Comestibles

I may have been wearing a jumper and a vest but I did have lunch on the outside balcony of our local restaurant on the beach. There was a brisk, blustery wind and the paper place mat had to be held down with the wine bottle and the knife and fork but the sun was in my face and it was acceptable.



I was, of course, the only person not wearing a coat and the only person not looking as though they were very much braving the elements sitting in the open air!


While the meal was perfectly acceptable the view over the sea looking towards the headland in the distance at the end of the sweep of the beach with the sun slowly sinking was breathtaking.


The incentive to leave the restaurant and go home was what had arrived early in the morning.


Having been brought up on Radio 4, I am a true disciple of the “unconsidered trifle” approach towards human knowledge. I delight in the squirreling away of unrelated facts, opinions and assertions like some sort of bookish magpie - and what arrived this morning feeds this need.


Having heard a few of the broadcasts I was eagerly awaiting the book which simply had to be produced to go with the series and Amazon (god bless it) afforded me the opportunity to get the book at cut price so that even with the postage and package I still managed to save almost ten quid.


“A History of the World in 100 Objects” by Neil MacGregor is published by an impressive trinity of The British Museum, the BBC and Allen Lane. It is a delight.


Where else, in one set of hardback covers, could I have found out that the blue colour in the Hokusai woodcut of The Great Wave is actually Prussian Blue and not a native Japanese pigment and therefore the print is a reflection of the opening up of Japanese society rather than a stylized statement of its otherness; that Lothair (he of the Crystal showing the story of Suzanna and the naughty elders and a descendant of Charlemagne) was King of Lotharingia a country squashed between the greater possessions of Charles the Bald in the west and Louis the German in the east. This country was devoured by his neighbours after his death but, and this is what I didn’t know, the name of Lotharingia survives in the name of Lorraine!


If things like that don’t interest you then I can only echo with Mr T and say, “I pity the fool!”


The book is a treasure trove, both literally and in a descriptive sense as MacGreggor’s writing is short and to the point and aimed quite clearly at the general reader.


The range, as you would expect if you could draw on the resources of an institution like the British Museum is astonishing ranging from the pebble looking stone sculpture of the Ain Sakhri Lovers Figurine of 9000BC to the much more detailed lovers in the rather surprisingly explicit Warren Cup from Roman times from some 9000 years later.


From The Rosetta Stone to a gold VISA card the objects defy expectation and the urge to read is akin to that I feel when I inadvertently open The Guinness Book of Records and lose myself inside. I fear that this book is going to make my everyday conversation even more unbearable than it is at the moment. After all Radio 4 listeners are few and far between in this part of the world so I have the field clear to drop interesting pieces of information into any conversations in which I happen to find myself!


Back to the book!

Seems is what is real!

We have all agreed that only teaching Thursday and Friday this week has not meant that the teaching week has seemed dramatically shorter. This is a well attested phenomenon that is a function of teaching late in the term and any teacher with more than a few days experience will assert the truth of the observation.



This is especially daunting as next week (a full week) starts off with one of our legendary and interminable meetings after school when ever single class is commented on and every teacher has to make some sort of fatuous comment.


Of course as we are taking about individual students and classes and not educational theory or curriculum everyone has something to say – apart from my good self when I only speak when I am forced to; and only then through gritted teeth.


We have now been told of the “final” arrangements for the so-called “White Week” or “Ski Week” or “Trip Week” that is going to take place in late February or early March.


We people who are not (emphatically not) going on any trips with any pupils have been told that, thanks to an arcane calculation we will be required to come in to school for three days in the week from 9 to 1 pm. Monday and Friday are both “free” making satisfyingly long weekends at each end of this fiasco.


To be fair the week is not the fault of the school but rather of an idiot of a minister for education in Catalonia making up policy on the hoof and then looking on bemusedly as schools tried to make practical sense of his mindless pronouncements.


The school does actually pay teachers a flat rate for each day that they go on a trip with the pupils, but this does not compensate for the woeful rates of pay for our full time services. This is just of academic interest to me as going on school trips is not something which I would contemplate however much (and it isn’t that much) extra that they pay.


A few Christmas trees have gone up in the school but there is precious little sense of the festive season around. In Castelldefels the main street is bedecked with furry coloured discs suspended across the street and our part of the town has sprouted a single forlorn Christmas greeting across one of the side streets. There is no evidence of Christmas trees blazing away behind net curtains and the number of external lights on houses is summed up in the single word “paucity.”


The single clearest indication that Christmas is imminent is the supermarket shelves groaning with the weight of solid slabs of calories in the shape of turron. This confection comes in all shapes sizes and consistencies and represents the total sugar output of half a dozen Caribbean islands. No festive home is complete without it and an unwary visitor is presented with a bewildering array of tooth rotting delight to eat.


One gets much more of a sense of Christmas from watching (as I now can) British television through the magical assistance of the internet and the Pauls’ “switchbox”. I don’t really understand the details but my birthday present of a complex program on my laptop means that I can infiltrate my televisual way into a house in Rumney and Cardiff and using their aerial in some sort of undefined way piggyback my way onto the airwaves.


I watched an episode of “Grand Designs” and realized how much I had missed intelligent, well presented, interesting television!


Time for a little more!

What next!

The trauma of going back to work after the too short/too long holiday of three days added to the weekend was made even worse by the fact that it rained as well!



In a comic re-run of our “self inflicted injury” approach to deadlines, no sooner were we back on the treadmill of lessons than we were worrying about the collation of examination results and the termly grades that are the be-all and end-all of the educational life of our school. Suddenly everything has to be done and dusted by midday tomorrow. A self imposed deadline which, as far as I can see has no real relevance to anything in the so-called “real” world as opposed to dictates of the fervid atmosphere of our institute on the hill!


I didn’t get out of school until 6 pm this evening after marking part of the sixth form’s mock exam which should have been marked by a computer but had to be done by hand as we do not have the optical reader which would have allowed me to leave way before darkness fell!


The fun and games continue on Monday when we have one of our periodic monster meetings of the entire teaching staff talking about pupils way into the same darkness that engulphed me this evening.


The stories of what happened today in the demonstrations against the imposition of increased tuition fees for university students is a disturbing indication of what is to come.


Even in my days in university all demonstrations were places where, mixed with the “normal” students making a shamefaced manifestation of their wishy-washy liberal sentiments, there were always members of the hard left or the SWP or Communists (in the days when it was still intellectually acceptable to feel something approaching toleration for that much abused system) or hangers on from some sort of more politically involved group than the overwhelmingly white, middle class and slightly diffident students making polite demonstrations that I was involved with.


Smashing shop windows in Oxford Street and splashing paint on the Roller of the Prince of Wales seems to be a taste of what is yet to come.


The cuts have not yet really begun to be felt by the general population and, it has to be admitted that student tuition fees is something of a side issue from what is going to affect the pockets of the people in Britain in the next couple of years.


The Lib-Dems, after swigging deeply from the poisoned chalice should not be particularly surprised that the party is now imploding to a chorus of vituperation from people who feel that they have been betrayed by the vacillating approach which is an integral part of the realities of being part of a government which is largely made up of people with whom you don’t agree. I am not sure what the Lib-Dems should have done, but I am blood sure that I will never forgive them for joining the government of Conservatives and I look forward to their being cast into the everlasting darkness (with burning sulphur ever unconsumed) there to gnash their organic, macramé brushed teeth in impotent agony. God rot them. And the Conservatives too. Don’t think that I failed to notice that the so-called Prime Minister of my country invited That Woman to come and have tea with him in Downing Street. God rot the lot of them!


Much as I despise those in the political ascendency at the moment in my country, I am equally disgusted by the violence which opportunistic demonstrators use which devalues the reasoned opposition of those with a valid case against the present shifting of the weight of payment for the present financial crisis away from those who are mostly to blame and onto those who lack the power to force the government to protect their privileged positions in the financial system.


I think that last paragraph has to be said all in one breath and with innocent eyed exasperation so that the cathartic effect takes away the reason that you might have said it in the first place.


What I should do is go back to my telephone and read another sci-fi story from the 1950s; start reading my book on evolution and make myself a nice cup of tea.


Ahhh!

The fun way to misery!

At the last second I switched my choice of book from the Dawkins’ hit on evolution and chose “Whoops – Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay” by John Lanchester.

This is a brilliant book. Lanchester, with a novelist’s sure touch in the writing, makes this a compulsive read. [If you haven't read it already then I thoroughly recommend his first novel "The Debt to Plasure" a very funny, very nasty and unforgetable story.] He doesn’t talk down to the reader but he acknowledges that what he is writing about is going to affect all of us for some time to come and therefore he feels that he has a mission to help us understand what he thinks has gone on and what needs to be done.

He writes, “The credit crunch was based on a climate (the post-Cold War victory party of free-market capitalism), a problem (the sub-prime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk) and a failure, that of the regulators. It was their job to prevent both the collapse of individual companies and systemic risks which ensured they failed. But that failure wasn’t so much the absence of attention to individual details as it was an entire culture to do with the primacy of business, of money, of deregulation, of putting the interest of the financial sector first.”

This sort of clarity is a key element in the narrative which he tells. His explanations are clear and easily understood and he links anecdote and allusion to illuminate his perceptions. He is very much a participant in this story and it is difficult not to be drawn into his world when he starts off chapter one with, “As a child I was frightened of cashpoint machines.”


Essentially this is a depressing book with his descriptions of (some) bankers and the activity of banks guaranteed to test the limits of the reader’s credulity while we the taxpayers fork out money to keep them in business.


This book should be required reading for anyone who feels short changed by what has gone on and wants a clear explanation of what has happened, is happening and what is likely to come.


I won’t waste my time suggesting that this should be compulsory reading for bankers as the ones that were most to blame are the ones still to blame and they are carrying on (with little or no governmental opposition) as though nothing has happened.


It is at times like this that I begin to think that our lack of participation in the radical jollifications that went on throughout Europe in 1848 might be made up for in a crusade against the guilty: we could always import suitable lanterns from the French.


Read it!


Last day of freedom and an 8.15 am start tomorrow: at least it is within a couple of days of the weekend!


I go back to a fury of assessment when all sorts of results have to be loaded into a creaking computer system for use in an after school meeting to discuss (interminably and impertinently) the details of students’ achievement. In Catalan. Sigh.


Lunch today was a deeply unsatisfying experience in a Turkish restaurant. The meat was doggedly tough and the wine tasted as though it had just been made. And not cheap either. To my bewilderment the restaurant filled rapidly and people seemed eager to eat the well displayed by culinary vacuous offerings.


Today was a fiesta and there was much blowing of raucous reeded instruments in the town square in front of the church and town hall. Stretching down our little Ramblas was a snaking line of small stalls staffed by people wearing approximations of peasant clothing to emphasise the home-made qualities of the produce they were selling.


Though they were undoubtedly quaint I was not tempted to buy anything and happily returned to my book. Many of the stalls were of what can only be described as the “frippery” type with ornaments, soap, pottery and highly priced bread. The prices were all encouragingly high and one wonders yet again where the financial crisis is in all this. There is supposed to be 20% unemployed in Spain; the construction boom has come to an abrupt halt; government employment seems set to take another cut both in terms of employment and in terms of the money paid – all should be doom and gloom but the shops are packed and people seem to have plenty of money to throw around. It is most confusing – though as few people seem to have shown any relationship with the reality of the situation I suppose that I will have to go on dancing on the rim of the crater until the ash begins to fall!


The one thing that I did buy in town was a further supply of Red Earl Gray tea – after all it is only sensible to stock up on essentials in times of trouble!

perchance to read . . .

It is a measure of how far I have changed (in certain respects) that, as I was having lunch I noticed a face I recognized on a television screen behind the bar. I knew him as a past Barça player and it was only a moment before I remembered his name – Deco.



I know to those who know anything about football this is hardly something which merits a feather from Big Chief I-Spy but for me is it a breakthrough – the next thing I will be doing is actually using the names of the pupils in my classes.


But seriously, leaving fantasy to one side, this is more than I can do for any British team – apart, of course, for Ryan Giggs and even I know who he plays for, apart from Wales that is.


Well, that’s exhausted my footballing conversation so back to safer topics.


Apart from odd (very odd) short stories on my phone I have read a novel there called, “The International Spy” by Allen Upward and published in 1904. The book is a thriller with the “baddie” being the Kaiser, though even he turn out to be quite a sporting cove when his dastardly plans are frustrated by the elegant and resourceful spy in the title.


I read this because somewhere in my memory is a collection of short stories called “The Railway Accident and Other Stories” by a left wing writer called Upward. The biography of Allen is interesting and sounds totally made up and I can only assume that he wrote other things which were much more intellectually satisfying than this pulp exercise in vague racist xenophobia.

The other book I have read today is a real one and bought from W H Smith in Luton: “13 Things That Don’t Make Sense – The most intriguing scientific mysteries of our times” by Michael Brooks.


Towards the end of the book, after considering the implications of the “horizon problem” and the uniform temperature of the universe, he writes: “The solutions to the other anomalies might have similarly wide-ranging implications: investigating the origin of death and the story of the giant viruses might lead to radical revisions in evolution: understanding the placebo effect could – and probably should – change the face of medicine; coming to grips with the delusion of free will could alter the way we look at human beings and their responsibilities. It is safe to say, I think, that there is more than enough work ahead for the next generation of radical-thinking scientists – and the generation after that.”


This is the sort of book where I know that I have read all the words but I am not sure that I can explain what I have understood. And that is sad because Michael Brooks writes in clear and fairly simple language; but I am never truly happy when people start taking about quanta at one end and billions of galaxies at the other. I am sure that it has been good for my soul to come to terms with concepts and to discover just how fluid definitions are for things like life, free will, death, sex and the missing matter in the universe.


I am now dangerously overloaded with half understood scientific questions which can make science teachers’ lessons just that little bit more trying as pupils regale them with unanswerable questions from casual remarks in mine!


I well remember a furious colleague rounding on me in the staff room after I had “explained” light to a bemused group of sixth formers – my explanations being based totally on my reading of the play “Hapgood” by Tom Stoppard – and the poor science teacher having to repair the scientific damage I had done to his erstwhile students!


My next W H Smith book is on evolution. God help!  So to speak.


And only one day left before the return to school.


Perhaps I would be safer sticking to the phone and pulp!

Aint it great to be blooming well dead

For any holiday to be worthy of that sacred appellation there has to be a period when I lay out in the sun.



Today this essential part of the procedure was completed. I have to admit that I was fully clothed but I was able to lean back in my chair and allow my face to be bathed in the refulgent vitamin D giving rays.


It wasn’t for a particularly long time before the scattered rags of cloud caught up with the sunshine and made even sitting fully clothed outside less than a good idea; but it was for a time and that satisfies me. And there are two more days for the sunshine to do its health giving work!


I have not been able to stay away from my telephone and have therefore read an inordinate number of pulp science fiction short stories. I have also been able, for the sake of my literary credibility, to find much in them which in terms of narrative, social comment and sheer style worthy of recognition.


To be fair I can feel the old tug of the drug-like qualities of sci-fi dragging me under and I have therefore escaped from the electronic thrall of the potency of cheap literature and start looking at the books that I bought in Luton before boarding the flight back to Spain.

The book that I have almost finished is “The Book of the Dead” by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson. I bought this in spite of the quoted recommendation of the ubiquitous Stephen Fry whose comment was “Dead good.”


This is a book about dead people taking in the famous like Florence Nightingale and Genghis Khan to the reasonably obscure like George Psalmanazar and Archibald Belaney.


This is a type of book where the reading is so ridiculously easy and jolly that you feel mildly guilty reading it in the firm solidity of an armchair at home rather than in the plastic discomfort of an viciously uncomfortable aeroplane seat or on the gritty discomfort of a beach.


As the writing is littered with what the authors of “1066 and all that” call real facts it appeals to my rag-bag mind and I greedily sweep up unconsidered trifles like the “fact” that it was Sir Joshua Reynolds looking at the painting through layers of varnish who termed Rembrandt’s painting “The Night Watch” – though I am not convinced that I believe it.


This is a book which makes me wonder if I should have heard of Fernando Pessoa or have known more about Nikola Tesla. Did I know that Oliver Cromwell was abducted by a monkey while a baby or that Frida Kahlo never went to the district in Mexico where those dresses she wore came from?


As always in book like this that have too friendly a writing style I begin think that this is like one of those books by Borges where the more detail and footnotes there are then the less likely it is to be true!


Any book that links together Leonardo da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, Isaac Newton, Oliver Heaviside, Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, Hans Christian Andersen and Salvador Dalí in one chapter cannot be all bad! Well worth a read!


In the real world today is a bank holiday and, horror of horrors it has brought the scumbag next door neighbours back to their usually vacant house. At the moment there is just much going up and going down staircases with the occasional squawk or some type of rat-like dog; but if they are in residence then the screaming at adolescent girls can only be hours away! On the other side the baying, yapping and dry barking of the canine canaille kept by our bollard wrecking neighbour keeps up its wearisome punctuation day and night.


Tomorrow I assume that the shops will be open again and the menu del dia back to its non fiesta price. Today I had a Japanese meal which, while very good and more than substantial, was almost double the price which one pays on a normal Monday. Well, I suppose that is keeping things going: it is pleasant to think that one is bolstering the European economy and not just being a poor sucker in the profiteering clutches of grasping capitalists.


Back to my reading.

A day to savour!

There is something about a crisp, bright Sunday morning when one is sitting next to the radiator with a strong cup of tea which inspires the soul to expressions of contentment which can only be augmented in felicity by the unprompted remembrance that Monday to Wednesday of next week is a holiday!



The virus infested bedclothes of the past few days have been consigned to the most unrelenting cycle of the washing machine as a sure and certain sign than (a few chesty coughs notwithstanding) my illness has been officially written off.


I consider it positively unprofessional to be unwell during a holiday and these three days will be the last gasp of sanity until the welcome escape of dead time around the end of the year.


For Spanish teachers there is then a truly horrific period of educational slog until the partial relief of Easter which is only a staging post along the via dolorosa which leads to the sunny days of July and August.


Ah, in writing it is but four short paragraphs from a short holiday in December to the glorious months of summer release – in reality it is half a year! Perhaps this is one time when one should adopt the stance of the pessimist and say that the year is “half gone” – though for that to be true one has to “borrow” the months of July and August of 2010 and add them to September to make the maths come out right! Which seems OK to me!


This has been a thoroughly gray day only enlivened by my continued reading of my telephone. I have now completed the Baroness Orczy novel which was, of course, completely forgettable and which displayed a thoroughly reprehensible degree of sympathy for Capet’s Widow or Marie Antoinette as she is more readily known.


I do remember reading the first of the Baroness’s novels when I was an impressionable youth and in those dim and distant days I did have a sneaking sympathy for the Royalists (Wrong but Romantic) and who could not fail to be moved by the figure of The Scarlet Pimpernel!


Them days is long gone and now I feel nothing but repulsion towards that haughty Austrian who thought it would be good fun to dress up in costly silks and brocades to play the part of a milkmaid, taking specially cleaned cows to a parlour fitted out with porcelain by Meissen while the majority of the population of the country she and her like were sucking dry were starving.


And even if she didn’t actually say, “Let them eat cake!” she deserves to be remembered by that startling piece of simple incomprehension and we need to remember that there are plenty more like her in the world today.


Talking of out of touch autocratic, unelected dictators the members of FIFA have come in for the same amount of vituperation that is usually reserved for those making snide remarks about our gallant boys fighting in whatever piece of left over business from our wrecked empire happens to touch the news.


I do think though that the unholy trinity of the luminaries of FIFA, Russia and Qatar together and then having Marie Antoinette join their oligarchic (at best) group would inject simplicity and guilelessness into a thoroughly disreputable group.


I am sure that it would be very revealing to follow the paper chase of expenses that have ensured that the “FIFA” World Cup has gone to two countries where democracy is a hollow concept – but this is sounding more and more like sour grapes and I should merely take the opportunity of wishing Russia and Qatar all the very best of what I am sure will turn out to be a poisoned chalice for the both of them. Salut!


A flattening glass of Cava from lunch is an indication of the reason that I did no academic work today. Tomorrow however, if I can drag myself away from the library on the telephone there is work to be done.


Probably.

Culture Makes You Better

Sometimes the well known, at least to me, syndrome of teaching in front of a class having a sort of rejuvenating and disease defying effect simply doesn’t work.



That happened on Friday when, in spite of feeling generally ok-ish on Thursday, the end of Friday didn’t come at all as soon as I would have liked and my eventual return home was to take to my bed at once!


I put this relapse down to coming in to school a day too soon after the virus that I brought back with me from the UK had worked its evil on my system and kept me away for a day. I am sure that there is a lesson to be learned somewhere in my attitude towards not feeling well and going to school which needs to be drummed into my brain in double quick time!


Today however, apart from the stubborn cough which punctuates my progress, I felt fine and to prove it I took a bus into Barcelona to start our five day “holiday.”


Meeting up with Suzanne was only managed after the frustration by my new phone’s refusal to let me answer a telephone call.


I suppose that I should not be surprised by this inability of the machine to accomplish what it is ostensibly designed to do when all the other functions of the thing are so much more interesting to me.


It is true that my generation of mobile phone users have an almost morbid fear of making a call because we believe that it “costs the earth” and that it is “much cheaper on a land line” – never mind that I am in a foreign country and god alone knows what they are charging me.


I do realize that this is mere paranoia and that I should knuckle down to the realities of life and accept the phone as simply a part of modern life – but I can’t.


I subscribe to enough of the Protestant Work Ethic to believe that mobile phones are, in themselves, little more than an extravagant frippery. We were happy enough with tin cans and stretched string when we were lads and the smooth, gleaming wafers of sleek technology are mere indulgences to high-faluting notions of self importance and nothing more.


But I have started reading out-of-copyright pulp sci-fi stories and I am more than half way through a novel by Baroness Orczy and there is a whole slew of stories by Doctorow that I am about to devour – and all of these are on my phone.


I am slowly discovering the other applications and the quality of the photos that I can take on the phone is substantially better than on my last one – and so on.


It would just be an advantage if I could work out to receive phone calls.


The exhibition of Artists’ Jewellery was interesting but essentially unsatisfying. The individual pieces were sometimes astonishing but the lack of context and the complete absence of process in the display of the pieces meant that there was a much better exhibition waiting to be staged with the exhibits that the one that we saw.


Far more satisfying was the meal we had a lunch time in the excellently situated restaurant in MNAC. It was the first time that Suzanne had been there and she was much impressed.


Although today was bright it was very cold and there was a warm wintery selection from the menu to combat the weather which Suzanne chose: chestnut cream soup and fillet of dory with a pil-pil sauce. I, on the other hand, went for a defiantly summery choice of salad of caramelized apple with tuna belly followed by carpaccio of cod. My sweet of ice cream seemed more than fitting. At least the coffee was hot.


The real success of our cultural foray was the exhibition in the Miró foundation which was “Let us face the future” British Art 1945 to 1968.


This is a major exhibition with an astonishing range of paintings from Hockney to Sutherland taking in some iconic paintings from the period along the way.


It was one of those exhibitions where one (well, I) emit little squeaks of pleasure and surprise as a new delight comes into view. Delicate drawings by Hepworth and Moore contrast with the impasto of Auerbach and Kossoff while the figurative is pushed into other worldliness by Freud and Bacon.


Delicate landscapes from Pasmore and Nicholson in the 40’s are contrasted with later works including Pasmore’s “The Snowstorm: Spiral motif in Black and White” of 1951. There are a couple of delicately crude Kitajs; wavey Rileys and grotesque Hamiltons – including the wonderfully named, “Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland” of 1964.


All in all an exhibition to return to and one for which I do not begrudge the cost of the (hardback!) catalogue – especially as I was given a small reduction in its price for sheer unadulterated cheek!


As the catalogue is in Catalan there is even less encouragement for me to let my eye slip from the pictures into the morass of incomprehensible text. But I will make the effort. Especially as it might be the sort of exhibition to which we could take the kids.


Now its time for me to read by phone before bed!

Abroad thoughs from home!

The clearest thing to emerge from my recent visit to my native land is that I have obviously developed some sort of allergy to the place.



I was fine when I set off on Saturday and was a broken coughing wreck by the time that I returned home to Spain!


I have to admit that an unlikely evening out in High Wickham which took in flavoursome pints of real beer and a deliciously wonderful Indian meal (with more alcohol) and (indeed) with yet more alcohol at the end of it was a delightful interlude from health to illness.


As indeed was the equally delicious, heart-warming and bucolic visit to my Aunt Bet to celebrate her ninety second birthday up a bumpy lane to my cousin’s spacious house in rural Buckingham.


I managed to fit in a rushed visit to Tesco with a fit of delirious spending in the ever welcoming aisles – always with the fear of overstuffing the single piece of luggage that I had to take back with me.


Yes, Saturday (after the two hour wait in Barcelona airport) and Sunday (after losing the key to my hotel room) went well. The birthday party for my aunt and her delight at her presents was well worth the trip and it was an experience to be in such a welcoming and rambling house that my cousin inhabits.


It was the gradual arrival of a cough on Sunday evening and its development in the chilly air of Monday morning with the disconcerting flurries of snow as courtesy details that dragged the delight of the trip back to sordid reality.


Finding a petrol station to fill up the tank on the hired car (and finding that every other hired car in the neighbourhood had found it as well at exactly the same time) linked to the hour wait that we had in some sort of holding pit before we were allowed to board the plane, ensure that by the time I took my seat I was no longer eager to start reading one of the books that I had bought (on pure reflex) from the branch of W H Smith which catches me every time I fly.


No, what I wanted to do was lapse into a semi-coma and arrive immediately in Barcelona (or “into Barcelona” as the air flight attendants will have it) and find my bed.


I did manage to find a seat on the wing where the row of three was blocked by a man so enormous that he made me feel svelte and petit. As he was sitting on the outside seat I felt that if only I could get to the window seat no one would ever try and take the “compressed” middle. And I was right. With the arm rest up and me sprawled diagonally I managed to find some sort of comfortable position and hope for oblivion.


This, of course, did not come, and by the time I was ready to find a taxi in Barcelona airport I was prepared to pay almost any amount of money to get home.


However ill I felt, it would not have been human if I had not tried to make the “prepared laptop” work and see if I could get British television programmes as I had been promised as part of my birthday present.


Astonishingly: it worked. It was just cruel fate that the first programme I tuned into was “The Weakest Link” – I will keep the culture for later.


The bed. But no oblivion. Alternately hot and cold, there was not comfortable position I could find and the night was one of searching for the impossible with moments of drug takings so that by the morning my blood stream was mostly ibuprofen.


Tuesday dawned with my realization that (pride aside) there was no way that I was going to trust my coughing, pill pushed, dog tired body behind the wheel with the usual slew of suicidal drivers that I can usually dismiss with casual contempt.


The rest of the day in bed was a continuing search for the elusive “comfort zone” with only my incandescent hatred of the noisy dogs next door to give lashing direction to my maudlin self pity.


My great mistake was to go in to work the next day, with the result that Wednesday was truly horrific with my falling back into bed at the end of the day.


I did do some teaching, though what its quality must have been like defies description. There is a sort of professional adrenalin that keeps you going when you are in pedagogic mode and not really firing on all available cylinders, but using this invaluable substance means that you have a price to pay when the clientele is not there to keep the fix in place!


Bed beckoned, though not before I downloaded books into my telephone. It is very difficult to convey what unutterable delight that the last sentence actually gives me. I am but scratching at the capabilities of my fearsome phone but the fact that I have the whole of Paradise Lost on my telephone is a fact which gives me particular delight.


In spite of wheezing, coughing and bruised ribs I managed to declaim Satan’s brilliant speech beginning “Not too know me argues yourself unknown, the lowest of your throng” before fatigue and a realization of the astonishing pretention of what I was doing got to me and I fell back into bed.


Today (with the mere grace note accompaniment of theatrical coughing) has been much better and I begin to believe that I will be fully recovered so that I can enjoy the latitude of the “bridge” which means that this weekend will be converted into a sort of mini holiday with three days of next week being mine to do with what I will.


Lazing around and recovering seems like a good plan at the moment!


One more day to get through and then the thought of an exhibition of British Art to look forward to!


Culture to the rescue.

The day before

The blissful silence of a class doing an examination – or at least as near to silence as a group of Spanish pupils get! They ask the most amazingly nit picking questions of the examination itself and are always driven by an almost overwhelming sense of injustice about what they don’t know.



It is not unusual to hear pupils say to a teacher when they have been told that something is wrong and have therefore been denied the mark, “But, I studied!” as if the mere effort of “learning” should be its own reward no matter the accuracy of that learning!


In English teaching you sometimes have to say that the sentence is wrong because it simply isn’t English. Sometimes the work that we are given by weaker pupils looks as though it has been composed by throwing fridge magnet words at the fridge and then writing down the results.


Although English is a remarkably flexible language in many ways or In many ways English is a remarkable flexible language or Remarkably flexible in many ways is English or English, a remarkably flexible language in many ways and so on, the kids manage to find a combination which even I cannot make work – even going back to the structures and spelling in the time of Chaucer!






As some lessons start at 8.15 am the school has a “breakfast” at 10.45 am when the students are given a baguette of some sort. The staff too are given a baguette which I usually ignore but today the offering was a pizza which was delicious. Unfortunately I also have a library duty which meant that I had to rush the savouring of the delicacy – but at least the taste remains!






I am now about to start a whole sequence of lessons which will take me to lunchtime. Then one lesson after lunch and a well deserved escape to complete the packing for my trip. I am relying on there being a decent branch of Tesco in High Wickham to stock my wardrobe with cut price clothing which seems to be in short supply in Catalonia.


Revisiting a store like Tesco makes one realize how far short the other supermarkets in Catalonia fall short of what we Brits have come to expect from a one-stop store. Catalonia has a whole selection of massive supermarket chains but they do not seem to me to have the same emphasis on quality and range that one expects from Tesco, especially.


The tragedy is that I have one piece of luggage and that is always smaller than one expects when it comes to buying things that you can’t get here, or which are far more expensive than an “own brand” equivalent.

The dry decision

Another bright and sunny day.



I know that I shouldn’t dwell on such things, but I still haven’t lost my simple delight in a rainless sequence of cold, but bright and cheerful days.


Today a discussion with the equivalent of the sixth form about the crisis in Spain and a clear division of opinion about the seriousness of the situation.


One boy asserted that much of the problem in this country is psychological – an interesting position to take in a country where there is 20% unemployment and talk of a further cut in the wages of “civil servants” such as teachers!


No-one to whom I have spoken has the slightest faith in the present government and they are acutely embarrassed at the mawkish and faintly embarrassing figure that their prime minister cuts in conferences abroad and world leaders seem to go out of their way to avoid speaking to him.


The situation of Ireland has made me (if not the people in this country) a little jittery about what might happen to Spain. One of the sixth formers said that the economy of Spain was based on tourism and construction and that one has declined and the other has largely been terminated with half built buildings dotted around the country and the city.


The financial background of our kids does have a fairly wide spread from those whose parents are the movers and shakers of the region and beyond, through the prosperous professional to the indigent professional (or teachers) and downwards! I have to say that the graph of the financial situation of our kids is slanted more towards the “haves” than the “have nots” but some of them could well be adversely affected by the continuing crisis.


Meanwhile I exist in a situation where my present salary and the “pourboire” I get on the day before my birthday in each month do not add up to what my salary was when I left Wales. A shocking state of affairs! But the sun does shine.


I have made an almost certain decision to pack, at least partially when I get home this evening; there is surely nothing worse than destroying one’s Friday evening by frantically putting the wrong things in a case which is too small. Though I have to admit that it is something which has been customary for me in the past. I’m not sure that something in which I am not panicking at the last moment actually counts as a “true” holiday!


I have also realized that I have not confirmed anything with my cousin and that I should have done that before now, but I will have to allow that little oversight to act at the “panic” part of my excursion.


In my mind I have a whole series of things that I want to do and objects that I want to buy and I am worriedly certain that I will not have time to get everything done. The compulsory visits to Tesco and M&S are more like a homage to things that are no more for me than a clear destination for things that I need.


The word “need” in itself is an interesting one as far as I am concerned. I “need” things like computers and other gadgets. As long as they come with flashing lights; shiny metallic surfaces; sleek design and complex instruction booklets – what, after all is the point of a gadget if it can be understood and mastered in a few minutes – then I am happy.


Even lever corkscrews, though admittedly simple and elegant in design and simplicity itself to use, have vagaries in their practical application that take many, many bottles to discover.


Not everything can be encompassed in the tissue pages of a multi-lingual tome where the sometimes rarefied use of English (at least) makes it appear to have been translated by a monoglot Serbian from the original Alpha Centurian.


The Internet has now provided the gadgetophile with access to others with his (and it’s usually a “his”) affliction and solutions to problems from any geek with a camera; a predilection for YouTube and an earnest hope that something he does will “go viral.”


I am still scratching the surface of my mobile phone (well, rubbing my finger across it, it is tactile after all) and it is doing very little more than my last mobile phone (significantly, I actually typed camera, but the two are virtually synonymous these days!) and I am stymied by the limited access that I have to the Internet from it. As it is “free” I do not have a contract to access the Internet from everywhere and that is something of a major limitation.


On my last phone I was able, with the inadvertent touch of the wrong key, to find the damn thing connecting to the internet at exorbitant cost. Now, as much as I try my present phone I can only get a connection with the Wi-Fi at school and home! The more sophisticated the more complicated!


Now I must do some packing. I really must – even if it is only for three days!

Am I missing someting?

I am thinking of writing a poem about my school and I shall entitle it “Does it have a mark?” This is because the status of learning in our establishment is directly related to the mark that one might get for shoving it into one’s head to allow one to regurgitate it on paper at a later date. And then promptly forget it of course.



One of the weaker years in our place is particularly concerned that they are not subject to “unfair” practices which will force them into the intolerable position of giving some of their precious time set aside for cramming to something which may not be in the exam and therefore, by virtue of not being examined, not being important and therefore can be dismissed from serious consideration.


Achievement has been narrowed into what can be examined and education is basically a mark out of ten.


It is exhausting to do something so essentially empty and the thanklessness of the consumers doesn’t make such a thankless task any the easier.


Ironically as I sit and fume at the impertinence of needy pupils the first of the welcome emoluments from my decades of toil should be pouring (well, dripping) into my bank account. I expect that my first cheque will be horrifically small as so-called “emergency” taxation is ripped from it but that must surely be repaid at the end of this financial year which is not too far away in April 2011.


I am sure that I should be taking some advice about what is going to happen over the next few months as the reality of what is occurring is going to affect my decisions about what to do next academic year.


Meanwhile the sun shines and all is not well with the world – although it would be if I could have the money without the drudgery of the work that goes with it. Alas, I have found to my cost that money does not come to one unasked, as it were!


Tonight should be the evening in which the Follett book is finished off and then will rust gently in its undisturbed corner for the rest of its existence until it falls into dust having been read once. Alternatively, I could take it in to school and get a few more reads for my money out of a novel that I should have ordered in its electronic form anyway.


Decisions! Decisions!

As if a Monday as not enough

It takes a certain sort of individualistic flair to fall “up” the stairs, but I managed to go it yesterday and in the process Split the nail on the index finger of one hand and jarred the middle finger of the other. Both “injuries” are of the type which does not merit compassion only faint ridicule, but both are irritatingly uncomfortable and remind you of their presence at ever opportune and inopportune moment. Typing is one of those activities that combine maximum utility with a fairly low level of discomfort given my throbbing fingers; but I tend to think that such exercise is, in some way, “good” for my trifling injuries and will ensure their disappearance in extra quick time.



I have discovered that falling and landing on your middle finger is not the most enjoyable of experiences but it does reinforce those half remembered lessons in physics about the increase of force when momentum is concentrated on a small point!






I am now well into the Follett novel and am becoming increasingly irritated by the way in which the author gives extra historical information for the benefit of readers who might lack the necessary general knowledge to follow the text. As his novel is set in 1914 and we are now firmly in the trenches there is a lot of scope for explanation, which he never fails to give.


I know that general knowledge is obvious to those who know and incomprehensible to those who don’t. You either know the three rivers that flow through Cardiff or you don’t. If you do then the information is obvious and if you don’t then the guesses get more and more wild.


Follett’s book is for a general readership and its swathe of geography and history is “breathtaking” (as I am sure the advertising states) so there is a necessity for illumination at certain points but it is nonetheless irritating.


The joins in the formula for writing a book like this are also showing and, although I am devouring the damn thing, I am feeling slightly cheated at the same time. I can see no discernible difference in the structural form of this book from the other two that I have read. To be fair to Follett: why should he change when he has had such notable success in the past? Why indeed and, after all, in spite of my misgivings I did buy the book and I am, in spite of what I am saying, enjoying the book.






Although cold we are enjoying bright sunshine and, yet again, I look wistfully at the panoramic views which sweep down to the Mediterranean and wonder what the hell I am doing here.


Tomorrow, as far as I can work out from the information given to me by the kind people in the UK, will be the first time that I begin to get back some of the money that I have been putting away for the last few decades. It will be a revealing moment for me to find out exactly how much my profession thinks that I am worth after giving an inordinate amount of my time to the education of the young!


I think that it will be another of those “wait-a-minute” moments that will give a new reality to my present way of living.


These questions are more pressing because (partially because of the “wasted” sunshine) I sense the sort of negativity in the staff today which makes me ponder more urgently the application to my own situation of many of the relative pronouns which I have been suggesting that the kids might like to learn!






I listened with disbelief to the pronouncements of the Bishop of Rome about contraception. In the real world I think that his attitude is viciously out of kilter with the demands of the world today, but I also felt a sort of sneaking delight unravelling why he said what he said.


He seems (translation is a tricky thing) to have said in his “book long interview” that male homosexual prostitutes can wear condoms to prevent the spread of disease, specifically that of AIDS. But female prostitutes? Apparently not. The theological justification is that there can be no chance of conception when two men are having sex so that the contraceptive device does nothing to interfere with the conception because there cannot be one. Whereas, on the other hand with female prostitutes there is a chance of contraception and therefore . . .


This puts me in mind of what I have read about the high days of Byzantium when it was said that it was impossible to have a hair cut without engaging your barber in a discussion about the niceties of theology about the divinity or otherwise of Jesus; co-substantial: co-eternal; being one with the Holy Ghost and God the Father etc. taking first place as the number one hot topic to produce a lively conversation while the hair fell!


The truly horrific death rate from AIDS in Africa cannot, of course have any bearing on the debate about contraception in the Roman Church (a nicely ambiguous sentence there!) because the important practicalities have to be based on Jesuitical (naturally) reasoning which uses nit-picking theology rather than the needs of a dying continent!






A much more civilized meeting after school with a colleague preceded by a selection of tapas ranging from stuffed vine leaves to crystallized fruit – a simple repast with actual work afterwards! The things I do for education!






I am now steadily working my way through the Follett novel, though I have steadfastly refused to take it to school to read in the moments that are not filled with teaching or preparation. Such activity is frowned upon in school as every available moment in our ridiculously long day is expected to be filled with school work. However, as far as I am concerned reading is furthering the subject content which is essential for my discipline. Or something.


Only a hundred or so pages to go and we have only had half a dozen remarkable coincidences so far, so plenty of room for a few more before the saga comes to an end!


And still no real preparation for the jaunt to Britain!

Time passes again and again

Already the morning has gone and I have done nothing about getting my stuff together for the journey to Britain. Not only the physical impedimenta that is necessary for modern travel but also the psychological help which is essential for those benighted souls who are flying into Luton (breathe in not in Garth) rather than a real airport.



The only time I have been to Luton was when a flight was diverted there. The placed was like a morgue and I was glad to get out of there. Perhaps things have changed.


I can hardly contain my excitement at staying in High Wickam – a new geographical experience. Not to mention collecting my delayed birthday present of my “treated” laptop which should (I have complete faith) allow me to see British TV programmes via the internet and the Pauls’ digibox. Time will tell.

Too much already

The absence of Thursday and Friday are explained by the horror of having the school day extended in each instance. Thursday was the occasion of the presentation of certificates to those pupils who had passed the various Cambridge examinations that rule the school with a severity which makes the rigidity of steel seem like the merest wisp of muslin.



As this ceremony (at which I was the official photographer) did not start until seven in the evening the time after school was spent in desultory conversation and despairing attempts to try and finish the latest book which I have been loaned, “The Constant Gardner” by Le Carré.

This book is not quite the normal thriller in that it is set in Africa and concerns the crusade of a young diplomatic wife against the machinations of international pharmaceutical companies as they try and “trial” a new drug to combat typhoid by using it on poor Africans before it had reached the stage for large scale deployment against the disease. The fatal side-effects are suppressed and the novel is a story of greed, corruption, murder and deception which makes for compelling reading.


This is one of those novels where the guilty party is made clear almost at the start of the book and therefore the interest is seeing how the obvious wrong may or may not be righted. I don’t think I give anything away when I say that this is no fairy story and the central characters are flawed by intensely real characters about whose posthumous and living reputations the reader is made to care.


I remember a novel where one of its futuristic details was that the “problem” of Africa had been attempted to be solved by the wholesale nuking of the continent; “The Constant Gardener” does not add to one’s optimism for the future of the continent, and it seems to encourage the depression and all pervading sense of failure that comes with a survey of corruption, war, misery, starvation, political disaster, civil war, exploitation, nepotism – and any other kind of abuse that makes up the present complexion of this disastrous continent.


And yet the individual striving for justice and right is always (however self deluding it might be) uplifting. For a while, until reality forces itself back into the picture!


Well worth reading – and a major motion picture if I am not mistaken. And if I am then it should be.






My lust for electronic, portable and sophisticated has been satisfied by my purchase, at absurd and completely unjustifiable cost, of a new mobile phone.


It is not an i-phone. I have spurned such obvious pabulum for dedicated gadget freaks and gone for the more elevated option of a Samsung Galaxy S. If nothing else the screen is bigger than its all conquering rival and I know (because I have watched incomprehensible videos on YouTube) that is also has other “things” that the unmentionable does not.

For me the USP is the way of inputting text.


My last phone had an on-screen keyboard, but my spatulate fingers only approximated to the relevant keys and I often ended up with the unintended gobbledygook of frustrated miniaturized technology rather than the usual gibberish of unedited flow of consciousness typing!


My present phone uses a truly disturbing form of input where a lazy drawl of a finger approximating to a selection of the keys necessary to form the word, produces, you’ve guessed it, the word!


In as disturbing a display of prescience as I have seen outside those little electronic balls which ask you to think of an object and then in a series of questions to which you only answer yes or no, works out what you have in your mind, the keyboard finger slur does actually get the word more often than not!


This phone (like “The Other”) lives or dies by its use of “applications” which are as bread and mother’s milk to your average teenager but as terra incognito to me.


There is a button, usefully marked as “applications” which, when pressed, reveals screenfulls of gaudily coloured and artfully designed masterpieces of the world of the logo which invite me to delve ever deeper into the electronic universe inhabited by the young.


I noted in the advertising for this machine, which, had it been human would have been burnt at the stake until relatively recently - and in some parts of rural Norfolk and most of the southern states of America up to and including the present day – that many of these “applications” are “free”. This, to my untutored and naïf mind suggests that some, or indeed many of them are not free, and I have a numbing feeling that I am going to tap my life away by carelessly loading something which will drain away my money while I gaze on in helpless misery doing the electronic equivalent of sucking my thumb.


For reasons which are in some vague, indefinable way linked to the Defenestration of Prague; the Begums of Oudah; the Rise of the Protestant Hegemony and The Industrial Revolution mixed with a half understood version of Puritan Calvinism, I have bought my phone thus making it (in a pleasing oxymoron) “free.”


I am not sure what advantage this gives me other than encouraging me to spend vast sums of money on the machine. The “point” of this particular phone is that it has to have almost constant access to the internet for most of the fun bits to work, but as I am “free” I do not have a contract to give me phone access – but that is something I will have to work out as I get to know what the thing is capable of.


I do recall that in my last phone it linked to the internet at any casual clicking on inviting buttons, and I am sure that my present phone will do the same. If I let it. I have no knowledge about how much anything is costing and with a pay-as-you-go attitude, linking to the internet is very much supping with the devil for which long spoons were invented! What I have to do is find the electronic equivalent of the “long spoon” – and before anyone tells me that can be found by not buying a mobile phone which relies on the internet to function, please remember that love of gadgets often moves beyond ordinary logic!






Today it has had the actual temerity to rain. Admittedly it was not for long and the pavements soon dried, but I take it as a piece of effrontery which can easily be linked to today’s temperature which seems to me to be quite unnecessarily cold. We have had to resort to the demeaning expedient of turning on a small portable radiator and talk about hanging curtains to block off the heat sucking extractor which is the open stairs.


I have the uneasy feeling that the suggested solution of a curved rail on the ceiling at the bottom of the stairs with curtains depending from it may give the living room the look of some sultry bordello! I await more concrete plans with a certain apprehension.






Tomorrow I should prepare my bit and pieces for the epic voyage to the UK for the celebrations of Aunt Bet. As I am spending both nights of my stay in deepest, darkest England I am also packing my trusty (!) GPS even though I think that I have a GPS as part of my new phone. It is remembering the small things that is the sign of an experienced traveller – on that basis I am little better than a stay at home! Not only that, but with what little I remember to pack I find myself leaving small reminders of my stay where ‘ere I stop! I suppose it is my way of doing my bit for the alleviation of the financial crisis by spending more to replace that which I leave!


In theory I should be able to download books and music to my phone thus obviating the necessity of taking either with me on this trip. I am not yet convinced but I will see if it is possible in the few days that I have before I go.


Time to experiment.

What money will buy

There being nothing wrong with my mobile phone, I have bought another.

That sentence has all the simple elegance of Austen; though she might have used a semi-colon rather than a mere comma. And it is a sentiment that all gadgetophiles might read and think it states nothing but a completely understandable and ordinary sentiment.


I do not yet have the thing in my hot little hand as it is the “phone of the moment” and, before you ask, not anything as vulgar as an i-phone, but something which is, allegedly, bigger and better.


That remains to be seen, as does my use of the thing. My present phone is woefully under-used with my attempts to delve deeper inflicting no more than surface scratches on the goodies packed inside. On the frustrating basis of ineptitude I have bought something even more sophisticated and powerful. There is a certain sort of twisted logic there if you search for it. At least if you are me there is!

Even the Spanish and Catalan papers had pictures of a couple who had just announced their engagement. The disinterested part of me that tries to be fair is happy that they are happy: the rest of me (the vast majority of me) is appalled that such an undistinguished pair have achieved international, world-wide notoriety because the male part of the couple is the son of a broken marriage of an adulterer father and a publicity seeking mother; whose almost completely talentless grandmother (married to an insensitive, accident prone, bigoted Greek husband) achieved prominence because her diffident, stuttering father was forced into prominence by the selfish philandering of her arrogant playboy uncle . . . I could go on, but you get the general idea.


I understand that there was journalistic over-kill in the UK about this essentially empty event; at least I was saved that by being in Catalonia, but it was nevertheless depressing to see photos on the front pages of respectable newspapers.


I can only assume that with the world wide crisis in the financial world; cholera in Haiti; a growing critical situation in Morocco; the continuing (alleged) corruption in FIFA; the election campaign in Catalonia; the disaster of unemployment and one or two other stories that come to mind, it was, nevertheless a “slow” news day which gives two nonentities the absurd level of coverage that they have been given.


Let’s face it, the monarchy of Great Britain has been, since The Glorious Revolution an increasingly empty institution having all the rhetoric of authority but none of the real power.


All its existence demonstrates is the effective negation of the reality of a meritocracy in the United Kingdom. It is a living contradiction of what democracy is all about. It has no place whatsoever in the modern world.


When Big Ears and the only “noble” virgin over eighteen that the authorities could find were married I went to the USA to escape the maudlin, sycophantic, grovelling and suffocating coverage that was given to the great non-event. To my horror I discovered that there was actually more television coverage in New York than there was in London!


I hope that Barcelona will have much more restraint than that!

Get with the Age!

I have made a fundamental error in buying the new Ken Follett novel – not necessarily in terms of its literary worth (that remains to be seen) but rather in terms of its actual form.



I bought the book from a bookshop in Castelldefels and I am now the proud possessor of a massive wedge of reading. I have read the first few pages which start the history of the Williams family in their small South Wales Valleys home just as the youngest of the family begins his career down the mines. The link has been made from this humbled family to the important people who live in the great house (Ty Gwyn!) in the neighbourhood . . . and I know with a sickening certainty that I will never read this book again.


Even at this stage of the reading I can see the same old formula beginning to work its way through the narrative in the same way that it did in the other two books of Follett that I have read. But it should be entertaining. Just like the other two.


But, back to my mistake. The problem is, of course the format. I am going to have this lump of literature lurking in my library taking up valuable space whereas if I had bought the book electronically and downloaded it to my Kindle it would have cost about a third of the price I paid and only take up a miniscule electronic space.


I need to get into the electronic frame of mind and realize that books which I want to read are available at a reasonable price. It will take a sea-change in my attitude because the only books which I have downloaded to my Kindle and Sony e-book readers have been free. I have yet to pay real money for any e-book, but the time is coming.






I have done a little desultory hovering with the new device in order to break it in. It seems heavier and altogether more fierce than its slimmer and lighter predecessor. That machine has been relegated to the higher regions of the house to be gently ignored.


An early finish tomorrow and then two days of meetings after school – just to make the weekend more welcome!