Culture Pays!

Set on a block of polished wood and slightly off-centre a partially drunk glass of light beer with the foam gently settling down the fluted sides of the glass was the painting which I would most liked to have stolen from the exhibition “El Arte del Comer”, translated into English as “Eating Art” in the gallery of Catalunya Caixa housed in the Gaudí masterpiece of Le Pedrera in Barcelona.  

http://blogs.elpais.com/el-comidista/2011/03/el-arte-de-comer-naturaleza-muerta-ferran-adria-pedrera-barcelona.html

I had arranged to see this with Suzanne as she is “doing” still life with one of her classes.

The Exhibition was a revelation with an astonishing range of art from the seventeenth century to the present day: from my favourite of “Still life with glass of beer and bread rolls” (1665) by Johan George Hinz to Catalonia’s favourite chef Ferran Adrià whose photograph (sic) of Richard Hamilton (sic) who has been a customer of his for the last twenty years formed part of the last stage of the exhibition.

Along the way paintings by the inevitable Dutch still life artists augmented by Picasso, Barceló, Zubarán, Nonell, Oudry, Soutine, Gris, Nicholson, Wols, Magritte, Dalí, Hamilton, Manzoni, Broodthaers, Beuys and others.  A feast in more ways than one.

What it was supposed to be “saying” is more difficult to be enthusiastic about, and I am not sure that I know what (or indeed if) there was a coherent raison d’etre behind it, but I do know it was full of interesting things both installations and more ordinary paintings and photographs.

And it was free. 

So I felt duty bound to buy the catalogue and I will try and work my way through some of the Spanish to delve a little deeper into the “why” of the exhibition.

It was perhaps fortuitous that our next port of call was a shop.  For food of a sort.

If all coffee disappeared from the face of the earth I would not be over-worried.  If tea followed it, that would be a disaster.  I have therefore been able to watch the growth of capsule coffee with a certain disdainful aloofness.

We do have a capsule coffee machine of course, not to have such a gadget would have been petty minded spitefulness, but I refuse to buy the capsules.  Which is not to say that I am not speechless with admiration for the mind that thought of this way of making customers pay much, much more for much, much less.  As a marketing tool I think capsules are little short of genius!

Suzanne wanted to replenish her supplies of Nespresso capsules and so we went to the High Temple of such things on one of Barcelona’s most prestigious streets, Passeig de Gràcia.

Through the glass electric doors which whispered open for us our first sight was a be-suited greeter who politely, graciously and obsequiously wished us welcome and gave us a printed ticket with the number we needed to get served. 

Past this elegant gentleman a flight of marble steps descended into the nave of this edifice where immaculately uniformed acolytes ushered customers to their appropriate altars where the officiating ministers distributed the sacred capsules on their own particular altars of commerce while behind them the panelled reredos gleamed, each of its niches filled by the ends of the slim stacked tubes of coffee.

Beyond the reredos the marble wall stretched up to the high vaulted roof giving a sense of ecclesiastical calm to the uncluttered displays of chalices and sacred spoons all devoted to the mysteries of coffee making.  It was all overwhelming in its restrained orderliness.

And money flowed.

By the time we got out (after being ushered to a circular enclosed bar to sample the “limited edition” coffee being sold) I was a gibbering maniac.  So much effort, so many people, such a prime site all devoted to a fairly simple and inexpensive drink elevated to “life style” with a commensurate price tag.  You were not merely drinking coffee you were buying into a concept.  And buying and buying!  Crisis?  What Crisis!

After the emotional drain of seeing money sucked out of suckers hands so efficiently and elegantly I was in no mood to idle our time away on a succession of buses and tubes to get to our next destination so I stopped a taxi and we arrived at MNAC in style.

As an official Friend of MNAC (the art gallery) on Montjuic I waltzed in and we (she used her teachers’ card to do the same) were soon seated in the dining room in the museum.

The restaurant has one of the finest crappy views in the world.  Through the floor to ceiling windows you look down on the city and over to the surrounding hills: it is panoramic and breath-taking, until you realize that it is simply not very interesting.  The important bits in Barcelona are 90° to the right: that’s where you can see the impressive buildings and out towards the sea, not what we were looking at.  But most people don’t see it like that and gawp at nothing very much.  As we did.

The food was superb: a sea food risotto, followed by seared tuna and the meal was completed by lime sorbet with mango and coconut soup – all washed down with an aromatic Rioja.  Although Suzanne had coffee I decided to try the tea and was presented with a case of sachets from which I selected two, Darjeeling and Red Chinese and had a reasonable cuppa for once in this country!

By the time we had finished our meal and had a “rest” on the low sofas in the high domed area outside the restaurant we found that we had only 15 minutes to see the exhibition of the paintings of Courbet and others scrabbled together under the general heading of Realism.  This, rather than the meal, was the ostensible reason that we had come there in the first place.

Although there were some very nice things in this exhibition including a small Velázquez portrait of a haughty gentleman called Franciso Pacheco whose lace ruff was a delicious swirl of glacially applied manically flowing paint, the main thrust of the exhibition seemed to me to try and equate the significance of Gustav Courbet with Ramon Marti Alsina a Catalan artist perhaps best known for his painting La Siesta of a sleeping bearded man on a striped sofa.  

Alsina did not gain by the juxtaposition of his paintings next to Courbet’s and I think that those individuals who loaned work from their Coleccións Particulars are not going to see a marked increase in the value of their object d’art because of this showing!

There were however three Alsina drawings called “Sexo feminino” “Dibujo Erótico” and “Mujer tendida de espaldas” whose subject matter you can guess, which I thought were splendid and compensated for some of his decidedly uninspired work on display.

Still it was good to get to see some of the early self-portraits of Courbet including the startling one of him looking demented, hands twisted in his hair and staring wide eyed at the viewer.  An exhibition, like the other, worthy of a return visit.

And so home by train and subsiding into post-Cultural collapse.

Still Waiting

Today is the calm before the storm.

The last day of individual study before the sitting of the final evaluations of the year: before the orgy of setting, printing and marking the examination papers begins.  And just when you think that life is an empty, arid apology you are hit with soul-drainingly futile meetings to add hot coals of frustration on a psyche already desiccated to the state of an Andean mummy.

Still, we are in June (the last month of school) and already the timetable is showing signs of fracture with the promise of acres of free time in which to indulge our whims and fantasies.

 

However, “fracture” in our school necessarily involves extra frantic administration as one activity has a knock on effect with the classes left whole and normal.  We have no slack in the staffing in our school so that a single absence can cause chaos and the concept of the “supply teacher” remains firmly in the memory of teachers from Britain because the reality here is that they are rarer than hens’ teeth.  Here the hens don’t even have gums!

It was, given our recent weather, somewhat depressing to listen to Radio 4 and hear the weather forecast prefaced by an announcer saying, “For those of you hoping for rain, you are going to be disappointed.”  “Hoping!”  Dear god, what is happening back in my country when temperatures of 25 degrees are seen as a boring and worrying continuation of splendid weather.

We have torrential rain making its inexorable progress down the coast from Girona towards our presently sun bathed city!

It was interesting however to see pupils who had come up to my desk to ask about the use of certain words and phrases in our infuriating language furtively compare their skin colour with mine.  Needless to say I am the more convincing Iberian than they!  I only hope that we get enough sunshine for me to maintain and extend the depth and profundity of my brownness – which to me at the moment is little more than a desperate British holiday maker’s superficial fortnight sheen!

As if to reinforce the irony of the British weather forecast it is now raining in Catalonia as we are engulfed in the front which has been sweeping down from the north.

 

“Chocolate Week”, an instant tradition inaugurated by my good self, has got off to a triumphant start by a colleague (excused from making something himself because of his part-time contract) arriving in school with a magical construction in chocolate from one of the finest patisseries in Barcelona. 

This was a chocolate cake with a shimmering layer of semi solid dark chocolate on top and succeeding layers of ever more chocolaty delight beneath.  A circular wall of chocolate kept it together with a chocolate sweet on top with a jaunty sprig of rosemary: it looked wonderful and tasted better!

We are all now thoroughly disheartened by what we have to achieve with our own homemade efforts.  I have already decided to augment my now decidedly pedestrian British Brownies with a chocolate sweet stuck on top of a square of chocolate stuck on top of each Brownie.  With jam.  I will not be downgraded to ordinary by a delirious quasi-illegal dream of a chocolate cake bought in by someone else!

I must admit that I am somewhat worried by the fact that I have never made anything like these in my life and this will be very much a first attempt. 

At least I will be alone with my experimentation as Toni and family will be revisiting their collective youth by going to Colonias. 

Toni’s Mum, as the eldest of three sisters had a harder time than her siblings and never actually made it onto a school trip, so this is an opportunity for her to “get her due” at long last and go on holiday as she would have done when she was a child. 

This has been imaginatively organized by her daughter and will include her children and grandchildren accompanying her.  At which point my imagination comes into play and I am grateful that I am visiting an exhibition in the centre of Barcelona on Saturday and making chocolate brownies and am therefore unavailable to participate in such jollifications!

While “The Family” will be Having Larks I will be swearing at chocolate that refuses to melt properly or cook properly or set properly.  It is an adventure to which I am looking forward. 

In a way. 

Every day is a day nearer

Today is a test.

Not of the kids but rather of simple justice.  According to my timetable and the delightful loss of two classes, I should gain two free periods today.  But already there are mutterings that things will not turn out as expected.

In spite of the loss of the classes it would appear that today (when I have a gained free) the kids are actually going to turn up.  One down, one to go!

Or not.  I have now been told that the kids will not be there but they might be somewhere later and we might have to do something.  This is situation absolutely bloody normal for the school: mild, unsettling chaos reigns supreme!  Until it develops into full, in-your-face panic.  Which it will!

In spite of the unsettled weather yesterday I did stagger off to the pool at the end of the day.  Needless to say I was the only one in the pool yet again and made the most of the space by meandering my way from one end of the pool to the other lit by the fitful light of an often cloud-obscured sun.

The smug self-satisfaction of having done something healthy stayed with me throughout the evening.  An evening which I spent very pleasantly going out for some sort of augmented burger (to hell with health!) in our favourite fast-ish food place in the centre of the beach part of Castelldefels and then back to the “Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain” written by Becky Conekin. 

This is obviously the book form of a PhD thesis and it is heavily footnoted in the best academic tradition.  It wears its historical and cultural methodology on its sleeve and is a bracing change from the easy narrative approach of Barry Turner in his “Beacon for Change: How the 1951 Festival of Britain Shaped the Modern Age” – though it is interesting that both authors chose the same pictures for their covers: a night scene of the Dome of Discovery and the charismatic icon of Skylon.

Skylon was an innovative engineering construction of startling elegance which, more than anything else characterized the whole festival – and which was summarily destroyed by the incoming Conservative government in a spiteful gesture of petty party politics to get rid of the taste of the Labour extravaganza of Modernist egalitarianism mixed with Utopian hope on the South Bank.  A piece of cultural vandalism for which I will never forgive the Tories.  So there. 

And while we are on about the evil of the Conservative party, I still remember, with sharp vividness Heath (ugh!) imposing admission charges for our National Museums.  I don’t forget and I don’t forgive.  Though the campaign against museum charges did produce one of the great posters of my youth – a copy of which is safely preserved here in Spain.  Somewhere in the house!

Skylon fascinated me as a child when I saw pictures of the Festival of Britain in a book called, I think, “50 Glorious Years” and published (to my shame) by Express Newspapers. 

Although, thinking about it, one could always partially justify the Express because it published Giles cartoons which were obviously a Good Thing.  However good Giles was, and he was and remains one of my favourite cartoonists, he could never fully compensate for the truly repulsive column of John Junor whose sickening diatribes I read with horrified disbelief every week in the Sunday Express.  “Home Truths: life around my father” by Penny Junor, his daughter, published by HarperCollins, 367pp, £18.99 ISBN 0007102135 - which Peregrine Worsthorne describes as “not only the story of a deeply unpleasant, philistine and hypocritical man but also of a deeply unpleasant, philistine and hypocritical newspaper” – makes it sound like a book to get to redress the anger he caused me in my impressionable youth! 

Skylon has remained at the back (and front) of my mind ever since I saw pictures of it.  I was delighted to hear that there is a movement to get Skylon rebuilt.  You too can vote for its location at http://www.voteforskylon.com/then.php  It still looks good, and will look wonderful, especially at night. 

I wanted it to be rebuilt for the Olympics in London as near to the original site as possible but, like the good middle class person that I am, I am prepared to experience delayed gratification as long as it gets re-built somewhere!

I have lost a “real” free period because I gained a “gained” one.  The logic behind this escapes me, but at least I kept one of the “gained” ones.

The weather continues to be skittish and, at the moment it is heavily overcast and not at all what one would expect from June in Catalonia.

I have been given a financial tip to tie up money for a period of time so that I do not get my spendthrift hands on it.  My bank, which is La Caixa is trying to raise one and a half billion euros to establish itself as a full working bank.  To do this they are offering what looks like very seductive interest rates with the conversion of half the money invested into shares in the bank at the end of eighteen months with the rest of the money continuing to earn a handsome interest rate.  It does look as though it is worth a flutter.

But I can’t get to the bank to do anything about it.  Which, in the long run, may be a good thing as the money will still be available for frivolous purchases of worthy books and attractively metallic gadgets.  We will see.  I could, I suppose assay the telephone of a way of getting to my bank manager but his English is rudimentary and the concepts of getting things done too advanced for my Spanish.  Though it did seem capable of getting some bonds from the Generalitat when they needed money as well.

The situation in FIFA has now gone beyond a farce with the tin pot dictator acclaimed and allowed to continue his questionable stewardship of a multi billion pound organization.  Blatter seems to think himself the equivalent of a Head of State, presumably it is only a matter of time before he demands to be addressed as “Your Excellency” or something even more elevated.

His shocking intention to make the voting for the siting of the World Cup involve all the members of FIFA and open corruption to include all the delegates rather than the few chosen sticky-fingered individuals on the executive committee is breathtaking in its audacity and laughable lack of concern for the state of the sport.

The behavior of the FA has been questionable to say the least.  They cannot suddenly adopt a high moral tone when they were the ones castigating investigative journalists for bringing forward the allegations of bribery before the fiasco of the failed English bid for the World Cup.  The whole catalogue of their mistakes and missed opportunities has meant that their ignoble rejection at the meeting of FIFA was totally predictable.  If ever there was a case for decimation then the governing bodies of most of the important sports in the world make a convincing case for it to be put into practice at once!

 

Where are numerate Roman generals with a sense of honour and a high cliff when you need them?

Gothic!

I have kept one of my “extra” “frees” that the disappearance of the second year sixth should have been giving me on a regular basis.  To celebrate this fact I was able to get into a book which I had been loaned by Suzanne.  This was what she called an “inspirational” book – “Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire” by Rafe Esquith.

This is one of the most horrific books I have ever read.

It concerned the quarter of a century teaching experience of a man who is fanatical about teaching.  He seems to have spend most of his salary on his classes and spends twelve hours a day in school, opening his class two hours before the official start of lessons for those pupils who want to do extra work.

His school is one of the largest primary schools in America and is situated in the heart of Los Angeles where all his pupils speak English as a second language- 

He puts on an unabridged Shakespeare play a year in his classroom which is equipped with a professional lighting rig.  He teaches music after school.  He has a film club.  His academic year starts in July.  He runs school trips for which he has done painstaking research and his pupils stay after school and at weekends to learn more about the places to which they are going.

He has turned his classroom into an official non-profit making charity.  He has his own currency in his classroom and pupils pay for their seats and desks every month with the money they “earn” during their academic life and by taking part in extra curricular activities.

It goes on and on.  He works thousands of hours more than his stipulated working week.  Weekends, holidays and lunch breaks are given to the children in his charge.  He loves education.  He has dedicated his life to education and the progress of his kids and their spiritual and academic development more than repays him for his donation of his time.

 

I love literature and have been a teacher for more than thirty years.  I have never, even when I have been at my most dedicated, been a patch on his giving to education.

If what he says is what he does then he is worth all the awards that he has been given, up to and including his honorary MBE!

But as a guide for aspiring teachers?  A disaster.  Measured against his achievements we are all failures!

I have always said that I would like to see a profession of mediocre teachers who are promoted to excellence by the support, facilities and administration which allow them to do their jobs and do their jobs well.

In “Mother Courage” scorn is poured on the general who wants his troops to be “brave” – if he needs brave soldiers then his strategy must be suspect.  What soldiers want is a general to recognize their cowardice and plan accordingly!

Dedicated, inspiring teachers are the exception not the rule and institutions and facilities should reflect that and still be able to provide exceptional education.  We want professional teachers and not have to rely on dedicated ones!

It’s June and this teacher is counting the days down to summer release. 

Just like Rafe Esquith isn’t.

Small room: small thoughts

Reading about the Age of Austerity of 1945 to 1954 in Great Britain for those who lived through part of it inevitably forces one’s memory back if not to all of that period (after all I wasn’t alive for some of it) at least as far back as early memories will go.  Specifically to the bathroom.

Which in our case we did not have. 

The kitchen doubled as the bathroom and the bath (in the kitchen) had a hinged cover which made it into a sort of breakfast and casual meal table. 

I can even remember having a bath in the sink!  And my especial delight at the end of the cleaning process was to have a measuring jug full of cold water poured over me!

These specific memories have been prompted not only by my reading but also by my attempting to rationalize the number of bottles and jars that I have on shelves in the bathroom.

What did I have when I was a small (!) kid in the bathroom?  Soap (Cussons?  Imperial Leather?  Lifebuoy?) a flannel; a nailbrush; a toothbrush and toothpaste (Gibbs SR?) – and that was it.  Shampoo?  Not always.  Toilet paper?  Not always and certainly not soft.

Yet now there is a positive array of soaps, unguents, oils and various other things littering the shelves.  And this is not counting four drawers of assorted stuff elsewhere in the bathroom.  On the principle of lightening the load of a 747 by emptying the ashtrays I pounced on something which seemed to be clearly sensible.

Concentrated mouthwash!

Ten drops and a splash of water and there is your oral hygiene.  Done.  One small 100 ml bottle sufficient for 50 odd mouthwashes.

The clever thing about this product is that when water is added the resulting mixture goes milky thereby indicating that something is happening.  And its taste is revolting – so it is clearly doing you good.

I remember my grandfather’s toothpaste was Euthymol a revolting pink sludge with a taste of how hospitals smelled.  My concentrated mouthwash is very much reminiscent of that: vile and it stings.  For a boy brought up on TCP, who could ask for more?

I have been loaned the admirably quirky titled book, “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.  The original story was by Shaffer but, before publication she was too ill to make the changed suggested by her publisher and she entrusted the task to her niece Barrows to see it through.

The novel uses the old-fashioned and unfashionable technique of the epistolary style but, as is usual with those fictional correspondents who are not averse to writing lengthy letters, there is little disadvantage to be found.

The USP of the novel is its setting in immediate post war Guernsey and much of the action of the novel is concerned with the description of war time experiences.  There is a real experience of finding out something about a part of Britain which is much nearer France than England.

The love element reminded me of Bridget Jones and the whole tone of the story seems like an odd mixture of “Cold Comfort Farm” with “Goodbye to all that” and the literary references sometimes seem a little meretricious and self congratulatory, but the book itself is a charming and undemanding read spiced with interesting information.  A good beach read for the summer.

And the rain is falling steadily and has been since just before the end of school.  Not happy.

Time and time again!

Another glorious morning and I am stuck in school.  In many ways I feel this situation to be illegal and its essential wrongness never fails to taint my academic days – especially Mondays; and especially Mondays when I lose part of the first available free period!

Still, every day is a day nearer to freedom and there are precious few days left in this month and we have kidded ourselves that June is such a fiddly month with trips and classes cancelled and things going on that the 30 days will pass by like a mere nothing.  By such self-deluding means do we struggle towards the end of term.

Although I do my best not to admit this as a fact (so that it comes as a delightful surprise) I do know that the very end of term will be without the kids.  As far as I can work out the kids will be no more from the end of the 22^nd of June which is one of those strange “fun” days which make you wish for easeful death.  Then, a few kid-free and role-play filled days and we depart to sun loungers long and drinks equally so, for our two months well-deserved rest!

I seem to be the only person worrying on a personal level about what next year might hold. 

I seem to have been the only person to enquire about wages for next year; I am the only one thinking about timetables for next year – not the detail but at least the classes and the number of lessons to be taught; I am the only one asking about holidays – as I do not intend to waste two weeks of vacation at Christmas again this year!  And so on.  All the things which seem so far in the distance at present but which have the capability of making or marring the terms ahead.

The final examination system starts with the start of the new month and teaching takes second place to the demands of finding out how much or how little has actually sunk into the little heads of our charges.  This is the final misery before we are finally allowed to slink off into the distance – but it is an extended misery with one or two of the notorious “meetings” which are the nearest that we come to the great Spanish tradition of the auto-da-fe where the torture becomes one of mental force rather than physical – though god knows its becomes physically demanding as well as I restrain myself from emulating Munch’s famous vision of alienation in the middle of the interminable chatter!

The arrangements are largely in place for our Chocolate Week where, from the 6^th of June each member of the English Department will take it in turn to produce a chocolate confection to delight the Department and set the rest of our colleagues gnashing their collective teeth in a frenzy of chocolateless jealousy!

As soon as I buy some greaseproof paper I am good to go on the production of my recipe from The Week – British Brownies.

The Unthinkable has happened and Swansea have beaten Reading and are therefore in the Premiership next season.  And Cardiff are not.  One can only sympathise with Mista Kurtz and echo his cry of "The horror!  The horror!"

At least I have the safety of a foreign perspective!

Success and Reality

Funny old thing philosophy.  “What you don’t know, won’t hurt you” is obviously wrong – as witness all those unsuspecting motorists who receive one of those official looking envelopes containing a computer generated fine from a computer generated photo from a computer operated speed camera.

But in a development of the inconsequential thought about an unobserved tree falling over in a forest without sound; can one be really happy if one ignores those elements which could make you happy – even if you don’t know of those elements’ existence.

These thoughts have been prompted by travel broadening the mind.  In the hotel room in Gran Canaria the en suite shower had an illuminated shower head.  Who until then knew such things existed.  And once known: desired.

I suppose in the scale of things having an illuminated shower head does not rate that high, but my present shower head is too large for the fixture which keeps it at the right angle and it keeps falling down when the water pressure is turned off.  So I was forced to buy a new one and that one just happened to be an illuminated one.  I was therefore able to link necessity and increase my perceived happiness quotient.

So the price is irrelevant.  Isn’t it?  Yes. 

Though I have to admit that the change in colour in the new shower head is a little abrupt and not as subtle as the one in the hotel where one colour merged with the next, and I think the light was brighter.  You see – you find a source of new happiness and immediately the required level of satisfaction becomes higher as the detail of the new happiness is searched for areas of dissatisfaction.  There are the makings of a sermon somewhere in that lot!

The food was excellent; the game good and the result right.  


Barça now have two pieces of silverware with the possibility of more as they are now qualified to go for the Supercups in football.  For a football non-enthusiast like myself this means that the season is extended even further than it would be normally, creeping ever nearer to the start date of the next season.

The triumph of Barça was accompanied in our neighbourhood by exploding rockets, firecrackers, car horns, sirens and people shouting: an affirmation not only of football’s importance here, but also of the significance of Catalonia as a distinct part of Spain.  Football in this part of the world is, to rephrase Barça’s motto, “More than a sport!”

What a contrast with the way the sport is organized.  People can no longer have any confidence in the way that FIFA, for example, administers the game when 50% of the executive committee governing the game are accused of corruption and when, more particularly the two candidates for the presidency of FIFA have both been called before an “ethics” (now that is as startling an oxymoron as you are likely to find in the world of sport) committee.

FIFA, which is based in Switzerland because of the insanely flaccid corruption laws there, has been dogged by charges of corruption for years, but their arrogance bolstered by their seeming immunity from prosecution has seen them through most of the accusations.  The unreal world in which they live allowed them to announce the startling “winners” of the locations of the next two world cup competitions with the innocent expectation that the rest of the world would simply accept their fiat.

The first country that this contemptible organisation "chose" has a corruption rating of 2.1 out of a possible 10 putting it as the same level as some of the more unsavoury countries in Africa and Asia (UK – 7.6) which is presumably a case of like calling unto like.  


Their second "choice" of country was one where there is no real tradition of football but one which is awash with money, again a situation which is not unlike that of FIFA itself.  When was the last time that the smug movers and shakers of football actually kicked a ball themselves; but they are certainly near vast sums of money!

The truly astonishing thing about FIFA is that it actually believed that it could get away with such a self-seeking announcement.  They sincerely think that they are the Lords of their own particular Universe.

Well, one of those Lords, the architect of the successful “bid” (O how loaded seems that term now!) to bring the World Cup to Qatar has been forced – not to resign – but merely to withdraw his candidature for the presidency of FIFA.  This leaves the current President unopposed, as long as the ethics committee (to which he has been summoned) allows him to stand!

Even the most hard-nosed politician would by now have been “considering his position” when the organization of which he is head is, and has been, riddled with accusations (proven and pending) of such criminal gravity.

Sport is no longer a harmless pastime where bumbling amateurs can rub along together in an old boys’ network to ensure that things work out.  It is a multi-billion pound, multi-national employer with political, social and above all economic implications.

We have ministers for sport: it is time that they united and demanded more transparency and a root and branch change in the administration of the “nice little earner” by the shady characters who run it at the moment.

And the first trophy should be the head of Blatter.  Followed by the rest of his cronies.  For FIFA and the rest it is well past the “Salt Lake City Moment” when even the Olympic Games cleaned up its image a little.

I live in hope!

But – there is a far more important consideration in Sport which is much more immediate than that confined to the rarefied upper levels of sports administration.

Cardiff City lost against Reading and that means that Reading go on to the Play-Off Finals to decide which team goes up to the Premiership.  Cardiff losing is bad, but Reading’s opponents in the final make it not bad but potentially catastrophic. 

Their opponents will be Swansea City!

As someone who went to University in Swansea I have many pleasant memories of the place, but my home was in The Capital City of Wales - Cardiff.  To have Swansea as the sole Welsh team in the Premiership with Cardiff languishing in the lower divisions is something which cannot be countenanced with anything approaching equanimity.

Although I do not condone petty squabbles between football teams, I would merely say that the population of Cardiff (with the exception of foreigners from West Wales who have sneaked into the city) wishes Reading well in their forthcoming final!

Just to end.  


Have you heard . . .

Cardiff City are releasing a new drink called "Play Offs"... Not sure about the taste but they've been bottling it for years.

Apparently they had play off final cakes made to give out at full time but they crumbled...

How does a Cardiff fan celebrate a Play Off win? He turns off his xbox and goes to bed.

Sigh!

Weekend musings

Well, if you look for it you can find some blue in the overcast sky, but it is not what I would call the predominant colour and everything looks a little weary: it’s amazing how lifeless colours can be in early morning gloom!

However, there is a Toni’s Mum’s fideua to look forward to for lunch; some time to read during the afternoon; what might be a momentous (at least in Barça football terms) match, and gambas a la plancha for dinner.  With any luck a fine day tomorrow to laze on the Third Floor.  What weekends should be.

I am already, as is my wont, worrying about what next year might hold.  I have been assured by the bursar that our wages will not be cut – which in the present circumstances is something to be thankful for as other teachers have had a government imposed 5% cut in their wages linked to a two or three year pay freeze.  Our wages for the academic year 2011-2012 will be the same as for 2009 so we will have a year-on-year pay cut of the cost of inflation plus the annual wage increase.  One could see the refusal of our school to pass on the government cut as merely the transfer of the annual wage increase: the school, in effect, loses nothing while we . . .

I have been trying to work out what sort of timetable I will have next year.  At present I teach 24 (!) periods a week:

1ESO         5

3ESO         5

Media Studies   2

Current Affairs 2

Language Arts  4

2BXT         4

Modern Art       2

I am likely to have 1ESO; 3ESO; Media Studies; Language Arts; Current Affairs; Modern Art again next year – this leaves a possible 4 or 5 periods to be added.  A member of staff who has been away for a year on maternity leave will reappear next year and I will be interested to see what she takes up again.  She taught Drama (which I have no interest in doing if it means putting on productions for the public) and Media Studies for which she designed a course; she could take those and I would be left with god knows what.

I am preparing myself to reject what I would consider an unreasonable workload.  During times of crisis there is pressure on members of staff to accept anything because “at least you have a job” – that is not a dictum that is going to carry any weight at all with me.  But, as usual, I should wait and see what the reality is before painting luridly horrific pictures of what might be.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof: though it may not be until the first day of the new academic year that I actually find out what exactly I am expected to teach.

Meanwhile the pound has improved slightly, but only because of the chaos which is facing the Eurozone with the economy and governmental administration of Greece not even achieving the status of “laughable” and the rest of the PIGS’ economies being in almost equally parlous states and therefore threatening the continuation of the Euro as a viable currency for all the member states in the EU who joined the Eurozone.

In our little town (Crisis?  What Crisis?) there has been a lurch to the right on the basis, presumably, that a party like PP (riddled with corruption) will try its best to preserve the wealth of those who already have it and want to keep it.

The Socialist (!) alternative is equally questionable and has shown itself to be shockingly inept in the way it has governed.  The political future in this country is anything but bright!

I do feel a bit of a fraud as I sit here typing this, while the gentle breeze makes the palm tree I can see from my window sway causing its shadow to dance on the surface of our swimming pool: it’s a hard old life!

Another week done!

A gloomy start to the day but, on the other hand, the depressing weather seemed to have a calming effect on the drivers so that there was only one near accident on the motorway to school today.

The first outing for the Swiss Army Briefcase which, so far, has excited no comment whatever.  But, there again, what sort of saddo actually takes notice of a colleague’s school case?  The answer to that is perhaps best left unsaid!

Or it might be a colleague sitting next to you and one on an opposite table.  On being asked if I got it from El Corte Ingles I replied in the affirmative and to the question of whether I had paid a lot, I put on an enigmatic smile.  €50 might sound a lot for a school case, but it hardly matches the extravagant amount of money lavished on The Machine, so I am prepared for my colleagues to think their most spendthrift thoughts about my Maecenean capabilities.  Or possibly I am thinking of another classical rich guy like Lepidus.  Or not.

I have now lost another free period so that means that I have lost all (all) the “free” periods that I was set to gain from the disappearance of the upper sixth form.  So it goes.

After school preparations for The Game have to be started as tomorrow we are going to have a barbecue before The Game kicks off.  I will have to drug myself to be able to take the general level of hysteria that will be augmented by the screams of young boys as the game progresses.

I have not yet worked out a game plan for what to do or offer by way of compensation in the unthinkable event of a defeat of Barça. 

My panacea is Cava and I pour scorn on those who are not invigorated by the inhalation of those exploding bubbles and the ingestion of that vital grape juice!  Well, if nothing else, it will give me the opportunity to drink with impunity!

I have now read “In Flight Science” or rather I should say that it read itself.  It is a masterpiece of clarity and is science writing without pretention and aimed primarily at an easily distracted general readership: big writing, well spaced with pictures and anecdotal illustrations.  In some ways reading this was like a Chinese meal: enjoyable but ultimately unsatisfying in the sense that you want more – which is surely the aim of books like this.  A success!

The television is full of The Game tomorrow with speculation, analysis and atmospheric pictures direct from a deserted outer London suburb! 

Although I am looking forward to The Game (and more especially the food which will be prepared to make the day go better) I will not be sad when the season is finally over.

Buying therapy

The risible lunacy on the roads is becoming more marked as the weather warms up.  I will not elaborate on the numerous suicidal manoeuvres that enlivened by journey to work; suffice to say that my intake of breath was sharp on a number of occasions.  Driving along the motorway sometimes feels like you are a part of driving display team whose members have just met for the first time and are doing a little improvisation based loosely on a shared death wish!

Actually arriving at the school and having to cope with the merely breathtakingly inconsiderate stopping, parking and driving off of parents as they deposit their children in our care is a positive relief from the imminent slaughter on the main roads!

Our first lesson was broken up by the clothing police coming around to check on the suitability of the scanty wear of the female pupils.  Certain pupils were taken out of class to an accompaniment of barely concealed hysteria and delight at the interruption.  Bringing pupils back to normality after something as exciting as indecent exposure is difficult to the point of impossibility – especially as the class in question is one not noted for its maturity.  To put it mildly.  Just how to start the day!

I am getting more and more frustrated with the broken zip in my school bag.  I have hunted around at home and discovered that I have no other to take its place!  I find this difficult to believe, but I seem to remember giving one away.  Such shortsighted altruism!

I did “pop in” to El Corte Ingles and was duly horrified at the price that is being asked for some very ordinary looking cases.  I did, however see one which is made by the Swiss Army Knife people.  I rather like the idea of having a bag made by such unlikely manufacturers.

By an effort of will which continues to astonish me, I actually left the store without buying anything. 

In a further astonishing act of consumer denial I went to a common supermarket and looked in one of the adjacent shops at low priced alternatives. 

The supermarket only offered a large case on wheels, so I am tempted to go back to El Corte Ingles and have another look at the Swiss Army Briefcase and if I can’t bring myself to buy an overpriced piece of office luggage with a little Swiss logo, then I will go downmarket and buy something which will probably have a half life of a few months.  And then I will have to buy another which would indicate that buying cheap is false economy so I ought to buy Swiss now.  I do like logic linked to spending!

It took me just over an hour to decide which of the briefcases to buy.  In fact, to be exact, I didn’t really buy a briefcase; I bought a computer case.

I don’t really see how I can be held responsible for a purchase when the zips have a little white cross on a circle of red on them.

 

To be absolutely truthful the new case is not exactly what I wanted.  Just as with my ideal watches I do have a list of requirements for my ideal case: double zippers (if that is what you call two zip heads on one zipper); a small zippered section on the front for keys; a section for papers; a padded section for a computer; rugged construction; little pockets and thingies for things; an overall look of subdued opulence.

Well I got most of what I wanted.  It was very, very difficult rejecting more expensive cases than the one I eventually bought.  This is a disturbing tendency which I will assiduously attempt to reverse when I next assay a purchase!

As I suppose is natural, the contents of the old briefcase will not fit into the new one.  The major problem, as I have always found is what I used to call a “pencil case” but which is now apparently called an “accessory case” – but it looks just the same and it doesn’t fit in the same way that these “cases” never do when you have all your bits and pieces in place in the briefcase.

Dinner this evening was in a second choice restaurant with first class food.  We decided to have three tapas: patatas bravas; pinchos, and anchovies in light batter – looking like large white bait.  The wine was superb (the waiter virtually refused to give us gaseosa saying that the wine could not be diluted as it was too good) and, as usual, I had forgotten my phone to take a photograph of the label!

The waiter was someone we knew from the restaurant at the end of the road on the beach and he offered us a glass of Cava which was from the same house as the red wine: delicious.  The name was Castelo de Pedregosa and it is a label that I shall look out for, especially in Cava!

 

The excellent meal for two of us was €29 – a real bargain.

And tomorrow is Friday.  Life is sometimes, well, satisfactory!

Over and above!

Horror of horrors!  I came into school for an early start and then realized that it was a normal start, but an early finish!  It was Wednesday not Thursday.  I actually did some marking before 8.00 am before I realized that I didn’t need to be here!

It will take me the whole of the day to recover from such an excess of grovelling professionalism.  I have had to have a medicinal cup of tea to take away the sting of giving extra to an institution that doesn’t pay for what it gets anyway.

I am in the staff room of building 4 which seems to amplify the voices of naturally loud speaking Spaniards and I have resorted to I-tunes to escape from the incessant chatter.  Incessant chatter, I might add, about school and the pupils.  One can have too much of a “good thing” and wall-to-wall education is a little wearing.

I would much rather talk about the proposed Chocolate Week where each member of the English Department makes some sort of chocolate confection on an appointed day to be shared with all the other members of the Department than discuss the limited progress of some pampered madam in the 3ESO

Meanwhile extracts from Khovanshchina fill my ears.  This is music which I first discovered as a result of my mother going to Bristol for a day’s shopping and coming back with a present for me of a Music for Pleasure LP with a splendid cover of a detail of one of the more apocalyptic paintings of Hieronomous Bosch 

and the record itself filled with famous and not so famous (as I thought then) music of Mussorgsky.  There was one piece where you could distinctly hear a music stand fall over and in subsequent performances of the same thing I missed (and still do) the satisfying clunk from the disc that introduced the music to me!

The other notable example of extraneous sounds on a disc that I used (ah, where are all my LPs now!) to own was the Heifetz String Quartet where there was the distant sound of flocks of birds and the explanation on the record cover which stated that they tried everything to get rid of the birds from the environs of the hall where they were recording and failed, but felt that the performances were worth listening to even with the birds – and they were right!

I also enjoyed a disc (mfp) of the Concierto de Aranjuez where as the music faded in one of the movements you could hear the soloist/conductor humming the melody.  In string quartets it is almost mandatory for the first violin to draw in a huge, audible, nasal, hoover-like breath before the start of one of the more taxing fiddle passages.

I have never owned discs of the grandfather of extraneous noise Glenn Gould – but I am sure that I could get to like his interposed grunts, groans and hums!

I suppose I ought to say that there is something sterile about the perfect recordings that we now get devoid of hiss, scratches and duff notes – but I love them.  One only has to listen to some of the re-mastered AAD discs to remember the bad old days of poor reproduction to turn to DDD with relief and delight.

I do miss some of my LPs, but rather in the way that I miss my old Grays wooden badminton racquet: they were fine at the time but technology moves on and the Kelvar racquets I played with eventually were immeasurably superior to the heavy old wooden clubs that I used to use!  So with CDs performances are much cleaner and easier to listen to than the performances on LPs.

Some of my favourite LPs did not make it to a CD release and those I do miss: especially one LP which was a compilation of music by Gluck and Grétry.  This selection of music was so insanely jolly that I used to play it continuously when I had to pack up in University before the vacations.  Packing was, is and ever will be anathema to me and I miss the music which helped me get through those dark afternoons of the soul that packing produced!

As I recall the front cover had a line drawing by some artist like Tiepolo or similar.  If anyone knows of it do contact me.  A drug more powerful that aspirin that can be taken aurally!

 

I underestimated the power of the Internet.  I found the cover!  The recording I am looking for is Gluck and Grétry – Ballet Suites, played by the New Symphony Orchestra of London conducted by Robert Irving and first issued on Ace of Clubs.  Amazon does not come up trumps with information about a current recording.  But at least I have something to go on now! 

Someone somewhere will have transferred this recording into a digital form – all I have to do is now find that person.