Driving where?

All the characters that I mentioned (with the exception of the backward sliding mother in the family car) were out and about this morning!  The I’ve-got-a-god-given-right to join the road that you are driving on car owners caused me to take one or two indrawn breaths and the boy-racer was comic-book stupid as he dodged from lane to lane, undertaking, overtaking and generally risking death!

But the sun is shining and it promises to be another lovely day.

One consequence of bright sunshine and living in a city of generous amounts of pollution is the awe-inspiring vistas that you get as you wend your way to school.  My motorway of choice affords generous views of the surrounding hills which zig-zag their way into the smoky distance.  When illuminated by a rising sun they are breathtakingly beautiful - and even the pollution looks good!

Toni has been buys working on his devices to keep a towel on the beach secure from inopportune gusts of wind.  He has now made a prototype and he should be testing it today.  If (when) it works it will be time to take it to a design centre in Barcelona which exists to help people with their inventions and to give advice about their possible development.  I can say no more at present, but I look forward to developments with some interest.

Impulse buying is one of the great pleasures in life.  Visiting a hypermarket yesterday in pursuit of “items” to help Toni’s invention I impulsively bought a new beach towel (I put that down to the psychological effect of Toni’s creations) some Barça shorts (which will have to be taken back today as they barely fit one leg!) and, more oddly, frying pans.

Impulse buying frying pans would suggest a beggared life because, as all know, impulse buys are for those things which do not have a real practical use and about which you feel terribly guilty later.  Frying pans do not fit this concept.

Though, “fitting” is one of the reasons that I bought them.  Storage in the house is at a premium and cupboards are full to overflowing so these Tefal things with, most importantly, removable handles (!) are easily stackable and also have that magic “gadget” element without which purchases are arid and empty.

I have tried to get hold of these stackable frying pans for some time and this is the first time that I have seen them on open display in Spain.  Of course I haven’t used them yet as I have some vague memory of Clarrie telling me that you have to coat them with olive oil first in some mystical way akin to a christening.  This may just be with the fabulously expensive cooking receptacles that she uses and mere Teflon does not merit such loving care.

What I have been able to do so far is to click the handles on and off with proprietorial glee.  I have also ordered some similar saucepans from Amazon.  These things do not (of course) come with lids - which are surprisingly expensive.  There are also plastic clip on lids which mean, in theory, that something can go straight from the cooker to the fridge – minus the handle of course.  These lids are also things that I do not have. 

I have justified the purchase of the saucepans because, for reasons that I do not fully understand, I have got them “post free”.  Which makes everything sensible and reasonably priced.  In a way.

Tomorrow-another trip to Terrassa for the birthday celebrations of the Little One who is now two or possibly three.  I am sure that I will have to contain my fury as I see the presents with which he is showered and I compare it with what I had when I was three. 

Of course, I can remember nothing of what I had for my third birthday; in fact I can remember remarkably few presents being given.  

One I remember with remarkable clarity was when I was allowed to choose an ornament from my kindergarten Christmas tree (a Father Christmas on a sleigh with bits inside that rattled when shaken as you ask) which was on our Christmas tree for the next umpteen years.  I may not be able to list them all but I do remember them in use. 

There was a wigwam of cloth stretched on a framework of four bamboo poles; a scooter; a Dinky toy dumper truck; a feathered headdress (more Red Indian than 1920s Flapper); the March from The Nutcracker Suite; a stapler; books; a Golliwog; a second-hand tape recorder; a xylophone; a small carved dog; a recorder; a helicopter on a long wire with a handle at the end which, when turned, caused the helicopter to fly into the air – and that lot takes me up to the years that I can remember with clarity.

It is sad to think of the multitude of toys lovingly and considerately bought which have vanished completely from my mind.  I am sure if I thought long and hard I could resurrect more of my juvenile possessions – roller-skates, for example pop into my mind – but the amount of money spent on things which have left no lasting impression must be enormous.

As my parents were fond of telling me: when I was one year old they decided against elaborate celebrations because I would remember nothing of them, but they did bow to convention in the Birthday Cake area by putting a candle in a jam tart.  I was, apparently, delighted – and my first birthday lasted until the jam tarts and candles gave out!  How sensible!

All of which makes me wonder about the amount we have spent on Toni’s very young nephew: how long will the present last?  Given the shoddy construction of expensive toys, if they last the birthday it’s a bonus; if they are remembered the day after it’s astonishing.

Ah well, I sometimes think that such purchases are more proof to allow the parents to realize that we care, rather than something which is going to be a lasting treasure for the kid!  And we do get a meal out of it as well!

A vivid memory from a few years ago is of a very young girl who we visited on Christmas Day and she got bored with opening her Christmas presents because of there were too many of them!  Something which I cannot recall from my own personal experience – and I did very well from my parents and relatives! 

Different times, different customs!

Although I was early to school the traffic, which is usually reasonably light at this time of the day, was very heavy with long tailbacks onto the motorway from the various turn-offs.  An irritating consequence of the tailbacks is that Spanish drivers feel the urge to cut into the line of cars waiting to exit and thereby block another lane of the motorway. 

This means that Spanish drivers who are thus blocked attempt the most outrageous manoeuvres to cut into the nearest free lane where the drivers are not inclined to let them in and so you have the perfect recipe for disaster – which, as a general rule does not take place. 

In spite of its being almost impossible to imagine cars escaping from the mayhem and general cataclysm that must result, space magically appears and life goes one.

It is true (to their shame) that Spanish drivers are worse than French drivers.  I discovered this piece of useful ammunition in a general Internet search for the safest drivers in Europe.  The safest drivers were not the British - but we figured surprisingly loftily in the list which dwindled down to the lunatics of the east.

Based on vehicle miles you are twice as likely to die in Spain as you are in the UK and about a 50% higher chance of dying than if you are driving in France!  Shameful figures!

One of the most satisfying activities as I trudge my way to school – although trudging in a car is difficult – is double guessing the drivers in front of me or lurking at the side.

At various points in my journey there occur opportunities for drivers to demonstrate their innate sense of courtesy as roads merge or diverge, or where lane changing is essential or where space is restricted and Care Needs to be Taken.  And they don’t.  The fun comes from deciding the sex and age of the person behaving as if they were immortal. 

I take one slip road which joins two motorways and it is a constant source of fun to be driving along in the lane which eventually changes into the link road and guessing which of the cars on my left is suddenly going to change lanes and push in before it is too late.  One has little enough to go on as the driver is usually invisible and one has to make one’s decisions based on the make of the car and the slightly uneasy parallel along which they drive. 

Unfortunately such people also take further risks after they have gained their lane and disappear into the distance to become another statistic.

Some drivers are obviously in the ”under 25 male” category, while others are just as obviously in the “little old lady of either sex” slot.  There are well-catalogued descriptions of “middle aged man refusing to accept ageing” and “wife driving family car for the school run” which any experienced driver will recognize.  One learns to slow down to avoid death with one and to keep a more than reasonable distance on hill starts with the other!

The middle lane is the most problematic area for the keen driver spotter.  The “middle lane tail backer” who attracts a line of trapped traffic behind his (I use the pronoun advisedly) slow moving vehicle as traffic streams past him on both sides is the usual preserve of the frankly old man; his wife is more likely to be an “inside lane crawler” and can usually be passed with ease.

Those irritatingly smug smaller cars with the rounded shapes and the look of self-satisfied domesticity are the preferred mode of annoyance of the younger career woman, usually professional and in one of the so-called caring professions.  They drive carefully badly and anything, absolutely anything can be expected from them.

BMW and Merc drivers are obviously in a class of their own and their vehicle make transcends age and sex: they are all bloody inconsiderate, arrogant and downright dangerous.

Tinted windows are danger signs, while tinted windows, spoiler and line drawing decorations are extreme danger signs.  Any attempt at car humour using toys, stickers or painting is an obvious Keep Clear warning.

The one clear rule that one needs to know when driving in Spain is that “indication means action, not mere intention”: when the indicator light comes on the driver is already moving in (usually) the direction the light shows.  The fact that you are in the space that the driver appears to be attempting to occupy means nothing to him: he has indicated; he is moving.

If Spanish drivers use the roads in the same way in Britain that they do at home in Spain then they must move to a constant fanfare of car horns.

In Spain, in my bit anyway, the horn is rarely used because the manoeuvres that would give British drivers heart failure and an urge to punch the horn in the middle of the steering wheel are here are accepted as a normal part of driving.

When a Spaniard uses his horn it really is because he cannot kill you with his bare hands!

Sometimes I have risked death through a determination to find out if my hunches about the age and sex of an inconsiderate driver are correct.  In city traffic, or even on urban motorways, traffic progress has a way of being somewhat self-limiting: the car that lurched past you and then in front of you with a death-defying swerve that you normally only see on action movies you see a little later caught up in a line of stationary traffic.  Only the most stupid of motorists (and all motor cycle users) manage to make real progress – and I wish them well in the rest of their short lives!

Today is one of my early finishes and I have a trip to Toys r Us to look forward to!

Such happiness!

The school is suffused with a electrically crackling air of hysteria as today, today we have naming of parts. 

Or to put it another way, we have one of our monumentally long and tedious meetings.  This one is scheduled (“scheduled”) to run for three and as half hours.  As I will be praying for death within five minutes of the start of the thing, you will appreciate that it is going to be a long, long day for me.

On the plus side I suppose that this is the last Great Horror before the holidays and then we will have two months to try and forget that they will all be starting up again next September!

My list of Things To Do is growing longer as we approach the magic date at the end of June and this year I want to get more of my list done than I did the last.  Two things that I am almost determined to complete this year are sorting out my books and visiting a church on the hill that I have been passing for years and have always voiced an ambition to visit it which lasts as long as it is in sight and then my determination fades as it falls behind.

This is part of the reason that the books still remain in their unsorted state.  As my bookcases have opaque doors the chaos of double stacked books and books shoved horizontally into the spaces above the books and below the next shelf is hidden from view, unless, like yesterday I went in search of a book.  Then the full horror is revealed in all its squalid higgledy-piggildyness.

The book I was looking for was the catalogue to the exhibition in the V&A about the Festival of Britain.  As I have been reading other books on this event I wanted to refresh my memory with some of the excellent photographs that I knew the catalogue contained.

All things considered, I found the book relatively quickly: it always helps when you know what the design of the spine is like and I even managed not to be too distracted by seeing other books which seemed to demand my immediate attention.

One thing that I had forgotten was that I had a copy of the original 1951 Guide to the Pleasure Gardens of the Festival of Britain in Battersea.  I wonder how difficult it would be to obtain a Guide to the Exhibition itself.  I will have to consult Amazon!

The Meeting was broken up by the fact that it started at 3.00 pm (1¾ hours before the official end of school) and as there were two lessons to staff some of us had to leave, only to come back after a hour of looking after kids to listen to the gibberish of colleagues who like the sound of their own voices and do not seem to care that there is a life outside school. 

The meeting finally finished a mere 45 minutes late and, as we went home in daylight we counted ourselves lucky.  At least they did, I was fuming with impotent rage at the time (which can never be replaced) was squandered on my having to half understand the tedious home life of kids not in my charge.

I can truthfully say that knowledge of the home life of any pupil has never played a significant part in the way or what I have taught.  A few Shakespeare plays usually cover most of the likely situations of domestic dysfunction that any modern family is likely to reproduce!  What is a teacher supposed to do?  Self-censor?  Bowdlerize?  Rubbish!

When I finally got home and had a swim the water was quite warm at gone 7.00 pm, there was only one way to take away the taste of having been in school for close to twelve hours – going out to eat.

Our choice of the Basque restaurant near when we used to live.  This has always been a good choice as we invariably have the tapas which are placed out on the bar.

We had a fair selection ranging from a slice of tortilla with cod to a strange tapa of chorizo and salmon.  They were good but not good enough to justify the pretty steep charge of 40 odd euros even if that included a bottle of the strange wine which has to be poured into the glass from a distance of a couple of feet!  It will be long time before we go back!

Meanwhile another day done!

Cake Day!

The cake is out of the freezer and softly defrosting.

It doesn’t look exactly symmetrical and I am wondering just how much one can do with a palette knife – especially when one does not have one.  Or is a palette knife just for painting?  I am thinking about the rounded end pliable knife used to smooth icing sugar.  Well, whatever it’s called I haven’t got one and so I will have to improvise or make my cack-handed attempts look intentional!

The most that can be said for the weather is that it isn’t raining, though it looks that though it is thinking about so doing.  So far June has been a total failure.  I am eager for summer to start and to stay.  Perhaps it is waiting for me to finish school and then it will spring forth in all its glory and not go away until the start of school in September.

The weather improved and the cake was a success.  Every bit of it was consumed.  I have therefore been emboldened to try another one with the cream and chocolate that I had left.

This one took a tenth of the time that I took with the first one and although I had to improvise with the fruit – as I didn’t have any strawberries left I used apple and nectarines and marinated them in red wine and brown sugar with a touch of lemon juice.  That sounds really professional: one cake and suddenly I am a Master Baker!  The proof of the mastery is in the eating and that is yet to happen.

The whisking of the egg whites was taken to the next stage this time.  After listening to the advice of two hardened professionals about the dangers of grease remnants stopping the formation of peaks, I was meticulous in my washing of the receptacle for the whisking thereof.  And it didn’t work, but it didn’t work in a way which was a step nearer to success, so I wasn’t downhearted – and I used them anyway!

The whole thing is now freezing so that – well, I don’t really know but I was told that it was the thing to do.

Toni has had his Name Day celebrated in style with the assembled hosts of The Family going out to Our Restaurant and then having a selection of cakes made by Toni’s sister and my good self!

Another day gone and we are now down to single numbers with the kids.  All things come to those who wait and wait and wait!

And a day of the week is already gone!

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.