Getting to know it

I have consulted the mystic books of knowledge and steeped in their lore I feel that I am about 20% confident about linking the IPod to the Tom-Tom GPS via the USB port in the dash.

For how many years has the latter part of that sentence been comprehensible?  Probably not more than a decade, but that does mean that most of the kids that I teach have never been aware of a world without them.  What I regard as new technology they accept as complete normality.

My father used to say that my grandmother on my mother’s side had lived through a period of time which brought in the modern age: she lived to see the development of the motorcar as a normal means of transport and the start of the space age.  She saw the introduction of television and its development into colour sets.  She lived through the revolution that came with the development of the transistor.  She saw flight as essential rather than exceptional.  And so on.  She lived from Victoria to Elizabeth II and her world changed radically.

But having been born in the middle of the twentieth century I think more of my world has changed than the equivalent in my grandmother’s time.

My father was much taken by a “sculpture” made by one of his colleagues which was a construction with a base of shattered glass valves set in plaster and painted black with a gleaming silvery transistor stretching upwards on spindly wire legs from the broken technology of the past.  How quaint that now seems in a world of microprocessors.

I am fond of saying (no doubt inaccurately, but who cares) that there is more storage on my mobile phone than there was in all the computers in the world when I was a small child.  And the kids never fail to smile with the superior condescending indulgence that they do so well, when I tell them – truthfully – that the memory of my first computer was 28K.  In fact this present from Clarrie which made me deliriously happy in spite of the fact that I could do virtually nothing with the machine had only 1kB of on board memory; I have just looked it up and seeing the machine again made my memory lurch!  It seems like an ancient artefact and indeed it is, as its name suggests from 1981 – over thirty years ago.

I am typing all this on a MacBook Air.  Thirty years seems like a very short time to go from the ZX 81 to what I am using at present – and how much of our lives have changed in the same way.  At least for those of us “lucky” enough to live in the so-called First World with ready access to the latest developments in society, technology and social networking.

All of the preceding is of course yet another example of displacement activity as I should be proving that I am a worthy recipient of all this technology by actually making an effort to get it all working and linking the IPod to the GPS in reality rather than speculating about the social trends in writing!

Well, that didn’t work.  I’m not sure why.  The music from the IPod plays through the car stereo system but the information about the tracks does not appear on the screen.  Probably you have to buy some highly expensive lead to get the final bit of the acoustic puzzle into place!  Which I am not going to do.

Lunch was from our usual place but the quality today was awful: the chicken dry; the chips far too greasy and hard; the salad unimpressive and the croquets tasting “funny” according to Toni.  The only satisfactory part of the meal was the aioli – even the wine tasted odd.  A meal best forgotten.

The entire population of Barcelona appears to be in our town at the moment and we are getting the first taste of the awful parking that we can expect for the rest of the season.  On the positive side (and believe you me you have to look carefully to find the positive in the summer months) I suppose that the new car is at its best in these stop/start situations.  At slow speeds the car works on the electric battery and when I stop, everything stops – except the radio which is being powered by the charged battery.  Quite economical and carbon dioxide lite!  Probably.

For the first time this year I have had a “proper” sunbathe lying out on the terrace on the Third Floor.  There is still a little wind, but the weather is glorious and the crowded beaches at the bottom of the road would indicate!

Tomorrow sees the start of, wait for it, an Examination Week.  Another Examination Week!  To go with all the other Examination Weeks that make up the normal day to day existence of the institution in which I teach!

The meeting on Saturday (!) and some of the discussion in it was aspiring to a form of education in the school which is impossible given the tyranny of the examination system that they willingly encourage.  But logical joined up thinking has never been the forte of the educational establishment anywhere, and certainly not here in Spain.

So the beginning of the week will be spent looking at past papers and wondering if you have completed all the work necessary for the kids to have a good stab at the mindless questions that they are going to be asked to complete.

We are working, or more accurately stumbling our way towards our long weekend which is at the end of next week and then another two weeks before we finally get to the Easter holiday.

This term has been truly interminable with no real lighter spots to leaven the blank depression of day succeeding day only interspersed with examination preparation, setting and marking.  That is, of course, a lie.  There have been lots of good moments since January – but remembering them now is contrary to the justifiable feelings of resentment that a long term engenders!

Still, in spite of everything, time is ticking onwards and each second brings release nearer.

I am already “planning” the summer and have decided to join the Olympic Canal club (as long as it is not too ruinously expensive) and do a little light rowing.  I rather enjoyed going down to Roath Park from time to time and messing about and I would like to do the same nearer home. 

I have other things in mind that I would to hand.  But I need the comfort of a holiday to work out the details.

It’s better than marking.

Day of Shame

I set the alarm for an hour later than usual and enjoyed my lie-in through, as it were, gritted teeth until I got up at 7.30 am to get ready for school.

I dressed in jeans, pseudo American college t-shirt and trainers.  After a cup of tea I rejected the trainers as not casual enough (and they were uncomfortable) and put on a pair of sandals after, of course, taking off my socks – I would not want to be taken for a German!

The net effect of my dressing in this way was to emphasise my feeling that a Saturday was no day for a meeting and therefore I was dressed as obviously casually as I could be as my mark of disgust.

The Powers That Be had visited a high class bakery for us when we arrived, but I cannot be bought by a cruddy croissant and I made myself a cup of Earl Grey tea in my individual filter machine and sat, or rather paced around muttering obscenities and general bewailing my state.  I was joined in this sullen activity by one of my colleagues who was, remarkably, even more pissed-off than I!  Who would have believed it possible?

I ostentatiously stomped off to the meeting room so that I was there for the scheduled start of the meeting which did not, of course, start at the scheduled time.

The meeting was like all meetings in this school, a form of ritualized torture.  The practical value of these meetings is practically nil – but that does not stop us from spending three hours of a Saturday morning wasting our time.

I had to say something as every teacher had to comment on their classes, and I was even thanked for my contribution by the directora afterwards!

My angry colleague was out of school as soon as the meeting ended and beat me to his car!

It was only The Great C Major blaring through the speakers that kept me on the straight and narrow driving home.  To insert a CD one presses a button and the whole of the GPS does a sort of glissade to reveal the disc slit: very ostentatious and yet elegant!

Lunch was in our favourite restaurant in Sitges and was the excellent (if unspectacular) value that it always is.  The wine tasted watered though and, as it came in an open bottle, one has one’s suspicions!

I had a siesta when we got back to Castelldefels and then decided to go to El Corte Ingles to buy a new pillow as I am missing by old (and I mean old) feather pillow which was finally put to sleep after my consecutive bouts of illness during the winter.  I was beginning to feel that the pillow was beginning to develop a life of its own which was rapidly becoming inimical to my own survival!  I therefore purchased some sort of artificial equivalent which was supposed to have all the characteristics of the real thing.  Not true.

I tried out a variety of pillows and eventually settled on the one that I thought was best.  I then made a big mistake.  I asked the price.

I returned to Castelldefels without the pillow which, to my absolute horror, turned out to be over €200!  Even I have my limits.  And I could, in no way, count a mere pillow as a gadget!

The evening has been taken up with updating my GPS and establishing a base for the information on the computer.  According to the instructions I can use this to control my IPod.  Something I can try out tomorrow.

When The Family are arriving too.  A day full of incident is promised.

Empty!

Poisoned Friday begins.

Although I am not going to talk about The Day of Horror tomorrow, its mere touching of my consciousness has blighted the traditional end of the week feel for a normal Friday.  However, in a normal teaching day it takes far too much energy to fuel red-hot anger and teach at the same time, so I am going to have to suppress my quite natural and understandable feelings of resentment and injustice under a cruelly hypocritical veneer of micron thick affability.

Enough!  I will reserve my true vitriol for tomorrow when the crime is being perpetrated.

The car continues to please and surprise.  I came to school today not warmed by the gloriously cumbersome symphonies of Bruckner but rather by the more astringent music of hummable pop stars – some of whom I could even name and in a few cases even sing along!  Any pop song that mentions, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” has got my vote!

I have found the cigarette lighter in the car.  Well, it would have been that in my dad’s first car (a Ford Prefect complete with running boards) with a pop out button with a red-hot element at the end of it.  On my last car the hole for the button was there but not cigarette lighter filling it and now, on this car the hole (with integral cover) is labelled 12V.  How times have changed – not even a nod towards the disgusting habits of the past!

While waiting at a roundabout at a set of traffic lights I pushed the brake button to secure the car.  I then went through a period of panic as I failed to get the car moving when the lights changed to green.  I pushed the button again – which did nothing.  I pressed on the accelerator – which did nothing.  I changed the gear lever – which did nothing.  I might add that all these “did nothings” were on a roundabout where consideration and patience are not the attitudes which are on prominent display.

Eventually after what felt like hours but was obviously a matter of seconds I lurched forward again and considered putting the air-con on to get my complexion back to something approaching the ordinary, but I drove on with my eyes on the road ahead and not on my rear-view mirror which I am sure would have shown drivers frothing at the mouth at the unbearable delays that my neophyte incompetence had caused!

I have not yet attempted a hill start, which is just as well as I do not know the holding capabilities of a stopped automatic.  I do have a handbrake so that ought to make things easy, but I have not been in a practical situation which tests my new driving ability.  Given the slopes around the school and the complete inconsideration of many of the drivers I encounter on a daily basis, I must find an opportunity to practice without the pressure of needy parents ostentatiously revving their engines around me as I try to achieve the smooth take offs of my non-automatic driving!

Recently I have found myself confining my reading matter more to the Guardian than to real books and this is something which I intend to rectify as soon as possible.  It will become another of my resolutions which seem to be piling up rather than forming a neat queue and which I seem to be making little effort to diminish.

I still have not returned to my daily swimming (most glaringly) and there are various others tasks and irritations that I am supposed to have taken care of but which flutter in the wind of neglect like forlorn kites tangled around telephone wires.  Something must be done.  And with an exclamation mark too!

I need to call into my Union, but that takes a major effort of organization and I may need to take Toni as translator as much of the vocabulary I will need is not everyday.  There is also the threat of the dentist.

Alas my “good boy” habits seem to have fallen into abeyance as far as these jumped up barbers are concerned and my natural reluctance to visit has increased steadily since the death of Mr Hamilton well over 40 years ago!  He was the dentist of my childhood.  He was the smiling face of dentistry for me: he allowed me to dress up in his white coat; he encouraged me to handle the instruments of torture; he gave me birthday and Christmas presents; he and his wife had me to tea as the sole guest.  In short he was a Good Thing and with him I felt no fear.

His greatest act of questionable kindness was to give me a tiny earthenware pot with a globule of mercury in it.  I had endless minutes of pleasure pouring the blob out onto a smooth surface, breaking it up into a multitude of smaller globules and then marshalling them all back together again before it was put back into its pot. 

The fact that such behaviour nowadays would probably get him struck off for giving a hugely toxic heavy metal to a very young child to play with does not in any way lessen the ecstatic delight with which I regarded such a wonderful present.  And I am sure that he told me not to eat it.  Which I didn’t, and have survived so far without lasting ill effects.  And it’s a bloody sight more than I have had from any other dentist I have visited!

I am not doing too well in the not thinking about The Day of Horror, and it is not helped by seeing colleagues’ faces crumple as they remember periodically and the misery of the ages descends on them momentarily as they attempt to shrug off the awful thoughts.

At least this evening we went out for a consolatory meal of tapas with a decent Rioja – and it has a different taste when you are eating it knowing that the weekend has not really started.  It is devalued by the contempt you feel knowing that the morrow will bring an empty, time wasting experience which, unforgivably encroaches on a sacrosanct weekend.

An early night I think so that I can muse on my hard life and build up the right quantities of resentment so that I am in the right mood for the meeting.

Sleep tight!