Tomorrow is not enough!

Tuesday is not a good day.

With six (count them, six) periods to teach it can never be a good day.  With the last two periods of the day a double session of Media Studies with Year 9 it starts sliding down the “insupportable” scale.  And when the day starts with an examination which demands marking, it has gone off the scale of awfulness.

On the other hand tomorrow is The Day of Spanishness about which I couldn’t give a damn except that we have a day off on which to not give a damn which makes it strangely different!

Unfortunately it now feels like a Friday evening and after a free day tomorrow it will only be Thursday when I have to go back to school; and Thursday and Friday are my early starts.  Ah well, one shouldn’t be greedy.

One afternoon I have to look forward to in school is going to be taken up by a performance of a pipe band from some Scottish Academy.  One really has to weigh up the positive of not teaching a class with the horror of the sick parallel universe cacophony which constitutes the playing of the bagpipes. 

 

If I remember rightly there is an apt quotation in The Merchant of Venice about the inability of urine retention when the “bagpipe sings i’the nose”.  I think in context it is seen as inexplicably positive, but for me the negative is much nearer to the fore.  Life is far too short for it to be tarnished by any folklorique abomination which uses contained wind to whine down reedy pipes to produce travesties of music.  On the other hand, it does mean not teaching for a period

My investigation of the problem of the so-called “extra” pay at the end of the autumn term has revealed that it is only the upper echelons of the civil service who are threatened with the withdrawal of this money, not mere teachers.

The “extra” payment, as I never tire of explaining to my colleagues and anyone else who will listen, is nothing of the sort.  The way that salaries are worked out in this inexplicable country is that you have a monthly salary and then a month extra in December and June: making 14 pays.

Now even a person of mean intelligence can work out that this 14 pay rubbish is merely a ploy on the part of the employers to retain one sixth of the annual salary and pay the salary late; four months late in December and an astonishing six months late in June!

In spite of the obvious indication that the two “extra” pays are completely spurious and that the total salary over the fourteen pay-outs should be divided by twelve and paid out in normal monthly instalments people here insist on looking at these payments as “useful” because they help pay for Christmas presents in December and help defray the cost of the summer holidays.  Such thinking makes me weep with frustration at the way that stupid workers redefine managerial meanness as paternalistic thoughtfulness!

I am now in the age group where an injection against flu is now regarded as a necessary formality.  I now have so many drugs coursing around my system that I am virtually a walking pharmacy.  My very perspiration should be bottled and distributed in vials for the benefit of mankind!

If I had my wits about me I would do some purely mechanical marking.  But I simply cannot be arsed.

I declare a holiday!

Life is getting better all the time - sigh!

Well, apart from a short sojourn in bed after my second pill, this weekend has been more active and less depressing than the last few.  The swelling in my leg is going down steadily and it looking far less red.  All positive aspects of a extended and draining period of not feeling well.

Monday evening I go to the nurse in our medical centre to check on progress and I can look forward to a blood test at the end of the month.  That at least is a good thing as the tests are and a possible shake up in my medication.   Oh, the things I have to look forward to!

As the weather has continued to be astonishingly good for this time of year we have been afflicted by a weekend spate of even more astonishingly bad parking by our visitors.  As we are one road away from the sea our parking spaces are quickly taken up and then the parking on corners, parking on zebra crossings and everywhere else that they can (and shouldn’t) park a car.  The selfishness of our visitors has to be seen to be believed – especially as the parking spaces the next road back were virtually empty!

Anyone who has been into a supermarket car park knows just how little consideration people seem to have for parking.  It seems to be impossible for people to consider walking more than the absolute minimum of yards to a destination even if it means parking in a disabled space!  One can get quite cynical just by considering the selfishness on prominent permanent display in public parking areas!

The week of work stretches ahead and I can work up little enthusiasm for the classes ahead.  My timetable is so enervating that by Wednesday I am exhausted having spent most of my time traipsing from one corner of the campus to another for one lesson after another.

I think that the negativity follows on from the disastrous start to term where the managements’ compulsive desire to have worthy but irrelevant staff meetings meant that the lead into the start of the year was hysterical rather than measured, as all the essential preparatory work was postponed as meeting after meeting got in the way.  And one should remember that planning in the traditional sense is difficult as the new year is very much a new start and what one has been told at the back end of the year in June may have changed radically by September.

Just in case that anyone thinks that all I do nowadays is moan and sulk about the work I have to do to get my measly pay, I would point out that I have actually done some reading.  To be precise “Blimey! - From Bohemia to Britpop: London Art World from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst” by Matthew Collings with photographs by Ian MacMillan.

This is an updated version of the original book (though Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are both still very much alive in this edition) and is a thoroughly entertaining, thoroughly prejudiced view of modern British art from a commentator both knowledgeable and involved.  The book has big writing, lots of photos, swear words of the worst sort and gripping anecdotes. 

Who could ask for more!

Good and bad!

Let’s get one thing straight: no day can be entirely bad when it starts with me stretched out on the Third Floor soaking up the sun in a bathing costume!

So even Clarrie’s insulting phone call to attack my nation for having beaten the Irish in the Rugby World Cup while, at the same time casually (not!) mentioning the fact that she had bought the latest version of the i-pad failed to dent my optimism which the bright start to the day loaded into my system.

This feeling of rightness with the world lasted right up until I went outside, unlocked the front gate and gazed in speechless horror at the anti-parking post which, for the THIRD time has been destroyed by person or persons unknown.  Actually that last adjective is just there for legal purposes as the guilty parties are within a hair’s breadth of where I live.  Allegedly.

I of course took photographs of the broken post which, this time had been left in the gutter – which was possibly one step better than what they (allegedly) did the last time but one, which was to put the post they knocked over in the street rubbish bin, from where I “rescued” it to be used as evidence against them (allegedly).  Actually, the last time they (allegedly) knocked the post down they had the criminal intelligence to hide the evidence.

Taking a photograph of the broken post also meant that I took a photograph or the car that was parked (illegally) on the pavement and suspiciously near the broken post.  The photograph (now printed out ready for the city hall to act on) also shows the number place with remarkable clarity.

While I was taking the photographs relying on the anti-shake setting of the camera to compensate for my towering fury someone not a million miles from being a neighbour asked, with consummate cheek if we were taking photographs of her illegally parked car!

Toni responded that we were taking photographs of the post and did she know anything about that?  To which her reply was, “Oh, OK.”  My Lord, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, I ask you, was that a reasonable response, or did it betoken some form of guilt?  I ask for the ultimate penalty the law can impose – and I won’t write what I was going to write, but it did have something to do with the end results of dogs’ ingestion.  So to speak.

I have now had a total of eight of the forty-two fearsomely serious looking and virulently coloured antibiotics that I have been prescribed.  Although Toni says that the improvements to my leg are clearly visible, I am not so jocose but am prepared to give it until the end of the weekend for me to be convinced that something is really working.

The weather has been noticeably cooler this evening, though only by a couple of degrees or so – the windows are still open and I am praying that this unnatural autumn will continue for as long as possible!

We have bought another printer to replace the broken one and have decided to keep it downstairs.  It prints photos, in colour, copies and has a little screen to preview things etc and it cost €49 – just over forty quid.  The printer manufacturers of course make their money on the ink; the cost of replacement cartridges is more than the cost of a new machine; the cartridges in a new machine are of course not fully filled.  Oh the cunning swine!

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.