We are now fully bambooed.

The sometime subfusc appearance that characterized the dull material that stretched between our ‘estates’ has now been invigorated by a profusion of split cane. In one of those efforts where very little is needed to make a considerable difference we have completely changed the outside area under the house.

Our initial hope was to increase our protection from the outside living of our summer neighbours but the bamboo screen doesn’t reach all the way up to the roof so there is a space for the sound from the dysfunctional family that arrives for the summer months to bounce into our bit.

And bounce it certainly does!

They bring the television outside and listen to it at full volume and then leave it, presumably on the ‘gone but not forgotten’ principle!

I am trying to muster the energy to go to the third floor and either do some marking or attempt my next effort to bring some sense of order to the room. Typing is getting neither of these two options nearer to reality so – enough!

In a complete reversal of normal expectations and in spite of not having completed at least one paper on the Friday evening which ensures that you do at least some marking during the rest of the weekend, I have completed the marking that I had to do!

It was a dispiriting experience as the results are dismal. My star pupils have done as well if not better than usual, but the middle range pupils have apparently been revising for a different examination.

I wouldn’t mind so much but I buy my own disposable red fountain pens and I seem to be getting through them as if they were provided by the school. Which they aren’t so that is a bad thing.

I have now completed the marking of 40% of my examinations and I waiting with baited breath for the next 60%. Which is not quite true. At all.

The next thing is to put all the results into the computer and compared with the marking that task is an absolute delight. Though the information which will result from such an effort will be depressing.

There are two weeks left to the term and I suspect that our ‘holiday’ is only a week long – and that will be it until the end of the summer term at the end of June. One really does miss the half term!

I intend to find out exactly what we are expected to do and more importantly when we are expected to have done it. These things tend to leap out at one with little warning, but with a deadline impossibly near to deal with.

My aim is to stay a jump ahead of what might happen. To be, in effect, pro-active. For once in my life!

Today The Family descended. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them and the youngest child has grown even more and can now say my name with some confidence.

Unfortunately my own confidence has been somewhat dented by my having to take part in a goal scorning competition with small children and my being only partially successful in comparison with their own efforts! I am sure that it is good for the soul to be put in one’s place by someone a third of your size!

The weather today has been much more like the weather that one would expect for March in this country: bright and warm, though as soon as the sun went down it was cold and we put the heating on!

Penultimate week. Thank God.

Four legs bad!

Domestic cats are loathsome things.

They are loathsome precisely for those attributes which endear them to their brainwashed owners.

They are arrogantly independent; they are territorial in that they regard everywhere as being their own; they use only other peoples gardens as toilets never their own; they have horrid teeth; they eat nastily with little nibbles; they slink; they target me when I am in an owner’s house and leap on my lap and smirk at me as I have to stroke them with a pretence of civility. Ugh!

I was, until recently, a dog person. Admittedly a very particular dog person: only yellow Labrador bitches were acceptable. All other dogs were a pale and ineffectual reflection of the One Breed. I now realize that statement sounds just a tinge fascist, but let it pass, let it pass.

I am a dog person no more.

It has taken the demented barking of the next door neighbour’s melancholic mutt to change my mind.

They have built a sort of pen for their pets in the space created by the shape of our houses. The living room is at first floor level and the space underneath is an open area linking the front and back gardens. In this prison lie two dogs: one is a weasel-like rat-dog with a half-hearted bark which makes it sound as though he is inside the house. The other is a larger creature who shows his despair at being left outside by barking morosely every second on the second.

Sometimes his limited litany sparks off other animals in the neighbourhood (it is de rigueur to incarcerate a canine in this part of the world) and there is a demented choir of discordant life forms yelping out their desolation to the uncaring heavens and one deeply affected neighbour!

I have not plucked up enough courage to go next door and tell the inconsiderate (or perhaps deaf) members of the household that there is not a system of sound baffles around their baying beast and it is quite easy to hear it over and above any other sounds that a normal house makes.

The reason for my reticence is that I will have to do the complaining in Spanish and what I am likely to say is going to be direct and abrupt and lack the ironic sophistication which would usually accompany any expression of displeasure were I to speak in my native tongue. You might well aver that directness could be the most effective approach, but these people have bought, not rented their house, and so they are likely to be here as our neighbours for as long as we rent the place. One has to consider the possibility of animosity over an extended period weighed against a (fully justified) complaint about the noise of the dogs. Noise which may well continue without the slightest abatement after the complaint has been made.

Why can’t people simply behave properly?

Ah, the question which has dogged social reformers throughout time! And now dogs me. Doggone it!

Today is the construction of the Great Bamboo Wall to try and lessen the potential noise of the neighbours on the other side.

I do realize that this writing is making me appear to be a paranoid sound hater; but you really do have to live here to discover just how bloody-mindedly inconsiderate people can be. Though if you merely observe how people park in any normal supermarket car park then you realize just how selfish people can be!

Today is also Part IX of the clearing out of the Third Floor. To be fair, you can move about a bit there now, but it is not yet the slinkily, smoothly efficient modern office working space that I envisaged when I first saw the room. Again, like the books, I am working towards the summer for completion of this project. You will note that I did not state the year.

So, once more off to Gavá to visit the hardware store confusingly called Bauhaus – though the sheer vulgarity of most of the stuff they sell there and the place in which they sell it would have been rejected with horrified contempt by the original founders of that stripped back statement of sheer steel and glass that characterized one of the most important temples to Modernism.

I’m not sure that that statement of easy pretention sits well with a person who is going to construct a bamboo wall to baffle the neighbours – though perhaps Paul Klee might have approved!

Scraps of paper!

As Doctor Johnson did not say, but I am too lazy to look up who actually said it, “Be assured sir, if a man is to be hanged on the morrow it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

These strangely uncomforting words came to mind this morning as we lurched into the second glorious day of the examination season. We kept to our smaller groups in the vain hope that we could at least contain the cheating which is endemic to the whole of the school and the whole of the intellectual array of talent we have here. No matter how clever you are; or indeed how academically challenged you might be, nothing adds more zest to the pursuit of knowledge in this place than a little judicious cheating.

The ways that the pupils do this vary and, fairly obviously, the more refined and sophisticated ways of cheating have passed me by and presumably worked for them – though their marks would appear to tell a different story!

The first lot of marking was collected by me yesterday and after a soul destroying start I lapsed into a sulking indifference and stopped marking. Today we had another exam so I have a second set of marking. This too I have started, but that was because I couldn’t find the set from yesterday.

And this is where the “concentrates the mind wonderfully” comes in. Given the prevalence of cheating in this school I am not convinced about the essential value of any examination: but you lose a set of examination papers and they suddenly assume the importance of The Dead Sea Scrolls. This is the only time in my life when the marking of a new set of examination papers can be officially classified as “displacement activity” to keep my mind off the terrible reality of missing papers.

I worked out where the papers ought to be and then found myself stranded in another building and unable to find out whether I was right or not.

Friday is my ‘duty day’ for lunchtime. It comes as something of a total failure that after years of struggle in Great Britain to ensure that teachers were not bound to be in school for their lunch hours I supinely give in and accept duties that I would have rejected with outraged contempt at home. Ah well, different countries different attitudes!

A second ride on the bike! I rejected with incredulous laughter the idea that my bike riding should be extended to any area which wasn’t flat. When, I asked with withering scorn if anyone had ever seen a cyclist going up a slope with a smile on his face? Case proven I think!

Instead a decorous ride to Gavá and back and then by way of reward a meal in our local restaurant!

That’s the way to do it.

And my missing examinations papers were where I thought they might be. Eventually.

Now the weekend is set for a couple of days of intense joy and marking! And yes, that is an oxymoron.

Turning Thoughts

There is something very tempting in pushing in the dagger just a few inches more!

Character assassination is such a morish activity once you get started and I am grateful that I finished my lunch before we could really get going. It is always pleasant to flirt with an activity that is generally despicable and to leave before ones hands get too soiled. It is too easy for a general discussion about a common irritation to turn into a shark-like feeding frenzy!

I only half understood what was going on because the conversation was in a mixture of English and Spanish but you can’t mistake attitude!

The examination season has now officially opened (again!) and the flood of marking is beginning to mount up. As fast as we are invigilating examinations so are we writing them. Today I used my free afternoon to write questions for the equivalent of the sixth form. Part of the paper that I wrote was made up of sentences into which appropriate words and phrases have to be put. This is one thing that I have always enjoyed doing. Although my sentences were never short, they always managed to get good marks. Indeed the high point of my academic career was being accused of cheating and being told that I was supposed to have made the sentences up myself and not copied them from a book! It’s just a pity that I peaked in form 3!

God knows if the kids are going to understand some of the sentences I’ve written, but they should understand enough to put in the right word if they have studied in the right way.

I have yet to understand what constitutes studying in our school. The kids, through constant practice, have developed a technique to deal with the way that examinations are set in our place. They allow, as far as I can tell, one evening to ‘study’ a subject. They retain a fair amount of information, all of which seems to be jettisoned as soon as the examination paper is completed! It’s learning Jim; but not as we know it!

I have one paper to mark at the moment which will soon be joined by four others. At the moment there is no talk of when the marks need to be collated; but any day now the management will suddenly say that everything must be done by “tomorrow” and there will be wild panic, with me laughing (hollowly) in the background, trying to keep the hysteria out of my chuckle!

I tried to get at least some of my marking done after I had completed the sentences etc for the exam but I rapidly found myself loosing the will to live as I looked at increasingly bizarre formulations of what elements my pupils think comprise a typical English sentence!

It is a fascinating fact that whatever level of incompetence pupils reach, displaying as they sometimes do a woefully inadequate level of English expression and gaining abysmally low marks, if you dare include in an examination a word which you have not previously explained there is a torrent of objection. They may not be able to define or use the words which they agree that you have explained, but their radar is so highly attuned that they can spot a ‘ringer’ word instantly. What confuses me is that this recognition, if tweaked just a fraction, could surely be the way that they improve their marks immeasurably. I used that last word as that is the sort of word that their examinations love.

In my small survey of the examinations that have crossed my path since I have been in the school I have come to the conclusion that the Cambridge Examination system has an unhealthy predilection for the word “shabby” and, true to form, it was included in the first examination of the “season!”

The bike has been used. After a strenuous session using plastic ties to secure the cladding on the front gate to obstruct the view of lewd fellows of a baser sort from getting avaricious ideas about the opulent riches stored in the house, I sallied forth to start the new regime of bike exercise.

Riding into the setting sun along the paseo on the beach was, as it should be, stimulating and inspiring – and very, very cold. I need a little woolly hat and a pair of gloves if the future rides are to be anything but sensual torture!

I did feel very virtuous as I rode along, though I have to admit that all the other cyclists that I passed seemed to be working at a very much higher level than I was and they all looked miserable.

I was very impressed by how quiet my bike is. It is a stealth bike and I was able to ride up to walkers and have them jump a little when they realized that I was lurking behind them on my silent wheels. After a while it became a little unnerving as previously I have been used to that comforting clicking sound which I always used to think was an essential part of the riding experience.

With the enthusiasm of the recently converted I rode right to the end of the paseo and then realized with some excitement that I might have to use my dynamo.

My bike did not come with a Users’ Manual, probably based on the idea that what you did was sit on the thing and pedal away: what more is there to know? Well, one of the things is how to turn on the dynamo.

I could see quite clearly that there was a little plastic thingie with a knurled bit to go against the wheel and rotate, thus producing electricity to cause the light to blaze into action. All previous attempts with the first bike to get the thing to work failed utterly and I had to go back to the dealer and ask how to set it up. The dealer didn’t know at first and it was only after extensive consultation that he explained the trick.

That explanation I had forgotten. And no amount of prodding, pushing and twisting would get the knurled wheel anywhere near the tyre.

It was only after a frustrating period of silent teeth gnashing that I pushed something instead of pulling and the whole dynamo unit lurched towards the rubber.

Elated I leapt onto the saddle and pedalled away furiously and was gratified to see light blaze forth from the front lamp for all of fifteen seconds and then the sounds changed from an electricity producing whine to a darkness inducing clunking sound. I think that more adjustment is called for. But tomorrow and over the weekend and not now!

Tomorrow is Friday, though god knows what day it actually feels like given the confused nature of the week so far.

At least this weekend I do not have to go into school for some fatuous meeting on a Saturday morning!

Shame! Shame!

Bright but Cold

Today is the sort of autumn day that you do not want in March when summer is supposed to be just around the corner.

I am taking on the Spanish national obsession with the weather that I now realize was only partially developed by what I had previously taken to be our over-concern with the climactic conditions in Great Britain.

I think that the fact that the present Spanish weather is beginning to exhibit the idiosyncratic schizophrenia which has characterized our climate over generations has prompted the present monomania on the subject.

We are subject to a constant bombardment of vivid descriptions of climatic extremes on TV from flooding to landslides, taking in tornados and snow. This is not what I expected, having been brought up on a diet of sunny expectation fostered assiduously by the Spanish Tourist Board. The reality, I am rapidly discovering, is somewhat different.

The sun-trap on the third floor is now a breeding ground for mould and I think that the cushions for the sun bed have mutated into a new life form and I am hesitant to go out onto the terrace and battle with something which looks as though it is trying to emulate the hairiness of a pelt of penicillin without the benefits of being a wonder drug. I wonder what does grow best on a well used sun-bed. On the other hand speculation on this subject might well bring to mind my favourite quotation from the etchings of Goya!

Real Madrid are out of the Champions’ League and it is a function of the extraordinary passions that football raise in this part of the world that when the match had ended and the defeat was secure fireworks were set off around us in Castelldefels! To celebrate the defeat of a Spanish team by the French!

I have found that our traditional hatred of the French is more akin to passionate attachment and genuine affection compared to the real hatred by the Spanish and Catalans of our traditional enemy.

I even feel a sense of violation and demand that the French decide who best fits the role of Traditional Enemy. Finding out that the French have been flirting with the Spanish as an enemy seems to me to be something bordering on faithlessness and they should remember that all their best phrases of cultural hatred are directed against us. I bet that the French have never referred to the Spanish as Perfidious Iberians, Perfidious Albion trips off the tongue so much more convincingly!

This is the calm before the storm in our school as the full force of the examinations is waiting to be unleashed. This lesson (one of the many which have collapsed classes to compensate for the absence of a colleague) is supposed to be given over to study. Unfortunately that conflicts with the Prime Directive of the Spanish and Catalans which is to talk at every opportunity! However the growing sheets of paper clutched and waved about by the pupils are a visible sign that the examination period is nigh.

I think that our school must be one of the major users of highlighter in the world as anything and everything is highlighted in a variety of colours. When the pages of the text books have been super-saturated the kids then turn to their copious notes and highlight anything which looks vaguely significant. They may not be useful but they are colourful!

The real horror of this period starts when the marking has to be done. If these exams follow the course of the last ones (and the ones before that and the ones before the ones before etc) then we will suddenly be faced with a totally impractical completion date for all the results to be written in some sort of data base which will be part of a computer site which will not accept input when you need to make it.

Chaos, which is the normal element in the working of the school, will then reign supreme and the teachers will, paradoxically, breathe a sigh of relief as the SNAFU status of the period will have been established.

At least we have a real cut off date as the end of term is on the 26th of the month.

Not that I am counting the days!

Especially as I suspect that one of the ‘teaching opportunities’ may well be on a Saturday morning and I am still not well enough to give such an obscenity the full professional contempt which it richly deserves.

Crumbs of cold

Is there anything sadder than grubby remnants of slowly melting snow with roads and pavements glimmering with the off-white detritus of discarded salt, looking like a layer of dandruff?

I suppose that there is, but you feel a little jaundiced when returning to school after a glorious day off and so you notice the little depressions of everyday life.

School is girding itself up for a jolt of its favourite drug: examinations. Junkie-like we feed the testing habit and have started the ritual thinning of forests as the photocopiers begin to churn out the reams of paper which are necessary to satisfy the raging need which racks the addicted institution.

For the next week or so pupils will be wandering round with odd sheets of papers which they will earnestly consult turning the school into a living representation of a Daumier cartoon of self important lawyers brandishing sheaves of paper as though its mere bulk will somehow impress itself upon the brain.

The chaos of Monday afternoon when The Insanity of Snow (surely a book title waiting for a narrative!) meant that little teaching was done in the prevailing hysteria brought on by the floating to earth of specks of frozen water. The loss of the day following meant that the school was running a deficit of teaching time – and we teach up to the wire as far as the exams are concerned! With a colleague not in school and the best part of two teaching days lost the timetable for the exams has had a few serious jolts!

Rather like some of the trees in the area which, finding it impossible to support the weight of snow have been jolted out of their accustomed places and are now littering the roads with hordes of men swarming over them and reducing the giant trunks to manageable chunks for disposal.

As in the storm of a few months ago, I am shocked at how shallow some of the roots reach of what appeared to be substantial trees. Great gaps have opened up and new vistas have been revealed as part of the cost of the snow.

I should imagine that even the slush-balls that mischievous children have been throwing all day as they scoop up the grimy remains of iced water that has survived the increasing heat by lurking in gullies and secluded and shady nooks will have disappeared tomorrow and the astonishing transformation from Alpine to some other witty choice of word beginning with ‘A’ will be complete.

The construction of a screen (of tasteful bamboo) to hide the bike from the lustful gaze of passing sequestrators is now complete and looks effective and efficient.

The bike itself has acquired a lock with a built in light to allow the combination to be entered even in adverse lighting conditions. A second lock attaches the machine to the bolted rack and a cover is draped inelegantly over the bike. All it needs is for me to use it – which I haven’t done since I went to get lunch from the pollo a last and half killed myself by pedalling furiously over the motorway bridge. By the time I got to the downward slope I was almost coughing blood! I am sure that it did me good, but I do feel that one can have too much of a good thing.

At the moment my swimming is zero and my biking once in a blue moon so there is room for improvement. I didn’t even have the excuse of adverse weather conditions because there was no snow on our bit of the coast. I shall rely on good intentions to justify the continuing efforts to make the bike available for immediate use. I only hope that these good intentions are translated into some form of action in the near future.

A double delight was waiting for me at home: The Week magazine, which is indeed a weekly delight as I hoover up the information contained in it and wish that I could afford to take The Guardian on a daily basis and The BBC Music Magazine with its CD.

I cannot pretend that the magazine is cheap because I pay a supplement on the hefty £4.60 cover price, but it does mean that I acquire at least 12 new CDs a year and am forced to listen to music that would otherwise pass me by.

This month is devoted to Great American Classics (ever a moveable feast in linguistic terms) including Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms”; Gershwin’s “Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra”; Duke Ellington’s “Harlem” and Ferde Grofé’s “Mississippi Suite.” The only thing by Grofé I know is “The Grand Canyon Suite” and there isn’t anything in it which I could whistle! Perhaps things will be different after a week or so of travelling from Castelldefels to Barcelona and listening to new music!

Meanwhile this broken-backed week will limp on to its conclusion and bring us nearer to the holidays.

Deo gracias!

Climate and Climax!

A thoroughly depressing wet Monday was made even more depressing by my loss of a non-contact period to take a lesson for a colleague who has been absent for almost two weeks. I ground my teeth in impotent frustration at the sheer unprofessionalism of the place in which I work. There is no point in making a fuss because people moan and do nothing and I know more surely than VAT is an evil unfair tax that if I said anything then the support of those people most vociferous for change would melt away like the snows of Kilimanjaro.

This feeling of cynical world weariness continued for some hours and was not mitigated by the baseless self-satisfaction of the deluded kids I attempt to teach.

Then it started to snow.

I hate snow with a visceral hatred. Yes, I do have a child-like thrill every time I see the falling flakes and I have an ooh-aah response to landscapes coated in white and yes, I do relish that particular form of silence that comes with snow and I like the crisp crunch of stepping through virgin layers of the white stuff – but in a city in which you have to move and live it is truly loathsome.

The kids were of course hysterical and un-teachable even though the stuff was not settling. By lunch time the snow had formed a slush which to my expert eye was going to provide some sort of base for settling snow. And so it proved with picture postcard settings around the school and the hysteria of the kids reaching new levels of absurdity.

With the settling snow came concern about the kids and staff getting home, not, of course that that meant that school was truncated by a single solitary second. So, with the snow getting ever thicker I, at last I made my way through the accumulating drifts to my car.

Thoughtfully parked at the lowest point of the school perimeter my car looked more like an igloo than a form of transport. Dashing the snow from windows and lights I started the more than perilous journey down our one in one road approaches to the school. Sliding decorously towards the traffic lights, the curb luckily stopped my precipitous flight from education.

The slip road to the motorway home was closed so I had to take an alternate route.

I am not, it has to be admitted, good at traffic jams. I am even less good at traffic jams in driving snow. I will not dwell on the horrors (as horrors there were) on the drive home. Suffice to say that lurching about on an almost deserted motorway with the sickening realization that everybody else was going the other way; being stuck in stopped and slow moving traffic for one and half bloody hours and . . . well you get the idea. I was not a happy little underpaid professional when I finally arrived home. And Castelldefels was, of course, completely devoid of snow.

Just to confirm how I felt I rather foolishly took my blood pressure (because, thanks to Boots the Chemist, I can) and it was the wrong side of whatever it is that I can convince myself is almost acceptable.

Then, just as life was quickly becoming intolerable there was a little musical beep and an email informing me that school was closed tomorrow.

Irritatingly Toni asked who had sent it; to which I replied with colloquial wit and incisiveness words enough to convey the impression that I was not really that much concerned about the verity of the message and was inclined to accept as gospel anything which chimed in with my inclinations so exactly.

It also gives me the opportunity to visit the Worst Bank in the World aka BBVA and beard the unresponsive, arrogant, unprofessional and just plain not nice people who refuse to refund me my money.

It should be an interesting situation!

How are the mighty fallen!

Let’s face it, a day off school starts on a positive note. If the reason for your being at home is snow and where you lived is bathed in delightful sunshine, then it simply gets better and better.

It was with growing excitement and anticipation that, armed with my trusty interpreter, I approached the office of the manager of the Worst Bank in the World aka BBVA. After a brief wait outside her office we were ushered in and, lo and behold! She knew all about the case! She had attempted to contact me by mobile phone and by e-mail! Amazingly none of her attempts to contact me by phone and by email was successful! Truly amazing! There is, of course, another, simpler explanation for this lack of communication by a bank proven to be incompetent to the point of caricature ; but I was far too much of a gentleman to voice what went through my head!

After much discussion and explanation (and blaming of the Terrassa branch of The Worst Bank in the World) we eventually came to some sort of conclusion about what money I was owed. The final calculations were involved, to put it mildly, and anyone would think that we were discussing the national debt of a country like Greece rather than the couple of hundred Euros I was trying to prise out of the grasping rapacious talons of BBVA!

As is the way of banks there was a short, shocked discussion about whether I should return at some later date to pick up an odd €12 that was owed to me apart from the bulk of the rest of the money I was to be given and could not for various reasons be paid in cash at that time. Toni did not bother to translate that bit and insisted that I wanted to close the account immediately with all monies given to be immediately, if not sooner.

After a bit of coming and going the manager gave me cash (not that much!) and a paper to sign which indicated that my account was cancelled. I was, at long last, free of the pernicious mockery of a financial institution that had been sucking my money into its every open maw.

With a form of words which is surely counter intuitive for any banker she said, “I’m sorry!” as I left! If her professional (I use the word loosely) association were ever to discover what she blurted out she would be expelled from the Noble Order of Financial Incompetents for blasphemy!

I am not a trusting soul when it comes to my ex-bank and as I had my bank book with me I decided to find out if it still worked in the machine and try to discover exactly when this dispute was “sorted out.”

The book still worked in the hole-in-the-wall and I found out that some money had been paid in last Thursday. The wrong amount admittedly, but at least some money was paid in. A month to the day when I took time off school to go on and sort things out for the first time and left a letter for them to work on. It wasn’t really rocket science: they had charged me for an account which I didn’t have and they needed to repay me. It was clear in my account. There was no discussion. I shudder to think how long it would have taken if they had been an element of doubt about their own inefficiency and ineptitude!

There was evidence of a flurry of activity today in my bank book as they had magicked up the money to pay me while I was sitting waiting in the manager’s office, but in their haste to settle everything they had left some of their money in my account! Active money in an account that was supposed to have been cancelled. An account which didn’t, as far as the bank was concerned, exist.

So, having just signed a paper which informed me that my account had been cancelled I felt no compunction whatsoever in taking €50 from the account as the money was obviously a little gift to me for all my trouble and wasn’t in any way real as far as the bank was concerned! The crisp note emerged and was pocketed as soon as daylight hit it!

In a sorry history of my dealings with this apology for a banking outfit which would have been drummed out of Toytown for lack of credibility, the €50 was the single success story. And we had a pastry and a coffee on the strength of it. And later an excellent menu del dia in one of our old haunts. All courtesy of BBVA and the magic note!

Today was one of those days which, for teachers, usually occur at the start of the holidays. A day when there is time to get things done. These are all the little things which are difficult or impossible to resolve when stuck all day in school and which are suddenly and easily sorted out when there is a spacious day in which to settle old, half forgotten tasks. As settled they were with a whole check list of little jobs all ticked off!

School tomorrow is going to be something of an anticlimax.

Again.

Lost opportunity!

“If I were you, I’d have the red rather than the White.” Or it may have been the other way round. Whatever! That was the sum total of my conversation with one of the great writers of Wales. Oh yes, he said, “Thank you.”

This less than scintillating exchange came back to me when I was reading the two novellas “The Alone to the Alone” and “The Dark Philosophers” by Gwyn Thomas. Reading them makes me wish that I had had a rather more searching conversation with the author.

These novellas published in 1946 and 1947 deal with the fictitious Welsh location of The Terraces based on the memories of the Rhondda of Gwyn Thomas’s childhood and youth. Cantered on a group of middle aged unemployed friends who meditate (and take action) on the politics and meaning of life the two stories present a sardonic, searching, personal and above all funny view of a period in the life of the Valleys that was anything but amusing.

The action in the stories is slight enough but constantly fascinating because of the easy to pastiche but hard to imitate style of Gwyn Thomas. Take a sentence which is, if not typical, then at least representative from “The Alone to the Alone”: “She was a fair specimen of that woeful daftness that spoils all dignity and negates all purpose in a community whose intimate traditions and self-conceits had taken a thorough shellacking, a gripless fatuity of mental action that undermines the whole system of interlocking relevancies and reduces the equipment of social existence to a dangerous and chilling fragility.”

We are given an almost irresistible mixture of exasperated insight linked to the mundane and archaic in appealing constructions like “woeful daftness” and “gripless fatuity” and the use of a word like “shellacking” wonderful stuff!

This Thomas lacks some of the more obvious self-conscious wordsmithing of Dylan while preserving the darkness of R.S. and the poetic quality of Edward!

I must admit that I had forgotten how much I enjoyed reading him. I thoroughly appreciated his later stuff, even though some of it was perhaps facile and sometimes complacently anti-parochial in that culturally depreciating way that some Welsh writers in English can display.

These two stories appealed in a sort of atavistic way to a memory that I (brought up in a Cardiff suburb) simply do not have – except as a shared folk memory of deprivation and belief in education that was still seeping down the valleys to flavour the growing commercial and administrative wealth of Cardiff even when I was a boy.

But nationality is irrelevant for the reader: these are stories which transcend their background and yet are deeply rooted in it. In the same way that Chekov (to whom Gwyn Thomas has been prepared) is not limited by the Russia in which he sets his tales, so Thomas uses what he knows to explain what any reader can understand.

I think that “The Alone to the Alone” is the more satisfying of the two tales, perhaps because it is the less rounded of the narratives, and anyway how can a story fail with such a title!

I do urge people to read Gwyn Thomas. If you haven’t read him before you are in for a reading delight if you have read him before, then revisit.

The woeful (that word comes courtesy of Gwyn Thomas) weather continues with rain all last night and this morning: snow! Luckily it doesn’t seem to be settling where we are but that must mean that the situation is much worse elsewhere. If it snows in Barcelona then the disruption in the higher reaches of the area must be severe indeed!

In spite of my reiterated plea to close the school we seem to be soldiering on with one of my free periods being taken to cover the class of a colleague who has now been away for over a week and a half. We have some colleagues who are looking at the snow and realizing that they live in the hills and that they stand a chance of not getting home easily. Trust me to live absolutely at sea level just when the weather seems to be about to close schools!

I hate snow with a visceral loathing while still appreciating its picturesque value in decorating far mountain tops. It is when the level of precipitation impinges on my living space that I object! And my school doesn’t close.

That’s the galling bit!

When I was a child . . .

Proust may have re-invented the madeleine as a pastry to the past and a cheap way to travel through time but for me I discovered that it was something else which worked and which appealed to quite another sense.

The multitude of pills that I am taking at the moment seem to be failing, signally, to get rid of my cough. During the day it is not too bad, but the evenings seem to produce a more insistent orchestration of guttural explosions. Something, in the immortal words of that philandering upper class parasite, Had To Be Done.

Toni is a great believer in medicinal syrup, though as one who has drunk the stuff in great quantities straight from the bottle I am not so convinced. The look, smell and viscosity always put me in mind of quack patent medicines - and they don’t work!

This weekend is supposed to be the period when the illness at last gives way and departs from hence. The cough seems to have no intention of leaving so I was not looking forward to another unsettled night. It was then that Toni suggested Vick’s Vapour Rub.

And if that doesn’t take you back then nothing written about by a recluse in a cork lined room will!

Apart from the fact that the Vick bottles that I remember were made of glass rather than plastic everything about the experience took me back instantly to my childhood.

Vick and TCP have one thing in common: you know they are working because they hurt!

Vick, applied liberally on the chest has just a pleasant tingling feeling, but as I recall it was also pushed up my nose and I was given a stinging ‘moustache’ of Vick as well. It’s uncomfortable: it must be working!

I’m not sure that it did but it was worth it for the revisiting of times past and the comforting sharp aroma of illness being confronted.

The sunshine has disappeared today and been replaced by the bright dullness which is a bit of a feature of this winter. Now “bright dullness” is obviously better than dull dullness, but I am looking for streaming sunlight as I feel that my vitamin D levels are dangerously low!

Today is the first day of the Using of the Bike as part of the new approach to exercise. Unfortunately the tyres are a bit flat and we will see how long it takes me to find the pump and bring the air up to the required pressure!

Before any of this happens I have to get some sort of screen to protect the bike from the lustful eyes of the roving thieves who prowl around our neighbourhood seeking what they might acquire.

Back to Gavá for stuff!

Always worth a visit!

The barcarolle of barking which acted as a prelude to the breaking day went beyond a joke. It would appear that our next door neighbours (whose horns seem to be growing more pointed by the day) think that it is acceptable when they leave the house to place their dogs outside in the pen and allow them to bewail their lone state by barking every second on the second! My patience is dissipating with every reiterated decibel!

However the sun is shining, even as I type I can feel its friendly warmth on my neck and it gives me faith that summer is on its long awaited way. At certain points during this long, long winter I have doubted that such a season was ever going to arrive; like a Doubting Thomas I had to feel the vitamin D actually coursing through my veins before I would believe that sun was possible.

In my darker moments I had to keep telling myself that my dissatisfaction was with temperatures which were seven or eight degrees above what I would be experiencing were I still in Wales. It just goes to show that you become accustomed to things with greedy speed and then expect more. Though I have to say that my dissatisfaction is as nothing when compared to the natives in this area who make the winter sound as though they expect Scott and Amundsen to be setting up base camp in Plaça Catalunya!

Toni has suggested that we go to Sitges for lunch in our little restaurant that represents best value for money in a very expensive resort. The sun beckons and I shall take my camera!

After a good value if unspectacular meal in our usual restaurant we walked along the sea front in Sitges and were duly impressed with the new development at Platja Sant Sebastia, and stretching over to Platja dels Balmins and Platja d'Aiguadolc. This has made all the area much more visitor friendly without the threat of instant death from the traffic squashed into too small a space with wandering tourists! The new paved pedestrian areas look spacious and pristine and, most importantly, welcoming. Even the church with its intimidating graveyard has been given a coat of paint and looks rather imposing. There has been some landscaping behind the beaches and the whole effect is positive and rather impressive.

Toni was insistent that I take photographs of rocks so that he can get some ideas for one of the paintings that he is currently engaged in completing. I did managed to take other photographs including one which I rather liked showing part of a church with a skeletal tree looking like some sort of many legged creature emerging from a window. I obviously meant it as a cutting comment on present day Roman Catholicism whose exact meaning I will work out at a later date.

One or two of the other photos of Sitges have come out well and I am glad I took the camera!

The bike rack is now in place. It wasn’t even mildly simple to do and the end result is something less than professional but it does the job and it will hopefully mean that I use the bike. I have, of course, lost the key to the bike lock which has remained unused for the last few months and so have had to buy another. I expect to find the key for the other one almost immediately if sod’s law is still in operation.

And I feel that it certainly is because my cough still hasn’t gone.

To sleep perchance?

I have had more sleep over the past few days than is healthy or normal!

I am now thoroughly fed up with the persistence of my cough and the consequent propensity to flop down on a horizontal surface and slip into the arms of Morpheus. While this unconsciousness has its attractions I prefer to be awake and at least reading!

I have decided that the germs have one more weekend of superiority and then, if the present régime of large tablets has not had some dramatic effect then I will return to the medical centre and demand more attractive drugs.

The only real task which I have ahead of me at the weekend is constructing the bike rack and drilling it into the patio. This is not as daunting as it sounds as it only has to be secured by four screws and I have a sinking feeling that one hefty pull will dislodge them with comparative ease. Still, I will check that my household insurance covers the machine and will then hope for the best!

It is part of the New Life that I envisage for myself that the bike is readily available (and as readily used) so that the idea of vigorous swimming can ease itself into my mind to complete my exercise quota. Although we have had one good day of sun in the last week or so (!) I know that it has not warmed up the outside pool in the slightest and I have no intention whatsoever of flinging myself into the icy deeps: I want exercise not execution!

Our confusion over the absence of our colleague in school continues to cause disruption with last second alterations to class composition and content making the working day just that little bit more exciting. I think that I will have to cough more excitingly to ensure my exclusion from any extra classes which may be offered for my consideration during free periods!

The unholy cocktail of drugs that I am taking must be playing havoc with my gastric system: the fact that I am now taking thirteen pills a day is not something that I want to continue with for very much longer! Hopefully this weekend will see the end of the contumacious cough!

So tomorrow the only thing I have to do is to ensure that the bike rack exists on the patio and is securely screwed in. Not much in itself, but something which I have been writing about and not doing since I bought the damn thing!

Small targets give a disproportionate sense of achievement if you actually manage to get them done. Just what you need for a weekend!

Cough consideration!

With depleted forces in the English department in school things are a little strained as we try and cope without the support of external help. The head of department is frantically trying to find teachers who will be able to give some form of extended service in the school.

At the moment the absence of one teacher is being covered by colleagues in school while I cough delicately in the background and am thereby excused from extra duty.

Amazingly (for a school) I was actually thanked for “struggling into school”! This has to be a first; it could start a whole new trend in appreciation! But welcome though it is it doesn’t actually put any extra money in the bank!

The drive to and from school is made more vivid by the continuing celebration of the life and work of Chopin. His anniversary is being marked by a concentration on his surging melodies so the drab reality of the usual traffic jams is being accentuated by swellingly Romantic music.

The most obvious element in this festival of a composer best known for his piano music is the astonishing differences in the sound of the pianos that have been used and the wide range of quality reproduction to bring his music to listeners. As the music channel to which I listen is in Catalan and is the equivalent of Classic FM I tend to miss some of the finer points in the commentary of the programme presenters. As long as the announcers are not too long winded I can usually understand the gist of what they are saying; after all gushing sketchiness is easy to interpret!

The names of performers are usually familiar to me but with Chopin it would also be interesting to hear what instrument they are using. Some of the recordings we have listened to have hardly been of the ‘historical’ variety, but the pianos on which they have been played have verged on the ‘honky-tonk’! I am not sure that Chopin would have played on the forte piano, but some of the music certainly sounds as if it has been played on something which has lacked the subtlety of a modern instrument.

The most important thing that I have to do is resist the wealth of excellent value CDs which have been issued to mark Chopin’s anniversary. I am not so sure how long I can hold out!

Dogs.

I have always thought of myself as a dog person. Cats are alien life forms and constantly show their contempt for humans with every attitude they adopt. They treat their owners with barely concealed contempt and strut about with an arrogance which is positively human in its intensity!

No, dogs with their engaging dependency are by far the better option.

Or at least so I thought until living in this country.

Dog ownership seems to be a sine qua non for living in our part of Castelldefels with the emphasis on the rat-dog variety of ugly, yapping, etiolated apologies for what makes up a real dog which, on the other hand, fit so easily into the life of a flat dweller.

In spite of lip service paid to the importance of cleaning up after what Le Corbusier would I’m sure have called “A machine for defecating” you only have to walk through out shit strewn streets to see that most owners regard our pavements as one vast dog’s toilet.

And the barking.

In spite of the fact that the area in which we live is densely populated with houses and flats each dog owner seems to think that they live in a landed estate well separated from their neighbours where a howling, yapping, barking, snarling, snuffling dog will be inaudible to everyone. Dogs’ behaviour is regarded as a force of nature which, like thunder and lightning, are regarded as acts of god.

Common consideration should inform the actions of people who live in a community – but it doesn’t. I don’t know why I am surprised; you can tell the quality of a community by the way that it parks its cars. And the way our fellow citizens park has to be seen to be believed!

This moan has been brought on by the actions (or rather inactions) of our new next door neighbours who place their dogs outdoors in a caged enclosure and leave them to bark their way to hoarseness at night and when they are out thereby disturbing numerous households. They seem unable or unwilling to hear the quantity of sheer noise that their so-called pets produce. Robert (bless him!) has suggested that we solve the problem by killing the dog! Why is it that that seems the easier option than simply going next door and asking them to shut the thing up!

Perhaps this is god’s way of preparing us for the advent of our next door neighbours on the other side who truly are the Neighbours from Hell and their inconsideration makes Margaret Thatcher look like a namby-pamby angel of mercy!

When April arrives we have to get into training and flex our telephone number punching fingers so that we can call the police when the rollicking outdoors festivities of our thoughtless neighbours (who will probably arrive in May for their five month stay in their holiday home) get obnoxious.

It’s part of our established calendar!

Coughs and capability

As I wake up semi-comatose and go through the invigoration of my ablutions in a Zombie-like trance, automatically turning on the internet wireless to have my fix of Radio 4 before I set out for the horrors of the ring road, I do not have to use my voice.

It is only when I arrive at school that I have to speak. This morning what emerged when I attempted to vibrate my vocal chords was a strangulated croak. This was neither sexy nor intelligible and it wakened a dim glimmer of hope that if I was without voice then I would have to go home.

It was only then that I discovered the full ameliorative qualities of a hot cup of tea.

One cup later the hacking cough was still there but a voice had emerged. Caffeine and tannin have a lot to answer for. Thank you very much PG Tips and your pyramidal bags!

At least this is my early finish and I intend to take the full period: I want to be capable of listening to Irene when we meet this evening for one of our regular chats and discussions about life and the founding of much needed schools!

The weather continues unsettled with high winds added to the generally dull skies which mock my craving for the sight of my favourite star. Rain is scheduled for later in the day and the only bright spot is that the class I should be teaching now have been taken to the Zoo Museum. All known jokes about where to leave the kids so that they could be devoured or accepted into another animal group have been made and unfortunately they will remain in the realm of fantasy!

As the months roll by the question of where we are going to continue to live becomes more pressing. At the end of May we will have been in the house for a year and that means that we will be able to leave. The rent on the present place is high (though lower than the flat by the sea) but we can always move further inland to find a cheaper place. These issues are going to be more pressing the further we get towards the summer. Nothing remains the same and it is just a question of seeing how things turn out.

I am less and less inclined to stay in school for any time longer than is absolutely necessary. Although the temptation to find out what it is like to work when you actually don’t need to is strong, the price in terms of stress and inconvenience is not even remotely compensated for by the derisory salary that we are given – so, things to think about.

As usual!

Weak flesh!

This was typed on Monday 1st of March - Saint David's Day

The jingoistic tie has created a more than satisfactory stir in the privileged young amongst whom I move. It is something which it is hard to be indifferent to and wearing it has allowed me to say “Bore da!” to my pupils. If I do nothing else I do sensitise them to the fact that the west of Britain contains another country!

A magazine was thrown on the table which had a leading article on “The Taste and Flavour of Catalonia”; it is good to see that the press follows the example set by the Sitges Wine Tasting Group yesterday with its grand array of wine and cheese from the region! Where we lead the rest inevitably follow!

I have now discovered the end of term is an interminable 26 days away. I have not had the courage to check how long the holidays are because I am sure that it would reduce me to tears. At least in the UK you can be assured of a full fortnight; here, because of the alluringly long summer break they can curtail breaks during the year with the explanation that we will get it all back later. Working in a system which does not have a half term, you realize just how important such breaks are and their lack makes the term stretch out like some sort of drawing in perspective where the lines seem to stretch for infinity and indeed beyond.

My mood is not helped by one of my colleagues singing “I will survive” in a broken voice tinged with despair as he totters from the staff room to his next class. We also have a colleague in the department away and the first choice in this place is for the department to cover its own – and I have a vulnerable period in our ridiculously long day.

I fear that the fact that I own a fabulous tie is not going to ameliorate the pain of losing a non contact period. It never does!

The loss of my voice to a deep sexy croak over the weekend has now developed into a hacking cough and a cut off point for reprimands which is well below the level needed to get young Catalans and assorted Iberians to do as you want.

The cough has now developed so that I am not feeling at my best. I resent the fact that my absence tomorrow would cause serious problems as the school makes no attempt to find supply teachers. All the burden is placed squarely on colleagues; and all the guilt is placed squarely on those who might be ill! I think that it is pernicious system for which the management of the institution must take responsibility. I do recognize that finding English speaking teachers who are prepared to do supply work is difficult, but that should not stop the place trying to find a group prepared to help. But apart from grumbling and feelings of resentment nothing concrete is done and there is no real process by which opinions can be officially transmitted to wherever the real executive power is situated!

Meanwhile on a more mundane level the exhibition of photographs in the mathematics competition have now been put up and the English department’s efforts look fairly good.

Part of the competition is decided on the caption chosen for each photograph.

Chris said that if there was a prize for the most pretentious caption that I would win hands down!

I was strangely gratified by such a commendation!

Tuesday 2nd March 2010

As usual bed rest and a shut-down of the system has produced its usual results, so that I feel relatively good today and resentfully have had to complete my teaching load without crying off and going home. My body has a lot to answer for in its efforts to keep me sickeningly close to the smaller members of the community seeking education!

More photographs have appeared in the Great Mathematics Photography Competition but I still think that Chris and I have a more than reasonable chance of keeping off foreign competition. Disturbingly we are still not clear about how the eventual winners emerge so we are asking cagy questions in an effort to find some transparency about the whole affair.

Another way of looking at this process was voiced by Chris, who said that we should recognize how appallingly empty our lives are if this is the most important event on the horizon! Rather defiantly I opined that I was looking at it from an anthropological point of view and seeking to discover new aspects of the way our institution operates by the way that this competition is judged. It’s what I do!

I was furious with two giggling girls in class yesterday and as part of the pantomime of my fury about such lèse majesté I slammed the door at their departure with such intensity that it echoed round Building 1. Unfortunately it also acted as a disincentive for a pair of prospective parents to deposit their child in a place where such barbarism could take place! Ah me!

On the plus side I have just been given a mixed selection of pepper corms.

I think that I could do without all spices and even salt as long as I was left a twist of freshly ground black pepper to use on my food. Considering the fantastic price that pepper used to fetch, weight for weight more than gold, I think that we should rejoice that it is now so cheap and use it with reckless abandon.

I am told that my ‘over’ use of this condiment is bad for my health and ruins the taste of the food – to which I reply that faint are they of heart that eschew the ‘black rain’ to make their lives less savoury. So there.

Finding loose pepper corms is somewhat difficult in this part of the world as all the shops seem to demand that you buy a one-use pepper grinder to get hold of them. Suzanne, however, has gone to her herbal shop and returned to school with the multi-coloured delights in a little plastic bag. I have been breathing in their heady aroma like some sick junkie as I wait for my next lesson and perhaps I should be a tad concerned that no one has taken the slighted notice of the black powder drugged bliss on my weary face!

Smelled through the plastic the aroma is reminiscent of very old leather bound books. But I would say something like that, wouldn’t I?

My reading has fallen off of late and the old horsemen of the Apocalypse are still trotting half ignored at my heels. I think that as it wasn’t the book that I expected it to be I have lost a certain amount of enthusiasm for it and I can’t really see a way in which it is going to claim my full attention. I live however, as always, in hope.

Toni is painting like a demon and has turned to representational art after two abstract canvases. His magnum opus continues to gather paint and the strangely stretched tree has now assumed more conventional proportions. The sky is also receiving treatment and layers of paint continue to be laid down like the sediment at the bottom of a lake being fed by a glacier. Well, there is a snow covered mountain in the paintings so I feel fully justified in the image!

My own work on the classification of the books has progressed not a jot and I feel almost guilty about it. I have looked for the Boris Vian book and, although I have found a play by him, the Penguin Modern Classic version of ‘Froth on the Day Dream’ continues to elude my eyes. Still, I have given myself until the middle of the summer to get things into some sort of order so there is still time for that odd little book to turn up.

And this evening to town again to renew my angst at the complete arrogance of The Worst Bank in the World for doing precisely nothing to refund the money that they have taken wrongly!

It is good to have a cause in life!

Survival

I am not sure how you judge a wine tasting, but the inability to talk the next day must be some indication of quality!

During an excellent evening in which my voice got hoarser and quieter we consumed numerous bottles of wine of varying quality. The last wine we tasted was twice the price of anything else we drank and it was head and shoulders above the rest. It says much for the quality of the wine that even after a meal, various Catalan cheeses, ferocious pimentos de padron and numerous sips of other wines it was clearly the tipple of choice for us all.
We had ten wines to taste: two whites and eights whites. We chose wines from many of the Catalan D.O. regions
BLANCOS
1 ALELLA Marfil 2008 €6.90 This wine had an assertive nose but not lasting; slightly earthy with a harsh taste at the back of the mouth; acerbic and dry.
2 CATALUNYA Macizo 2008 €15.60 Nose of apple and horse-chestnut; crisp with an aftertaste of cheap sweets.
GARANTXO
3 MONTSANT Bruberry 2008 €9.90 Slightly medicinal nose with fruit overtones; deep and smooth taste which filled the mouth; smoky and astringent. This wine was a disappointment as I have had it before and really like the taste!
4 EMPORDA IO Masia Serra 2004 €15.20 A bizarre looking bottle with the wording on the label struck out! The nose was frankly awful smelling of paint thinner. The taste was sickly and insipid with a faint metallic taste. This one grew on me and I liked the aftertaste.
5 TERRA ALTA Llàgrimes de Tardor 2006 €7.75 Rich and complex nose; taste slightly sugary; high tannin content leaving a sherbety dryness in the mouth; slight after taste of toffee.
6 PRIORAT Camins del Priorat 2007 €13.50 Assertive and slightly acidic; high tannin; smooth finish.
CABERNET
7 PLA DE BAGES Abadal 2008 €6.85 Unobtrusive and drinkable.
8 PENEDÉS Pas Curtei 2007 €6.85 Nose of wheat and agriculture; slightly Sharp and papery with a well channelled taste.
9 COSTERS DEL SEGRE Vilosell 2007 €10.80 Sharp taste with a memory of Champagne-like pettilance; excellent after taste.
10 PRIORAT Somni 2007 €35.50 By far the best bottle of wine of the evening; smooth, sophisticated and delicious.

It has been suggested (possibly in self defence) that for our next meeting we have fewer wines to try but of higher quality and of the sort of wines that we would not normally buy. We shall see.

I have been contacted by Christopher with the suggestion of a web site that might help me in the disposal of books which I keep promising to start. Throwing out a book is anathema to me so I have been considering the possibility of getting some of the labels from http://www.bookcrossing-spain.com/ which would encourage me to leave books in public places so that they can be picked up by strangers and start a journey of being read and abandoned.

Christopher’s suggestion is that I look at http://bookmooch.com/ which is a site at which you can list the books you want to get rid of and then send them to people who express an interest and in return you get points to ‘spend’ on books which you want from others. I rather like this idea, but there will be a fair amount of postage involved, but at least the books will be going where they are wanted. I think that this deserves more study. It would also fit Toni’s injunction that any new book must be matched by an old one being ‘disposed of’.

Now for some cough medicine. Perhaps I should write tasting notes on that as well!

What money can buy!

The old truism, “Be careful what you ask for because you might get it” came to mind last night when I went to get the cheese for the Wine Tasting.

I visited the Deli in the centre of Castelldefels. It is a gastronomically beautiful place, but perhaps I should have been alerted by the fact that the shop name was emblazoned in a terminally elegant script. I had previously visited this establishment for an eye-wateringly expensive piece of cheddar and had been impressed by the knowledge of the person serving me and the fact that he knew about Wales.

This visit was for the selection of Catalan cheeses which are to be an accompaniment to the array (selection seems far too mild a word) of wines that have been purchased for the occasion.

Feeling fairly confident about what to ask for I informed the shop assistant that I wanted a “surtido de quesos” which means a selection of cheeses. I should perhaps have remembered the way that this innocent sounding request is interpreted in restaurants.

I watched in something approaching horror as the selection of cheeses were pared of their rinds and then carefully cut into bite sized segments and arranged artfully on a golden plate. At my request small cards were written to inform gourmands of the name of the cheese that they were sampling. This hand carving of already expensive cheese took so long that I could barely walk when I finally staggered away from the shop clutching a bag which contained a cardboard construction which in turn contained a bad which contained the cheese.

I paid by card because I do not think that I could have stayed the tears if I had had to hand over sheaves of money!

As getting the cheese was one of the three tasks that I had set myself for today I am now reduced to two: constructing the booklet for the tasting and getting some sort of metal construction to which to attach me bike to discourage the thieves who regard our part of the world as one large free shop!

Our new next door neighbours continue to disappoint. One of their bloody dogs has obviously been partially de-barked and its emasculated efforts sound like two rocks being ground together in a distant room. The other animal, however, is of the full throated variety and barks at anything that moves, anywhere in the vicinity and when tired of that emits a mournful howl. I hate it.

The ironic aspect of this cacophonous menagerie is that when the mendacious owner first arrived and engaged in conversation one of his first questions was whether this neighbourhood was noisy! I said that apart from the occasional aeroplane the noisiest aspect of living here were the dogs. In my innocence I had thought that he valued silence, not that he was going to shatter it!

And as if that were not enough, we now have only two months left before the arrival of The Scumbags who infest the house on the other side of us for the summer months. The Scumbags also have a crippled dog which has to be decorously arranged on the grass by his doting owners so that he can take the sun. His bark sounds as though someone (and the idea has certainly passed through my mind) is sticking a long, sharp pin into him in one of the areas where the thing still has feeling!

The periods of silence between the monomaniac yelps of the demented dog are almost as hard to bear as the noise the thing makes as you are waiting for the next bark.

It is now almost lunchtime and I have merely assembled the determination to do something rather than having achieved much! The information I have to present this evening is all on the coffee table in front of me; the ideas for the cover are stirring yeastily in my mind all it needs is action for things to happen.

A later entry will inform you whether I have done things in good time or waited for the adrenalin to kick in to get things done when there isn’t really the time left!

I am trying to get used to skimmed milk again. Not even real skimmed milk but rather the long-life variety. It says much for the way that I drink tea that my first cups of skimmed milk adulterated milk were not the shock I remember from the experience of Tesco red pack aged milk which, as far as I can remember, was vaguely white liquid and about as far removed from the dairy product that I relish as Alpha Centuri is from The Horse Head Nebula. I don’t actually know how far that is, but it must be more than a 15 minute drive!

Now to taste or ‘taste’ wine!

The Last Weekend!

Things have got to change!

Ah me! The wistful memories that such an injunction brings to mind! I wonder if I can still list all the times that I have stated (with a passion almost the equivalent of truth) that the status quo was not acceptable!

This time, however, the phrase has to be a lot more than a windy susurration.

I have been to see the nurse as part of my medical review and, although my charm managed to bring a smile to her face and a simper to her lips, she was quite firm in her conclusions. Conclusions which I fear are going to be reiterated with some degree of eyebrow raising intensity by the doctor when I see him this evening.

Those things which should not be high are, well, high and there is only so much that drugs can do before human willpower is called into play.

The bike is going to have to be brought out of its winter hibernation from the cupboard underneath the stairs and some form of bike stand drilled into the patio so that the thing can be kept outside. This is essential because the palaver of taking the bike out of the shed makes its use less than attractive as two other bikes have to extricated first. And when I say extricated I mean the solving of an intricate three dimensional jigsaw where the pedals are just a tiny bit irritating because they manage to link themselves together in the manner of one of those twisted metal puzzles that grandparents give to their grandchildren so they can see what a child with Attention Deficit Syndrome looks like.

By the time my bike is finally out of the shed and my murderous thoughts have calmed down a little, it is time to put the other two bikes back – knowing that when my bike ride is over I will have to take them out to put my bike back first and then fit the other two in again.

It isn’t worth the effort. And the bike staying in the shed unmolested for the colder months shows that. So a way of keeping the bike outside and ‘ready to go’ (apart from the numerous bike locks) is the only solution.

My attempts to find a 'bike safe' such as Clarrie and Mary have resulted in such looks of concentrated susupiciong and disbelief on Catalan faces that I fear that the time for such exotic things simply has not arrived in this part of the world!

Tomorrow is the Wine Tasting and I have done nothing, apart from not finding the bottle of wine that I wanted to put on the cover, about getting the booklet together. I am sure it will make Saturday just that little bit more interesting!

I have also said that I will provide a selection of Catalan cheese and I am relying on a recently found shop in Castelldefels to provide all the examples that I can hope to find. Cheese is disproportionately expensive here so I might find that I have drawn the short straw in compensating for the fact that the house is not really suitable for a gathering of a dozen in civilized surroundings.

Our Tasting is not going to be in Sitges but in St Pere de Ribes, though I will be staying in Sitges at the end of the evening. The fact that there is not a late train from Sitges to Castelldefels is something of a drawback to extended festivities but I have a friend in Sitges who extends the facilities of her ‘hotel’ for the night!

Before then I have to purchase a representative selection of Catalan cheeses to complement the selection of Catalan wines that we are going to taste. I know nothing of Catalan cheese and the ones that I have seen all look the same to me and have something of the same taste. I am sure that the (reassuringly) expensive deli in the centre of Castelldefels will guide my wallet to emptiness in the cause of gastronomic delight and exquisite flavour!

Escape! Some hope!

The Great and the Good (or at least the governing council of our school) has been visiting today.

I am still no further forward in finding out just how our institution runs than I was when I first arrived. At one level it seems democratic and above board, but when you try and find out specific information then the waters become just a little muddier! But that doesn’t really distinguish it from most of the other schools in which I have worked. Sometimes information clearly laid out can be obfuscation personified. I’m not sure that the previous sentence makes any sense but what I am getting at is that presentation of information can be a variant on the ‘hide something in full view’ technique.

We seem to be a Foundation and a Grant Aided school at the same time and in addition we charge large fees for the students in our care, but we do not seem to be dripping with wealth; at least the teachers don’t! What, one is tempted to ask, happens to the money! The perennial cry of teachers through the ages!

Toni has started to produce abstract paintings. I found the first when I came downstairs to begin the tea ceremony which is an essential propellant in making the transition from inside to outside to get me to school.

There, leaning gently against the large canvas on which Toni has been working for some time and which has more layers of paint than the Sistine Chapel was a vibrant scarlet canvas with a vaguely fish like form in streaks of colour. In the centre was a round white blob surrounded by yellow and orange. All in all remarkably effective and I even (gasp!) took down MY photograph of the frozen rose to put up Toni’s latest efforts. And it looks good.

He has already started a second canvas which is a black base with smears of silver metallic paint and that is well on its way towards being a successful emanation of Toni’s artistic spirit! I think that these canvases are much more lively and interesting than his more representational paintings and have a flair and panache that the others lack.

I only hope that this artistic outpouring can be converted into a reasonable cash flow.

Bring on the internet!