So much for jabs!

A couple of days of self pitying cold symptoms and I shun the typewriter. There’s an archaic word for you!

As I have been feeling sorry for myself (it’s a job only I can do with the requisite sincerity) I have neglected my writing. Part of that neglect was also immersing myself in a book.

I would like to say that my choice of literature was uplifting and intellectually respectable. But it wasn’t.

My choice of reading matter was a chance encounter with one of the books donated by past staff to the reading shelf in the staff room: ‘Eldest’ by Christopher Paolini.

This is the second volume of his ‘Inheritance’ trilogy, of which ‘Eregon’ was the first volume. This book has already been turned into a film with Jeremy Irons emulating Alex Guinness and acting as if he was in a much better film.

It comes as no surprise to find out that the author was home schooled and started writing the first volume when he graduated from High School at the age of fifteen. That sounds very arch and knowing and is a wilful acceptance of a stereotypical assumption that anyone home schooled will, of necessity, turn to fantasy worlds to fill in the lack of socialisation stemming from a lack of peer group contact.

There again, what the hell do I know about the realities of Christopher Paolini’s life? I should just go with what I’ve read in this volume.

So. The content of this narrative will not come as a surprise to anyone who has read any other fantasy books. Take a cast which includes elves, dwarfs, dragons, magic, humans and a scattering of semi humans and then you place them in a chosen-one-aiding-the-final-battle-against-evil sort of scenario and that’s what the book is about.

As someone once said that there were only seven basic plots (“The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories” by Christopher Booker – thank you internet where a casual comment can be footnoted in a couple of seconds!) I suppose that it would be unfair for castigating a novel which uses a fairly hackneyed structure. It would be far fairer to assess how Paolini uses the framework to tell his story.

And it isn’t, in my view, very good.

His archaisms in his writing of speech are cringe makingly irritating and he simply doesn’t not have the authority in his narrative thrust to enable a reader to ‘roll with the punch’ of some lazy formulation and get on with the story.

His descriptions are weak and, while he undoubtedly creates some pretty pictures his prose does not rise to the necessary heights for set pieces which promise much but deliver little. The promised battle that is the thrust of much of the volume is a woeful let down when it finally occurs.

It is an amusing, though not very taxing literary game to list all the sources that are shamelessly stitched together to create this tale: from The Star Wars saga, though Lord of the Rings to The Old Testament no epic is left unplucked!

Tolkien’s genius was to choose a central character for the Lord of the Rings who was tangentially human; incorporating all our flaws while remaining visually and morally ‘other’ – close and distant at the same time. There is none of that subtlety in this epic wannabe.

Having said all that: I enjoyed reading it, but at the same time I would only recommend it for those who are enthusiasts of the genre. And adolescent boys. Or is that a tautology?

Nice portrait of a dragon on the front cover, courtesy of John Jude Palencar. Whose surname, now I think about it, resembles the honorific title of some long lost elfin King in the fabled country of Çleñdälé? It looks so much more convincing with bits around the letters doesn’t it?

Whatever.

I shall return the volume to the staff shelf on Monday rather than place it firmly among my other books.

That must tell you something about my reaction to the book!

The hand of the law

My days are numbered. I wait in fear and trembling for the soft thud of envelope hitting the floor. Justice will prevail.

A flash of light while speeding my way toward the opera. Sudden realizations that this stretch of road alone in all the roads of Catalonia has your typical boy racer (of all ages) meekly submit to the newly imposed speed limit of 80 km an hour. Yet I ignored the uncharacteristically moderate behaviour and recklessly exceeded the limit by 10 km an hour!

I suppose that some of the preceding writing indulges in a degree of poetic licence. My letters (eventually) find their way into our post box which is on the inside surface of the garden wall of the flat. I would have to have hearing at the level of acuity of a highly strung bat to hear my post arrive! Especially as the post is delivered as a lump of correspondence which falls through the central letterbox only to fall to the ground because the box is broken and it has no back.

Someone, something, sometime then sorts the letters and puts ours in our little box. Our box has a plastic window so that you can tell when there is mail. That at least is the theory. I don’t think that anyone has cleaned this little window since the box was first placed there. If the little window was cleaned it would be easier to see if there was any mail.

And here you get to one of those stupid problems that human flesh is heir to. Which one among us can not say that we have left undone those things that we ought to have done (and there is no health in us) [think of the Prayer Book] There are some things that we ought to do that would take virtually no effort; would be done in the twinkling of an eye – yet we omit to do them.

Usually they are tiny cleaning jobs: the gunge around the base of taps; the casually glimpsed smudge on a window or mirror; the slightly grubby light switch; the crystallised sugar on a sugar spoon; the gunge in grooves that bedevil surrounds of sinks and cookers; the dust that accumulates on the base of standard lights and inside open ornamental bowls. I hope that all of this is striking some sort of resonant chord with someone out there and it is not my personal paranoia that is being illustrated!

Cleaning the little window in our mail box is one of those jobs. Every time you look into the murky plastic you make a resolution to clean it. It doesn’t work with a thumb brush – I know, I’ve tried. I would have to bring a paper towel down and do it properly. And, if I am truthful, the floor of the box could do with a clean too. But by the time that I have walked up the stairs to the flat the intention has gone and the preparation to ensure a thorough job is just too much of a fag to bother with.

So, ever since we first arrived in the flat, this has been one job that has been waiting to be completed.

How shameful! How slothful! How typical!

On a more self pitying note I have to tell you that the efficacy of the anti-flu jab has now worn off. I have not had a cold throughout the ostensible winter in Catalonia I have felt, like Miss Flite, that there has been a cold somewhere in the room. I have, however kept the damn thing at bay until the last couple of days. I have felt thoroughly rotten today and yesterday but, as is my wont, I have had to do without sympathy because I don’t seem ill. “What?” asked one of my colleagues today, “always happy, Stephen?” If you exude bonhomie then it is unlikely that you are going to score highly on the sympathy-for-the-miserable scale. I must remember to look more morose. On principle!

Today has been the day that my class (augmented by extraneous bodies from another class whose teacher is on a skiing trip with pupils at a resort where there is no snow) has completed the production of their models of the sculpture suitable to go in the centre of roundabouts.

I have to admit that you will never know the reality of the phrase “needy children” until you have been the teacher in charge of a class of primary school pupils hell bent on constructing a model of anything using cardboard, paper, plastacine, tooth picks, lolly sticks, sellotape, coloured paper, photocopies, felt tipped pens, elastic bands, straws, tissue paper, silver paper, clear plastic sheet, pencils, ink pens, rulers, glue and paper clips.

After a while the words that make up your name appear meaningless as seemingly countless mouths mouth it. In an act of sheer self protection I have insisted that all the kids have to use ‘may I’ rather than ‘can I’ before they get anything. This allows me a few precious seconds to refocus on the next of the faces demanding attention. They remind me of nothing more than a nest full of young birds that, as soon as the parent bird appears, turn toward the parent and squawk with gaping mouths towards their provider.

I can now, fully, understand the frenetic life of the dealers on the floor of the stock exchange who appear to be communicating with the entire population of the place all at the same time. Any primary school class in full creative flow producing some artistic artefact would reduce the hardy denizens of the stock market floor to gibbering wrecks in double quick time!

And we did science experiments as well. Though not during the same lesson – that really would have been a living hell!

We are now working our way towards a book exchange. The idea is simple. The pupils bring in those books which they feel that they have outgrown or no longer want and exchange them for similar books that their friends have brought in.

A simple and unremarkable idea you might think. But no. Our kids are already developing the proclivities which have allowed their parents the financial freedom to send their kids to a fee paying school. The idea of exchanging a book ‘for ever’ was greeted with horror. When I think about my books, my kids seemed to be saying, the emphasis is on the personal possessive pronoun (or adjective) (or whatever) what I have I keep. My books they seem to be saying are, by definition, not anyone else’s.

Tomorrow we are designing posters for this (traumatic) event. I will not hold my breath to see how many books turn up!

Meanwhile I have to design the vouchers which will be issued to each child for the books that they bring in, which in turn will allow each child to claim another book.

We live in a materialistic society.

Meat is murder! Sometimes.

My new found vegetarianism (in school only) is having mixed results.

The Dinner Lady is frankly sceptical; not about my particular case, but about the possibility of anyone being truly vegetarian. In a country where meat eating is second nature true vegetarians are something of a rarity. One of my colleagues recounted her experiences of explaining that she was a vegetarian (real) in Catalonia and was therefore offered chicken and fish as alternatives! One person said that they had gone out to a restaurant and asked for the vegetarian alternative for one of their number and was told that the restaurant didn’t really have one, but they could have a smaller portion of the meat instead “if that was alright!” Bless!

Today’s offering in my box was tepid lentil soup and completely tasteless veggie burgers. The only saving grace was the salad (of which I had more) and a piece of fruit. The bread was OK as well! Not inspiring, but I still consider that I am doing better than my carnivorous colleagues.

It puts me in mind of my new found vegetarianism in college which was ignominiously suspended because, as someone pointed out with completely unnecessary logic, I was eating the meat too. Pedant!

As an English teacher I should be gratified at the way that my colleagues are evincing a new found enthusiasm for practical criticism. Never before has so much attention been paid to so few, yet significant words. There have been discussions about nuances of meaning about individual words and phrases and there has also been deep and academic interest into the various editions and versions of texts under consideration.

The texts in question are the various versions of the contracts that bind us in adamantine chains of servitude to the dictates of capricious wage payers.

The phrase most often heard is “what if?” and then a speculative rumination about how to get the full amount of what we are worth is weighed against how we will be frustrated in this laudable aspiration.

Everything hinges on how and when people have to give in their resignations. We have been asked to indicate our intentions as far as continuing in employment in the school for next year. The deadline for responses is the first of April which is absurdly early when considered in the light of what would be required in Britain. International Schools work to different time scales, but even so, few of my colleagues are prepared to reveal their hands at this early stage. The situation is tense and endlessly interesting!

Talking of interesting: the end of term is, it would appear, a ‘moveable feast.’

I took, take and will take the end of term to be indicated on the school calendar as ‘summer holiday.’ Not, I think you will agree an unreasonable assumption. Wrong!

There is an extra week at the end of June, stretching into July. The kids will not be there, but it is an opportunity for us to tidy (acceptable) and clean! (Not acceptable.) I am perhaps being a little previous here and cleaning may only be taking down displays, but I fear that something much more thorough is actually involved.

In my darker moments I assume that it another little trick of The Owner to get us so infuriated that we all walk out so that she doesn’t have to pay us for the summer holidays. In my more paranoid moments I also wonder about the fact that I started in January and will not therefore have completed a full year by the time of the summer holidays. What will her attitude be towards my extended lazing about at her expense? Time, as they say, will tell.

I think that things are heating up not only in terms of the climate but also in terms of the attitudes of my colleagues.

Easter could yet be a turning point.

Family Life

Today was not the day to develop a runny nose.

This evening saw me set off with Buddhist calm into the extended traffic jam which is the coast road into Barcelona. My destination was the Gran Theatre del Liceu for a performance of ‘Elektra’ by Richard Strauss.

Almost as soon as I found my seat – wait, that’s not true. I have tried to work out the cabbalistic complexity which is the seat location as printed on the ticket but I have constantly failed. The most that I have achieved is to be in the general area of where my seat might be. Then the red Nehru jacketed workers, using a knowledge passed down through generations, usher you to your seat.

This was the best seat in which I have sat: the front row of the second tier with an expanse of red plush on which to rest my programme. If I had had time to buy one!

I really should have done my homework and not relied on a WNO performances of god knows how many years ago. I can remember the safety curtain with Electra written in blood on it and a hapless Electra swinging disconsolately around the fragment of a colossal statue of Agamemnon.

This production opened with a faded and rotting classical façade with a few small slight showing through the wall, when this was flown the thrust of the production was vividly presented by showing the changing room with flashing insect-o-cuter for a collection of what looked like German concentration camp female guards. The main set of the opera was the palace which had faded grandeur with classical detail filled in with corrugated iron sheets and a Napoleonic chaise longue vying with oil drums for attention.

This was a society driven by paranoia and life and death being indistinguishable one from the other.

The singing throughout and the orchestral playing were equally superb. Total authority and intense drama characterised the production both dramatically and musically.

But back to my nose.

Almost as soon as I had finally found my seat, settled back and waited for the lights to dim it was as if a tap had been turned on inside my olfactory system. I was intensely aware of the proximity of the lady on my right and I leaned towards the empty seat on my left. Subtle drawing of my hand across my face in a gesture which I felt expressed Straussian angst and Wargnerian loftiness, but which was actually designed to stem the flood, did nothing of the sort.

A desperate (but contained) rummage in my pocket managed to unearth a minute fragment of tissue which had to absorb above its surface area for much of the performance.

It being sod’s law of course, ‘Electra’ is a one act opera and is therefore performed in its entirety without a break.

While the massed flow of mucus rushed to obey the laws of gravity I also developed a cough. My desperate attempts to suppress the urge to cough brought quite literal tears to my eyes which coursed down my fact to join forces with . . . well you get the idea.

The fragment of tissue gradually disintegrated as did my composure.

The fact that I was able to appreciate the music at all is a direct reflection of my determination to get value for money for my vastly expensive seat!

My enjoyment was more than shared with the less fluid members of the audience who shouted their appreciation at the final curtain. Flowers rained down on the singers, some bouquets hitting the stage with solid thuds. When Clytemnestra took her bow aficionados in the gods threw handfuls of leaflets down onto the stage!

This is a production not to miss. Whether you know the music or not, the sheer drama of the piece will keep you transfixed.

I feel that this exemplification of Greek family life is trying to tell me something about the present state of education in my school, but I am too tired to work out the detail of the lesson.

Perhaps tomorrow.

Pondering the wind!

Castelldefels was packed today.

It was as if there was something going on that I didn’t know about. A holiday, a fiesta proclaimed to all the world, but kept a secret from me so that the influx of people determined to enjoy themselves could come as a nice surprise to me!

The generally rotten weather of the past few days has given way to better. Not wonderful, but better. The sun is shining fitfully and, as long as you are within the shine of that distant star then you can convince yourself that it is early summer.

Once walk into the shadow and you can easily convince yourself that winter is not yet over! Having said that I was wearing a short sleeved shirt today. I was, of course alone in affecting this form of dress, all the other inhabitants of Catalonia being firmly and snugly tucked up in their full winter wear!

There was also a sharp wind which whipped up the sand on the beach into fast moving clouds. The shape of the beach, or at least its profile, has been altered by the work which has been done near to the first line of flats. I have no idea what they are up to, but they are quite flamboyant with the number of earth (sand) movers and the general chaos they have caused. They have made major inroads (almost literally) into the partially grass covered dune which is just outside the exit from our flats on to the beach.

The wind and the clouds of sand were doing their best to transform the man made incursions into something far more natural. Give the wind a few more days and the profile will look as though it has been caused by wind erosion over the centuries!

The wind brings out the surfers in force. Not those namby-pamby board surfers, but rather those more showy wind surfers who use the curved kites to give them speed and height. The velocity that one of the guys (? Difficult to tell) managed to achieve on his board is usually only matched by those infinitely irritating motorised ski bikes or whatever they are called. Cutting through the waves at that speed must be exhilarating and I am quite prepared to leave the feeling that these intrepid or stupid (depending on your point of view) sportspeople get to my imagination rather than my experience.

I regard them as a sort of moving landscape feature that makes my contemplation of the sea and surrounding areas more interesting.

As television overload makes the ordinary unacceptably boring in short measure so people, with what I can only describe as a death wish, pander to our jaded appetites and produce ‘sports’ which stay just this side of the suicidal.

I suppose that all skiing is a form of going down a mountain side, but on conventional ski slopes there is usually a covering of snow and chasms and ledges and rocks usually indicate that you are falling off a cliff rather than engaging in sporting activity.

Now, of course, there is a sort of skiing which looks to me like falling and it is a very well organized (or state funded) television company which doesn’t resort to gratuitous pictures of some idiot jumping from a helicopter onto a pinnacle summit and then skiing and falling his way to the bottom.

I suppose my shouted advice to the rescuers scrambling towards the crumpled figure that they “leave him (it really is usually a him) there to die,” is a little unfeeling and unworthy of a member of one of the caring professions!

When you have sat on a Turkish beach and tried to explain the way to play squash to a frankly disbelieving Turk, you begin to realise that your sport and perhaps all sport is innately ridiculous. I did try and explain badminton to the same Turk but after my description of squash I think he regarded me as some sort of Baron Munchausen figure! You can get injured in these sports – one of my squash partners smashed a ball into my eye – but generally the greatest damage to the system is done by the drinks in the bar after the game!

With potholing, sky diving, extreme skiing and the like the risks are fairly obvious. If anything goes wrong in potholing then people have to put their lives at risk to rescue the ‘sportsmen’ and the rescue services are generally funded by the public.

I suppose that this is a ‘slippery slope’ argument. The same could be said for those who deliberately adopt a life style where food, drink and drugs play a significantly adverse part in the health of the participant.

How boring, the argument goes, it would all be if we all played safe. I’m not sure just what potholing has given to the world, discounting nice pictures of stalagmites and stalactites. Does hang gliding really do anything to further our understanding of aerodynamics and apart from giving plastic and other surgeons bodies on which to improve technique does extreme skiing add to the wealth of human happiness?

Mind you, can’t think of much that squash has given to civilization either, and don’t get me started on the ridiculous claims of MCC bores for their tedious game.

To sum up: everyone should swim.

Job done!

Training!

As far as I am aware, this is the first time in my life that I have spent Saint David’s Day outside my country! Apart, that is, for a few times in England.

I am the only Welsh teacher in my school – that in itself must be something of a record. Where else do you get a school where the teaching is in English where there are not at least a couple of Welsh teachers? I am assuming that in English speaking countries you can count people of Welsh descent as fulfilling the necessary quota!

There were no plans for an Eisteddfod and I did not feel inclined to try and institute one, but I felt that such an auspicious day (even if March the first was on a Saturday) could not be allowed to pass by the benighted pupils of our school.

On Friday (the nearest school day) my classroom was bedecked with full colour Welsh flags, depictions of leeks and daffodils and outlines of the country. My English class were treated to a potted version of the Saint’s life complete with sceptical version of the Magic Mountain incident in his life.

It appears that Saint David was preaching to an outdoor congregation, some of whom had difficulty in seeing him. Cue the miraculous: the ground beneath David’s feet rose up and, lo and behold, all could now feast their eyes on the holy man! One cynic among he commentators that I read through on line described this as one of the most redundant miracles ever performed given the mountainous nature of Wales and that fact that David could merely (and probably did) just walk up the nearest slope to give everyone a good view!

Still, the pupils seemed quite amiable about accepting, with equanimity, the impossible and expressed delight when I distributed outline versions of the Welsh flag for them to colour in. I also gave them drawings of the saint himself and they were even more delighted to hear that they could colour this in with any colours they liked as opposed to the restricted palette of red, white and green for the flag.

In one of the even lower age classes than the one I teach there is a Welsh boy. This lad knows he is Welsh but he didn’t know where in Wales he was born when I questioned him. Still, his mother cooked some Welsh cakes and his class teacher allowed him to bring some to me.

The frantic and pathetic pleading of my class meant that I broke up the Welsh cakes and distributed them around the class like some sort of Celtic priest distributing communion bread! This went down, literally and metaphorically, very well.

If I am still here next year (teaching in Sitges I mean, not in Castelldefels) then I will have to do something more, even if March the first is on a Sunday in 2009.

When did I last buy something nice?

Perhaps I should have written that word as ‘nice’ because it is a quotation. Whenever I ventured into town with a certain number of items to buy for my mother, she would often say to my departing back, “. . . and anything else nice that you see.” Which being interpreted meant, “If you see anything that you and I (and not your father) would recognize as interesting and which it would be crime to leave on the shelf at that price - then buy it.”

When you have been trained (as I have) by a mother who sometimes regarded shopping as a vocation rather than a chore, then you begin to develop which may be termed a Value Instinct.

A Value Instinct is the ability to be able buy, with assurance, something that Others might say you don’t really need. And not feel guilty about it.

My mother started my training young and I often accompanied her on shopping Expeditions (I use the capital letter with some reason) which were far closer to Campaigns (I use the capital letter with some justification) as she moved around town with the confidence of a cross between a general and a guerrilla fighter.

When I was old enough to wander around town by myself, so that I too could handle, assess and deliberate upon articles that I had absolutely no intention of buying (the sign of a true shopper) my mother always insisted that our later rendezvous point was the Wedgwood concession near the entrance on the ground floor in Howells. This was, of course, before the irresistible rise of the perfume concessions which have now swept away all other opposition and reign supreme in the prime sites of department stores at the ground floor entrances. Have you any idea how great the turnover of over priced pungent liquids actually is? I was once told (some years ago) how much the perfume department in Debenham’s in the St David’s Centre in Cardiff made in one week, and I was speechless with frustrated envy and horror.

Wedgwood has had a not inconsiderable effect on my life. My mother liked jasper ware and that took care of a fair number of birthday and Christmas presents before she tired of it. Wedgwood is my default setting of choice for china and glass.

I have to admit that sometimes this preference is not a good thing as, for example, when I priced a fairly simple dinner service in white with a metallic trim and was told that it was two thousand pounds!

As the assistant had worked quite hard pricing all the individual items that I deemed essential for a basic dinner service (one surely needs two gravy boats?) I thought that my look of horrified amazement at this price was hardly an adequate recompense for her attention. Thinking quickly I stuttered out a panicky question, “Can you use it in the microwave?” The answer was delivered in a stern voice and with a steely gaze.

“No sir, that would adversely affect the platinum.”

That gave me the escape route that I needed and mumbling my thanks I told her that anything I bought would have to be microwave safe, and I hastily beat a retreat from a place where my budget did not give me admission!

The dinner service that I eventually bought was dishwasher safe, microwave safe, oven proof, freezer proof and insured for twelve months against breakages!

And it was Wedgwood.

Like riding a bicycle, some things remain with you for life!

Hearing is not convincing

It comes to something that the highlight of my week was winning the ‘Best Kept Classroom’ award!

To the absolute delight of my class the scrap of card outlining our success was handed over in the only assembly of the week this afternoon.

I am now noted for my ability to transform dull certificates to things of wonder by lavish use of garish border strips and glitter pens. Take it from me the reality is even worse than you can imagine. It proceeds from the suppressed imagination of a primary teacher manqué that I must have been for most of my educational career! Perhaps it’s best not to go there; some fugitive thoughts are better left running than being tied down and considered!

I have recently been trying to remember the last time that I read a book. I barely remember what they look like, let alone remember what they feel like and what they contain. In a foreign country there are strategies for obtaining reading material; you just need to think before you panic.

In the staff room there is a shelf devoted to novels in English. I have to say that they reflect the gender imbalance that is inherent in teaching. The titles are not encouraging and I’ve never heard of the authors. Not a good start, but also offering the possibility of an unexpected delight.

You could also buy English books, though I have to say that they are far less ‘available’ than I would have expected. Even in Barcelona they are no as readily apparent as I would have hoped.

The last way is to buy them from the internet, though I have to admit that I have only bought one book using this method since I have been in Spain.

What I really miss is the cheap book shop. With books in English! We have a cheap quality book shop in Castelldefels, but, apart from a couple of cheap art books, it does not satisfy.

It is perhaps all for the good as all the shelves that I have are at present occupied with ‘essential’ books. Each new compact volume in the Great Artists of Catalonia series poses a new storage problem. There are some jejune and callow commentators who might say that the ‘problem’ could be solved by my taking some books back to Bluespace and the cold, heartless prison where the rest of my books languish.

I was hoping for a job in Secondary so that I could justify releasing the rest of The Bluespace Thousands and bringing back the exiles into the warmth of human contact. The school in Castelldefels has stymied that plan, so the Siberian banishment of my volumes continues.

Virtually every day, and sometimes more than once during the day, I think of books that I want to dip into. Hearing of the success of ‘No Country for Old Men’ made me think of other Yeats poems that I wanted to look through – without the hassle of having to bring them all up on the internet.

There is something inhuman about reading a poem on a screen, let alone a poem magicked from improbable pixels floating around the web. Unless I have the comfort of the hard reality of cool, flat, smooth pages to caress then an essential aspect of the reading experience is lost.

I always used to wonder when listening to Desert Island Disks about the veracity of certain musicians who were on the programme. Ray Plomley, the only authentic voice of the programme, used to ask the guests, after they had chosen their eight records if they would rather have the scores of the music rather than a performance. When some of them replied that they would rather have the scores I always assumed that they were showing off and they couldn’t possibly ‘hear’ the music from rows of funny shapes symbols on the page.

It was only much later when I imagined being given the opportunity to respond to the ‘which eight gramophone records would you choose to have with you’ that I thought about how I would respond if, instead of music, the recordings were of poems.

Suddenly the ‘pretentious’ musicians’ requests for scores became more understandable. Imagine the poem from which the film title ‘No Country for Old Men’ is taken being recited by your favourite actor or personality. Imagine the dark velvet of Burton’s voice sonorously telling the verses of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’: an initial delight at such voluptuous indulgence hearing Yeats’ poem read by Our Richard would soon degenerate into irritation and then revulsion at the unchanging nature of the delivery. Far, far better to have the words and then begin to imagine the perfect rendition in your head than hear a performance which is, but its very nature, static.

There are some lines in poetry which I have never even come close to saying in a way which I find even remotely satisfactory.

One such phrase is the rather bewildering “silence in the echo.”

Never been able to get that one right.

And that’s from a poem I wrote myself, so I really should know how to say it!

The clock is ticking!

Do you know how to turn your fog lights on?

This was a pressing problem while ducking in and out of tunnels and in and out of patches of fairly thick mist on the way to work. As usual there were the suicidal and homicidal drivers who rushed past as if the sun were shining in a clear sky! I’d like to say that such idiotic driving were the exclusive preserve of Catalan drivers but, alas driving in Wales in fog will show that the general IQ level of a considerable minority of drivers is slightly lower than your average pebble.

I eventually twiddled the right sort of stalk protruding from the steering wheel and found a reassuring image light up. I have no idea whether I have front and back fog lights; further jiggling of the stalk only succeeded in turning off the little logo

My second day as a vegetarian in school: today rice, salad, omelette with an indescribable milk confection which tasted wholly artificial in spite of the assurance that it was 85% milk. I suppose that the other 15% allowed the manufacturer to pack in every E number known to European artificial additive experts!

Illness and injury has reduced the staff in the school to crisis levels and two threatened resignations in the science department of the secondary section of the school were they to happen tomorrow, would reduce us to a state beyond chaos.

I can hardly wait!

The weather continues to be far below expectations. I await the return of the sun with anxious impatience.

We are looking around for another flat because we are still reeling from the buying of a new bloody tap for the landlord. A Mercedes driving multi property owning person too tight to replace an old faulty tap in one of his own properties!

We have a hard life.

As you can tell, I’m not really into writing this evening – things are waiting to happen.

Wait and see!

The Good Life is Good for You!

Tired and drained? Why not try a lobster paella with a sturdy house vino tinto and a mediocre crema catalana?

It worked for me! There is nothing like a good meal (even with a putrid postre) to take your mind away from the day to day problems of life and get them on to something more useful and productive!

In school: injury, illness and accident seem to be claiming a higher and higher percentage of the teaching population. There seems to be no ‘fall back’ plan to ensure that pupils continue to be taught apart from the ‘can you ask your friend if he will give a hand?’ sort of approach. When I asked about agencies for supply teachers for International Schools I was met with blank looks – there is obviously a niche in the market waiting to be filled with work for desperate teachers who thought that Catalonia was a cheap place to live and are now having to find a job to pay the rent.

Next week is Ski Week and one of my colleagues is joining the kids (for the après ski as far as I can tell) and to care for the casualties as they merrily fracture the necessary bones to make Ski Week a success.

As only a few of the kids are going on the trip, others who are going to be left behind in school are going to take the week off: I only hope that a substantial portion of my class is going to do the same! Isn’t private education a wonderful thing!

Talking of wonderful things; from casual gossip around the usually deserted staffroom I understand that events such as ‘parents evening’ and ‘open mornings’ are about to occur. I have no idea what form these occasions take, but, from my experience of they way in which this school does everything they promise to be outré and other worldly. I await with wide eyed innocence the surrealistic phantasmagoria that such ordinary events must surely generate. At least they will be near Easter so that there can be a degree of recovery and revitalisation for the succeeding term!

I have heard nothing from the school in Castelldefels and today was the date by which people were supposed to have been informed if they had made the short list for interview.

I don’t know whether to be depressed, elated, mystified, angry or phlegmatic about this apparent rejection. My CV read like a description of an amalgam of Kent Clark, RAB Butler and Roald Dahl with a few minor sporting details thrown in. I suppose, if I am truthful, that my secondary career seems like a distant twisted dark dream rather than a concrete reality on which to build a career in a new country, but still, I mean, even so, what are my rivals going to have in their CVs which will equal mine? Apart, of course, from a rather more immediate contact with the target pupils. And a rather more immediate date of emerging into the rat race!

We shall see.

Especially as I already have an hour’s experience of working in the Castelldefels institution already!

The memory of times past!

No more night school!

The chore of having to go to the local language school and teach a small group of 11+ kids is at an end!

Having now acquired the social security number which makes you a real person in the eyes of the local and national government, I can discard this element of my professional life like (as Quentin Crisp so elegantly put it in quite another context) used Hershey Bar wrappers.

The rate of pay offered by this institution is so low that it pushes my mind back to those long gone days when I worked for Securicor. The rate of pay in that iniquitous organisation was five shillings. 25p. Believe me that was not much then, let alone now!

The sickest aspect of working at Securicor was the in-house magazine.

The quality of this organ is perhaps best summed up by the fact that Ray Gunter (there’s a name from Labour’s murky past!) wrote an article praising capitalism either directly or by implication. I have to admit that my memory is hazy on this issue because a red mist clouded my eyes as I read further into the mendacious rubbish that Gunter (ex Labour cabinet minister) wrote. He was, I think, part of the management of Securicor (if not the chair) which emphasised and gloried in the fact that it was a ‘mutual’ company.

To explain this adjective there was a little drawing looking like something that an earnest clergy man would draw to explain the complexities of the Trinity to a credulous child (autobiographical!) This was to reassure employees that everything was working together for their benefit in this best of all possible worlds. 25p an hour. I think that speaks for itself!

There were also photographs of impossibly heroic guards in Securicor uniforms who had fought off dastardly robbers who had dared attack the Securicor vans containing the canvas bags full of money that were being transported to various banks.

The caption to the photograph would detail all the horrific injuries that the guard had sustained and show a smiling member of management handing the bandaged guard a cheque for a pathetic twenty quid! Mutual company indeed! The only lesson I took from this magazine was ‘if attacked do nothing and, short of offering to load the money into the thieves' car, do anything they say.’

I was once given a truncheon when we went out to collect money and was told, ‘whatever happens don’t use it.’ Happy days!

I have been trying to work out the last time in my life that I worked for so little as the pittance offered by the language school and I think that I have to go back twenty years or so! Allowing for inflation I think I got more in Securicor than in present day Castelldefels!

Anyway, all of that was this morning; this is this evening.

A zoo out of season (and believe me, February makes the zoo the province of school parties not of real human beings) is a bleak sort of place.

For a start all the food outlets appeared to be closed – a tragic reality for a lazy teacher who has relied on easy access sustenance rather than the hard slog of a home packed lunch.

Secondly, the animals seem totally bored by the neophyte visitors. They are like seasoned old pros that are only prepared to work at 50% for an audience that doesn’t have sufficient clout!

My perpetual reservations about zoos surfaced when observing crocodile like reptiles in pools barely their length and certainly not their width/length – if you see what I mean. Lions, panthers and tigers pacing their allotted spaces with practised monotony all added to my unease.

But then there are the penguins.

Rather a motley crew in Barcelona Zoo, but still - penguins!

I do find them endlessly fascinating, but they also point up one of the flaws in the ‘but-zoos-are-there-to-help-endangered-species-survive’ philosophy.

Since when were penguins an endangered species? They are not in zoos because of their precarious situation in the world of non human animals; they are they because human animals find them so fetching. Well, this human certainly does!

Apart from the fact that zoos present me with concrete evidence to refute my passionately help conviction that giraffes do not exist. What is their function? Zoos that is?

Do you believe in giraffes? Hippos, crocodiles, chameleons and rhinos: I can take all of these unlikely creatures in my stride; but giraffes? No! A thousand times no!

Have you seen a giraffe gallop or glide or float or whatever the correct term for a running giraffe is? It is like a Dalí fuelled dream of an augmented Afghan Hound: it is impossible poetry in motion.

My case rests. Giraffes do not, have not, can never exist.

Scream or screen?

The screen has arrived!

Never mind the events rocking the world outside the small sector of education which is my professional life; the screen for my OHP has arrived.

This now leads, of course, to phase three of the operation to get what I want. I now have to start the process to get pens, spare bulbs and OHP transparencies. It’s a long hard slog to get anything in this school and each step in getting something takes so much effort that you start to wonder if it is worth it.

I have rearranged the classroom and put the desks in islands so that I can have access to all pupils. I’m not sure that it quite works, but I will see what it’s like for a few days before I institute any further changes.

It’s sad, but I am genuinely excited by the change that something as generally insignificant as a screen can bring to a classroom. I obviously need to get out more!

We are getting nearer to the end of term and so long term planning for the last term of the year is necessary. I am going to be initiated into the sacred mysteries of planning is it is understood on the distant planet in a far universe which is my school.

I have applied for another job but, in the contrary way in which these things work, the interviews for the school (which is in Castelldefels) are going to be held in London! Why are things never straightforward? (Rhetorical)

Tomorrow the zoo. I have never been to the zoo in Barcelona and don’t really know what to expect. I have mixed feelings about zoos. Early memories of Bristol Zoo are coloured by animals confined in cages which were much too small for their natural movement and produced forms of animal madness which resulted in pacing to and fro in their cells. It made their observation even more of a guilty voyeuristic experience.

I am not convinced by zoos’ new found altruistic mission to act as a sort of ark for endangered species rather than the chamber of curiosities of the animal kingdom that was their original conception.

I wait to be converted. Though with my class in close attendance it is perhaps not giving the institution a fair chance. There again, if it is truly convinced about its mission in life it should be convincing under trying circumstances.

I hope there is somewhere nice for lunch!

Tea is life!

There are few things that show up the vulnerability of the British than a faulty kettle.

It is never a pleasant thing to discover that you are a walking, talking, thirsty stereotype!

The bloody light on the kettle wouldn’t come on, and that reassuring rumble of 2Kw of electric power surging into action was silenced. My default approach to electronic equipment which fails to work is to hit it. If that fails to work then to hit it again. And again.

This tripartite pugilistic approach actually brought the light back on!

Then it failed to work again. My world stopped. Life without tea. Unthinkable!

You might, were you not British, consider heating up water in a saucepan. But it is not the same. Any Brit worth his tea bags can tell when water has been heated in this way rather in a bona fide saucepan. Heating water in a saucepan is the sort of thing that someone who heats milk to put in tea would do. And that, as Lady Bracknell would say, puts one in mind of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And we all know what that unfortunate event led to!

The misery of tea-less existence was augmented by the misery of dripping taps.

The tap in Toni’s bathroom was leaking. This being a rented flat we informed the thieving bastards who masquerade as estate agents and who are supposed to represent our interests as tenants. To my speechless amazement we were informed that the replacement of the tap would be the responsibility of us, the tenants! After five months of living in the flat we had to replace an old tap. Why? Well, we were told, those things which we use ‘every day’ were our responsibility to replace. A light bulb I can understand; but a tap? Since when have taps only lasted seven months? Our new tap will be there for the increasing of the wealth of our Mercedes driving landlord long after we have left. The simple injustice of this system takes my breath away!

We have now replaced the tap and emptied our wallets. I was so annoyed by the whole episode that I bought myself some flowers; I have given up hope of Toni buying any. I also bought the next volumes in my double series of books which are on special offer with La Vanguardia newspaper.

The Grans Genis De L’Art a Cataluna has now reached the sixth volume and the painter Joan Miró. Miró is another Catalan artist with whom I have problems in appreciating. I have to say that this series of little books has managed in its limited space to produce a stimulating range of paintings from each artist which do encourage a retrospective interest. In Miró’s case there are some very interesting early works

which show little sign of the sparse faux juvenile symbolist surrealism that characterise his later years.

The National Geographic series on the Patrimonio de la Humanidad concentrates on Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Among the wealth of religious buildings which has been the staple of past volumes, it was refreshing to see industrial monuments in this volume together with the Bauhaus


and fossils!

The kettle has been replaced with a rather elegant Bosch model and I have purchased a cheap kettle to take to school for my classroom. The way in which the school day is organised in our place means that I can be without my Indian Drug for hours at a time. This is not good for me or the pupils I teach. A Briton without a regular tea fix is a basically unstable element in the educational system.

Infuse those leaves!






PS. This is blog number 400! That must mean something. Mustn't it?

Wipe it off!

Never let it be said that I do not make an impact in educational circles.

When I was in Llanedeyrn High School I was instrumental in getting the staff toilet paper changed from the hard Izal-sandpaper-type to soft Labrador-puppy-type paper. You really have to be a teacher and have worked in a ‘normal’ school to realise just how big an achievement something like that can be.

Educational discussion in schools divides into two camps: those saddos who actually know what the acronyms thrown around with increasing desperation in curriculum debate actually mean, and the rest who only contribute when the topic being argued about is something nice and understandable like on which side of the corridor pupils should walk.

In Llanedeyrn years ago, when the world was yet young and Sir Keith Joseph stalked the corridors of power with the wide eyed fanaticism of the undead, the key question in school was ‘Should pupils be allowed to wear their coats in school? I kid you not. I can remember with that verge-of-tears feeling which characterised my usual response to staff meetings the many hours which were devoted to this crucial question.

The staff always voted for the pupils to have to remove their coats as soon as they entered the building. I always proposed the abolition of a rule for which I could never see the point. Most of the staff ignored its enforcement, though they argued vociferously for its retention! This apparent paradox will be very familiar to all benighted souls forced to listen to educationalists trying their very best to make the world a worse place!

So what have I achieved in my present school?

It all stems from ‘a nice idea.’

I thought that it would be ‘a nice idea’ to have a ‘picture a week’ for my classroom. I thought of buying some cheap art book for the illustrations, cutting it up and putting a great work of art in a frame and changing it every week. A colleague suggested matching the Great Work of Art

with a contribution from a pupil and having a weekly pupil picture on the wall as well.

I priced a few cheap art books and a couple of frames. Total possible cost, around €40.

And there the idea floundered.

In our school there is no petty cash. Radical ideas (sic) like this have to be passed along the chain of command and eventually be stymied by The Owner.

The idea of buying a cheap and cheerful art book and cutting it up was vetoed in favour of the more expensive alternative of using a colour photocopier! The buying of the frames has been lost in the Byzantine complexity of the ordering process.

The existence of a colour photocopier (heretofore a closely guarded secret) opened up possibilities.

On Friday, as part of the topic for our classes, my colour photocopying order of sculpture on roundabouts (don’t ask) reached the photocopying lady. There, alas, it was also seen by The Owner who looked at the sheets waiting to be copied and instantly devised a new regulation.

From now on, the laborious and lengthy process of getting a photocopy done in our school has an extra layer of administration. From now on, anyone who has the temerity to ask for colour photocopying has to get the form (don’t ask) countersigned by a unit manager.

Never let it be said that I couldn’t make my colleagues’ lives just that little bit more fraught.

Talking of fraught, we had good news in the Monday briefing at the end of school. From the start of the summer term, we were told, we could leave school as soon as our pupils were safely with their parents. This could mean that we would be able to leave school half an hour earlier.

By Friday this had been rescinded!

All members of staff had had a meeting with The Owner who told us that this was A Mistake. Next Year Something Might Happen. But not this year, oh no, not this year at all.

It says something for the lunacy which is the key operating factor of this school that this Renunciation was taken by everyone with phlegmatic indifference. Just another normal day in the Kafka novel that is our normal life here!

Thanks to Paul Squared, whose normal reading matter seems to be in the international section of the TES on line, I have been informed that there is a vacancy in the British School of Barcelona (here in Castelldefels) for an English teacher in the secondary part of the school.

I have sent in an application.

If nothing else it will save me the €10 a day getting to and from work along the expensive tunnel punctuated motorway to Sitges!

Here’s hoping!

Break a leg!

What drama queens young children are!

Tomorrow is the assembly for my class and I have written a short script to ensure that all members of the form get to say something. The problems of participation are exacerbated by the fact that some of the pupils find speaking in English of major difficulty.

Before you begin to wonder why there should be a language problem in a school which ostentatiously teaches through the medium of English, I might point out that any foreigners arriving in Catalonia with children of school age will find that state school teach through the medium of Catalan, not Spanish. For northern Europeans the prospect of teaching using English would appear to be the better alternative.

But that doesn’t mean that they actually speak English. I am not sure that I understand the deliberations that some of our parents have gone through to allow their children entry to our school.

So, some of our kids can’t really speak fluent English. That doesn’t stop them breaking down into floods of tears if they feel that they have fewer lines in that language than other more privileged speakers!

During our one and only rehearsal last thing this afternoon I could feel my dictatorial directorial impulses rising to the surface. These proclivities reached their apogee during the rehearsals for some play or other in Kettering High School when I found myself treating the actors like chess pieces and virtually throwing them around the stage to get them into position; hauling bodily the more recalcitrant members of the cast and unceremoniously plonking them where I, the dramatic mastermind, determined that they should be.

Limited, time; a few interruptions, howling pupils; unhelpful suggestions; last minute additions; even later deletions; improvisations; suppressed hysteria – all this for a bloody assembly. Just imagine what it would have been like if we had been putting on ‘King Lear’!

We will see what happens tomorrow.

I had hoped that this evening would be the last that I would have to go to our local language school and teach a handful of young secondary pupils English.

I gained (!) this job opportunity when nothing else appeared to be on the horizon and the two hours of teaching in the evenings seemed to offer the opportunity to gain the magic employment number which would make all other pen pushers in positions of importance in this country lessen their importunate demands for something to type into their computers and make me exist on their systems.

Almost as soon as I got this job I was fortunate enough to gain a full time job. It is difficult to let that sentence stand without making some cynical comment, but let it be, let it be.

Knowing that two evenings a week I would have to go to the language school and teach does not add to my store of human happiness and the laughably derisory payment that I am earning for my efforts makes the slog even less acceptable.

This evening was supposed to be the last time that I had to take the kids but I was met by a whining administrating begging for me to take them for a further week. I agreed, though I am at a loss to understand why: all I am doing is ensuring that the company continues to make a real profit while giving me an unreal pittance!

I need to have a glass of decent wine and stop this uncharacteristic whining!

At least that doesn’t cost the earth here!

They Shall Not Pass!

After a few days of positively Welsh grey gloom, Castelldefels finally squeezed out a few minutes of vapid sunshine.

I have been in a foul mood, glaring at low cloud and shining pavements glistening with recent drizzle and rounding on convenient Catalans and demanding when the much vaunted constant sunshine of our stretch of coastline was going to lighten my day.

My day has not been particularly lightened by the Closure of the Door to the Ablutions in school. The threatened division of Administration and the Lesser Breeds (or teachers as they are sometimes known) actually came into force this morning. We were, therefore, locked into our section of the school – the only egress reported to the plucky band of dauntless educationalists by the Escape Committee was up the stairs, through the IT room, into the library, down the stairs to reception and then making a run for it!

The alternative toilet was reportedly ‘near the children’s toilets’ in itself a disagreeable and malodorous possibility.

With colleagues in tow I inspected the reputed toilet. It was through the same entrance as the kids, with girl kids to the left, boy kids to the centre and an unremarkable door with a badly cut out sign reading ‘Staff Toilets’ stuck on with outsize sellotape. The ‘toilet’ turned out to be a windowless hovel with luridly coloured bulbous plumbing accessories and no wash basin.

One does not want to appear precious, but one has one’s standards and a Stygian bog was not up to any of them.

I remarked to the headteacher that at the end of the period I Would Go To The Toilet. If the door to the acceptable loo was locked; the Stygian Bog was not acceptable, I would therefore immediately utilize the Escape Route and return home to make use of the more civilized facilities available in the flat.

My immediate colleague adjacent to my classroom, who has had the spark of professionalism extinguished from her eyes over the last few days evinced a lively desire to follow my example and walk out.

Big build up: inevitable anti climax.

Marching down from the library, car keys a-jingle in my pocket, the Door of Exclusion was ostentatiously open.

Defeat of stout party and return to normality.

Not really.

The atmosphere in the school is one of paranoid exasperation. If real financial commitments had not been made by my colleagues, and if they shared the callous disregard of the owner, the school would be minus the entire primary staff!

Added to the trials and tribulations of closed doors, non appearing photocopying and the usual petty restrictions, there have been murmurings that essential accompanying parents who want to come on the forthcoming trip to the zoo thus fulfilling the requirements of adult/pupil ratios are to be asked to make their own way to the zoo and then pay for their tickets.

Every day and in every way life is made just that little bit significantly more difficult.

On the positive side I have managed to finish reading ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

Let me start by saying that I enjoyed it.

That sort of opening immediately shouts the word ‘but’ at the reader and I do have a few ‘buts’ to add to the pleasure that I got from following the narrative.

This literary detective novel is, in its five hundred pages, wonderfully self indulgent. If you are a lover of melodrama and Grand Guignol then this is for you. That is not to say that it is vulgar; there are sections of the novel where the writing is a sheer delight, but you have to read tongue in cheek, if you will accept the clumsy cliché.

For me the style put me in mind of ‘Wuthering Heights’ ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’ and a sort of melange of Dickens, Trollope and a touch of Eliot (George that it, though T.S. could find a home here too!) Infuse the lot with more than a hint of Borges’ magic realism and you are almost there!

We follow the main character from his traumatic choice of book from the wonderfully evocatively named Cemetery of Forgotten Books to the final pages of the novel over a period of some twenty years and we are left to wonder who the hero (if there is one) of this novel is.

The characters we meet along the years are both mordantly realistic and whimsically grotesque but throughout all the action and time the city of Barcelona stands out as a palpable creation giving structure and literal geography to the narrative.

If this novel does not sustain the imagination and promise of the opening chapters, it does provide a stimulating kaleidoscope of picaresque entertainments along the way.

I recommend it with some enthusiasm.

And now to more soul destroyingly mundane concerns: I have to take the weekly (!) assembly on Friday and some sort of entertainment from my class is demanded.

Where is inspiration when I need it?

Sigh!

Comrades Unite!

Simmering rebellion characterises the atmosphere in our school.

Things are not, as you might say, hunky dory. Apart from that being the first time that I have ever consciously written those words, it is also a grotesquely inadequate way to express the lack of normality that is our normal modus vivendi in this institution.

The meeting of the primary teachers last night produced a series of outspoken denunciations of the way in which the school is being run and the treatment of teachers that were shocking unless you happened to work there. We are working in conditions that would have precipitated a walk out in a more union orientated place than the one in which we have the dubious pleasure in spending the hours of daylight.

The latest piece of downright disrespectful lunacy that has been instituted by the vengeful owner is that a door leading to the office from the main body of the school should be locked because inconsiderate teachers have the temerity to bother the office staff while they go about their duties. Which are apparently not associated with the running of a school which astonishingly has teachers attempting to educate the young!

The ludicrous systems set up by an administrator who knows nothing of the practicalities of education make it inevitable that the office staff have to be asked for such banal things as paper clips! Paper clips are an essential tool in the process which eventually results in photocopies being produced. The same photocopying which has not been done since last Friday; the designated (and thoroughly decent) member of the office staff having been absent and then diverted to other tasks. The result is that carefully worked out lesson plans have all crumbled into ad hoc nothingness.

But the locked door, which effectively imprisons us in our work, also cuts us off from the only toilet available for staff use! The spiteful, autocratic and vindictive action has succeeded in uniting the staff in a spasm of shocked outrage.

This morning, with emails flying like poisoned darts, the locked door magically opened and stayed open for most of the day. In a spirit of heady individuality I not only went through the forbidden door, but also entered the out of bounds administration area and spoke to people I should not have. Excitement indeed!

This cannot go on.

Except of course, it has gone on since September!

Now is the time for members of staff to let out a hollow laugh of incredulity when asked if they are considering staying on for next year. As far as I can see from the moment that staff arrived to take up their teaching posts, no effort whatsoever has been made by the owner to encourage loyalty and respect for her unsympathetic rule. There is every chance that, for the second year running, the entire primary staff will resign at the end of the year!

You would have thought that even the most thick-skinned proprietor would begin to question her approach when it is supported by the display of the backs of departing colleagues. But no! To paraphrase one of her alleged remarks when questioned about the ludicrous turnover of staff, “McDonalds has the same turnover of staff and they are OK.” Breathtaking inanity!

Meanwhile the reading of ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ continues apace. I particularly liked the following: “In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.”

‘Riding the spine of a book’ seems like a phrase specifically designed to please me and a ready made title for a book itself!

Learn to love it!

How bad can shopping really be?

Toni has what amounts to a pathological hatred of the whole process. This is part of that kaleidoscope of human response which finds no sympathetic response in me.

In spite of living for so long in literature, where the people you meet are not necessarily those who you would wish to be living in your street, or indeed in many circumstances in your universe, I find that I have more in common with the reprobates of the great tragic Russian novels than with a person who does not regard shopping as an essential element of civilized living!

Shopping for Essentials this morning was the usual high tension affair with Toni pacing along the aisles like a highly strung aesthete sipping a crème de menthe thrown among the laager drinking loping canaille. I do realize that the last image is somewhat inappropriate but trying to give an adequate impression of Toni’s lack of ease doing something which should be joyous does tempt me into the areas of literary desperation!

A Sunday morning is the time when most of the population of Castelldefels seems to take the opportunity to visit their local shops to load up on the weekly necessities. In Spanish and Catalan shopping trolleys there always seems to be more bulk because of the iniquitous need to purchase bottles of water as the stuff which comes through the taps is so vile – safe, but vile!

Who, I ask you, dispassionate reader of these lines, who does not find the range of something as mundane as bleach laid out in serried rows for our delectation fascinating. Bleach, you might say, is bleach. But such a simplistic statement ignores the combined efforts of grasping capitalism aided and abetted by an equally grasping advertising industry. Different bottle shapes, colours, sizes, type faces, properties, strengths, viscosities and scents – not to mention prices. Faced with such variety; such a plethora who can resist at least pausing and marvelling at the range and choice offered in the most ordinary and humble of household liquids?

Or perhaps it’s just me.

On safer ground I have just started reading ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. The opening conceit of the book, that there exists in Barcelona The Cemetery of Forgotten books where, “books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands,” is one which appeals strongly to me.

The novel itself takes the form of a sort of detective story as the hero of the novel tries to discover more of the life of the novelist whose book he chooses on his first visit to this magical place.

The direction of the novel reminded me of the remarkable book ‘Quest for Corvo’ by A. J. A. Symons where the ostensible academic research for a literary biography was actually the basis for a much more revealing study of the subject and the author.

After a couple of hundred pages I can see why this novel has been translated from Spanish and why it has sold over seven million copies around the world! It is the sort of book that you read dreading its conclusion because there will be no more to read!

The computer I am using is becoming skittish and the research that I was supposed to have done over the weekend has been a little more stressful that it should have been.

How far we have progressed when what would have taken hours to find and download is now intolerable when it takes more than a few seconds!

Perhaps I should remember those happy frustration filled days when Windows 3.1 was the operating (!) system of choice and be grateful that we have progressed so far.

Irony!

A time to note

It has taken me the whole of my professional life and the move to another country, but I have now matched my mother in her first year of teaching.

My first salary from my new school doesn’t cover the cost of my monthly rent.

My mother’s first job was subsidised by my grandparents. Alas! I am bereft of the immediacy of family who can be tapped for easy money, so, in a way the horror is all the more poignant.

My pay slip is an A4 page of incomprehensibility; apart that is, from the deductions. These are all too obvious and I find it difficult to be jocose about the amount ripped from my fragile salary by convincing myself that I am merely paying my dues to my adopted country!

My ‘basic’ salary is so pathetically small that I hesitate to disclose it, but it is augmented by a list of ‘additions’ which Toni informs me are absolute rubbish. The advantage from the point of view of Scrooge like people who pay (I use the term lightly) my salary is that these ‘additions’ can be changed at a moment’s notice and a passing whim. The disadvantage from the point of view of the Cratchit like recipient (my good self) is that my money can diminish beyond the point of incredulity – and all done legally.

If the law allows that (to paraphrase one of my great heroes worthy to sit alongside Satan from Paradise Lost and Iago) then the law is a ass; a idiot!

I am assuming, for the sake of my sanity and my bank balance, that there has been some sort of mistake. I will have some critical and hopefully lucrative discussions with the Powers that Be! If not: who knows!

My lack of clacking at the typewriter keys for the last few days has been because Ceri and Dianne have been visiting.

An odd visit. Not because of Ceri and Dianne, I hasten to add. An odd visit because for the first time since I have known them both our holidays have not been for the same days. My half term holiday (if it can be graced with such a title when the days of non education were so preciously few) was the week before Britain.

Their holiday had been arranged months ago when Easyjet was reasonably priced and before I had discovered my previously well hidden vocation for primary education.

This meant that I was not able to meet them at the airport not was I able to let them into the flat when they arrived!

Problems were solved by the generous help of our local French newsagent who kept her shop open so that my visitors could pick up the keys. Vive la France!

What could have been a leisurely meander through some of the more interesting parts of Catalonia was instead compressed into three evenings – or more exactly three opportunities for aperitifs, meals and digestifs! And talk. And talk. It makes you realise who and how much you miss certain things when you move to a foreign country!

On the last evening when we were sitting, rather defiantly, out on a cooling balcony, we had news of the untimely death of a friend and colleague.

The last few months have been characterised by deaths and their effects have always been revealingly unsettling.

Loss has been partially counterbalanced by the reestablishment of communications with a couple who I knew in my first year of teaching in Kettering in Northamptonshire.

It was my great good fortune to start my teaching career in Kettering Boys’ School in the days when it had achieved international fame because a pupil astronomical club within the school had been the first to announce the launch of a Soviet space rocket to the world – beating the Americans with all their technology!

I of course had heard nothing of this when I arrived for my interview and was far more impressed with the reproductions hanging in the secretary’s office: Rowlandson, Lear (he of the limericks) and Girtin. I was much more impressed when what I took to be tasteful reproductions turned out to be originals!

These artistic treasures were part of the legacy of H. E. Bates (he of “the past is another country”) who was an old boy of the school.

Interviewed by the headteacher and the head of governors, I later visited the home of the latter to view a spare room that she had. She was the wife of the vicar of Barton Seagrave and I soon took up residence in the grandly named St Botolph’s House, St Botolph’s Road in the village. St Botolph’s House was the clergy house; joined to the vicarage, but separate from it. The deacon was living more centrally in the parish and so I had extensive if sparsely furnished accommodation. It was also extensively leaky and bloody cold: but it was Somewhere! The vicar once rather disparagingly if rather wonderfully referred to my part of the vicarage as “Napoleonic jerry building!”

The vicar and his wife were my immediate neighbours and we soon became friends. Who else can say that he had a weekend away with the vicar’s wife in his first year of teaching? It was (I hasten to add) because she and I were English teachers and we went to Stratford to see all three parts of ‘Henry VI’ over two days!

The vicar was notable for delivering sermons that were worth listening to and he was a patient and scholarly listener to my enthusiastic (if untutored) philosophical and theological ramblings and always took the Socratic method of gently bringing me back to academic earth! For which much thanks.

After a hiatus of some years we have regained our annual corresponding link and I feel as if a well worn of the jigsaw has been gently eased back into the wider picture of my life.

In school (which continues to astonish) the saga of my non appearing screen is now approaching epic proportions.

My Welsh visitors brought not only their good selves, but also a supply of OHP photocopying sheets; OHP pens and ordinary OHP transparencies. They also brought a whistle. The red (red?) whistles issued by my present school are visually unprepossessing and practically useless: one good blow and the pea implodes. Thanks to Bob I now have a black plastic professional model on a lanyard which is stridently assertive.

Tomorrow the photographing of sculpture on roundabouts.

Don’t ask, merely wonder at the range of excitement that defines my life at present!

Ah the tyranny of inarticulate youth!

After an excellent lunch of fideuá negro the family returned to the flat after a short excursion to the beach. A partial watching of Harry Potter in Spanish to the accompaniment of Catalan pop music to which Toni’s two year old nephew danced with some exuberance led to a perceived need for coffee and cake.

When I asked Toni’s sister if she would like cake, she indicated her infant son, waved a rusk in the air and said that he had something already. “And the rest of us?” I asked innocently. She paused for a moment, registered that there were six other humans in the room apart from her son, and started laughing.

And another son is on the way. She is going to be hermetically isolated from human kind if she is not careful!

Tomorrow Ceri and Dianne for a strange holiday in which we are only gong to be able to see them in the evenings as our holidays do not tie in with the half term in Britain.

We have been having glorious weather recently and I only hope that it continues for the few days that they are here. They are going to have a holiday where they use the flat more like a hotel with our meeting for dinner! Whatever! It will be good to see them as it seems such a long time ago when they were last in Barcelona.

Meanwhile there is the ever present lunacy of school waiting for me tomorrow as well.

Plus ça change!

Licenced to bemuse!

What an extraordinary title for the new Bond film: ‘Quantum of Solace.’

How do highly paid publicity people manage to come up with titles like this? Don’t they have focus groups and try outs and all sorts of things to ensure that they don’t get a repeat of ‘You’re never alone with a Strand?’

Although, I suppose that the Strand advert, though a disaster for the cigarettes that it was advertising, continues to exist as one of the most famous how-not-to-do-it pieces of advertising history. The name of Strand is still spoken of even if the brand itself faded into the smoke. Or, indeed, lack of it in the case of that particular cigarette!

Is ‘quantum’ like ‘nano’: a word which evokes elements of the scientific even if most people (including me) don’t necessarily know its precise definition? With ‘quantum’ even the particle physicists don’t really know what they are talking about. Hardly suprising when they talk of things in one place and then in another but cannot explain how they got there except by the phrase ‘quantum jump’ where the journey is apparently not the sort where you have to travel the boring bits between destinations. Where indeed normal physics does not apply! I think I know that liquid helium flows upwards when it is at a certain temperature: but even in this case when the substance is apparently defying gravity you can still see where it is going!

‘Quantum’ has a sort of magic that evokes all sorts of responses without the necessary tedium of having to know what it means. The sort of catalytic scientific word beloved of advertisers to add academic cachet to a description of toothpaste to reassure the user that the white coated boys in the backroom have been slaving over their test tubes and Bunsen burners to bring you the full force of the white hot heat of the technological revolution.

My old Sinclair computer was called the QL – which stood for Quantum Leap – was indeed a jump ahead of the commercial opposition all those years ago. It was black and sleek and had tenchological ideas above its station. Who, among those who owned one, can ever forget the quaintly absurd invention of the ‘micro drive’! Who, among those who owned one, can ever forget those lost hours as the machine ignored increasingly desperate typed command; or hours of work simply disappeared as the key board froze. Ah, happy days!

The most recent use in the commercial world of the word ‘quantum’ is in association with Gillette shavers where the addition of an extra blade in the shaving head seems to merit the addition of this overblown scientific appellation.

The advert is even more interesting in that it has two white coated extras apparently adding some sort of glowing material to what looks like a particle accelerator! I suppose you have to admire their ‘thinking through’ of the visual implications of their choice of word, but the reality is boringly prosaic.

So, at least I can partially understand the choice of the first word in the title of a film in a series of films which relies unashamedly on the (literally) explosive nature of cutting edge technology (who can forget the laser beam cutting its way through metal on its inexorable way to Sean Connery’s crotch?

But ‘solace’? A wonderful word but how many people know its meaning? To me ‘Quantum of Solace’ sounds like those mysterious titles from British colonial history: The Begums of Oudah or the Ankor of Watt – I may be confusing history, geography and literature here; didn’t Edward Lear write about something similar? But I hope you get my point.

It turns out that ‘Quantum of Solace’ is actually an obscure short story by the Man himself, Fleming. Since the makers of Bond films show shown themselves perfectly capable of ‘expanding’ Fleming’s original conception to unrecognizable proportions, the fact that they still seem to need that touch of authenticity to link to the stories is rather touching!

I suppose that ‘Quantum of Solace’ still has a way to go until it catches up with the idiotic ‘Night Of The Day Of The Dawn Of The Son Of The Bride Of The Return Of The Revenge Of The Terror Of The Attack Of The Evil, Mutant, Hellbound, Flesh-Eating Subhumanoid Zombified Living Dead, Part 3’ (2005)!