To see the sea!

Although most of my way to work is thorough tunnels the momentary glimpses of the landscape make the journey one of continuing interest.

The sudden view of a light flecked sea or the sun bleached stark rock of an outcrop denuded of trees and the journey almost seems worth it!

School continues to be extraordinary, though it does now seem to be policy that teachers do not have to serve children with food as part of their lunchtime duties! A small but significant victory. I am not sure that such small concession to what I see as the unprofessional way in which teachers have to work will be enough to satisfy me.

The teaching is utterly draining as virtually all the children want constant encouragement and response. They have overlapping demands which I have tried to stem by throwing linguistic niceties at them. I feel like the pedagogic equivalent of the Welsh Guards at Rorke’s Drift trying to fight off hordes of Catalan Zulus who keep swarming towards me with incessant demands for my attention and pencil sharpner.

We are beginning to realise that Carnival With a Capital C is something which is more than a mere parade and an excuse for slightly riotous behaviour in school. We are dealing with The Spirit of Catalonia when we touch the Carnival, and the individual pride of the town in which it takes place. It will, I am sure, be an experience.

I have decided to have a poem and painting a week in my classroom. This could be extended to other classrooms, but there were serious questions about cost so I have had to look at books in the library and select paintings which I think would be suitable to be colour photocopied. My original idea was to buy books and chop the spines off and use the illustrations as prints. This was deemed the more expensive option, hence the photocopying. I remain to be convinced about the quality of the end results.

My choice of paintings has been limited by the availability of books in our library, but I think that my own prejudices show through in the rapid selection that I made.

The weekend will mark the first of a series of Catalan artists whose work is going to be issued in a number of books linked to a newspaper. This is just what I have been looking for, as I have not found a decent book in English or Spanish about the history of Catalan art. I managed to pick up two monographs for under €8 in a bargain bookshop in Castelldefels, but the series with the newspaper promises to be much more comprehensive that I had expected.

Tomorrow the Opera and expensive parking!

Eat it and see!

Just when you think that life is a sterile promontory bereft of anything to excite the jaded palette along comes something to restore one’s excitement in life.

There are those among you, I know, who will not emit a little inward squeak of delight when confronted, on a supermarket chilled shelf with a new flavour of yogurt, but I defy anyone not to be at least vaguely interested in what a pot of yogurt labelled as Marie biscuit flavour.

The reality was not, to put it mildly, as exciting as the expectation – though, thinking about it, I don’t really like Marie biscuits, so why did I buy it. Ah, to ask that question, shows a remarkable lack of insight into the mind of a neophile constantly seeking for reasonably priced commercial excitement on the shelves of local shops.

It actually tasted of Marie biscuits but with an admixture of a memory of creme caramel created by Angel Delight. The texture was like thin glue and I might have problems eating the second jar. Well, there’s a second set of yogurt of an equally odd flavour lurking in the fridge. I lead an exciting life!

In school I have discovered that Making Moving Monsters (C.D.T. & Science) was everything that I could have expected from an excitable class of eight and nine year olds – and more. In sheer self defence I instituted an immediate ‘may for can’ offensive. Just because most of my class cannot speak fluent English, this does not excuse their unforgivable solecisms when confusing the use of ‘can I’ with ‘may I.’ Some things are simply unforgivable and I found that insisting on the correct form of words for the request for material that they were using in making their monsters gave me at least a few extra seconds breathing space!

Today has been an unrelenting series of pupil centred teaching opportunities and I am beyond tiredness and into some strange other universe of uber fatigue!

And my colleagues have been doing this since September! I am only in my second week. Oh God!

Tomorrow should be when I have a meeting to discuss my staying in the school. I am still optimistic about the immediate response after the more than encouraging meeting yesterday. The mere fact that my OHP is still a matter of conversation among the powers that be makes me believe that I still have a chance of being here until the indefinite future when the machine finally arrives!

Meanwhile the reality of converting the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur into a costumed parade and dance for Carnival is still preoccupying frightened sections of what is still functioning in my mind. And the Club that I am supposed to run. And other little delights of school life which I am still unacquainted.

It’s all to learn!

What next!

Never a dull day in my present employ!

I will say this for being a member of a small staff; you constantly find out things at a speed which in a normal school would take you triple the time to discover. Personal information; professional information; subject information – you name it and information free, gratis and for nothing comes at you from all angles!

What is the most astonishing aspect of education as I see it at the moment? The resources room is open to everyone at all times!

We may not be allowed to photocopy; replacement ink cartridges for printers may be as rare as hen’s teeth; plastic cups in the water fountain may be scarce but books, pens, glue, paper, staples and all sorts of multitudinous stationery are there for the taking!

Unbelievable! For someone like me with a natural penchant for the little treasures of the office environment it is an open invitation to theft. It is only the obvious restraint of everyone else by not stealing them wholesale that I am convinced that these goodies will be openly available well into the distant future! I have had to curb my natural squirrel like acquisitiveness and retrain twitching fingers longing to sequester piles of brightly coloured paper and metallic strips. I have also had to deny myself the pleasure of amassing objects in plastic, wood and metal all of which come in amusing shapes and sizes and which I assume are available for primary teaching. Their functions, alas, I know not – but jackdaw-like I covet their shining glossiness!

Talking of shining: I have yet to switch on the Light of Education which will shine forth from my yet to be obtained OHP. The number of people involved in its arrival in the school grows day by day, but the actual machine does not seem to get any nearer!

Today I was shown the holy grail of an internet picture of the sacred machine, and felt like the chosen one of the Arthurian legends who was vouchsafed a glimpse of the holy cup. But I have mixed this image up with Moses looking into the Promised Land who saw what was available, but was not allowed to taste the fruits of his labour himself!

The saga continues!

Much talking with the powers that be today about the future of my career and the directions it might, or might not, take. There is a great deal of communication and there is a great sense of opportunity, but it needs concerted effort to make what has been discussed into anything more than polite conversation. Tomorrow will be a defining day. Unfortunately I am teaching all day and have a lunchtime duty so there is little space for meetings, but teaching can be remarkably flexible when needed!

I await with vague but interested misgivings the action packed morrow!

A small thing, but . . .

Today it was crisps.

The imperious indication of the Lady High Dinner Lady and I meekly doled out fat laden potato slivers to the kids. I cannot do this. It is an insult. It is unprofessional. And I don’t like it.

I think that this is going to be the issue that defines my relationship with the institution. We shall see, but if that turns out to be the case then I would have to say that the priorities of a teaching establishment are not directed in the right way.

Meanwhile my OHP (putative) has now achieved the status of being mentioned in a staff meeting as the green alternative to dispensing with voluminous printed agendas and such like paperwork.

I do not have an OHP of course and was told (quite firmly that it was “old technology) which was why there was not a single OHP to be had in Sitges – even for ready money. Searches are being made further afield and there is even talk of renting one. There more I hear talk of sterling efforts being made on my behalf to find something which used to be the common currency of high technology in schools, the more I think that the realization of my quest is being pushed further and further into the future.

But I do, of course, have high quantities of self deluding optimism and therefore firmly believe that I will have an operating OHP complete with angled screen by the end of the week.

This is one way in which you can tell if someone is a true teacher: a simple minded faith that reasonably priced teaching aids will be provided by a compassionate and reasonably minded administration. You can go for years with the naïf belief that ‘it will come next term.’ It is the way that education runs throughout the world.

Ah, bless!

Good things have to end

I am ashamed to admit that there is still an overflowing box of Christmas decorations in front of the fireplace and three parts of a dismembered Christmas tree lying like shrubbery in front of the window. The Christmas cards (we had two yesterday!) lie in a pile on the unit ready for the names of The Saved to be entered into The Golden Book of Good People Who Sent Cards; while those who were sent but did not reply will be entered into the Black Book of Impending Damnation. This will be done today and Christmas will at last be over. Until the arrival of the next Christmas card!

All the decorations are now gone, pushed into the inadequate space which I have rented in Bluespace to accommodate all my books and paintings. I could not resist opening a few more boxes to see what I’m missing and found a collection of novels from the eighteenth century with the typed script of a lecture by John Worthen about Fanny Burney. Which I read. I can still remember this lecture from my second or third year in university. In examination terms John said that Fanny Burney would be one of the writers thrown to the wolves by most people, but he wanted to make a case for studying her. I was already predisposed to take her seriously because I remembered Colin Richards in Cardiff High School pausing at her name when he was giving us a quick tour through English Literature in one of our sixth form classes. And what an excellent writer she is, especially in her diary, let alone the two novels. And they are all packed up waiting for me in Bluespace.
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I m missing my novels and other books more and more but I simply cannot find an adequate solution to the space problem of having them with me without the spending of vast sums of money. And there is certainly no spare cash from the present job for the fripperies of bookcases and the room in which to put them!

The one collection of books that I do have in the flat is my collection of poetry books and teaching primary school children allows me to use poems which previously have had to be discarded as too young or inappropriate.

When I was in the very lowest of the classes in Primary School there was one poem which I had memorised. I memorised it because I was encouraged to do so by one of my favoured (note the careful use of the adjective) teachers. I cannot (alas!) remember her name – I will have to wait for senility for the names of teachers and fellow pupils to come back to me – but I do remember that she let me stand with her when we lined up to go to classes and she drank tea with no milk in it. At the age of six growing up in Cathays in Cardiff that seemed to me to be the height of sophistication!

Anyway, I memorised the poem and used to trot it out at any provocation, to anyone in my class or any other class who would listen. I had already done guest performances as Herod in other classes so a little recitation was as nothing to me!

The poem, as far as I can remember (with apologies to political correctness) went as follows:

Little Miss Mouse
Had a very small house
And she wished it was very much bigger

Until one dark night
She had such a fright
From that naughty old cat Mr Nigger

He chased poor Miss Mouse
Right into her house
And because it was so small could not catch her

Now little Miss Mouse
Doesn’t want a big house
Because a small one is very much better!

I’ve read better since!

If I was to analyse this oeuvre now I might say that it was reinforcing the sentiments found in the suppressed verse of ‘All things bright and beautiful’:

The rich man at his table
The poor mat at his gate
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate.

I might also add that the poem reminds me of a lull in the arrival of the proper books that I had asked for in the Reading Room of the British Library, I asked for (and got) a first edition of Enid Blyton’s ‘Noddy Goes to Toytown.’ I have rarely read such a sexist and racist work of fiction! In it little Noddy has his little yellow car stolen by golliwogs and he is stripped naked and left in the dark forest. Some of the details might be wrong, but the basic story line of a group of blacks stripping a WASP and leaving him naked without his property does seem to me to be a little stereotypically racist. Who now would give a group of kids a poem in which the baddy was a Mr Nigger? I trust we have moved on!

Though for me, not in terms of the number of poems that I can recite all the way through.

I am good at remembering fragments and the general gist of the poem and using the fragments to construct a convincing essay. This skill has stood me to good stead for most of my scholastic career except for one question in my special paper in my finals.

I had revised Yeats. I had read all his poems in the collected edition and I had even read some of his mystical prose nonsense. I had taken part in a Yeats play as one of the soldiers at the foot of the cross – the only line I can remember is, “Our dice were carved from an old sheep’s bone at Ephesus.” I had even (god forgive me) read some of the spiritual ravings of Madame Blatavsky.

I was prepared.

When I say the question I reread it time after time to make it different. But it stayed obstinately the same.

“With specific reference to two poems by W B Yeats discuss the concept of ‘In dreams begin responsibilities.’”

If it has said, “With reference to the poems of Yeats” I would have been fine. But I didn’t know two poems by Yeats off by heart. I had to make a choice so I ended up by referring to ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ – neither of which would have been my choice if I had had the book in front of me. But I didn’t, so I did.

I think my essay was a masterpiece of ‘make do’ and ‘have a go’ and ‘hope for the best.’

Now I can combine my love of Yeats and my ability (over the years) to remember a little more with the necessity of thinking of poems for my class by selecting ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ as at least one of my choices. I will have to see what the girls say.

As far as I can work out the next Festival with a capital ‘F’ is Carnival in Sitges. This is an occasion when (horrifically) teachers are expected to choreograph some sort of dance for the pupils to perform. The only simple dance that I can think of occurs at the end of Bergman’s ‘Seventh Seal’, though I suppose that some may consider a re-enactment of The Dance of Death a little tasteless when performed by eight year olds! I am prepared to weald the scythe!

And doesn’t ‘scythe’ occur in the Catalan national anthem?

Funny how things come together!

Eating Proust's Cake

Thanks to Colin in New Zealand I was able to order up a few tracks to my past.

When I was in Swansea University it did not have a full Art or Music department just a single lecturer with help from some specialists in other departments. Most of History of Art lectures came from George Little – a man whose art work I first met as a pupil in an Art for Schools Exhibition in The National Museum of Wales Gallery. The Music Department was run by a long haired gentle person called Keith.

It came as a considerable surprise to find out that gentle Keith was actually a member of a band called ‘Dr Z’ which produced a record of psycho-spiritualist hard rock (or ‘Heavy Prog’ whatever that is) music! This record did not sell very well with only about 100 copies reaching the listening community; the rest of the pressing was trashed by the record company. Jim Ostler (The Man Who Introduced Me to Monteverdi) was doing first year music and he bought a copy which I borrowed. And copied on to a long lost cassette.

Thanks to Colin assuring me that this (and the following quotations were taen from a web site) ‘obscure early 70's English trio’ have had their record re-released as a CD in which the ‘dominant mood of the album ("Three Parts to my Soul") is set by a percussive harpsichord that is alternately majestic and militaristic’ with ‘lyrics, dealing with occultism and the evil of man’ and is something ‘strictly for serious collectors of dark, early 70's curios’ – I could hardly wait to get to the internet and begin searching for a copy!

It eventually arrived and I was able to listen to it on my way to school. I suppose that there are some who might aver that lyrics such as:

“Evil woman’s manly child
Spread earth upon your loins,
Sow the land with greed
Lavish all your envy on the world
Let the Devil free to do his will
And cast about and kill.”

are not the most appropriate sentiments to motivate a man setting off to teach Primary School Children – but this is the twenty-first century and times have changed!

As soon as the music started, even though I have not listened to it for more years than I care to recount, I realised that not only did I remember every note and harmony and percussive beat, but also a whole host of memories came flooding back.

Obscurely (perhaps appropriately given the CD) one of the most powerful memories was of some stylish retro black and red tin mugs that I had in University bought from Habitat. They looked great – the only trouble was that when you filled them with boiling water the temperature of the handle instantly became too hot to handle (so to speak!) Quite why this memory rose to the surface is difficult to say: perhaps it had something to do with the flames surrounding the heart logo of the group on the front of the cover. Who knows?

Names, faces and situations all jostled around in my memory as the music pounded out as the car sped through tunnel after tunnel on my way to work. Scraps of the drama in which I was involved come to the surface of the memory and some were firmly pushed back down again: my American accent in a Wilder play will stay with some people for the rest of their lives! Another dramatic event concerned Peter Thomson (now Emeritus Professor of Drama in Exeter University, then an immensely creative and understanding lecturer in Drama and English in Swansea) creating an evening where (as I remember) Dr Z, W B Yeats and anecdote were all linked in an extravaganza of words and music!

It’s just as well that the drive to school is not too long as I think that my mind would have been filled with happy times in the past and not with necessary awareness to cope with modern driving conditions on Catalan motorways!

If you want to listen to an extract of Dr Z try http://www.progarchives.com/mediaPlayer.asp?bandId=1230

Never let it be said that an educator ever stops trying to increase human enjoyment with new (old) things!

A New Nadir!

Yesterday lunchtime I had to do a duty. Something which we British teachers thought was a battle fought and won means nothing in this school. All that effort to ensure that teachers had the right to leave school during a lunchtime; that teachers should be paid extra if they decided to do lunchtime supervision. For the last term some of my colleagues have been doing five lunchtime duties a week!

And what duties!

For the first time in my entire career I was expected to serve salad to waiting pupils from a large metal bowl with a ladle. This was marginally better than one of my colleagues who was on her hands and knees cleaning the floor where some kid has spilled some soup. Other colleagues were wandering from table to table pouring out fruit juice for the children! The head dinner lady was in charge and was handing out duties to the compliant teaching staff! It was, of course, a vision of hell. For a moment I couldn’t distinguish my memories of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch from the terrifying reality in which I was an active participant!

Any new school takes some getting used to, but there are aspects of the one that I am in at the moment which may prove to be impossible to accept. Meanwhile the children continue to be enthusiastically responsive and the girls with whom I work have already worked out the medium term programme of work which gives me a breathing space before I have to produce some coherent scheme of work of my own!

All schools have their own idiosyncrasies and illogicalities but with this school the very raison d'être seems to be suspect. The longer I stay there the more inherent contradictions seem to emerge – but the school soldiers on somehow. The most revealing comment by a colleague (made after I had expressed shocked astonishment about some aspect of school lunacy) was, “It’s like being a member of some cult. It takes an outsider to tell us how odd it all is!”

I do like the school, but I’m not sure that the school is going to like me for very much longer!

Today was the first day that Toni and I actually worked on the same day for some considerable time. An odd experience for us to set off from the flat and go our separate ways in opposite directions to our work. We set off in darkness and arrive home in near darkness and I realised today that I had not looked at the sea from our window for three days!

Priorities are changing!

The Quest Begins!

As a long standing Primary School Teacher of two days, I feel the mantle of the pundit descending upon my shoulders, but I will restrain my pronouncements until at least half term – that’s the beginning of next month! It will be a struggle, but I think that my assessment of the state of Primary School Teaching can afford to wait that long!

I am beginning to work out the dynamics that make each staff room such a fascinating place and the tensions that inform all collections of professionals are beginning to surface. The systems that exist to ‘facilitate’ the teaching of my colleagues are also starting to show themselves for the obstructions that they undoubtedly are!

In other words I have entered another typical staffroom with the addition of ‘enclave’ status to make it just that little bit more interesting.

As the day progressed we found that our timetables had changed; the duties rota had changed and we had to perform a dance in each group for the Carnival in Sitges. I confidently await other ‘surprises’ during the rest of the year. I also now expect the start of the next term to be the equivalent of this January start – in other words more like the start of the year rather than a school year bedding in!

I am now not confident that we will retain the present staff until the summer term – who knows what will happen by Easter! We live in exciting times.

The kids, however, are bubblingly enthusiastic and have greeted each new aspect of everything that we have done with wide eyed wonder! If this lasts then teaching in the school is going to be a rewarding experience, even if the reality of day to day life in the school is going to enervatingly draining.

I have started my campaign to get an OHP. A search around the school has not turned one up. The science department in the secondary sector was supposed to have two or three, but an exploration revealed these rumours to be idle travellers’ tales. As one member of staff told me, “I’ve never seen one; and if we have any they are going to be broken!” Some things never change.

I have, however, been told that one will be ordered for me. Tomorrow will see if this was a ‘holding’ comment to keep me quiet at the end of school tonight or whether this has some sort of purchasing reality. I am more than prepared to go to a supplier in Sitges and get it myself if it will facilitate its arrival by the end of the week. This will be far more of a test about the quality of teacher support from the school than anything so far.

My immediate colleagues continue to be powerfully supportive and they seem to have unending reserves of energy, I only hope that I can emulate their continuing inventiveness and cooperativeness. They set a high standard!

Toni continues sick and although he is supposed to return to work on Friday, I think that he will be ill advised (how apt!) to do so.

Never has the weekend seemed so inviting!

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!