Creative?

The demented barking of the damned dog next door drove me from my bed and prompted me to complete one of the chores that really needed to be done.

I have accepted some financial advice and acted on it.  In my view anything which keeps my money away from my hands is a good thing.

I do not have a sophisticated view of money and I fail to understand the theoretical underpinning of my finances by the abstract concept of “money”.  I only find money easy to understand when it is translated into something which appeals to me more – like, for example, gadgets.

Even I understand that a whole-scale application of my “theoretical to practical” eventually, and probably quite quickly, leads to Micawber-like poverty.  It is therefore advisable for me to move money as an easily spent commodity into something where the money is held captive to be released to me at a later date.

My bank’s desire to take over the universe by issuing bonds or debentures or some such thing seemed to offering the sort of safe (for a bank) haven for my money.  To induce punters to give them the billions that they are after they offered something nearer (but by no means close) to the amount of money they make by “looking after” the money they already have on deposit.

My bank has now sequestered a small chunk of my liquid assets in Spain, so I needed to get some of my devalued money from Britain to make up the deficit. 

It is heart breaking to listen to the exchange rate for the pound when you consider that when I first came to this country a Euro was worth just 70p!  Still, thinking about these things doesn’t help personal stability and one must go on, hiding money in various financial institutions in the hope that the money will keep pace with inflation!

Exhausted with and by my financial wheeler-dealings I turned with some trepidation to the completion of Toni’s Name Day Cake.

I retrieved the frozen base from the fridge and considered it afresh.  To be frank it did not look appetizing but I consoled myself with the knowledge that the base was the least of my worries because it was going to disappear under a mixture of calories beyond calculation!

Since Toni likes strawberries I sliced some fresh strawberries that I found (in the third shop of looking) and placed those on the base and put the whole lot back into the freezer.

The main part of the cake consists of whipping cream, grated chocolate and vanilla sugar.  I added the last because I bought it for the Brownies and I am damn well going to use it.  I also added a pinch of salt because I was told to.

I made the important discovery that grating chocolate by hand is both time consuming and dangerous.  I also discovered (though too late to be of use in this case) that putting cold chocolate into the liquidizer does in seconds what took me longer.  Much longer.  And at the cost of a fragment of skin.

The next bit, frankly, did not work.

Once the mixture was nice and firm the instructions I was given demanded two whipped egg whites be “folded in gently”.  There were two problems here.  The first was that Toni is, to put it mildly, paranoid about raw eggs and the second problem was the way that I whipped them.

I suppose that a real cook would have meticulously cleaned the liquidizer that I was using to whip the cream, sugar and grated chocolate and then produced whipped egg whites of meringue quality.

My version of putting the egg whites into a partially scraped liquidizer did not produce what I vaguely remember of this sort of thing having to form “peaks” when a spoon was lifted from the mixture.

This never happened.  But I was determined not to waste two eggs so I folded the muddy liquid in anyway.  The resultant goo was spread over the frozen base and the cooling strawberry remains and returned to the freezer.

It was my artistic intention to cover the top of the cake with Cadbury’s Chocolate Buttons™ or some sort of foreign rip-off.  No Buttons™, not even for ready money, could be found.  So I decided to cover the top (and the uneven surface) with a masking covering of tiny chocolate biscuits and then use a paper doily as way of producing a fetching pattern on the newly flat surface.

Having lots of bloody fragments of chocolate left over from the Great Grating Fiasco it was my intention of scattering the fragmented remnants artistically over the top of the top of the cake.

It was at this point that I discovered the efficacy of the pulverising propensity of the liquidizer.  A few seconds on the “ice cube smashing” setting (which certainly does not work for ice cubes) and I had chocolate powder.

The surface of the cake was therefore flattened with the powder and slices of strawberry placed around the edge with three whole ones for the centre.  The whole strawberries made the cake (still in its tin) too high to go back into the place made for it in the freezer so they have been reserved for placing at the last possible moment – perhaps on a nest of cream.

Going out to lunch in the Maritimo Restaurant seemed the least possible recompense for all my effort!

We did actually sit outside and enjoy the windy sunshine with everything on the table weighted down to stop it blowing away.  Once again excellent value and a view which never fails to interest.

Of course, yet another problem concerned Toni’s Name Day Present.  Which I have not bought.  And I have been told that my holiday on Monday is actually a holiday for everyone and that no shops are going to be open on Monday, when I had planned to bring together my scattered wits and find Something to give to Toni on his special day.

Sufficient, as they say, unto the day is the evil thereof.  I remain confident that somewhere will sell me something that Will Do.

And The Family are going to arrive for lunch.

Hey ho!

Against Nature Again!

Well, we had the best of the weather in the morning when the sun did deign to come out and shine in a half-hearted manner.

I managed to stay away from the Third Floor and settle down to the horror of marking!  On a Saturday!

Although these are examination papers for the youngest pupils that we teach they are long and bitty and some of the questions have (as always in English grammar) variations in the answers that make marking a true delight.

The bulk of the marking (and especially the nasty bits) had been done in odd moments when I found myself able to get out the papers and beaver away for a few minutes before interruptions.  The sections left were of a more pleasingly mechanical nature and could even be completed on a Saturday (!) morning without too much personal angst.  Not too much.

I am now armed with the results on the computer which will be needed on Tuesday morning when everybody and his wife will be attempting to put in marks on an overworked computer system that goes down, as the saying has it, as often as a two bit whore.

The deadline for this piece of administration is self imposed and unreasonable which says something for management.  At least management in our place.  Perhaps everyplace!

I am comforted, as always, by the wisdom of my personal guru in school, who also works as the business studies teacher and is a mainstay of the English department, “Remember Stephen, this is not Britain” is one of his enlightened aphorisms which, together with, “It will get done, because it has to be done” has kept me sane in the unenlightened atmosphere of a Spanish school!

So, Tuesday with its panic and its horrific meeting will come and go and life will go on.  And get ever nearer to the end of the month and release!

The completion of one piece of school work encouraged us into town as I wanted to buy a cake tin and have lunch.

Lunch was in our usual place and we had to fight our way through the stumble of old age pensioners who seem to colonize the place to find a place to wait (!) before we were able to be seated.

As Toni will not wait anywhere for food usually, you can take his easy acquiescence with the airy instructions of the owner of the place to sit on the tall chairs by the bar as a sort of “holding station” until a table became available as a vivid indication of his assessment of the worth of the establishment we were patronizing.

I have to admit that the length and variety of the menu del dia is unparalleled in our experience and it is excellent value for money.

The cake tin was eventually bought in one of the larger hypermarkets and is one of those with a removable bottom and a clip side.  I’m not sure that I really need it, but I like the idea of needing it.

This was a necessary purchase for the making of Toni’s Name Day cake.  There is no cooking in this production and I only need to assemble the ingredients and mix them together and voila!  a cake!

As Toni does not like “dry” cakes this one should be perfect.

The only “fly” in the ointment is that (as usual) I have never made it before and I have only the sketchiest notions of quantities of ingredients.  But I work on the principle that if the ingredients in themselves are good then the end result is going to be OK at least.

As the basic ingredients in this cake are chocolate and cream what can go wrong?

The biscuit base took up a packet of digestive biscuits and some of the unsalted butter that I have left over from the making of the British Brownies.  I greased the inside of the tin and lined it with greaseproof paper and pressed the biscuit down to form a rough circle.  I do find that the paper gets in the way and the end result is not, as far as I can see going to be a perfect circle.  But what the hell!

For reasons I don’t understand, but it was an essential part of the instructions as I remembered them that I then froze the base in the tin.

Tomorrow the rest of the recipe which, to be frank, I am making up as I go along.

Days

Friday, in terms of weather and time allocation, did not go well.

My marking had to take second place to supervision and general faffing around after students.  Moving from building to building in sheeting rain is not, and never has been, my idea of fun – but that is what I did for most of the day getting more and more pissed off as my idea of how the day should have gone was pushed further and further back.

I gained virtually nothing from collapsing classes and even the last day of Chocolate Week was somewhat devalued by the final person buying two packets of good quality biscuits rather than making something chocolaty herself!

The end result of the day was that I did not do what I wanted to do and it means that Tuesday (when we return to work) is going to be a day of considerable horror as marks are frantically put into a computer system that I cannot access from home.

To my complete horror I can see no other alternative than to have to spend some of my holiday finishing off the marking!

These things cannot be thought of with any degree of composure so I will turn instead to something much more agreeable – eating.

Irene and I had one of our long delayed gossips.

We have been going to my “local” Indian restaurant but Irene did not seem enthusiastic so I suggested we try an Argentinian restaurant that we had vowed never to return to.

Our apparent U-turn is, in fact nothing of the sort, as we made our decision based on the ridiculous amount of cigarette smoke than ruined the otherwise excellent food we had.

Now that we Puritan non-smokers have just about taken over the world we can revisit previous smoke-filled dives and breathe the fresh-ish air of our local restaurants and laugh at the addicts huddled in furtive corners next to the traffic.

We did have an excellent meal of shared salad followed by meat – it was, after all an Argentinian restaurant – and, in my case by some elaborate ice cream creation and iced coffee.

As I like my steak “blue” if possible, this took a little explanation as such things are not second nature to a Spaniard.  It turned out that the kitchen described my (our) cooking preference as “in the English style”!  Who would have thought that we had achieved such racial gastronomic sophistication!

Children Watching

Today did not work out as planned.  All I seem to have done today is supervised recalcitrant children who needed just enough supervision to make marking difficult, unfair or impossible.

I did, eventually mange to get one set completed and the marks put into the machine.  This is not as easy as it sounds as there is an element of difficulty involved which makes the putting in of results something of a via doloroso.

On the positive side I have now discovered how to use Excel to change a series of marks each of which has been given a different percentage of the final global mark into something coherent. 

I don’t really understand the meaning of the symbols that I use to get the answer, so in that sense, it takes me back to my “solving” of quadratic equations, where I sometimes got the right answer to questions I didn’t understand using techniques which I didn’t understand to get marks which I felt I richly didn’t deserve. 

However, if it works, don’t knock it! 

And I have written down the gnomic sequence of letters, asterisks and dollar signs, all within brackets of course, which get those right answers.  At least I think they are right answers, but the row of figures that I have produced is so beguiling that I do not have the nerve to question their accuracy!

I could, of course do some marking at home – but I am in that school for at least (!) eight hours every day and they have no right to any more of my time outside the institution.

The school has begun its annual implosion as normal lessons are suspended and what we used to call “project work” commences.  The word “project” is now the exclusive property of Project Based Learning (which is of course a system of teaching for those with no life outside school and an insane interest in the perverse concept of pure education) and comes with theoretical structuring. 

 

The word “rubric” which used to indicate those parts of the religious service where an explanation (in red print) was called for now refer to a series of descriptions of what gets you what mark from unacceptable to outstanding.  What used to be called grade descriptors are now the essential add-ons for any self-respecting pupil-centred piece of teacher work.

Having to write the bloody things (and finding out just how difficult they are to write) shows how little most of we professionals actually think about what we want from a piece of work before we see the end result that we hadn’t thought or fully planned for!

What this project means in practice is that I spent the last period in school watching part of “Wall-e” a beautifully produced cartoon with serious issues packed into its narrative which shamelessly draw on a whole raft of other films for its storyline.  In my view the theme of the film, in the way it is slowly and lovingly developed by the two main robot characters in the film is more geared towards the adults accompanying the children in the cinema rather than the children themselves.

It remains to be seen what the kids in our place make of the film as the basis for their work.

Each year has its own basis for this project week and in the penultimate lesson of the day I listened to a talk given to our second year kids who are going to develop a questionnaire about travel to school and produce a report at the end of the week.  The excitement just goes on mounting!

Tomorrow I will try and get another set of papers marked and attack the computer program to get the results into some sort of digital form.

The holiday on Monday (hooray!) will be little enough compensation for the marathon meeting on Tuesday to which I will contribute precisely nothing – apart, I suppose from a few figures!

The weather continues bloody with only unconvincing scraps of sunshine to let us know what this country could be capable of if it lived up to its reputation for opening its skies to our nearest star!

I live in hope.

Once more into the dark!

I now have my first examination papers to mark and will get another set tomorrow.  They have to be marked and the final marks fed into a computer system for a meeting on Tuesday and we have a holiday on Monday.  Go figure!

I tried to get the back of the marking done today during my possible ·free” periods – but they disappeared in invigilation and believe me you have to have eyes like Argus to watch a group of Spanish kids taking an examination as everyone (everyone) giving half, quarter, a Nano of a chance will cheat.  If the individual is good then their work will be on display, casually held up for contemplation or a page dropping casually at the side of a desk or a shoulder moved so that the person behind will be able to see.  They are as inventive in the ways that they cheat, as they are uninspired in their attitude to what they write!

 

Cheating is endemic, systematic and inclusive and, as I have said before, I have never in all my experience come across such extensive use of unfair practices to get a mark.  Even with poor students in the UK I have never seen such a disgraceful display from so many students.  No matter how trivial or important the examination – they cheat.

And these deeply flawed results are what we talk about in our meetings.  The first of which is but days away.

The meeting will be one of the interminable ones for which our school is justly castigated (if only by me) and which take weeks from which to recover.  Unfortunately we do not have time for that period of recuperation as we have another bloody meeting following hard upon.  It is pure, unadulterated torture.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Torture.

Still the anger and frustration add energy to get through the remaining days until the holidays!

Day Three of Chocolate Week saw a colleague produce a biscuit based chocolate flan which is made without cooking in an oven but rather.  He was a bit vague about the details, but the end result was delicious and very, very messy.  I think I will assay this particular “cake” this weekend, certainly for Monday which is Toni’s Santo or name day.

The weather continues to be far less than ideal with sullen skies and clammy temperatures.

Where is summer?

Call this June!

So far June has been a woefully inadequate month in terms of the weather. 

Today, for example is muggy, brightly sullen and depressing.  And I have lost a free period.  On the bright side (so far) I have gained two (2) periods this afternoon when I should be taking the 3ESO through the long slog of a double period of Media Studies.  It won’t last of course, but I will enjoy the thought of a free afternoon even if the reality is ever-so-slightly different.

As we inch our way to a double figure date in June a kind of febrile excitement has taken over the staff and people are eager to share their calculations about how much longer we have to serve - I like the double meaning of “serve” standing for duty and a prison sentence!

Unadjusted figures would seem to suggest that we have 23 more days – but that does not allow for weekends, so in fact we have 17 days left.  But wait, we also have a holiday on the 13^th of June so that brings it down to 16 teaching days left.

We can massage those figures further.  The end of the course for the kids is on the 22^nd of June so actual teaching days go down to 10!  And, as the 22^nd is a day of fiesta we can bring it down to 9.  I love statistics!

The days without the kids are usually half days so the 7 days that I have got rid of to get the 9 teaching days can be further reduced to 3.5, so adding the 9 to 3.5 we get a total of 12.5 days left in school.  Much more manageable than 23!

I have no intention of counting the days of the holiday because I do not wish to limit the idea of freedom that they give.

Day Two of Chocolate Week was almost a disaster as the colleague whose duty it was to bring in the confectionary delights today almost left them at home.  She actually got outside the door without them before some primordial jolt of self-preservation prompted her to return and get the goodies!  I can see that future Chocolate Weeks will have to incorporate a fail-safe Plan C (for Chocolate of course) to ensure that if all else collapses there is enough of the Dark Stuff hidden away to satisfy anticipatory demands!

The first of the “Meetings” in our school is next Tuesday.  It will start at 3.00 pm and the scheduled end is 6.15 pm.  No-one apart from myself howls to the moon in horror at this meaningless squandering of time and resources. 

Even the Good Friday service is only 3 hours long and, well, fill in your own explanation of the time The Son of God took to die and say his Words from the Cross and compare it with our particularly pointless form of administrative crucifixion. 

Perhaps it would be more interesting if the proceedings in our particular hell were spoken in Aramaic; they would be just as comprehensible to me. 

Let’s face it in EVERY meeting I have attended in this school I have felt like echoing the words “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani,” and just as for Him, no one answers and nothing happens and we just plough on to the bitter, bitter end!

Writing the former paragraph has obviously angered the gods, so I have now lost one of the frees this afternoon.  I am typing this invigilating a maths and Latin examination.  For one delirious moment it crossed my mind that the kids would have to work out problems using Roman numerals but, as is so often the case, it is nothing like as interesting as that.

The Latin text concerns Scipio (famous in Rome for his exploits) and the Senate debating the peace with the Carthaginians.  In case you think that this is a credit to the single year of Latin that I did in school, that description was translated from the Spanish, and even then I had to look up “hazañas” (exploits – that was my choice rather than the given “hazards” or “feats”).  And talking of precision, I am not sure that I like that full stop lurking in front of a bracket.  But, so it goes!

As if to make my misery complete, it has started raining! 

June indeed!

Sweet Success!

Chocolate Week got off to a good start with people resenting the fact that they were not given a piece of one of my delicious Brownies as a right because they were not members of the English department. 

Not only that but the person who was in the English department and was next in line to produce some chocolate confection for Day Two was properly apprehensive about producing something to match the glory that was my effort in the culinary field on Day One.

I must admit that my overwhelming feeling was one of relief that people found them edible.  I must also admit that I was struck with the full force of a natural teacher trait: one-upmanship. 

It is never enough for a teacher (publically) to do what is required; there always has to be something beyond the ordinary – to have that little bit more. 

So, you could say that the additions of the elegant chocolate square on which was placed a chocolate sweet and the whole construction sprinkled with the essential dust of icing sugar was merely my giving in to the natural inclination of a teacher to show off to save putative face.

Teachers are so chronically insecure (why else would they become teachers?) that the “extra bit” becomes obligatory.  Left to their own devices teachers can whip up enough fear from a simple situation to shatter the strongest constitution.

Meanwhile there is something else going on which is taking over the thoughts and minds of the workers in this tired institution.

Examinations! 

The lifeblood of our body politic! 

Children wandering around with sheaves of papers and parroting learned facts.  In Spain the “First Aid in English” approach is extended to all subjects: if it can’t be learned in a list then it isn’t education!

There is something almost touching in hearing pupils prepare for their geography examination by reciting capital cities of the world!  Including Wales!

I am sitting with about a third of a class who have turned up to use their first early lesson as an opportunity to revise.  Their examinations start about an hour later than the official start of their timetable today and they remind me of myself at their age when I remember learning a list of ten reasons why Britain lost the American colonies.  Which I duly reproduced in a history examination and was as duly told off as “history is a literary subject” and I should have written in fluent, presumably Churchillian, prose.

Which brings me to Bloody Mary.  I have, during my academic career, written exactly the same essay in Form 3; Form 4; Form 5; Form 6; 1^st Year University: “Why was Mary Tudor unpopular?”  They didn’t even change the wording!  The essay on the loss of the American colonies I wrote only three times.  What a lack of imagination – but how lucky for we plodding learners who like lists for examinations!

Today I should hear if my investment in La Caixa has been accepted.  This was a debenture issue with a reasonable rate of interest on the money and 50% of it being transferred into shares.  The exact details escape me, but it does look like a reasonable approach to keeping the money away from my scrabbling fingers!

This investment has prompted me to ask my bank in Britain what rate of interest they are paying on my so-called “Savings” account.  0.25% is the astonishingly small amount they are prepared to pay.  This compares with their rate of interest on the money they lend in no way, shape or form.  I will have to Do Something about it.  Not that the amount of money there is vast, but it does exist and I fail to see why I should provide the banks with capital when they are not even keeping pace with inflation in my account!  But there again, what account does!

I think that I will have to add sorting the financial arrangements to the growing list of Things To Do on my summer schedule.  I think I probably have more chance of getting things done because Britain does not shut down so entirely as it does in this country during the months of July of August!  And, as an added bonus, we finish school at the end of June so there is the whole of July which is a possible month for action!

As usual the spectre of organizing the books in the library is beginning to haunt me but as the library (as a room) itself has been made a little tidier there is more imaginative space for me to begin the monumental task of arranging the books into some semblance of order.  I look forward to what I might find, as logic (rather than convenience) begins to dictate the placing of the books!

I am almost convinced to regard the summer holidays as a time when I can also Sort Out those piles of things that I have carefully carried with me from Wales to Catalonia and have not used once since I got here.  Space is at a premium and perhaps I need to be more selective about what I keep. 

As a solicitor might say, “I hear what you say.” 

Reality?  Aye, there’s the rub!

Cooking with Care!

It was, to say the least, ironic that the founder and moving force behind Chocolate Week (June 6^th to June 10^th) should be unable to find the recipe for British Brownies that he had boasted that he was going to make to start off the celebrations.

I searched every part of the house; I collated and put in date order all the copies of The Week that I could find; I have read through more Recipe of the Week articles than is good for my health – but recipe for British Brownies found I none.

It is my sneaking suspicion that the particular edition of the magazine that had the recipe I needed has been “tidied up” during one of the visits of The Family never to be seen again!  I shall adopt that as an article of faith!

Not to be outdone by mere mischance I resorted to the Internet with renewed zeal and found the site for The Week, but to get into past issues of the magazine you have to be a subscriber and my subscriber number is known only to god and the good people at The Week.  The web site promised that it would get my number to me “within 72 hours” but the problem was a little more pressing than that.

I searched through the Internet and I now have the general principles of Brownie Making firmly lodged in my mind; but the specific recipe for which I had already bought the ingredients eluded my search.

I eventually compromised on an amalgam of two (British) recipes and decided, given the ingredients that I had, what could go wrong?

Well, nothing worked out exactly as it said it would in the recipe, but as each of the fifteen remaining Brownies (I had to eat one for research purposes) is now resplendent topped with a thin square of chocolate on which is perched a chocolate sweet (stuck in position with honey) I think they look more than respectable.  And they taste OK as well!

The real trouble starts tomorrow when staff other than the members of the English Department (who have a Brownie by right) engage in unseemly squabbles to get the remaining goodies!

My greatest fear is to forget to take them to school tomorrow morning.  It is one of my early starts and I am mostly on automatic pilot at that ungodly hour and anything out of the ordinary takes second place to my zombie-like approach to the mechanics of getting to work!

As I went into Barcelona by train (leaving the car at Castelldefels station) I was able to call into one of my favourite cheap shops in the station concourse in Sants.  Many of my Catalan art books have been bought at bargain price there.  This time there was little to catch my interest in on the art front, but I did come across a cache of CD in damaged cases which were priced at €1!  I took a chance of most of the discs being undamaged and bought 21 of them.  I didn’t even look at who or what was playing them as I use things like this to while away the time I spend on the motorway going to school.

I have tested a few of them at home and put the rest in a CD holder to be placed in the car.  The titles of some of them give a clue to their potential audience: “Best of Baroque” “Three Viennese Classic Images” “A Selection of Opera Highlights” “Classical Romance” “Russian Romantic Fantasy”.  But, to be fair even the most luridly titled seems to have a good selection of music.  For example at the moment I am listening to Tchaikovsky’s Quartet No 1 in D major played by the New Philharmonic Quartet led by Alexander Shustin (who?) and I have to admit that the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra (a name to conjure with!) figures quite extensively in this collection!  We shall see – and hear!

After a rain soaked night the weather has cleared up and the sun is tempting me to the Third Floor to recharge the batteries after the exhaustion which comes with culinary creation!

No such luck!  The weather, though fine, is not that fine that I would want to lay out in it.  Instead I have attacked the neighbour’s flowering tree-weed lopping the branches that were foolish enough to be beguiled by the artificial grass on our side of the fence.

I am now covered in greenfly, but the garden appears to have grown in size immediately.  I have hidden away the branches of my crime and placed them in the communal bin where the evidence will be taken away at 6.30 am tomorrow.  The weed-tree itself is looking a little shaken – as well it might be, two large plastic sacks of compressed vegetation having been hacked away from it.  I do hope that I have not given encouragement to erstwhile shaded limbs to start branching out into the unaccustomed sunshine and actually accelerate the growth.

Never mind, I am shortly to be in receipt of a potent weed-killer for those hardy plants which survive even under the light denying layer of artificial grass.  This weed-killer is systemic so any leaf is a potential way to root death for the bloody things pushing aside the “lawn” and for anything else organic that dares show its green surface in our bit!

An early start tomorrow and all my efforts must be directed towards preserving the British Brownies intact until the first break when the Department can sample them.  The sharks will obviously be circling and it will take all my wiles to keep them off until The Sharing.

The good thing about being the first to make the offering in Chocolate Week is that I can then relax and wait for the others to respond to the height of the bar.  I think the final touch for me will be a light sprinkling of icing sugar and then I am good to go!

And wait to see what the others are going to produce! 

If my calculations are correct whoever is on Friday will have to produce something spectacular to keep up the effort and they will be nervous wrecks by the time Thursday comes along!

This has been a weekend when most of my reading has been devoted to the translation of captions on paintings and a half-hearted attempt to pick my way through the academic justification for the exhibitions that I saw.

I have to admit that when I was searching through my old copies of The Week to try and find the elusive recipe I was seduced into reading various articles that caught my eye!

Now I must gird my intellectual loins for the deathly season of examinations, marking and meetings which will greet us during the next week casting its pall of misery over teachers and pupils alike desperate to escape from the drudgery of a year which has been far, far too long.

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.