Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!

Living in Spain for a year has not given me any greater understanding of what is going on in the celebration of the festival of Sant Fermin.

This includes the tradition of bull running in Pamplona. A disturbingly large number of people dress up with white shirts and red neckerchiefs and provoke bulls which are set loose in the streets.

In the normal course of events I have no objection to people who indulge in dangerous sports as long as they do not expect the public health services to patch them up again when they get what they richly deserve.

I dread to think what they do the bulls before they set them loose, but if the bulls have the temerity just to stand around then there are plenty of people there to spur them up into more aggressively macho activity to match the fearless alcohol fuelled idiocy of the participants.

The bulls are obviously frightened and confused and on that basis alone this Hemmingway supported piece of cruelty should be banned. And talking of Hemmingway, look what happened to him at the end.

Toni is quick to point out that bizarre things like bull running only occur in places outside Catalonia. Inside Catalonia they have things like castell building and fuet. Things which have a human dimension at least and don’t involve cruelty to animals, though the fuet was once an animal, though I hope it was killed humanely!


There is very much a feeling of end of term and beginning of holidays and that is a moment for me to take the making of lists of tasks more seriously. More seriously because there is actually time to get them done and tick them off – surely one of the more satisfying activities known to human kind. As my list of tasks is on my handheld computer it reminded me that my insurance company have finally decided that the amount to repair the old broken handheld is too much. I therefore needed to return to MediaMarkt to get a refund on the deposit that was demanded before they would give me an estimate for the repair.

The ‘repair’ of my handheld is a long ongoing story which has been complicated by the international nature of the claim and the difficulty of the language in ensuring that the activity or lack of it in Spain was understood by all parties.

For whatever electronic reasons the first attempt to get the electronic copy of the estimate to the insurance company did not work and the delay between the failure and my realization that it was a failure meant that the time limit on the estimate had expired. The refreshing of the estimate and the extra application to the insurance company meant that I had to redo all the paperwork in MediaMarkt.

My presentation of the documentation for the refund was greeted by the assistant with the disturbing information that the repair would be ready in a few days. When I explained that I had not, could not have, authorized the repair, there was immediate recourse to yet more documentation – which could not be found.

You have to understand that I have given no indication of the actual time that this little transaction took or the number of people of increasing seniority and importance that were necessary to arrive at absolutely no conclusion to what is a nice dilemma.

I did not authorize the repair. The broken machine is mine and must be returned to me. I want the refund of the €100 deposit. I await the judgement of Solomon which will be needed to sort out this little mess.

I have, of course, bought a new handheld some time ago. This action was based on an eerie prescience based entirely on past hard experience which told me that the repair would not be simple/cheap/possible/easy/satisfactory or any combination of those words. As indeed it turned out.

The next horror I expect is that the insurance company will send me a cheque based on some gnomic computation to assess the value of the machine which has been deemed beyond repair.

This money will be sent to me by international cheque which I will have to pay into my hated bank, BBVA. This institution’s greedy fingers, unhelpful meretricious obstruction, dismissive attitude and refusal to speak Catalan (that last one was supplied by Toni) suggests that a major percentage of the cheque is going to be taken up with spurious ‘bank charges’ and probably the worst rate of exchange in the western hemisphere.

I can feel a comforting anger beginning to build and, as the cheque takes about 28 days to be processed, there is plenty of time for that anger to develop into an all encompassing fury.

My tasks are still growing with not a single job completed today.

But the sunbathing and a swim took my mind off such mundane concerns.

And I’m now convinced that the ‘dead’ cactus is showing subtle signs of life!

On other people's shoulders!

Watching a very young child clamber up the backs of a human construction some fifty feet high to the accompaniment of a raucous orchesta of various reeded instruments is an odd experience.

I have to say that every time I see groups of castelleres making their castells I find it a rather moving experience.

These human towers are constructed using people standing on each others shoulders and these structures sometimes have up to ten levels!

The top two levels are where the children come in. One child known as an aixecador makes his, or in my experience her, way to the top of the tower and then awaits the second child known as the enxaneta. The enxaneta climbs on top of the aixecador and raises his or her right hand which is the sign that the castell has been contstructed. The completion of the castell does involve the successful dismantling of the structure as well without its collapsing.

For more information you can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castell but reading about the process does not give you an idea of what it is like acually being there.

On the face of it this activity is absolutely pointless and dangerous with the added suspicion that sending a small child to the top of a rickety column of people smacks of child abuse!

If you would like to stop and think about how many of your activities could be summed up by the two adjectives “pointless and dangerous” then you will rapidly discover that many of the more interesting diversions of the human animal can be dismissed with those two words. Sport, sex and sunbathing (to take but three starting with the letter ‘S’) could certainly be covered!

So, we will ignore the obvious idiocy of the activity and concentrate instead on the more positive aspects.

All Catalans I have met take a defensively nonchalant attitude towards the building of castells and treat the successful completion and dismantling of a high castell with the same respect and enthusiam as they would give to a well scored goal in football.

The musical accompaniment with the traditional instruments and the fact that the enxaneta is supposed to raise four fingers as a symbol for the four bars on the Catalan flag gives some idea of the nationalistic feeling that is present when the castells are built and perhaps gives some basis for the sight of the rising column of people being a representation of a national group rather than merely a quaint custom produced by odd folk.

For the column of people to rise there has to be support and, at the base of the structure, this support is a whole mass of people whose combined effort ensures the solidity of the whole. The people involved are not all trained athletes (through training and practise there certainly is) and the sheer ordinariness of the participants is strangely uplifting.

It may be, of course, that I am merely exhibiting my more romantic side. Or indeed just wrong. Time and understanding the country in which I now live will tell.

Meanwhile our joint life as the unemployed is about to start - though the idea of forming an EFL school is a real possibility and one which deserves some serious consideration during the summer.

My visit to the lawyer is still some days away so I have time to try and understand the tickets allocation system for the opera for next season. The Liceau offers various packages, none of which include all the operas, but do include other concerts that I do not necessarily want to attend. The total cost for a decent seat with a reasonable view is astonishingly large, but if you look on it as a year’s worth of entertainment then I suppose it becomes a little more reasonable. But it’s a lot of money to pay out all in one go!

And I’m unemployed!

One thing after another!

As I opened the door to go to the opera there, standing on the threshold, early, far too early to be home from work was Toni!

Not one to allow me to revel in exciting life changing moments in isolation he has joined me in the experience of being sacked!

My first instinct was to suspect the long arm of The Owner being in some way involved, but then I considered that such a response would show that I had taken too much of the everyday paranoia of my ex school into my ordinary life!

Whereas my dismissal was always on the cards, Toni's fall from grace was far more unexpected. His misery is somewhat lessened by the fact that, due to the quaint unemployment laws in Spain, and the fact that he has got a reasonable number of years in work to look back on, he should get a reasonable amount of money to luxuriate in days of idle richness. Though I have to say that this is one of those things that I will believe when I see it!

With both of us out of work we are back to those halcyon days of exactly a year ago when we arrived in Castelldefels: funny how cyclical life can be!

Talking of cyclical I have to report that the devil is among us!

He is alive and well and setting out his satanic wares in PC City. The fruit may have become less 0rganic and more technological, but this Son of Adam still stretched out his hand and did eat.

In my defence I would aver that only the basest form of scoundrel could pass by the new Eee PC series of mini laptops on the other side of the road.

It's cute little 7” screen and its tiny keypad which is not really made for my spatulate fingers: it is, simply put, a Needful Thing so I now have one and I feel that I can call on the moral support of that great technophile from the past, King Lear in dismissing carping criticism with the stern injunction, 'Argue not the need!'

The kind people in PC City set up the machine for me and offered to put all the basic software on the machine in an hour. I therefore departed for dinner.

The fish menu in the Basque restaurant was excellent with fish soup, cod with beans (how Bostonian!) and the sort of chocolate cake that, after one spoonful you feel like dropping your face onto your plate as the only adequate compliment to the confection. As the table was outside the restaurant in a colonnade next to the market and there were numbers of people passing I managed to resist. But only just!

Collecting the diabolical delight now bursting with its newly installed software, I took it back to the car in the Ramblas car park. The Basque meal having, as it were, completed its gastric journey I entered the car park toilet. And left it almost immediately as it was insole deep in what I hope was overflow from the cistern.

I decided to repair to the altogether more salubrious surroundings of the Teatre del Liceu.

Meditating in the spotless and marble acccommodation afforded to bourgeois patrons of the opera I heard a gentleman of advanced years come in to avail himself of porcelain relief.

I can only hope that the opera gave him as much pleasure as the emptying of his bladder. If I had been a marker of porn films I would have signed him up on the spot! In the time it took him to complete his business he enacted aurally the sound effects of a complete and graphic 'little death!'

The opera was 'Luisa Miller' and a thoroughly nasty little tale it is. The censors did not allow Verdi and Cammarano to stick too closely to Schiller's original conception which was much more political than the tragic melodrama which finally resulted which means that this fatal love story seems grotesquely morbid and self obsessed.

The ending is a piece of morbid philosophizing which is thoroughly repulsive. The son of a murdering count has suppressed his memory of his father's guilt until his own philandering becomes exposed and he uses his knowledge to ensure his father's compliance in not imprisoning his peasant lover. As you can see it is not the most sophisticated of story lines.

A sorry tale of intrigue ends with the count's son poisoning himself and his lover (while not omitting to murder the rascally lascivious henchman before he dies) leaving the count to look on the pile of bodies and rue the destruction of all his dynastic plans.

The tenor lead of Rudolfo was sung inadequately by Aquiles Machado who lacked the necessary bravura to being off this impossibly melodramatic role.

His father, Count Walter was adequately performed by Giacomo Prestia looking as though he had stepped out of a John Singer Sargent portrait, while his dastardly lieutenant, Wurm, was sung by Samuel Ramey with a rocking vibrato which was either crass characterization or poor singing. The unrewarding role of the unfortunate duchess was given a nasal performance by Irina Mishura. The old soldier and father of Luisa, Miller was sensitively portrayed by Roberto Frontali.

The star of the evening and a singer whose stage presence and glorious voice stole the show, Nino Surguladze, almost made the evening comprehensible. She was controlled, dramatic and exact – a joy to listen to!

The production (Gilbert Deflo) was interesting. The stage was undulating and (memories of WNO's 'Cunning Little Vixen') was visually exciting though it did let dropped hats roll and the soldiers stood at a slant.

The visual 'idea' of the production was to have the proscenium converted by black curved flat so that the audience saw the action take place in a sort of semi circular bubble. It gave the effect of an old fashioned print and at the same time it made the action look as though it were taking place in one of those glass bubbles which you turn upside down to create a snow storm.

I am sure that there were ideas of artificiality and contained societies knocking about in the concept but I was happy with the fact that it looked good!

Musically I found the sound of the orchestra somewhat cramped. It reminded me (disastrously) of the acoustic of the New Theatre in Cardiff – a boxed sound that I thought I had left behind forever!

At times I found the balance unsettling and the orchestra sometimes swamped the singers, but that might have been a reflection on the singers and not the band!

As an opera I found 'Luisa Miller' a join the dots Verdi: there was more bluster here than raw power.

Perhaps it's unfair to look at 'Luisa Miller' and think of 'Otello' – but it's a free world and I did and I was left unsatisfied, but I enjoyed the production.

Who could ask for more!

The repair man never calls!

The way to contentment is not gained by dwelling on the amount of time spent waiting for repairmen to deliver the dishwasher they have managed to keep out of operation for months.

But who wants to find contentment. Contentment (why not ‘content’?) equals stasis equals death. So I will dwell on the time that I have donned the Marigolds (metaphorically) and got down and clean by washing dishes using the old fashioned (and unhygienic) method of hot water, lemon washing up liquid and sheer exasperation.

It’s not really a question of which I prefer: washing or drying. I hate both. And the minimalist, white plastic curve which is supposed to be a draining rack which I had to buy (god how that rankles!) merely suggests stability for stacked dishes. A slight misreading of the topography of the sedimentary arrangement of plates and it all comes crashing down.

The delivery of our thrice futilely repaired machine is scheduled for the limited time slot of five hours from two in the afternoon to seven at night. Three of those hours have now passed and I can hear the nails scratching their way down the blackboard as my nerves begin to wind themselves up to fuel an inevitable tirade.

I confidently expect a ring on the bell at this moment because in my experience it is only when you have written about something that reality finally manages to catch up and see the way in which it should be going. So, the jigsaw repairmen (you know the sort, the ones with no technical expertise and whose knowledge only extends to replacing the most obvious units in a machine in order to get it working) should be here now.

I paused a few seconds and no bell rang.

Perhaps my writing lacks the compelling verisimilitude which produces instant results, perhaps I should look back and be more pointed, or more desperate, or more furious or be prepared to spend more money and get a better make than the notorious Taurus (never buy it) brand.

Deep breath. Think of other things.

Tomorrow the Union and a three way conversation to find if anything can be done to frustrate the machinations of The Owner. My paperwork is almost all together, I am just waiting for the headteacher’s reference and then I am ready to go to the meeting and start writing the necessary letters.

The school is answering none of my emails which suggest the way that the institution is preparing to face my gentle assault: by ignoring me. I am sure that this was a perfectly effective way to see off the irritants in the past, but I am not one to be placated by feigned indifference.

The battle lines are drawn!

(Please add your own appropriate quotation from the works of William Shakespeare.)

Waiting to go!

I don’t think that I am alone in thinking airports life denying vortices of desperation.

There is a desolation about those vast, inhuman, architecturally sculpted spaces which is difficult to comprehend.

The departure of the girls gave me an opportunity to muse and I realized that large city airports are usually monumentally striking in a tawdry sort of way, covering acres of land with nondescript prefabricated enclosures and are probably the nearest things we get to secular modern gothic cathedrals. Like the medieval churches of old they are centres of social hope, commercial greed and wish fulfilment, but mostly nugatory activity.

And the whole point of them is that people should (and want) to leave them as quickly as possible.

You come to an airport to go.

On the face of it there should be no difference between an airport and a bus station or train station – but there is.

With buses and trains you have proximity; you are next to them, you can touch them. A similar relationship in an airport would only be possible if you could stand on the runway without the reinforced plate glass between you and the mode of transport.

All the vast warehousing of check in, shops, passport control, more shops, cafes, waiting rooms and yet more shops keep you well away from the planes: no bus stops (except for airport buses) no platforms (except for airport trains) no tangible link to what is going to take you away.

And the activity.

Some of it purposeful especially from those uniformed denizens of the permanent workforce walking with confidence and barely concealed contempt for the transient population of mere travellers.

Most of the activity is of the pathetically aimless sort as neophyte voyagers struggle to orientate themselves in the ebb and flow of airport bodies. Like modern day dung beetles they scurry about rolling their lurid possessions on precariously loaded trollies, scanning their surroundings as if afraid of a predatory attack and looking for the safe haven of a short queue.

And leave taking is now a ludicrous sort of extended pantomime. Hugs and kisses just before the ticket control and then the ludicrous Pac-man impersonation of walking through the zigzag maze which separates people into single person lines in preparation for the x-ray machine and body scan. While you tramp your aimless way round this uninspired obstacle course, the people you are leaving watch everything with a fixed smile. By the time you have managed to navigate the frisky rays of the metal detector the fixed smile of your hosts has become a rictus!

As your erstwhile guests disappear into the money pits of the shopping concessions you are left to do what all airports encourage: leave.

So I had a menu del dia by way of compensation for my loss and give me strength for the further Struggle Against The Owner.

So far I have not manage to contact a single parent to inform them of what has gone on, and the longer this information is delayed the weaker its eventual effect.

There is still the weak hope of the Union doing something, but it is difficult to see quite what they can achieve, but I shall have an interesting time trying to make them do something!

Meanwhile on the real life front, there is an opera to go to on Friday and the tickets for next year to worry about!

Big, bad bank!

Never, never bank with BBVA.

Follow this simple rule and your way through life has just got to be better.

Not only was there the usual long queue of frustrated ‘customers’ in this apology for a financial institution but also my bank book did not work. When it finally did manage to get printed I discovered that this bunch of thieving pirates had stolen over €100 to service my money which the bank has locked away.

Six months rent ripped from my hands and imprisoned as some sort of surety for the flat. I will never forgive them! This money is locked in the bank ‘in case of’ something or other and they pay me 1.7% and charge me €400 a year to look after it. I wonder what their rate of interest to borrowers is. Not 1.7% I’ll be bound. And all the time it’s my money!

I left the bank spitting fire, yet at the same time reassured that the cheques The Owner had paid as part of the recompense for my teaching in her dysfunctional school had been honoured. The only time such a positive verb is going to be used for anything connected with her!

I had calmed down somewhat by the time that I got back to the flat and soon settled down on the balcony with a book taken from Gwen.

‘This book will save your life’ is a title which is instantly arresting and sets high expectations. Putting a picture of six doughnuts on the front cover is provocative so you open the book expecting to be stimulated from page one.

The opening paragraph, written in the second person and the present tense, is frankly disappointing and that was a response I had to the book as a whole.

The action of the story is a sort of ‘new age finding yourself’ type and is written in a picaresque style by A M Homes is alternately engaging and irritating. There are moments of humour and some absurdly captivating moments, but the novel taken as a whole is less than its parts.

The girls have taken the opportunity to ‘fry’ a little more with Nia throwing caution to the wind and welcoming the rays while Gwen has shrunk a little more towards the shadows with a good book.

As it was the last evening we made another attempt to have tapas at the Basque restaurant. We were lucky we went when we did, as we were offered a full display of the whole range of tapas which, during the early course of the evening was soon reduced to a fraction of the offerings we could choose from! The poor kitchen staff were loosing out in the race to keep a full range of tapas ready for the masses of people who were hoovering them up!

The evening ended with ice cream on the beach and photographs taken to the accompaniment of flashes of lightning in the distance.

The girls have been perfect house guests managing the seemingly impossible trick of being unobtrusive yet highly visible! Each time we have gone out for dinner they have always managed to turn quite a few heads and I have managed not to smash the faces of any of the impudent males who have dared look at my charges!

Their departure forces me to focus my attention on The Campaign and to realise that the Union has not contacted me and that I need to get a few more bits of paper before the next stage in my restrained revenge can take place.

This is the last week of school for virtually all the teaching staff whatever their status in The Owner’s eyes and after that, like all educational institutions it will fall into that particular form of hibernation where all enquiries seem to fall into a black hole from which nothing emerges until September. The Owner sacking me when she did was fully aware of the limited time opportunity that I would have to make any difference and I think that the typical torpor of the summer institutions may defeat me after all. However, I shall make a spirited foray and see what I can do, after all it’s only Tuesday.

Four days until Cut Off Friday might make all the difference!

You see, ever the optimist!

A win to savour

I never thought that I would ever sit in a restaurant in Catalonia and hear the chant of “Es – pañ – ya!” echo around me!

But I have sat in that restaurant. The victory of Spain in the European Cup was accompanied but much nationalistic shouting; though I have to say that I thought I noticed some Catalans sitting as quieter tables with a bemused smile on their faces while their more demonstrative countrymen were being very vocal. To my utter horror I actually heard the assembled delirious Spaniards even attempt a version of ‘Eviva España’ and was correspondingly delighted to find out that they knew even fewer of the words than their English counterparts! I have to admit that it sounded a little grotesque to hear an ill sung anthem of British boozers abroad ill sung by the people who were expressing their staunch patriotism.

Both the British and Spanish media have made much of the fact (as they see it) that support for the Spanish team has crossed all the cultural and political boundaries in the country and has fostered a real sense of national pride. You have to live in Catalonia before you can understand what an odd sight it is to see Spanish flags publicly waved in solidarity rather than as a political insult. Long may such a feeling of togetherness remain, but, personally, I don’t think it will see out the week!

The match was excellent and I saw how involved I was in the outcome when I realised that I had been shredding paper napkins in my anxiety. I think that this must have been some sort of unconscious tribute to those Dickensian figures that shred delicate cambric handkerchiefs at times of stress!

The only spectre at the feast for a victory that was richly deserved by the Spanish team, who had numerous chances which could have been converted into goals, was found in the opening ceremony for the game.

It is one of the facts of international stereotyping that Austrians never ignore a chance to parade eighteenth century foppishness as what they imagine to be a glorious symbol of the one time greatness.

To an Austrian any occasion would not be complete without effete figures clad in tight fitting silk breeches, silk stockings, satin shoes, brocade waistcoat and ornate white wigs lurking about. Sure enough, give or take a few sartorial details, the opening ceremony had such figures inexplicably waltzing around moving conical colanders which were covered in multi coloured buboes representing the national colours of the participating nations. The erratic paths of the colanders seemed to be contained by what looked from an aerial shot of the stadium to be a pattern derived from an uninteresting crop circle.

The camera shorts attempted to give vitality and coherence to this display but did not succeed. As I watched this vacuous posturing the cold hand of fear clutched my imagination and I thought about what we might have planned for the opening of the Olympics!

Talking of premonitions, my cactus, to my prejudiced eye seems to be getting healthier. The three parts of my prickly plant seem to be stouter – but this may be self delusion. Although I vowed not to look at it for a few days to give it time to find itself and start a new life, I find myself studying it like some ancient Greek looking for auguries in the entrails of some unfortunate beast.

Since the cactus is intimately connected to my ex-school I do not know what would be the most appropriate direction for the plant to go: flourish or fail, both extremes can be incorporated into a more than satisfactory prognostication for future progress.

As indeed can any state in between.

Wonderful thing literary analysis!

A Simple Night Out

The good thing was we weren’t actually stranded on a desolate motorway miles from anywhere relying on my shaky grasp of Spanish to contact the RACC.

As I believe it says somewhere in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Technocrats (Chapter 7, Verse 18 et passim) “Verily I say unto you; even as that man puts his trust in gadgets so also will he be disappointed. For of an hundred men that believe the smooth talking of the navigator by satellite, ninety and nine shall be brought to the narrow roads unlit and strewn with rocks of all sorts and potholes of unplumbed depth leading nowhere.”

And so it came to pass as we ricocheted from roundabout to roundabout like some hapless metallic ball in a giant pinball machine!

We eventually found the place to which we were supposed to be going by a combination of trying roads almost at random in the hope that the ‘recalculating’ voice from the box would have more understandable directions and also by Nia’s sharp eye which noticed a large sign stuck on a wall with our destination painted on it!

If we had been (if I had been) a little less flustered I would have noticed that Banyeres del Penedés was composed of picturesque arched entrances and quaint narrow roads and all sort of other details which were lost when we were unsure that we were ever going to reach our destination.

Seeing Reeven was a delightful bonus because basically he was the reason that we had made the epic journey. His enthusiastic and shocked welcome made up for some of the frustration of finding him.

We discovered that we had missed his first set, but that he and his singer were going to play a second when they had something to eat.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from the location for our musical feast but it was anything but the lowish sort of dive that my mind associates with Jazz!

The hotel restaurant of L’hort del l’avia turned out to be a stylish location with wide floor to ceiling arches

and wooden beams; starched linen napery and heavy cutlery; a ponderous waiter and uncomfortable chairs – all the prerequisites for an expensive meal.

The waiter was a remarkable gentleman; he moved with the ponderous slow dignity of the very fat and had an almost feminine grace in his majestic peregrinations from table to table.

As it turned out, at €20 for a three course meal, it seemed a bit of bargain. In an ironic twist, it would have been cheaper for me to have had wine with the meal (which was included in the price) than the water which I chose (which was extra.) Water was essential for a clear mind to deal with the petrol – but of that more anon.

The only hot thing I had in my meal was the coffee at the end of it. This is not a condemnation of the restaurant, but rather a comment on my choices: Vichyssoise followed by carpaccio and completed by turrón ice cream. Delicious!

Reeven and a singer Nicole were an excellent accompaniment to the meal. Her voice reminded me of Cleo Lane; it had a throaty sexiness and a melodic smoothness that was great to listen to. Reeven’s guitar playing was both an accomplished and sympathetic foil to the voice and also virtuosic when he performed some solo developments of the musical line.

It was an excellent meal, though I have to admit that the girls found their cod a little too salty for their taste (Welcome to Spain!) but they seemed to enjoy the evening. As Nia said, “It took a long time to get here, but I think it was worth it!”

At the end of the meal, after the bill had been paid certain facts which I had forcibly suppressed for the duration of the dinner began to reassert themselves. We were, it had to be admitted in the back of beyond. We were, to all intents and purposes, lost. It was very late. And last, but by no means least, we had very little petrol left.

The whole of the restaurant were involved in working out if there was a petrol station open at one o’clock in the morning within the distance that my empty tank would reach.

The directions that we were given were so simple, straightforward and fundamentally inaccurate that I was back at the hotel being plaintive within minutes. Plaintive tinged with hysteria as my schoolmarmish on board computer had pinged at me and lit up an ominous little light informing me that the car was running on faith rather than diesel.

To the everlasting credit of the restaurant, one of the workers volunteered to guide me in his car to the petrol station. Following the car through a hugely complex series of turnings which bore no relation to the simple instructions we were given we pressed on and – found the petrol station closed.

It says something for the mendacious (thank god!) qualities of petrol gauges that the next open petrol station was a considerable (and when I say considerable I mean all of us sitting in the car tight lipped, tight knuckled and forgetting to breathe sort of considerable) distance away – and we made it! When we finally coasted in to the side of a pump I am convinced that we were running on vapour and not liquid!

It is almost worth fearing running out of petrol for the sheer delight in the quality of relief when you find some to refill the tank. Almost, but not quite!

The girls took to their beds at once when they got into the flat and I do not expect to see them for any part of the morning! Though wait! I think I heard some vague sounds as of sluggish movement and it’s only half past ten. More plausibly it could be the neighbours who have turned up en masse as this is obviously the official start of summer and the preciously empty flats of the we-are-so-rich-we-do-not-need-to-rent-them are now filled by their few weeks a year owners.

Never let it be said that I was envious!

Or bitter!

To read is to live!

It is difficult to tell if the dead cactus I planted to commemorate the cessation of my scholastic striving in Sitges has changed its status.

It was planted in a fit of confused metaphorical angst, but now I feel a certain proprietary concern about its future. One of the girls pointed out, “It does look a little bit grey!” but I persist in a stubborn belief that its wasted sides and spikes have become a little plumper since I have lavished care on it. I think I will try and ignore it for a few days and then be surprised by a cheeky green bud or a potential poniard shyly pointing skywards!

I wonder if Tim Burton has purchased the rights to film The Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. If he hasn’t he should have: it would be a perfect vehicle for the portrayal of his sombre visual humour. No obvious part for Johnny Depp though; but there again, perhaps he could do the voice over for the character of Death!

The book was a present from Cardiff and I devoured it. Terry Pratchett is something like a banned substance for me. I remember reading my first Discworld novel and mentally registering that this could be trouble. If you are not immediately repulsed by the grubbily twee ideas featured in Pratchett’s novels then you will probably be hooked by the end of your first. Some people, of course, recognize this proclivity and immediately set up fire walls to protect themselves.

I have had some practice at this having had to defend myself from the novels and short stories of Robert Heinlein,

Isaac Asimov, Evelyn Waugh, Tom Sharpe, P G Wodehouse, Agatha Christie (especially the Miss Marple series) and Penguin Modern Classics when they had all those wonderful modern paintings on the covers. Some of these writers have an addictive quality that makes heroin look like sherbet.

I remember with the writings of Robert Heinlein that I had to set a number of strict rules to prevent my total overdose on his eminently readable books. I vowed that I would only buy his works second hand, in one second hand book shop and for a small sum of money. A sum, indeed so small that I hesitate to bring it to mind as it merely demonstrates with stark clarity the inroads that inflation has made in the ensuing years!

With Terry Pratchett I have had to rely on even stricter fire walls and only read volumes that I am given or find lying around. For example, if there had been a Pratchett novel among the books on the borrowing shelf in my last school then it would have been taken and read as one of my first coherent actions in the place. But there weren’t so it wasn’t.

Read it your own peril. A thorough delight!

The other book which I finished this morning while waiting for the girls to arise and go forth to fry was ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ by Khaled Hosseini.

This was given to me by our absconding assistant unit manager (obviously before she absconded. Isn’t that a wonderful sounding word? Absconded. I think its something to do with the daring juxtaposition of a plosive and sibilant) with the smiling injunction that I was to cry as I read it. I didn’t.

It is set in Afghanistan and uses religion, sectional infighting and the effect of world politics to provide some of the impetus for the drive of the narrative. The basic story is “in the end it is love that triumphs over death and destruction.” I know this because it says so on the back of the book. I found sections of it gripping and I found it hard not to sympathise with the final act of violence – but overall I was not enthusiastic. I would however recommend it as a painless way of reading about the misogynistic hypocrisy of the regime of the Taliban. One feels like making some trite comment about the inequities of religion and the inevitable genocidal extinction that comes with the logical extension of a faulty hypothesis which is based on revealed knowledge which is true by faith. That oxymoron, ‘revealed knowledge’ has brought so much misery into the world one doesn’t know how to find the words to give an adequately venomous response to the lazy beliefs founded by the sons of pregnant virgins, angels talking to business men, oddly disappearing golden tablets, stone engraved tablets and the rest of the magic rubbish.

I’m only guessing, but I think that the previous paragraph has its genesis in a bout of extended cleaning of the flat. There is nothing like brushing, sweeping and polishing to get me in a thoroughly unphilosophical state of mind.

Perhaps when the scent of the various aerosols I have used has dissipated I can get back to the state of placid cynicism which is my default setting!

Untune the sky!

Be wary of asking for CDs of Vaughan Williams in Barcelona.

I was in ‘the other part’ of El Corte Ingles and browsing through the classical music section looking in a determinedly desultory way for bargain box sets of the music of Vaughan Williams on the occasion of his significant commemoration (you can tell that I am a bit wary about just when he was born or died.) I have read about such things in the very wonderful BBC Music Magazine and am eager to spend a sizeable amount of money for a frankly astonishing number of CDs.

One of the basic problems with Vaughan Williams in his bid for musical immortality is that he chose the wrong bit of the alphabet for his surname/s. This name/s is/are too near the end of the alphabet. His stuff is likely to be mixed into the ‘Various’ section of the display shelves and his serious symphonic works are likely to be mixed in with bargain basement boxed sets and crossover trash by however is being touted as the new Caruso. This is no way for a serious musician to be treated.

Having searched through the Various and sneered my way through Vivaldi I eventually discovered that our Ralph (or Rafe as we pseudos like to call him) was firmly placed in the Mr Williams category. And there was nothing new or remotely interesting or bargain basement about anything.

Throwing linguistic caution to the winds I intimated to the friendly looking woman of a certain age behind the counter that I would like to have a box of Vaughn Williams.

The blankness of the stare which greeted this request forcibly reminded me of Toni’s mum as she struggles to make sense of my enthusiastic yet essentially flawed Spanish. I further explained in fluent foreign (far be is from me to claim that my excited gibber was anything approaching Spanish) that Vaughan Williams was a very important English composer. Her blankness, if anything, became even more vacant.

I then had one of those ideas which, almost invariably, have landed me in almost terminal social complexity. “His name is Bough-ch-an Why-ii-anz.” An immediate look of recognition closely followed by infectiously chuckling laughter and a gurgled compliment on my pronunciation!

Still no boxed sets though, so that it will have to be The Boys or Amazon.

After the thunder and lightening of the early morning and a sluggish sort of sulking weather up to lunch time, we were treated to a reasonable day of sunshine. We used the opportunity to go to Barcelona to ‘do’ the shops from El Corte Ingles to Mare Magnum. And back again.

After an extended period of energy building (or staying in bed till late) the girls were more than eager to expend their reserves on serious shopping. I told them, only half jokingly that a lack of purchases would mean the lack of seat in the car going back to Castelldefels.

I am glad to report that I had two exhausted passengers on the return trip.

I think that we would have to tick the Culture box because the girls visited the Market just off the Ramblas and had their photographs taken with a variety of ‘living statues probably the most notable one being the white painted gentleman on the toilet. Payment of money for the photograph eventually produced a most realistic fart, which I only half suspect was electronic in its delivery rather than gustatory! (Not the right word possibly but it’s in the same ball park.)

Our meal this evening was Japanese and for the first time we were given seats on the periphery of the integrated steel cooking area. Sushi was obviously not going to extend his dexterous use of cooking utensils, so I was somewhat relieved that we all ordered at least one hot thing.

Our cook provided the sort of interesting floor show of redundant flourishing of clanking metal knives and scrapers and those things that look like overlarge icing sugar smoothers that left us thinking that he could have done it better. But it certainly gave our food a certain vibrant urgency. Most enjoyable.

Tomorrow the girls fry during the day, while at night we have been urged to attend Reeven’s band performing some way down the coast. The girls seemed genuinely enthusiastic when this little excursion was mooted and we will have to see how the reality matches expectation.

It will, if nothing else, give me an opportunity to compare notes with the headteacher and for us to indulge in some cathartic skulduggery on the side of right!

A day to savour to come!

Building block invectve!

Just when you thought it was impossible to lavish any more hatred and loathing on an institution that ranks lower than the dirt under the fingernails of Robert Mugabe, you are surprised by what Gogol called the ‘lower depths’ of unsuspected idiocy that some institutions can plumb.

Not, for once, my inestimable previous school, but my worthless bank!

BBVA has done it again! Unthinking, complacent, inefficient, grasping, customer loathing, money machine!

Going to Sitges every day you are faced with a choice: do you risk the coast road with its wonderful views, vertiginous drops, convoluted roads and suicidal drivers wanting to overtake on blind S-bends, or do you take the boring but safe alternative of the tunnels? One is free and dangerous and the other is safer and expensive.

For most of the time I took the tunnels.

As you pass through the toll booths you notice that two lanes have bright blue roads and the toll barriers rise automatically at the approach of cars. I eventually learned that my way of payment for the tolls was the second most expensive. I used my bank card and I was informed that every so many of my trips would be free. This was good, but I was also told that there was the Blue Road Way. This was the cheapest way of all and required the possession of a small machine which sent out some sort of signal and set you apart not only from the hoi polloi who used actual money to pay, but also from the parvenus who used mere bank cards.

I asked my bank and filled in the numerous forms to get a machine to take me into the ranks of the chosen. I was informed that it would take days.

Needless to say it didn’t and weeks passed with no card. Telephone calls did not produce the card and I was reduced to shredding small cambric handkerchiefs in my frustration.

No longer needing the card I went into the bank with the documentation that I had signed and asked plaintively what had happened.

The machine, in an envelope with my name and address on the front has been in the bank in Castelldefels since the middle of March.

God rot BBVA. Alas! My Spanish is insufficient to do full justice to the fury that I felt but, with limited vocabulary and few verbs I did the best that I could. I pointed out with robust vigour that I had been paying €10 a day for months while they had the padded envelope waiting under the counter. I did note one bleating response from the frankly startled BBVA serf who attempted to placate me: “We are not a post office!” This is the same sort of contemptible remark that the medical centre made when stating that they couldn’t make a photocopy of my passport (which they had asked for) because “We are not a photocopying shop!” God rot the pair of them.

My visit to the employment centre in Gavá was no less frustrating. I am a month short of the necessary employment days to qualify for any sort of support from the Spanish state. I can’t say that I was expecting any, though it did pass my mind that if The Owner had paid me until the end of the academic year I would easily have qualified. Another crime to lay at her door!

Talking of justice: I have drafted my letter to the powers that be about the abuses that have gone on in my ex-school. Any situation that encourages me to use such expressions as ‘autocratic rule by edict,’ ‘attitudinal malaise’ and ‘Catch-22’ in a letter has got to be worth reading about!

Meanwhile the Spanish football team have made it through to the final of the European Cup. The girls and I watched this while having our evening meal in a restaurant at the end of the road. The volume of the televisions precluded any meaningful conversation and we had the added dislocation of discovering that though the match was being relayed live, some televisions were more live than others.

Our restaurant had what I think is a terrestrial station broadcasting the match, while the restaurant next door had a satellite link. This meant that the television next door was a few seconds ahead of us so we were easily able to tell if a promising move by Spanish players amounted to anything!

The girls were subdued. Their intensive sun bathing has exhausted them and they want a respite tomorrow and are prepared to reject the sunny sand and go instead to the restrained Ramblas in Barcelona for a gentle walk and shop.

Bring it on!

Undone things

I should now be in school.

I have been sitting on the balcony with a pot of strong tea and watching the cleaners on the beach finally returning the sand to the standard of cleanliness that I have come to expect after the explosion of rubbish deposited during the night of festivity.

This is all very pleasant but it is not what I am supposed to be doing. It is not all negative of course. The dismissive machinations of The Owner do allow me to have the time to visit Gavá to claim my unemployment pay and to visit my Union to put on record the shameful process by which The Owner has terminated by contract.

And the girls will be here soon! A week of worry, when, before they have even arrived I feel an almost overwhelming desire to acquire a shotgun and start practising a macho scowl to keep at bay any predatory Catalan boys who may even glance in the direction of my Welsh wards!

I am sure that this is merely overreaction and I will find opportunities to relax, even if it is only through exhaustion!

I am looking forward to testing the stated enthusiasm that the girls have for eating. We should be able to test that at once by having a menu del dia when they arrive: start as you mean to go on, say I.

There are surely few people who would unwrap gaudily presented gifts and, finding that the largesse comprises a plastic ceramic hob scraper, a bottle of ceramic hob cleaner and a box of OHP slides, would chortle with glee. I am one of those few.

Not only will these items help me through a difficult period of taxing cleaning but they will act as an incentive to get another teaching job to employ the slides to their full potential.

Within seconds of handling the scraper

I was effortlessly removing cooked on grime which had resisted the most frenzied attacks with fingernails. The application of the Australian hob cream seemed to work wonders. Can it be that the fabled task of the uncleanable electric hob was to be relegated to the ‘done that got the t shirt’ realm of quotidian experience? Time, as they say, will tell.

There was also a Terry Pratchett book and a copy of Private Eye and The Week but these things do not lend themselves to arch comment!

What a splendid variety of delights the girls brought with them; I do think that I will eschew the allure of The Guardian Weekly and take out a subscription to The Week instead. Never let it be said that I was impulsive.

Our meal out was frustrated by the fact that the Basque restaurant was closed for refurbishment. I must admit that I do not quite understand the timing element in this equation when we are now at last in the throws of the main part of the summer season (now that the nights are drawing in, I hear pessimists say!)

Instead we went to a more conventional restaurant and had a variety of tapas. The meal was excellent and who would have guessed that two sixteen year old girls could be such excellent and stimulating company.

Our walk back along the beach was only marred by the immediate attention of all sentient men we passed who did not disguise their unashamed interest in my two companions. I had to make a formal apology for my sex!

Tomorrow sun bathing for the girls and a probable trip to Gavá for me. Indolent manufacture of vitamin D for the girls and adrenaline making frustration for me as the slowly grinding administration of Catalonia demands the maximum paperwork with the minimum of results. Or money as it is sometimes known!

The headteacher in exile, still nursing her rapidly mending bone, has expressed an interest in finding finance to found a school in the area. The situation becomes rapidly more interesting by the day. I have contacted my union and the wheels within the administration of my organization are slowly beginning to turn.

This is that wonderful time in any campaign when all seems possible: armed with Right and Wholesomeness it seems to be truly, in education in Catalonia terms, another Children’s Crusade. This is a comforting idea until you remember what happened to that particular Crusade.

The Children’s Crusade makes the Fourth Crusade seem positively wholesome by comparison!

But my self deluding optimism will not be denied. To a man who can, at last, clean an electric hob – nothing is impossible!

Body Beach

Last night what I can only call a Saturnalia took place on the beach outside our flat.

Throughout the day the sporadic Beirut-like explosions kept the realization that it was a festival to the forefront of the mind. As the day wore on so the crack like reports of sizeable ‘petados’ grew less sporadic and more like a concentrated bombardment.

Which went on throughout the night.

Standing on the balcony and looking out I felt like some medieval baron standing on the battlements of his besieged castle and looking out at the motley crew ranged against him. The numbers of people in the darkness were indicated by the dancing flames of various camp fires and the unsettling deep murmur of what seemed like thousands of voices. From time to time the flash of an explosion showed serried ranks of people lurking about in the darkness.

Although tempted in theory to go along the beach and see what was happening, in practice I was tired and just wanted to go to bed. I was, however, revivified by a telephone from the Head Teacher of the school in which I used to work (ahem!) who told me that the way that The Owner is behaving is simply unacceptable and that she does not deserve to have a school.

So, from accepting that there would be little that I could do except to cause some mild exasperation in the life of the spoilt brat grown to womanhood, I am now encouraged to believe that We Can Do Something Real. At this point I lapse into King Lear and admit that I am not sure what it is that we will be able to do, but I fervently hope that we will do such things,-- What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be The terrors of the earth!

The restored enthusiasm for My Campaign against The Owner and All Her Works drained the last elements of wakefulness from me and I departed for my bed.

I was awoken from uneasy dreams by the same rumble of voices punctuated by explosions which had soothed me to sleep.

I scrabbled around for my glasses and shuffled me way towards the balcony. I was feeling unnaturally tired and I assumed that my sleeping brain had spent the night constructing ever more elaborate dreams to account for the strange noises that thumped their way through my flat.

The sight that met my bleary eyes was astonishing.

The beach was fully littered; not only with the sort of spread of rubbish which is usually only found in careful set dressing of high budget films, but also with bodies in various states of comotosity. And the ones who were conscious were still drinking! Boys lifting the mini metal casks of beer to their mouths and squirting the frothy rubbish directly down their throats. Men examining the contents of bottles stuck at various angles in the sand the ten raising them to their parched lips at half past six in the morning. People of all possible sexes staggering unsteadily towards the newly installed portaloo. What greeted them inside can only be guessed at after a night of unsure personal hygiene conducted in the dark!

By seven o’clock in the morning men in fluorescent tabards had started the Augean task of bringing back the beach to some degree of normality. It is a labour which has taken them all day with the assistance of the giant sand siever, a succession of rubbish vans and management in cars. The beach is now beginning to look more like the manicured stretch of sand that we have become used to.

Living next to a popular beach you understand just how much hard work is necessary to keep sand looking, well, unremarkable. With no tide the effortless flat and featureless appearance of British beaches is something which takes a lot of money to achieve in the Mediterranean.

The amount we are paying for the flat and its position, the least we have a right to expect is a natural looking beach which has taken vast sums of money to look like that!

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble teacher, but . . .

The past few days have been like living in a tired war zone where desultory and lethargically sporadic explosions in a seemingly random pattern punctuate the normal noise of an ordinary day.

We are building up to a National Holiday for which small shops and stalls have sprung up offering petados or ‘bangers’. I understand that people are even able to buy these incendiary things on the internet! The logistical ramifications of that one leave me speechless!

The 24th or possibly the 23rd is the Catalan equivalent of Bonfire Night and the masked denizens of hell in hessian will be walking the streets with their flaming pitchforks.

Fireworks or fuegos artificales have a more nearly central place in the Spanish way of life than in Britain. In Britain the dead hand of Blame Culture has demonized fireworks to such an extent that it seems positively anti social as a private individual to admit to possessing any of them. They are more safely left in the capable hands (allegedly) of local councils than in the palsied grip of mere ordinary people.

The Spanish seem to rejoice in fireworks and deliberately put themselves in the way of showers of sparks, squeaking delightedly as parts of body and clothing start to smoulder! I suppose this is all of a piece with their letting bulls lose in the streets, constructing human castles of improbable height and encouraging a selection of other wild animals to frisk about in the vicinity of vulnerable human flesh.

This is the sort of thing that would be impossible to regulate in Britain and something that no vapid British insurance company would touch. Given the grossly inflated premiums that companies ask for even the most trivial and distant risks you would have thought that they would be licking their slavering corporate lips at the thought of the truly mind constricting amounts of money they might be tempted to charge for what passes for normality in Spain. But no! Even though their business is risk they seem to want to offload that troublesome concept on the customer!

Spain has a long way to go in the accountability stakes. Most Spanish pavements are fiendishly complex obstacle courses with many unpleasant surprises in store for the unwary. Parking is simply a joke. Conditions that would bankrupt a large metropolitan borough in Britain are accepted with a nonchalance bordering on the criminally vindictive here. ¡Viva la diferencia!

Today is the start of my efforts to Ostracize The Owner. I’m not sure that is exactly what I am trying to do, but I am far too indolent to think of a more appropriate alliterative verb.

To be realistic I am not sure what I can do to frustrate her knavish tricks, but on the basis that ‘anything is better than nothing’ I will put into sluggish action the strategy that I have been considering for some time. I am well aware that I am confronting moneyed ignorance and that my efforts may well be derided as a ‘Brave Little Belgium’ approach but I am determined not, to quote a fellow countryman, to ‘go gentle into that good night’ and, god knows, The Owner does give one something to ‘rage against.’

The Campaign begins!

The Església Parroquial de Sant Pere de Ribes is only a hundred or so years old, but looks much older because of the style in which it is built. It seems oddly large for what would have been a very small village a century ago, but it turns out that the building was a gift to god for the recovery of a wife. Local boy makes good in South America and offers god a bribe to save his wife; a bribe that god obviously accepts – though why god wants a mini cathedral in a village outside Sitges must be put down to the resolute inscrutability of the deity!

The church itself is imposing with a lofty interior with bayed vaulting. The church famously has two towers and there is a lantern in the body of the nave. The stone used in the construction is a rather featureless grey which makes the columns look as though they have been made out of superior breeze blocks and the capitals from which the ribs of the vaulting spread are over large and ornate, looking as though they have been salvaged from another church.

The open bays are disfigured by ornate golden filigree altars in the usual Rags of Popery style, as is the high altar with a towering construction reaching almost to the roof and containing a particularly unedifying statue of Saint Peter clutching his keys and sporting a very spiky halo.

Architectural analysis was not why I was there. As Margaret had offered a second (after I had to pass up on the first) invitation to stay with the additional inducement of culture and food, I was there with alacrity!

So, for the first time in my life I have heard Benjamin Britten sung in Catalan: Sant Nicolau, op. 42 Cantata. Even my Catalan stretches to understanding that this is the cantata Saint Nicholas.

A disturbingly precocious saint who gained the power of speech at an exceptionally early age and whose first words, “God be glorified!” were uttered while he was still in the womb! What his mother’s words were on discovering that she had a loquacious foetus are not recorded.

This version of the Cantata had Crozier’s words translated into Catalan by Slavador Oliva and they were performed by the combined forces of the Cor Jove de L’Escola Municipal de Música Mestre Montserrat, the Jove Cor FlumineÑ the Cor de Cambra Isquione, the Coral Bitxac and the Orquestra de Cambra del Garraf.

This imposing list of organizations was expertly and enthusiastically held together by the lively direction of Salvador Brotons who was able to meld the exciting orchestral part with expertly tutored choral forces directed by Isabel Pla.

However.

The church’s acoustic defeated all their efforts. There was at least a four or five second reverberation which reduced the detail of Britten’s orchestration to a muddy sort of aural rumble. It was like listening to a series of radios tuned to different music stations with your ears filled with marshmallow! You had to know the piece to try and extricate the instrumental lines from the mass of undifferentiated sound which filled the church.

The soloist, David Hernández, may well have been very good, but sitting at the back of the church I had no way of knowing as his voice was often lost in the wave of sound which crashed and flooded over me.

However. Part II.

I did enjoy the music, especially the second half when the more dramatic elements in this music drama were brought more to the fore. The three young sopranos walking down the nave of the church was one of those simple coup de theatre which Britten does so well in his church music and gave an indication of how marvellous this piece can be in a more sympathetic acoustic.

Another Britten trademark was the involvement of the audience/congregation in the singing of two hymns. The first of which is an old favourite and one which I must have sung hundreds of times, though not with the opening words of, “Avui la gent de tot el món ta feliç al Déu vivent el gran amor ques tots etc.” I have to say that Catalan is not pronounced as it is written, so it’s just as well that my contribution to the congregational singing was minimal!

Thanks to the kindness of Margaret and Ian I was able to stay in Sant Pere for the night and have a leisurely and delicious lunch. Five of us sat down to lunch and we had a conversation that was as wide ranging as it was divisive – though it the best possible taste!

Then off to Terrassa to see the new born.

A full life!

Time to stand and stare

My first day of sackedness. And a time for reflection.

To commemorate this momentous readjustment in my employment status I have planted a dead cactus on the balcony. The cactus was brought in by one of my students and, as is the way with things in the relentless curriculum for primary children, was promptly forgotten. With cacti this is not necessarily fatal, but even they demand cursory attention. Which we did not lavish on it. It is a dead cactus – and all the rest of the Monty Python script.

I felt that planting a dead cactus from school was a deeply symbolic act with dark, mysterious, ritualistic overtones. The metaphorical implications are almost overwhelming, and I’m not sure that I can be bothered to work them out.

If some part of the latent DNA of the cactus is reactivated by moist soil then the metaphor becomes even more complex and even less open to interpretation!

After my onerous task was completed I settled down on the balcony to a pot (glass; Zara Home) of tea

(Rington’s ‘Two Cup’ industrial strength; Victoria) and gazed at the empty beach and the gently rippling sea. The horizon is a line of dirty blue and just above it the sky is a smudge of the spectrum comprising what Robert Graves described in ‘Welsh Incident’ as ‘mostly nameless’ colours. The rest of the sky is of that perfect sky blue that the sky rarely is. The flawless quality of the heavens is mildly flawed by a few impertinent scraps of cloud making their lazy way to the hills behind Castelldefels. Moments like this are part of the reason that I am here. Sigh!

I have decided that The Owner did not sack me - sorry, refuse to renew my contract – because of my radical tendencies. I fear that the real reason was gross moral turpitude.

I should explain. The room where I used to teach (please note the past tense!) had glass on two sides and therefore, with the weakest ray of sunshine, heated up to the level of an oven on gas mark 5.

A primary class is like a cup of tea: Brownian Motion observable through the busy, erratic movement of young bodies going about their versions of teacher inspired tasks!

It is impossible to stay static in this confusing melee and you, as a teacher, have to act as conductor, instructor and traffic light. This is activity. Activity within an oven. Bending, twisting and reaching it is inevitable that one’s shirt becomes less than securely trapped (as it should be) behind the stern constriction of one’s belt.

Re establishing sartorial equilibrium necessitates a sharp indrawn breath and a swirl of hands to return the wayward shirt tails to their proper position.

A few days ago, while harassed and hectored beyond comprehension by a more than usually complex pupil task which used card, paper, sticks, pencils, glue, scissors and virtually every other piece of material in the class, my shirt again skittishly emerged from its constraints. Multi tasking (as a mere man) is an onerous task and so while talking, walking, encouraging and mediating, I took a more than usually enthusiastic breath in to facilitate the return of the shirt tails. And my trousers fell down!

It is, and was the stuff of second rate British comedies; and here it was taking place in Catalonia!

It was but the movement of a second to return the trousers to their proper station and re-establish a modicum of decorum. But there are a couple of impressionable girls who glimpsed this comic slip with amazed delight and I am sure will retain the memory for some considerable time!

It is a tribute to the relentless voracity for incident of the young that this (admittedly) extraordinary incident, after a momentary flurry of excitement, was forgotten. How different from the home life of our own dear secondary school where such an occurrence would have provided the basis for anecdote, abuse and contempt for generations!

Today I have to go to Terrassa to see the new born pretender to the throne of adulation presently occupied by Toni’s older nephew. He has got a shock coming to him. I don’t think that he has fully realised that he has a brother, let alone someone else is going to be living with him and taking part of the attention which was one wholly his!

I also have to call into Bluespace and store some of the stuff that I have been using in school. I feel like paraphrasing William Pitt the Younger and saying, “Roll up those materials they will not be wanted these ten years!”

If only.

The day of an open ended holiday!

“To have been sacked once Stephen might be regarded as unfortunate. To have been sacked twice smacks of the worst excesses of the Tolpuddle Martyrs; and we all know what the actions of those unfortunate men led to.”

So, The Owner strengthened by the sinews of her own insecurity, managed to find the bare faced audacity to reject the offer of my future services!

My rank insubordination in questioning the imposition of dinner duties with teachers serving the kids’ food; my arrogance in expecting the provision of supply cover; my wastrel lack of control in asking for fans to mitigate the greenhouse effects of glass walled unventilated classrooms; my refusal to accept responsibility for a pupil/teacher ratio of 33 to 1 on a school trip; my support of colleagues and having a cup of tea – all this was offered up, in whole or part to explain how my continued presence in the school was an impossibility.

In a short meeting in an air conditioned part of reception (a luxury which is not found elsewhere in the teaching areas of the school) I was informed that virtually all aspects of my attitude and behaviour were unacceptable and my future was not to be in the institution which The Owner with single minded self destructive selfishness is obliterating.

My first foray with The Owner about lunchtime supervisions has never been forgiven or forgotten. My surly rejection of mealy-mouthed platitudinous gibberish from the ill tutored mouth of an unlettered, unprofessional and unspeakable non entity who had the offrontery to take a meeting and deny accountability and knowledge of anything being talked about was the final straw. Attacking this mouthpiece of The Owner was obviously lese majesty and the one unforgivable transgression. So I am gone.

My last act in the school was to take a Parents’ Afternoon. Virtually all the parents, with varying degrees of vituperation were most eloquent in the invective they used as they inveigled against the tyrannical power of The Owner. All of them bewailed their seeming powerlessness. “What,” they asked, “can I do?” The spoilt little rich girl, who was The Owner, has grown into a bullying dictator who uses her financial clout to do as she pleases.

Her paranoia (now fully justified as she is universally detested) linked to what must be an unshakable insecurity means that any slight disagreement on the part of anyone else can only be interpreted as stark rebellion.

In The Owner’s world everyone is seeking to do her down, so she must suspect everyone and fear every glance, flick of the eyelid and toss of the head. Subversion is always rife in The Owner’s world and duplicity and mendacity the only way forward.

Now is the time to test out my Union membership.

I am prepared to be under whelmed.

Petard of Pixels

Stymied by technology!

My credentials as someone who is computer savvy have now taken a punishing bump from my incompetence with the reports.

In our school everything possible is done electronically. This has nothing to do with being cutting edge and everything to do with paranoia.

People communicate via email when they could take a few steps and talk to each other! This extraordinary behaviour stems (need you ask) from The Owner who feels that mere speech is liable to be twisted by evil educational practitioners, whereas the written word is immutable. The fact that the system has more faults than California and is more liable to inexplicable vagaries than share prices in mortgage companies does not alter the fact that the email and pen drive are the weapons of choice in the conveying of information.

As someone who much prefers to top and tail reports in pen the use of the computer is limiting. As we had no style sheet to work from I felt free to make executive decisions about certain details of presentation. Alas! My revolutionary zeal was quickly curbed and the thin end of the wedge towards Armageddon (i.e. writing the pupils names in block capitals) was sternly rebuked.

And the altering of reports which exist on my pen drive and on the hard drive of my laptop is where the problems accumulated. Resentfully I changed my aphoristic (and frequently gnomic) comments to something more in keeping with the potential audience for my bon mots whose linguistic abilities were being extended by their offspring rather by themselves. This meant delving into report after report; messing around with them, forgetting to save the changes; opening another report; remembering to save the changes; forgetting to change the report opened before the other one was saved; reopening the wrong report; missing out a report on the list; changing the name and . . . well, you get the general idea.

What would be simple in moving sheets of paper becomes a frustratingly oblique shuffle when you are forced to do things electronically.

My only comfort blanket was a red file with scraps of paper of various sizes which contained information which allowed the formation of the reports in the first place. When in doubt I returned to the red file and rummaged about for a while, relishing the real physical feel of paper on finger tips and knowing that if everything was lost in one electrical surge the edifice could be rebuilt by my little red file.

Having twenty open files on a computer is a life shortening experience in laborious navigation, while the equivalent in report books is human and containable.

I am no Luddite and the thought of life without my trusty laptop is something which I can only contemplate in the context of a particularly disturbing Hammer Horror film – but the complexities of using the computer in the way in which my school demands adds a dimension of human misery which should only live in the pages of an existential novel by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Teaching has, to all intents and purposes fizzled out. Sometimes the fizzle comes after a particularly hairy educational explosion.

Today was a case in point. After hours of vicious rehearsals with vindictive haranguing accompaniment by my good self, adding a hard edge to the more than reasonable approach of the music teacher, our summer concert was performed for the adoring parents.

This extended piece of exquisite aural torture has been filmed professionally so that the tone deaf parents can relive the chromatic harmonies that make Stockhausen sound like the song writer for Sesame Street.

Apart from the performance of Mama Mia where the kids resolutely stuck to their version of the song while the backing track was not on their rhythmic wavelength – things went quite well. Obviously the relationship between the kids’ singing and their target songs was roughly the same as a car crash to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but hey, they were only primary school kids having a good time while exponentially increasing the misery of their long suffering teachers. What’s wrong with that!

My little Drama Group did well, with the laconic clown having the desired effect. They were all good (in its high relativistic sense) and even when The Cat lost her words, she was so vulnerable and cute that they all cooed and applauded. No one actually said it, but this was the one time that one of them should have sobbed, “You’ve been a wonderful audience, thank you!”

A burden of responsibility has been magically lifted from our shoulders now that the dreaded concert has been consigned to DVD and we can concentrate on the fabled list of tasks that we have to fulfil before the end of term.

I take it that The Owner once read a simplified version of 1,001 Nights and has never managed to shake off the concept of The Trial Before Eventual Reward!

As far as I can understand it, everything has to be cleared out of our rooms. Everything. Where it is all going I know not. And there are some things which I will want to save for next year. If I am allowed a next year in the institution.

With out depleted numbers (three primary teachers missing) every day has the possibility of disaster.

It’s one reason to go in!