviously wise to this as they have stationed a formidable no-nonsense lady to asses your gift covering needs and issue what she considers sufficient paper for your task. I had to scrounge a remnant from previous present wrappers to finish Toni’s present because I did not have enough courage to return Oliver-like to such an imperious lady!

I shall steal from the much more relaxed Carrefour.

Let music untune the sky!

The second concert that I attended in La Palau de la Musica started at ten fifteen in the night.

It was the Orquesta de Cámara y Coro Nacional de Bielorrusia conducted by Piotr Vandilovsky with Liudmila Efimova as director of the chorus performing Handel’s Messiah.

So we were presented with a Russian Choir and Orchestra performing an English oratorio in Catalonia. And what language did they choose in which to perform? German!

Now I know that there might be purists among you who might point out that Händel’s birthplace was a little further to the east than London. But that does not deal with the expectation of hearing familiar archaic words sung in dreadful accents by foreigners.

How can I ever forget my first live hearing of The Messiah in St Tropez in a small packed church where the chorus sang “Foe untow uz a chi is bor!” with the enthusiasm that comes with real confidence in signing in a foreign language. The bass in that performance was singing in a tongue which didn’t even seem to be remotely related to the Indo-European language family, let alone French English. A most satisfying experience.

It took me a while to stop sulking that the performance last night was in a foreign language before I could begin to enjoy the music!

This was a performance in which one felt that the conductor was in control. His positive and authoritative style of conducting kept his considerable forces together. He had a modest, yet compelling presence on the stage and you could believe that Piotr Vandilovsky was an essential component in the finished sound.

This was by no means a ‘pure’ version of the piece with the chorus sometimes sounding more like the Huddersfield Choral Society than a Handaelan choir. The (very young) orchestra too, with limited resources in terms of players produced a full modern sound while respecting the ornamentation of the original. Their ensemble playing was excellent, though it did get a little more ragged towards the end of the evening as the clock inexorably advanced nearer to one o’clock in the morning.

The soloists, Titiana Petrova (soprano), Natalia Akinina (mezzo), Arseni Arsov (tenor and Zapiokin Vitali (bass) were a mixed bunch with the graph, as it were, slewed towards the left in terms of ability. After my initial shock of hearing the tenor sing some foreign version of “Comfort ye my people” I gradually warmed to him, but his later performances were far too forced for my taste and at times he was positively unmusical and tuneless. The mezzo produced an unpleasant throaty warble while the soprano’s terminal vibrato was constantly irritating. The bass was the worst of the lot only occasionally producing something which matched the music.

The orchestra, with a leader whose exuberant style sometimes missed the meticulous direction of his conductor, was excellent throughout (allowing for exhaustion!) and was always worth listening to when the soloists that they were accompanying were best forgotten.

The chorus was gusty and enthusiastic. As is often the case the tenors could have done with more resources and the division of the chorus into paired couples from time to time exposed the sometimes forced quality of the singing, but they made a wonderful and joyful sound that was a pleasure to experience.

This was a long concert, but time never seemed to lag. A most creditable performance which could only have been improved if they had made some attempt at the English libretto!

The first concert of the evening was part of the ‘Festival de valsos I danses’ which is part of the programme of music provided by the Orquestra Simfónica del Vallés conducted by José Antonio Sainz Alfaro.

The popular programme of music from Rossini to Johann Strauss did little to stretch this fine orchestra but it left you wanting to listen to something meatier – though I also know that with playing of this quality there is something to be said for a concert of pure pleasure and entertainment rather than pedagogy!

All section of the orchestra played well with a fluency that sometimes veered into superficial facility. The most revealing pieces were the Brahms Hungarian Dances numbers 5, 6 and 7. Here the more syncopated rhythms seemed to be glossed somewhat by a legato approach which emphasised lyricism at the expense of national musical idiosyncrasy. But these are carping criticisms in a concert which was obviously as enjoyable to produce as it was to listen to!

The horns (always possible sources of weakness in any orchestra were confident – and that word could stand for the whole of the orchestra’s performance. It was a little disconcerting to see the horn section perform a sort of musical chairs after each number – but then horn sections are a law unto themselves!

The conductor was laconic in his performance to the point of caricature and looked more like a stand-up comedian at the end of his career than a music maker!

In the first half of the show Rossini’s Overture to The Thieving Magpie (La gazza ladra) was the most revealing. This was a well studied piece by the orchestra with masterly use of light and shade and with the orchestra not afraid to resort to the most garish vulgarity for the brass in the conclusion. Thoroughly enjoyable!

The second half of the concert was taken up with Strauss. The conductor was obviously looking for a Viennese type of audience participation but I think that Catalan audiences share a certain reticence with their British counterparts. With we British it is only the quintessentially middle class faux ‘wildness’ of the habitués of the Proms that allows us to step outside the self imposed constraints of proper behaviour in a classical concert.

Alfaro broke the glass wall between performers and audience by picking up a microphone in the second half and talking to us. During one talk after a spirited performance of the Pizzicato Polka when the rest of the orchestra had chatted, wandered about and generally ignored the strings, then played their own jazzy version of the polka, I knew enough of what he was saying about the highs and lows in music (the high being the strings and the low being everyone else!) to murmur appreciatively when eh illustrated another high and low by referring to Barça as one and Español as the other!

The conductor’s hard work eventually paid off when we gradually became a little more relaxed about clapping and making cuckoo noises as part of the music.

For me the high points of the concert came in the encores. Alfaro (born in Sant Sebastià) first played a beautiful Basque song orchestrated with some sensitivity and then hurriedly played a fantasia on Catalan themes which reminded me of Grace Williams’ version for Wales. This was loved by the audience who were encouraged to sing along quietly – which they did. Even I was able to join in at one point in a very muted and self conscious sort of way.

The final encore, the Radestsky (?) March, allowed full participation in a Germanic display of hand clapping and provided a fittingly crashing finale.

This was a brilliant concert and I look forward to their next concerts.

At last an orchestra whose musical ability matched the mad magnificence of their setting in the Palau!