Holiday officially ends with days to spare!

I defy augury.

I took my Christmas decorations down today. I know that it is not the 6^th of January, but I won't be here on that date so I decided to do it today. I usually do it earlier, usually on New Year's Day but we were in Terrassa for most of the day and by the time we got home neither of us was feeling up to the tedium of deconstruction.

I never did manage to find the Christmas lights in the horror which is the cupboard under the eaves on the Third Floor so the tree was relatively painless in its stripping. The “guilt” Christmas cards (so called because I sent none this year; not even an electronic one) have been collected up and, as usual, some decorations have been overlooked.

The ones which escaped notice this time round are the most camp of the lot. These are three golden, tasselled cords which have a series of large, clear, crystal globes along their length. I have (artistically) scrunched them in the translucent, curved shade of a couple of up-lighters with the tassels and one globe hanging over the side. The rest of the globes pick up the light from the lamp and gleam interestingly through the shade. The other is draped rather absurdly over one of Ceri's paintings.

I think that their addition to the rather stark and severe up-lighters are a good thing, though Ceri's painting will be returned to its original unadorned glory at once. I am sure, though, that Toni will want them all packed away securely and completely for another long year!

The Christmas tree, as usual was the most difficult element in the packing away of the festive season.

When I bought the tree (I have to have artificial as I am allergic to the real thing – and I would be grateful if all readers just took that information as a simple statement of fact about living Christmas trees rather than an interesting metaphorical take on my personality) I know that it fitted comfortably into the box in which it came. Obviously. In the few years that I have owned the tree the box has, quite obviously shrunk. There is no way in which the tree as it now exists can possibly have fitted into the box in which it came, and is yet another proof that the present state of Physics to explain the material universe is woefully inadequate.

It is only by the application of many strips of sellotape (my spell checker has offered me words from “sell-out” through “Sellafield” to “salt-pans” to replace sellotape) that anything approaching closure can be secured. The box is now a sort of down market jack-in-the-box with the stout cardboard stretching the tape to a twanging tautness.

The tape itself is now rapidly (well, annually) becoming a feature in itself as, rather like the rings in a tree, you can tell the age of the artificial variety by counting the layers of yellowing tape which have been used to secure the contents in the box. When the box is opened the fluttering ends of the tape appear to be post-modern strands of seaweed fringing the opening.

Well, at least the tree has been thrust back into the Cupboard of the Unnecessary on the Third Floor, but I did not have the energy to push back the tree decorations and the figures and stable from the Belen back into the three-dimensional jig-saw puzzle that the cupboard has become. Sufficient unto the day etc.

To all intents and purposes Christmas for me is over. I will not be in Spain for the last gasp of the season for the festival of The Kings with the parades and sweet throwing so I can now reorientate my thoughts towards the forthcoming term.

Perhaps the use of the word “can” in that last sentence was used in its more accurate sense of “it is physically possible that” - whether I choose to do so is another matter entirely. Given the risible salary that the school pays (though good and fair by Spanish standards) I feel no pressing compulsion to use holiday time for the benefit of the overprivileged youngsters that we are honoured to teach.

However, I do hope to find some decent teaching material about Advertising which is the basis of my Media Studies Course on my whistle-stop visit to the UK. 

There are so many things which will have to be packed into the few days that I am there that it will only be possible if there is a calamitous fall of traffic-stopping snow to allow me to get it all done in the extra days that may be added because of the elements!

That is always assuming that I do not spend them in the salubrious setting of Bristol Airport! And perhaps I shouldn't joke about such things.

Toni has just visited the dermatological consultant and been told that the growth at the side of his left eye is a small tumour and will have to be removed. He has been told that it is not serious but he is having an operation with local anaesthetic and the growth is going on Friday first thing in the morning.

Hospitals are beginning to have a central role in my social life! Better than school!

Count the days

After a night of heavy rain the clouds of the morning gave way to a glorious day of bright sunshine only marred by Toni's continuing illness. He stayed in bed till mid day and is now lying on the sofa a picture of dejection.

I have signally failed to get My Machine to recognize my phone. My technical knowledge extends to using a cable to join the two and then I expect the vast power of The Core (which had five stars ***** count them in the MediaMarkt blurb) to do its stuff. Which it is signally not doing. I know that I should read the instructions (I am, after all of that generation) but I feel resentful that in 2011 I should have to do something which surely ought to be automatic.

I did however have occasion to use one of my other laptops and I had forgotten just how bloody heavy these things usually are. I am afraid that you will have to put up with comments like this for some time so that I can continue to convince myself that I have done the right thing by purchasing The Machine.

Toni's illness stopped up from going out into any bar, cafe or restaurant and finding out if the new laws, some of the most swingeing in Europe against smoking in public places are actually being enforced.

I am particularly eager to revisit an Argentinian restaurant where the food was excellent; it was the atmosphere which was unpalatable. Everyone, apart from Irene and myself seemed to be smoking: man, woman and child. It was impossible to enjoy the food in the miasmic surroundings that Spaniards have accepted as normal until today!

There are, of course bleatings from those who fear that they are going to be forced out of business by the changes. And, if I am fair, and god knows I have no real desire to be fair to the people who have attempted to poison my life via passive smoking, they can point to all the countries that have changed their attitudes and laws and show that businesses have gone bust. And at a time of crisis in which there is already 20% unemployed!

The television has already shown pictures of people taking their drinks outside the bars, in one case a lady taking her bar stool outside and resting her drink on the outside windowsill. Another man, his drink on the sill, the window open and breathing his smoke through the open window.

It is also part of the law that there is to be no smoking outside or in the vicinity of school gates. As the older pupils in our school congregate outside the entrance to the secondary school I shall very much enjoy calling the police and getting the pupils expelled or at least having a criminal record. While I may be exaggerating a little I am sure that our school will react with a knee jerk inappropriateness on the day we get back.

This new law is going to have to create a real change in the way that people here behave and reform their expectations.

I shall observe the implementation of these new laws with considerable interest. And not a little scepticism. We shall see.

I am now painfully aware that it is the New Year and all I have done is buy new books and not arranged the ones that I already possess. I am determined to do something if it is only to bring down the volume of Sorolla 

that is on top of a book case on the third floor and put it with my latest bargain buy hardback of that painter in the living room collection of individual artists. That's what I call doable book organization. The key things, of course, will be to see if I have even done that little before the end of the holiday.

The days are creeping away but at least my holiday ends with a trip to the UK, my opportunity to visit Paul Squared at last and to celebrate a significant birthday, with the very real possibility of being snowed in on the Sunday before I have to start in Barcelona.

One can but hope!

Festive Days

Watching another country's music from the eighties as I am trying not to do at the moment as a nostalgic (is that the right word for the eighties?) television programme brings to light for me totally obscure non-entities from a lost decade is rather like watching an embarrassing faux pax from a distant relative in a social setting, but one still part of the family.

God knows I knew little enough about 80s music in Britain until I was taken in hand by Paul and given a double album of the greatest hits (sic.) of that decade and told to listen to them. I vaguely knew two of the tracks and when I told Paul the names of them he was contemptuous and didn't believe that my ignorance could be so complete of a decade that he thought one of the most memorable and scintillating in terms of popular music. He then went through the tracks saying, “Surely you know this bit!” but I did not.

I have to admit, surrounded as I was by people who valued rather than voided the eighties that I did, in self defence, come to know a few more numbers than the admitted genius of Ultravox with “Vienna” - kept off the number 1 spot in the UK by the mindless “Shut-up-a-your Face” - as even the most neophytic trivial pursuit player will know.

But still, not a decade to be proud of: the fashion; the hair styles; the footballers' shorts – so many things that jolt one from one's accustomed torpor when they leap out at you from some archival programme on the TV. There should be a little sign in the corner of the screen to warn viewers of a sensitive disposition that 80s footage is about to be aired!

The Familial strain of cough/cold/sore throat has now made its way through at least four members of The Family to me, so I am sitting in the self pitying echo of a past cough listening to Toni moaning about the condition of the kitchen.

I will at least have my revenge as I adopt the role of Plague Annie and make the fajitas for the meal this evening liberally dispensing pestilence with the paprika. The real temptation is to throw in a liberal splash of Tabasco and watch them cringe as the spice tickles their taste buds, but I do have to remember that I am dealing with people who regard chorizo as the daring point of piquancy!

A night in Terrassa and then back to prepare for my voyage to the UK.

The fajita mix is now made to my own recipe: the trick is in how you open the packets I find. A whole steaming casserole pot of goo is waiting to be spooned into wraps. I can do no more, and I certainly have no intention of chopping up the salad, tomatoes and cucumber for the interesting dips.

Neither Toni nor myself are in what might be described as rude health so the jollifications this evening are going to be a little muted, to say the least. One must always remember in The Family that there are two, young, shouting, irresistibly active children under the age of competent reading and writing to contend with.

Meanwhile there is the feeding of music to the New Machine. Because of the incredible selfishness of itunes it will not accept my music from my ipods and I am having to put the music into the computer's memory disk by disk. I have grabbed handfuls of disks from my storage and have fed them painfully slowly into the machine with the only bright spot being that they are being accessed by use of the “free” disk drive that I was given for being fool enough to buy such an exotically priced computer.

The selection of music I have so far made is a little unbalanced with an emphasis on Carl Nielsen and Benjamin Britten seasoned by a number of tracks from the evergreen 60s!

Well, New Year's Day is here and I am sporting a facial injury from the dinner last night.

As I always suspected young children are fatal. While whipping one of the nephews up into a frenzy in the only way I know how with kids viz. treating them like Labradors, a flailing hand raked my chin leaving a gaping wound which poured with blood.

The other, younger nephew was fascinated with this effusion and seemed delighted that it was the other nephew's fault. The other, older nephew seemed blissfully unconcerned of course and no one else seemed to notice. And you can't even blame alcohol in a Catalan household – though everyone did drink at least a taste of Cava after midnight.

The actual striking of the hour is the time of an important ritual where for each chime a grape has to be eaten. It is very interesting to see the difference between Britain and Catalonia. From the first strike of midnight we Brits drink, cheer, sing and start kissing; the Catalans are pictures of sobriety and are concentrating with all their might to ensure that they don't choke when the eat the grapes. There is a real sense of achievement at the twelfth stroke when your plate is cleared.

We didn't have seedless grapes so there was a certain amount of swallowing at we didn't have time to spit out the seeds. You can buy little tins of twelve grapes or cellophane packed twists of grapes you can set out on the dining table.

The food for the dinner and for lunch today was excellent, though it did not contain the seafood cake that Stewart was hoping to get the recipe for. Another time perhaps!

Already the light of the day is beginning to disappear and dusk with its short duration is starting to turn into night. The Christmas and New Year celebrations are ended for another yea and it only remains for me to put away the tree and decorations for it to be officially over. Unlike the Catalans I do not wait for 12^th Night and The Kings for the end of the season. Indeed, almost unthinkable to a true Spaniard, I will be travelling to Britain on The Kings presumably I will be among fellow citizens as The Kings is a time for family in much the same way as Christmas. My only hope is that all the best stuff has not been snapped up in the January Sales which, because of The Kings are unknown in this part of the world in the same frenzied way that they are greeted in the UK. Indeed the pictures of doors being opened in London to let the ravening crowds in made it to Spanish television.

We are now back in Castelldefels having left, with few regrets, the modern re-make of The Thomas Crown Affair that the men were watching with the aid of subtitles because. Instead I am settling myself down to enjoy one of the episodes of Harry Potter that I don't think I have seen. Which is a good thing.

My book reading this holiday seems to have stalled at an Algernon Blackwood novel that I am reading is a desultory fashion on my telephone. I started reading it assuming it to be one of Blackwood's short stories but it has developed into something which I would have expected from the pen of J M Barrie or Kipling or Wells in their more whimsical moments.

Keep the rubbish rolling!

Phone facility

It is surely a sign of the times that, having owned my new mobile phone for some time and used it every day to take photos, play solitaire, check the weather, read the news, use the internet, it was only today that I worked out how to answer a simple phone call on the damn thing!

I mean to say, the clue to the function of the machine is found in the nomenclature of 50% of the “phone”: it is, after all, essentially a telephone. I have been making do with pressing the tactile screen in vain attempts to connect to people who phone and then, after failing to make that connection phoning them myself. It took me a while to discover that touch is not enough; touch and slide is the trick.

Lunch today was in Sitges and not in our usual restaurant whose name we do not know but at least we know which small street to turn down to find it. This time we went to a restaurant we had not used before and, to Toni's horror, it turned out to owned by Chinese. I took the opportunity to order chicken Taiwan Style and hoped that the overtly Spanish choices of Toni would be acceptable. In the end we decided that it was acceptable if not spectacular and, taking service in to account we might well have been better off at our usual haunt. Still, it's fun to find new places, even if its only to cross them off.

On the way to the restaurant in a small but exclusive looking shop stuffed with chocolate goodies and other desirable comestibles I almost succumbed to the temptation offered by the purchase of a bottle of Cava with particles of gold leaf in suspension! Such things do put one in mind of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the cost was really prohibitive but it might have been worth while just for the shock of offering it to The Family on New Year's Eve.

In the event I put off such an indulgent purchase (!) on the grounds that I would be carting it around with me; much better to buy it on my return to the car.

It was just as well that I declined the purchase as we went on what I regarded as an epic walk to the end of the bay on which Sitges is built. By the time we got back neither of us even considered calling into the shop we were too concerned merely to get back to the house and non-walking tranquility!

My copy of The Week (dated the 11^th of December) was waiting for me on our return and, as usual, I devoured it in a single sitting especially relishing the feature on “The dodgy world of football” giving me yet more vitriol to etch my hatred of FIFA and all its works just a little deeper. One wonders just how many members of the executive committee would be liable to little visits from the boys in blue if they weren't exempt from Switzerland's anti-corruption legislation.

Tomorrow I have to make the fajitas to take up to Terrassa as my part of the communal effort to feed The Family on this festive occasion – without the golden Cava.

I will have to make do with the plebeian stuff!

Culture Undone!

A quick visit to the Design Hub to see a version of an Italian exhibition about a design for living was but poor compensation for not getting to see the exhibition that we were supposed to see.

First things first of course and we had an excellent lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant which did an more than satisfactory menu del dia in spite of the bawling baby on the table next to us!

Our original destination was the Picasso Museum but when we got there the queue to get in stretched along virtually the whole of the street. Even with our special “teacher” cards which give us free access to most museums we couldn't get to the front without queuing. So we cut our losses and had a cup of coffee in the Textile Museum and pondered our next move.

Which was to the Apple shop via walking. I am not a great fan of walking when there is perfectly good and heavily subsidized public transport system but Suzanne was insistent and by the time we got to the shop I had virtually forgotten why I was there in the general feeling of exhaustion which had over taken me.

I was not so far gone however, that I failed to find a machine specific, ludicrously priced scrap of zipped neoprene to go with my new computer. So that was alright. In a way.

There was also the disastrous calling into the book shop near the cathedral to show Suzanne the history of art book that I bought there on the last day of term when we had taken the kids down to the Christmas fair. And of course I bought a couple of others – but one of them was a book on Miró who is woefully under-represented in my growing collection of books on Catalan painters. Which, as the more preceptive will have realized, is simply a way in which I can buy more books with something approaching an easy conscience!

I can always explain the “Arte del Siglo XX” as something necessary for school as it does cover the period that I am supposed to be teaching: it is comprehensive and it has precious little text and a more than generous selection of paintings.

There is always space for another book.

Sun and Sloth

How difficult it is to enjoy the season of goodwill towards all men when there are French in the world.

One does try to regard that fine quartet in “Billy Budd” about hating the French (“Can't stand the French; don't like their manners; dammned mounseers”) as an amusing reference to the distant past when our two countries were indulging in their age old pastimes of fighting each other but then you have the International Olympic Committee.

This august body of corrupt, self seeking, self important, and overwhelmingly foreign non-entities has decreed that the prime language in the 2012 Olympics in London taking precedence over all others should be French! So, yet again the language of eighteenth century diplomacy dusts off its cobwebbed, archaic phrases and pushes its obtrusive and unwanted self into the limelight where its unregarded words will merely be the signal for general impatience before the language of the world does its job of informing people about what they want to know!

Not only is our language forced into second place but also our national flag is forced into an even lower place after the Olympic banner (fair) then the UNO flag (questionable) and presumably the Swiss flag as the flaunted symbol of where members of the committee have their private bank accounts!

I wonder how the Blatter (who not only managed to frustrate our attempts to hold the world cup but also sits on the IOC as well) person expects to be referred to: I suppose he hopes for a little more than the British designation of “Your Ignorant Corrupt Bastardship” though I don't really see why he should. His election was, at least, questionable and his style of leadership (if that is the right word) is autocratic in a way that even Brezhnev could only dream about.

If you really want to make your blood boil look through the membership of the IOC and count the number of titles. It makes depressing reading.

But today is a continuing holiday and my bile is merely mechanical and not soul-felt: who can be miserable on a sunny (though cold) day without the pressure of work to dampen enthusiasm.

A whiff of school managed to infiltrate its way into my consciousness by via a telephone call from Suzanne, but that was more to arrange a lunch and exhibition viewing rather than talk about the Institution on the Hill.

I will take with me the art history book that I have bought as it is an almost perfect accompaniment to the course that we are teaching. Its only drawback is that it is in Spanish and we are teaching the course as part of an English Credit so that all the work must be done in that language. Ironically the book itself was originally published in English, but I bought the Spanish version in a cut price bookshop and I shudder to think how much the non-discounted version will be via Amazon.com.

We are going to visit the Picasso Museum. This is one of the most popular museums in Barcelona and it does have a reasonably interesting collection of Picasso's work, but not so many of the major works to make this museum one of the most important in Barcelona. It does however have an enterprising programme of exhibitions which sometimes make interesting sense of what they actually do possess. They also create exhibitions using guest works and the current exhibition is one which uses paintings by Degas to draw comparisons and show the development of Picasso's work. I look forward to it and hope that the catalogue is not too expensive.

A visit to Barcelona is also an opportunity for me to visit the Apple shop (where ever it is) and discover if there is a machine specific and heavily logoed case for my present computer. I think that it has to be a case (exactly!) of if you've got it you should flaunt it!

Lunch today was in a cafe we have used before but not for a menu del dia. The cost of the meal was €7 and is the cheapest in the town centre as far as I know. I had a house salad of mango, avocado, olives and green leaves followed by roast rabbit with fried pineapple and potatoes, finished off by chocolate mousse all of this accompanied by a childishly assertive red wine and fresh bread. Excellent value for about six quid!

Our return home was via a hardware store where Toni has bought the wherewithal to make some new lamp shades. As he purchased plastic cups, string, glue and assorted balloons I am a little apprehensive about what the end result is going to be!

Thank goodness one has the spaciousness of a holiday to take this on board!

Holiday a day at a time

What a lazy day! What joy!

The days are long past when I would feel a convulsive jolt of guilt for every minute spent in bed beyond the normal hour for rising. I still, of course, wake up at the appropriate time to go to work but that is mere conditioning and by merely turning over I can override the moral imperative to get up and set new parameters for the luxury of snoozing.

I must admit by the time my snoozing dreams have taken hold and are beginning to develop themselves it is sometimes something of a relief to wake up fully and resolve the fantastic situations that my unconscious has created by harsh reality bringing me back to what passes for normality!

By the time I had a cup of tea it was time for lunch so we set off for town pausing only to check the mail box and discover the latest batch of Christmas cards, one of which was dated the 14^th of December so I imagine that the snow has had its part to play in the tardy delivery times. I do feel guilty as I have sent not a single card as I was going to rely on the electronic version to suffice for this year. But, due to technical difficulties beyond my individual control my attempts to produce something on a par with that which I managed to send last year did not succeed.

I am working on sending an electronic Kings card which gives me a few more days to get things in order.

The Spanish are not great card senders, though Toni's mother managed to send a card which she bought the last time she was in Wales.

I must say that the selection of cards which we have had have been remarkable in the quality of images used with one exceptional penguin card and numerous extremely tasteful religious ones.

Ceri's card this year features an atmospheric almost abstract image entitled, “After the Snowfall” which I am sure would fit neatly on the blank wall which was produced by the re-arrangement of the living room and which has still not been filled!

My concern about travel in the New Year increases with every news bulletin as weather chaos seems to be engulfing most of the places in which news broadcasters have correspondents to relay graphic pictures of sliding cars, stationary trains, frozen planes and everywhere disgruntled travellers.

I am only concerned about getting there and seeing Ceri on his birthday and visiting Paul; my getting back I consign to the gods of the swirling weather fronts and the vagaries of furious traffic controllers throughout Europe. School, after all, can wait!

I am determined to Do Something about the arrangement of my books. It is always easier to write about such a thing than actually do it because moving books is such sheer hard work. People think that book arrangement is as undemanding as flower arrangement; but this is simply not so. Flowers go from the purchased bunch into a vase and the arrangement is simply (in a Japanese sense) the artful placing of a single bloom next to a twig: what you don't need you can throw away.

The last part of the previous sentence contains two phrases which underline the problems that I have with my collection of books. The concept of a book “you don't need” is not one which I can, even remotely understand. It therefore follows that the idea that “you can throw away” a book is something close (very close) to sacrilege.

When you have as many books as I have and as little spare shelf space the moving of one book necessitates numerous movements elsewhere in the collection. It is rather like that little plastic game of a picture made up of a number of moveable squares which you can move one square at a time into the single vacant space.

I think, for example, that it would be a good idea to get all my art books together so that they form a coherent part of the total collection. But there are numerous problems with such a reasonable thought.

Arts books come in all shapes and sizes from the mini paperbacks giving a few reproductions through the mid size paperbacks that I bought when I was younger to the hard back purchases of my more affluent years. Some of these books are outsize and fit none of my shelves. Then there are the art histories in various volumes: should I break these up into their particular periods and keep all the relevant volumes together or let them stay as matching collections and take out the volumes as and when required.

Now I could go on at some length enumerating the pressing problems (and there are many, many more) just relating to the art books, but I am reminded of a programme that I watched on television last night about the lives, and more particularly the houses of the super rich. One lady while planning a dinner party in her spectacularly modern and totally desirable house told the viewers that she liked her table to reflect the seasons. She therefore poured sand on her dining table and carefully formed it into neat bands down the surface of the table into which she set the plates, cutlery, glasses etc with, in the middle, an arrangement of candles, cones and leaves from her lawns (collected by servants) to finish the effect. And one found oneself saying, through gritted teeth, “For god's sake woman haven't you got any real work to do!”

I fear my concerns about my book arrangement might be judged in the same sort of class as such table setting. This would be wrong of course, but I do see that there might be some irritation about how I choose to spend my time.

I might add that before writing this I had been “reading” a delightful book entitled “La Historia del Arte” which tells me such things as “Aunque Masaccio vivió 27 años, es en figura clave en la historia del arte europeo.” So, not only am I reading in Spanish (albeit at a fairly easy level) but I am also learning new things - as I seem to have ignored Masaccio's age in my previous reading about his life. So I do read the books I have as well as worry about where they are and whether I will ever find them a second time around!

Meanwhile the evils of the neighbours.

Much to our collective astonishment the bollards are still virtually upright and are definitely still in their holes in spite of our destructive neighbours having the whole of the holiday period with cars coming and going and parking and wrecking. We are still keeping a watching brief on them and photos have been taken and stored for future use should these inestimable protections against visitors using our driveways as parking sports be suddenly “vanished away.”

The more pressing problem is the baleful chorus of damned hounds that sing their monotonous song through the day and night. I do not, of course blame the dogs – though clearly I wish them dead as soon as possible. I blame the thoughtless and presumably profoundly deaf owners.

The Witch of Endor who lives next door is certifiably mad though friendly enough, at least to me. Perhaps one should never take the way that humans speak to their canine friends as an indication of their sanity, but her maudlin crooning of baby voiced idiocies go beyond the acceptable.

She also owns a selection of dogs all of which bark. One, a crippled mutt which should clearly be put out of his misery at once, barks a muted distant bark once a second every second while his owner is out of the house. The other dogs have their own “voices” and respond to different stimuli to get their vocal chords working. One responds to every movement we make in our house, while the other dislikes strangers moving past the house on foot or in vehicles or in its bloody imagination.

Further down the street there are a pair of decrepit dogs who scream in a demented duet whenever any other canine walks past their house. To encourage this horror their caring owners have cut away part of the covering of the gate so that the vermin can see out and scream with gusto. They have the same reaction when their owner comes home from work and when he goes to work so we are guaranteed a morning and evening banshee recital.

But the medal for sheer cavalier indifference to the lives of others has to go to a family living on a street adjacent to ours whose dog barks non-stop whenever they go out. He does vary his bark and, as he is given the run of the garden and the steps up to the house there is a variety in the intensity of the bark depending on where he is – but bark he does until they come back.

And when they are not barking they are shitting on the pavements and their owners regard their filth as authentic, organic and natural and therefore they do nothing about it. It makes walking along our pavements an odoriferous, slippery and messy experience.

But the sun shone today and it didn't rain and there is no snow in our part of Spain. 

Who can ask for more.

My Present Day!

The Christmas Meal finally got underway after the eventual appearance of our more tardy diners and it proved to be an exceptionally delicious success. 

 Although raw cod followed by a selection of fish and shell fish is not everybody's chosen Christmas alternative to turkey and trimmings it certainly was mine and what wine there was (surrounded as I was by Catalans) flowed gently in my direction as they showed yet again their disgracefully negligent attitude towards the consumption of alcohol!

At the conclusion of the meal we started on a procession to visit various households: the refurbished flat of a cousin who has taken over his mother's old flat; the mother's new, smaller flat, and finally the nephew's abode for a film “Salt” (with English subtitles) and more food.

“Salt” was the sort of agreeable action nonsense which is perfect for a weary Christmas evening when everybody (with the exception of the nephews of course) is too dog tired to engage imagination, intelligence or even basic human understanding to tolerate anything more than a shoot-'em-up fantasy with a touch of conspiracy and world threat.

The film opens with the heroine being roughly treated by the North Koreans while being asked, “You are here to destroy our nuclear installations, aren't you?” To which the most reasonable answer is “Who isn't!” But let it pass, let it pass. Hokum it undoubtedly was but enjoyable hokum.

I am now finishing off my cup of Earl Grey tea (Toni's mum has been well trained!) and waiting for the succession of presents which should fall into my lap it being, as all know, St Stephen's Day and therefore my Saint's Day, my Name Day and a Day second only in importance to my birthday for the receiving of gifts of all sorts as the necessary recognition of a Day of such auspicious importance.

No-one can be unaware of the Day as just after midnight last night everyone (nephews included) wished me “felicitationes” in the appropriate manner. Gifts, therefore, “must follow as the day the night, and thou canst not then be mean to any man” as Bill very nearly said.

The final meal of this Terrassa trip is lunch today where in years gone by the highlight for me (apart from the gifts of course) has been a sort of savoury cake made with bread, prawns and mayonnaise which has both the attributes of the “naughty but nice”: it is delicious and messy to eat!

After lunch back to Castelldefels and the long deliberation to think about what to take to the UK in January.

Festivity!

The love of an aunt for her nephew can surely reach no higher point than she give him a drum set for Christmas. What that says for her relationship with her sister and brother-in-law is quite another question!

The traditional time for present giving in Catalonia is Christmas Eve when the log with a painted face, Catalan hat and two stick legs shits presents for the kids after being beaten with a stick. There are some things in foreign cultures about which it is better not to ask!

After floods of tears from his brother when it was pointed out that the drum kit was a present to one person and not both peace (after a fashion) was restored with the brothers taking it in turns to beat the living daylights out of a miniature drum kit. One of the drum sticks broke almost immediately and the foot pedal for the “big” drum never worked but neither of these setbacks had the slightest effect on the quantity of sheer noise that was produced.

Our presents to the kids were track suits with their favourite characters sewn and embroidered on to them, but these, of course got barely a glance in the frantic ripping and rending of wrapping paper to see what else was there.

A subsidiary present for one of the boys was a small Zorro figure with an “alternative” body into which he could transform. Usually these figures are so securely encased in impenetrable clear plastic that the hysterical urgings of the recipient for you to release the figure from its crystal tomb are more than matched by the despairingly futile attempts of the adult to get at them.

This time it was different. The outer casing was removed with deceptive ease only to reveal that the figures were securely attached to the back of the packaging with numerous pieces of twisted wire. I assume that these fiendish trappings were put in place by machine or even more fiendish orientals determined to make life a real misery.

With wire ties it is usually possible to use the extended ends and by using thumb and index finger gently unwind them. Not with these. These attachments were carefully twisted to a point so that it was only possible to find the ends by wiggling a finger on the point and allowing the metallic points to disengage themselves from each other by becoming embedded in the fleshy part of the finger tip. The end result is that I now look as though in a previous life I have been a Victorian seamstress with puncture marks betraying my profession.

Needless to say this selfless work of mortification of the flesh was completely ignored by the impatient recipient who snatched the figures from my bloody grip and immediately started ripping off the limbs with sadistic abandon.

The meal, however, made up for any minor inconveniences that are consequent on any festivities which take in kids: pasta fish soup to start, followed by salad with strawberry sauce and then the main course of fish and shellfish. The meal was finished off with a selection of biscuits and turron all washed down with wine and Cava. Delightful. Even if my glass of Cava was knocked over by one of the kids!

I was first up this Christmas Morning (just as I was the first to bed yesterday) and we barely have time to regroup and have the stipulated number of cups of tea before we have to gird our loins and shuffle our way to the restaurant for the Christmas Lunch.

As is traditional either Toni's sister or I suffer from some incapacitating illness during the festive season. Over the last five years Carmen and I have only had a celebratory drink together on one occasion at Christmastime. This year it was Carmen's turn to suffer and abstain from alcohol. No doubt next year it will be mine!

The holiday begins!

The great advantage of my new green and lilac watch is that it is no luminous.

This is not because of some outdated fear I might have about the radio-active nature of the luminous paint (though as a child scraping the paint from a broken clock face I should have been) because these days it is not made of the same dangerous stuff of yore, but rather because I cannot see the time in the dark.

After four months (dear god!) of getting up early this term for the damnéd grind of school and knowing before hand that a mere glance at the glowing watch face will determine whether there is time to add another chapter to the involved semi-coherent semi-dream that is proving to be such a delicious alternative to rising from the warm, comfortable depths of bed – it is a delight to have no way of knowing what time it is and furthermore of not caring because it doesn't matter.

The end result is that I didn't get up until almost midday today! Such guilty pleasures! And now, after muesli and my second cup of tea it is almost lunch time. This is what a holiday is really all about. That and thinking of one's timetable and gloating over the classes that one is not taking!

I have finally worked out why my downloaded suite of programs have disappeared each day: the moving of the download into the “Applications” folder ensure that it has a life of more than 24 hours!

Similarly with the “Dashboard” (whose useful elements also disappeared into the thin electronic air) I have now worked out how to use it so that, at the touch of a button, I now have an array (ranging from snippets of the BBC News, via “Word of the Day” to Wikipedia) of useful tools flash up onto the screen and at the click of a touch sensitive multi-use mouse pad can be consigned to their place on the shelf at the bottom of the screen. I am learning the ways of my new and as yet untamed computer.

I had, after a more than satisfactory lunch in our local Basque restaurant, slumped down in the chair and was beginning to feel the real need to vegetate when the call to arms for the buying of Christmas presents was sounded and I had to gird the proverbials and sortie out again into the maelstrom which is the consumer strip which flanks the motorway.

We have now bought everything which we need to buy for the immediate future which takes us up to St Stephen's Day aka My Saint's Day at which time I would like it to be known that I am ready to receive small or large gifts to celebrate this auspicious moment in the year!

Tomorrow off to Terrassa to start the celebrations for Christmas.

The end and the start

There are easier ways to end a term than taking fifty kids into the centre of the city in the rain.

To be fair it wasn't raining when we set off on the long trek downwards towards the ferrocarril which was to take us into the city. Then there was the walk from the stop to the Cathedral square where the fair was situated.

There was a time, a couple of years ago, when I was prepared to be delighted and impressed by this fair – but those days have gone! The fair consists of a number of stalls which sell the raw material for the Belens or nativity scenes that many Catalans (et moi!) put together for the Christmas season.

The basic elements necessary are a model stable containing the three major characters with a selection of animals and the odd angel. Outside the stable the next level of normal characters include shepherds and the three kings. After those, you are only limited by your imagination and budget.

This time of the year gives television companies the opportunity to show those slightly odd folk to take things to the extreme and give over whole rooms in their houses to nativity scenes which take in villages, hundreds of characters, running rivers and water wheels, bakeries, trees, grass and whatever else comes to mind.

My own Belen has various workers bringing geese, eggs, wine, wood and sheep to the young child but the feature which seems to be odd to the point of blasphemy is the inclusion of the caganer or shitting man. This is a squatting figure, trousers down and with a pile of poo under his bottom.

These figures are a Catalan institution and you know that you have arrived in the public imagination when you find that a pottery figure of you as a caganer has been put on sale. The Barça team, politicians, sportspeople and any figures of note are available for inclusion in your particular scene. Many of the stalls were selling quite expensive figures of this type. Hardly the sort of thing that children should be looking at!

Our supervision of the children took the form of sitting in a cafe and drinking coffee (or in my case a glass of red wine) and eating a baguette. It's a hard old life in the modern education system!

By the time had arrived to go on to our next port of call I had visited a book shop and bought another book to add to my growing collection of volumes on Catalan painters. The new purchase is on Sorolla; a painter of naturalistic scenes executed in an expressively painterly style which reminds me of John Singer Sargent. The more sketch like Sorolla is the better I like him. He is a painter worth getting to know better.

The long walk back to school, only partially augmented by public transport, was timed to perfection so that we could go to lunch.

Our school version of a Christmas meal comprised a pasta and meatball soup followed by turkey with cooked pear. Sweet was a selection of turrons washed down by Cava. It is a long way from the school meals that I was used to for a number of years!

The film in the afternoon for the equivalent of Year 9 was a disaster as the projector closed itself down; luckily I remembered that Wednesday was my early leaving afternoon and I left.

Traffic was heavy on the way back home, but my heart wasn't as the glorious realization that I do not have to go back to school until the 10^th of January next year began to sink in.

To celebrate, as we went out to buy Christmas presents, I bought a watch. This, of course, is almost a reflex action with me and the house has caches of timepieces in a number of drawers. This one, however has a green strap and lilac face: a striking little number. A good holiday choice. And one has to celebrate the holiday season!

Day three and counting down!

I am beginning to succumb to the traditional curse of Mondays.

I wake up early and turn back to doze for that delicious hour or so when reality shades into Surrealistic wish-fulfllment, when all manner of things appear to be possible.

The intrusive and terminally irritating wake-up jingle of electronic musak that serves as an alarm bell on my mobile phone drags me back to the quotidian necessities such as leaving the bed and getting ready for school.

As Mondays start at 6.30 am all of the resented tasks are completed in darkness with the harsh bolt of electric light (and the official start of the day) being delayed as long as possible.

The joining of the never ending stream of traffic on the coast road is always a calculated risk. The glare of oncoming headlights seem one long light show and one has to rely on the fact that Spanish drivers are well used to people pulling out in front of them in a way which would get them beeped in the UK but here passes without rancour.

The dark crew with me as part of the sombre parade make their way towards the city. I branch off by the airport and join up with another motorway and a succession of traffic jams and dawn begins to break over the snarled up and snarling drivers.

Arriving early usually means that there is a prime parking space available (as the only possible advantage to this unnatural starting out) which means that I will be well placed to get into the stream of traffic going home in the maelstrom of cars driven by parents from our school who look straight ahead and will not give an inch.

It is sometimes comical to see the steely determination not to let me out become compromised by the youngster in the back of the car informing their parents that the flashing light indicates a teacher rather than a mere member of the public!

But the sheer horror of having to turn up on a Monday is becoming more and more of a bind: though that could well be that there are only a few days left before the end of term and each day is almost unbearable in its grinding tedium. Neither kids nor staff actually want to be there – and it shows.

Tomorrow is a normal day and then there are differences for the last day. I am accompanying the 1ESO to a visit to the Winter Fair which takes place in the square in front of the cathedral in Barcelona. Please pray that it doesn't rain because that would mean teaching for the periods that would have been spent drinking coffee, sorry, supervising the kids!

These last two days are going to be hard going as it is patently obvious that everybody's mind is, to put it mildly, elsewhere.

Nevertheless life goes on and I am beginning to use my new, unjustifiable computer. It is a thing of great loveliness and it does a bit of computing as well. It is so much quicker than my last machine that I feel that its purchase is justified by that factor alone. Well, not quite if I am truthful, but I don't care.

Part of The Family came down to Castelldefels with Toni and I was able to distribute part of one of my purchases from last year: candles composed of gold, frankincense and myrrh! They were a purchase from M&S so they must be good: I am sure that they improve and mature with time.

I am trying to put off the horror which is the realization that I have bought nothing for Christmas apart from a superfluous computer. Which, think about it, is not bad going!

Now spiritual preparation for a day's teaching that I don't want to do.

 Again.