The course has begun!

Having taken my first “allsorts” selection of drugs first thing in the morning, I am beginning to wonder if the cure is going to be worse than the illness.  I have convinced myself that the swelling in the lower leg has gone down a little but the general feeling of unwellness has increased since the drugs hit my unprepared stomach.

The prospect of another two weeks of feeling like shit is not an alluring one and, because I look well even when I am not, I cannot relax into a comforting wash of sympathy from colleagues!  It’s a hard old life.

John Wilkins has written to me informing me that an old college lecturer and tutor of mine was giving a talk to his local chapel group following the publication of his latest book.  M Wynn Thomas “In the Shadow of the Pulpit” - Literature and Nonconformist Wales has been described as “anecdotal” and “an easy read” as well as “authoritative” and “exhaustive”.  I remember Wynn as a frighteningly knowledgeable lecturer and an intimidatingly responsive tutor.  The things that he saw in books I would have given my eye-teeth to have discovered by myself before he made his insights blindingly obvious!  A good man and I must go to Amazon and buy his book!

The rest of the day was just about as bad as the start with my missing lunch yet again and relying on my appetite returning with the evening.  Which it did and I made a sort of broth with a chicken leg and numerous fresh vegetables to give a lining to my stomach to prepare it for the receipt of the next antibiotic!

I enjoyed the meal as far as my jaded appetite allowed and I think that the pill is now safely embedded and doing its work.  I have to admit that it really does feel as though there is a battle going on in my leg as the antibiotic forces for good get down to destroying the bad.  Toni tells me that the swelling looks less and I confidently expect the weekend to be better than the last two and I further expect to feel some real progress.

As the pupils have now been back in school for somewhat under a month the examination season will start on Monday!  One wag in our department suggested that the kids should be tested on what they did on their holidays, which would have just as much educational relevance as what they have been taught so far!

The one advantage of teaching the number of “credits” that I do is that they are not examined in the frenetic way that the EAFL elements are.  Thank God!  This means that I miss out on the seconds, fourths and first year sixth – though I have classes in all those years, classes with a bewildering variety of titles and a depressing amount of marking.

My colleagues in Britain will, at this trying time of the year, be looking forward with growing impatience to the slowly approaching half-term holiday of a week’s glorious freedom.  We have nothing like that to anticipate with only the odd day to keep us going until some horrifically late time in the year before we can make our escape.

Now, given the microclimate of chemical antagonism at present dominating in my body, is probably not the right and proper time to think about just how long there is in teaching terms before release.

Let me instead dwell on the wonders of a regularly occurring weekend which allows some semblance of sanity to obtain! 

A conclusion of sorts

Another beautiful day in which I feel too lethargically distant to take much pleasure in it.  I would consider that I am working at about 20%, though it is possible to boost this when I am in front of a class.  Sad but true.

Anyway a far more pressing problem is how to get the downloaded music from the i-store on to a disc so that I can play it in the car and thereby get to the know the music well enough not to think about how much I am paying for the privilege of sitting in a subsidized seat in the Liceu.

When Clarrie was working in WNO and I got to see what I wanted, including rehearsals it was a wonderful way of learning new operas.  It was a full dress rehearsal of The Makroplous Case that started my “stalking” of the WNO productions of the opera with the result that it is the opera I have seen most in my life.  I am sure that there are few opera fans who can say that!

There are some operas that I have seen once and that was enough: Tristan and Isolde (I know that the liebestod is wonderful but the rest of that turgid opera leaves me cold, like most of the paintings of Poussin; you admire the work but are less than impressed with the final result); “The Beach of Falesa” by the always dependably awful Alun Hoddinott; “The Making of the Representation of Planet 8” which was such a bitter disappointment after my delirious reception of a half heard and half recorded performance on Radio 3 of “Akhenaten.” 

There are others that heard once just makes you want to hear them again.  Top of that particular list is, of course, “Four Saints in Three Acts” which, when I heard it in the Coliseum reduced me to tears.  Tears which were quickly staunched when, turning to the lady on the left I said, “Wasn’t that wonderful!” to which she promptly replied, “No!”  Peasant!  “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was a wonderful experience and, as I know the opera a little better now I would love to revisit.  But the opera I would most like (after “4 Sts.” - obviously!) to see again is “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” ideally with a cloned version of Marlene singing the Alabama Song.  Ah, if only!

But I have quite enough learning to do for the forthcoming season without indulging in fantasies about what might be.  I have, among others, Ligetti, Donizetti, Semlinsky, Vicent Martin i Soler, Debussy and Francesco Cilea: a hefty load!

An early bedtime last night after a lengthy sermon from Toni’s mum about what I should be eating and a diatribe against the consumption of cheese.  As Toni loathes cheese this was greeted, as you can imagine, with gleeful receptiveness and he barely contained a cheer as his mother urged me to throw the contents of the cheese box into the bin!

The doctor today was encouraging (in English) [I suppose] and informed me that my two weeks of feeling completely rubbish were a result of an skin infection on my left leg and nothing whatsoever to do with any suspect food.  I was roundly told off for not going to him sooner and the tedious pattern of Nurse visiting (“At you age you must have the flu jab!”) and blood tests before they decide whether or not to change my medication. 

Meanwhile my daily tablet intake has been boosted with a fourteen-day course of antibiotics. 

The doctor’s routine question about allergies elicited an exasperated response from him when I, just as routinely trotted out the family legend that I am, of course, allergic to the major breakthrough in antibiotics for the last two millennia: penicillin. 

This produced hurried consultations of books and colleagues (something guaranteed to lower patient confidence – but at least he didn’t guess the alternative) and an eventual new list of my drug intake.  The antibiotic has been augmented by some sort of diuretic pill that seems to be having no effect whatsoever. 

I am relieved that there is some sort of diagnosis and I shall expect my pills to work within a day or two.  Even though a two-week (one three times a day) stint of antibiotics is longer and more serious than I expected.

The new regime of offensively healthy eating started (and probably finished) this evening with a melange of vegetables and barrage of complaints from the carnivore!

I only seem to have an appetite at night at the moment.  I wonder if that makes me sound alluringly vampiric! 

Perhaps not.

And music shall untune the sky!

I am at last getting down to my Opera homework for my first visit to the Liceu late in October with a performance of Schumann’s “Scenes from Goethe’s Faust” – a piece about which I know nothing.

Well, I have read bits of Goethe’s Faust in the Penguin translation, but I have not ploughed my way through all of it.  Thank god for the Internet.

I am now the proud possessor of a download to which I am listening.  I’m not sure that one should say this about a highpoint of Romanticism with Death and Transfiguration but it does sound like thoroughly good fun.  At the moment for instance I am listening a very jolly piece of Pater Seraphicus with a chorus of Blessed Boys, and I haven’t reached the chorus of Angels (and Younger Angels) and indeed The More Perfect Angels.  The music is absolutely glorious and disgracefully easy to listen to.  I am already looking forward the live performance!

The music is fairly monumental with a large number of soloists singing at the limits of their vocal ranges and various choirs of ethereal personages accompanied by a more than full orchestra.  The Naxos version that I have purchased is full of punch with excellent musicians.  I think that the Liceu is going to be hard pressed to match it.

I wonder if this is one of those performances that I can tick off in the i-spy book of Rarely Performed Pieces?  If it is, then all I can say is that from a first listening it deserves to be more widely known.

The Lamp is now filled after a positive hoovering of the beach of Castelldefels by Toni’s mum over a period of four hours when she returned with masses of pieces of glass.  The lamp is filled with hand picked sea glass and the multi-coloured bulb inside is startlingly effective.  We are already planning the second – though I think that we will have to refine our techniques and make the constructions a little more cost effective.  Perhaps we should only make them to order!  If only!

I will have to take some photographs of the coloured effects – that should stimulate demand!

I am still not right and I didn’t eat anything during the day today but was tempted to partake of Toni’s Mum’s tortilla: there is not feeling well and being stupid and TM’s tortilla is not something to thrust aside lightly!  I have made another appointment to the doctor and this time it is in school time: the new regime has started!

With a cruel irony the first available appointment was for Thursday at 11.20am - a time when I will be able to go into school for the first two lessons which start at 8.15am, come back to Castelldefels for my appointment and, in theory if the appointment is on time and quick I can be back in school without missing a single teaching period!  Even when I decide to be selfish, it works against me!  


There must be a sort of Teachers’ Fate reserved especially for me!

It's only a day that will pass!

I am in school in body though not entirely present in health.  I thought long and hard before I left home this morning as I was not entirely well after the misery of lying in bed during a glorious day of sunshine.

The moral blackmail which our school uses with complete unprofessionalism determined that I did not take the doctor’s appointment which was available for 3.20 pm today as my absence would have created chaos. 

We are already working with one person fewer because the head of department is in Canada collecting the kids who have been on exchange and we did not get a replacement for the days that she is going to be off.  There is my Making Sense of Modern Art which basically needs me to be there to teach it and . . . but you get the idea.  Because the school does not even try to get supply teachers the burden of absence is placed squarely on the department responsible, as if it is our fault that a colleague is absent!

My customary griping is made more pointed today as I teach five periods; do a lunchtime duty and have a collapsed class at the end of the day.  I am not, emphatically not, being paid anything like enough for this imposition – and I don’t feel well as well!

Hopefully I will scramble my way out of the Slough of Despond when the teaching starts – I always seem to get something of a boost when I do the job for which I am paid, though there is also the inevitable let down when you stop!

Lo and behold, when I get into school I find out that another member of the English Department is off sick with a bad back.  It was with total fury that I understood that the powers that be were trying to make me do a substitution on a day I was doing five etc etc.  Their crass incompetence had not noticed that I was actually teaching a class when they wanted me to do another.  Then they attempted to make me take two classes together when these classes are at different points in their reading.  I refused.

I am now, while still feeling like shit, in a towering rage and I will know exactly what to do when I get another doctor’s appointment in school time.  It is with weary resignation that I point out to my colleagues that management doesn’t give a hoot for any of their jolly hockey sticks approaches to saving money – they will take what you give and then demand more.

That gives a very biased view of our school which is filled with decent people doing devoted work – and being taken advantage of every single day that they stay in the place!

In a time of crisis and with unemployment running at over 20%, we should remember that every “saving” that we make and every extra lesson that we teach is taking away paid employment from a colleague.

The evening I have a visit to the hospital with Toni to look forward to as he goes to find out if the minor surgery he had six months ago has been successful.

I have existed today on a diet of cold water, as the idea of eating anything has not filled me with delight.  You can imagine how pleased I was that Monday is my duty day for the dining hall.  I had to stand there, watching hundreds of children much their way through things that my gorge rose at – so to speak.

The last effort of the day is in taking the collapsed class of 3ESO who are going to have the delights of a whole range of vocabulary forced at them.  There should be three classes, but with the absence of the head of department that have been collapsed to two.  One other member of the department is absent so I will be the only English teacher taking them.  At least the handouts have been prepared (with answers) and are ready for distribution.  Ironically given my present situation, the vocabulary is all about the body and medicine.  O Joy!

The kids, having started their day at 8.15 am, were not in the most receptive of moods and the behaviour was vile – but they actually did the work, which makes them rather different from their British counterparts.

As you can imagine, after a foul day in an uncaring school I was in no mood whatsoever to interact with human kind – it was just as well that no bloody drivers got in my way.

An excellent trip to hospital for Toni – who has now been fully discharged, was followed by a meal in a Basque restaurant.  I was allowed to eat a “steak” which was waver thin and fairly tough.  The potatoes were fine, but I still can’t pretend it was a satisfying meal.  And it was washed down with agua con gas.  Dear god, what have I come to!

Tomorrow is, however, another day and I trust that I will be back to what passes for normal for me!

Though tomorrow I have six periods to teach rather than the measly five I taught today! 

This is all going to end in tears.

Half a lost weekend

Friday ended with Suzanne and I enjoying a chat on the Third Floor interspersed with glasses of wine and nice things to eat.  The nice things to eat continued on Saturday when Toni, his mum and I went to our local and, for the first time for a long time I had poussin.  It was delicious, although Toni was contemptuous of the English word for a small chicken and intimated that it may have had its origins in France.  Which it did of course.

After lunch we went straight to a DIY store to get the bits and pieces for The Lamp.

The Lamp has been in construction for some time and comprises two glass cylinders, one inside the other, with the space between them being filled by sea glass.  The centre cylinder has a colour-changing bulb and it is held in place by a lid constructed by Toni and when turned on illuminates the sea glass in a very fetching way.  The sea glass (which I am reliably informed dates from the 60s!) is usually in white or green with some brown and it takes a hell of a lot to fill up the space on The Lamp.  We reckon that it will take the rest of this year to get sufficient pieces of complete this work of art!

In school on Friday John (via Julie) loaned me “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga which apparently won the Man Booker Prize in 2008.  On the strength of reading it I agree with the accusation that the Booker Prize is becoming dumbed down.  Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but it didn’t have very much in the form of depth to keep me thinking.

I thought it was more on a par with Slumdog Millionaire in its presentation of a radically different culture which is seemingly motivated by corruption.  I liked the idea of a murderer telling the story and I thought the direction of his writing to the Chinese Premier was also an acute and interesting detail given the development of the major countries of the Third World.  The detail in the book was interesting, but I thought it was essentially shallow.  But a good read.

Saturday night and most of Sunday was not quite so pleasurable as I had a recurrence of my illness from last Sunday: feeling cold and generally unwell.  This is not the sort of thing that I expect, especially as I have spent most of Sunday in bed.

The Family has been here since lunchtime and I have been very much the host in absentia.  I made one abortive attempt to get up at about 3 in the afternoon and lapsed back into bed within an hour.  I have finally come to some sort of wellness in the evening and I have managed to force down a couple of sandwiches made by Toni’s mum’s fair hand.  After a day of not eating, they tasted delicious.

Tomorrow seems to be dominated by hospitals as Toni goes back for a check in the evening and at the same time he is waiting for his physio to start at a health centre in town.

All this and teaching too!

Gad! The heat!

The pet topic of conversation is the weather. 

Our sultry times continue with old hands gazing at the sun and muttering that it is not normal at this time of the year for it to be so hot. 

The Protest Work Ethic part of me is now confidently expecting retributory weather to compensate.  Though disconcertingly I understand that the Old Country is also having something of a heat wave too!  That hardly seems fair or right!

Tomorrow early leaving and taking wine with Suzanne on the Third Floor.

If I have time during the day I might well print out some of the information about Chaucer that I have been getting together.  Thank god (yet again) for the Internet!

I am going to bed tired and waking up tired – but this is probably par for the course at this stage in the year.  My colleagues in Britain are already looking forward with growing desperation to half term, whereas we in Catalonia do not have that saving luxury – and late December does seem an awfully long way away!

Day by day.  Day by day.

Onward into the fourteenth century!

One colleague admitted to me this morning that my suggestion that we introduce Chaucer to the hapless pupils in the equivalent of our second form has left her with nightmares.

As far as I could make out from the welter of Spanish descending into Catalan that was the meeting that I went to at the end of school last night, the area of concern for the project that the kids are going to have to complete covers a period of some 400 years from the 11^th Century to the 14^th or 15^th!

Chaucer was the obvious writer of distinction – who is also interesting to read.  Having given the assembled company my rendition of the opening lines of The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in my own version of Middle English they stared at me with expressions ranging from incredulity to outright horror!

The most outraged was a fellow member of the English Department who had sudden visions of having to pretend knowledge of a writer who she had not dipped into!  I will have to provide a “Chaucer for Dummies” handbook.  Though I have to admit that my knowledge does not extend to the story that I have not and will not read “The Tale of Sir Topaz”, that long drawn-out ironic joke at Chaucer’s expense.  That is the sort of literature for which life simply is not long enough.  And after all, even his character in the Tales was interrupted and told to shut up.

I was thinking more along the lines of the play version of The Pardoner’s Tale.  This is a fairly simple moralistic story and the background to the character of the Pardoner will afford the kids hours of innocent fun.  Or something.

Nothing has been finalized, but as everyone knows that Suzanne is my “friend” and as she is the “Big Cheese” in Project Based Learning there is a fair chance that Chaucer will make it to the final cut!

Unfortunately this means that I will have my own work cut out to produce something that can act as an introduction to the work and the sort of language that he used.  Though I do envisage the use of Middle English being kept to an absolute minimum!

I think that other members of staff were equally shocked by the range of ideas that seemed to be flowing – all of which de-skilled colleagues and hinted at the range and extent of work that would have to be done if the project was to succeed.

It is a real and painful truth that that meeting, like ever other meeting in the world of education that I have ever attended, did not make my life easier.  Always by the end of the assembly there is more work to do and no consequent lessening of the work that you already have.  Still after more than thirty years why should I expect any difference just because the country is different!

Hope springs eternal!