The Last Day

It has come round in half the time that it would have taken in Britain: the last day of the woefully short Easter Holiday.  I shouldn’t grumble as my holiday has been extended by an extra day by the school taking one of the days that they can choose.  But it is still far, far too short.  And the long slog towards the end of June begins.

The day for me began with an almost swim: I almost decided to go to the pool but there were things to do and you know how it is.  So I didn’t.

One of the things to do was financial and that meant that I took out a large sum of money from my bank in the morning and, because of circumstances beyond my individual control, put it back in the bank in the afternoon.  At least I tried to.

Banks, as I have always maintained in this country have taken the place of the market square.  Where do people meet and chat?  Their banks.  The old folk come in for a socializing talk with the tellers and to make sure that their money is still there.  People come in with sheaves of bumf and take an inordinate time sifting through their documentation and getting their papers stamped (always a good thing in Spain) or signing each page of endless photocopies from the bank.  The queue for the single teller never seems to get shorter and everyone in front of me seems to be putting the affairs of the whole of the Eurozone in order by the amount of time that they take.

So it was with a sense of depressing familiarity that I entered my bank and stared mournfully at the congress of humanity that had decided to visit at exactly the same time as me.

As I had a wodge of money to put in I thought it expedient to wait in line so that I could give the whole amount to the teller and let them do all the work of checking that the amount I said was there was, well, there.  No movement for minutes so I decided to risk the machines.

I know from past limited experiences that I can feed money into my account as well as take it out.  And I knew which one of the three machines on offer in the central bank was the one to use.  I had previously had my bankbook renewed in the morning when I took the money out so I was well prepared to put it all back again.

I fed my bankbook into the appropriate slot and the machine grudgingly authenticated it and (in English, because it is well trained) it asked me what I wanted to do. 

Each request was displayed on the screen and each finger touch was accompanied by an inordinately loud beep.  I got through to the feeding of the machine with my cash when I hit a problem.  The machine can cope with 40 notes at a time and I was trying to feed it 100!  So the whole process had to begin again with my feeding the thing with batches of 40 notes.  Each time the machine rejected one suspect note (a note I might add which came from the same bank just a few hours before) and therefore after three separate transactions and a whole orchestra of beeps I finally retreated with two of the notes still in my hand but the vast bulk of the cash safely in my account.

I tried to ignore the baleful looks which my retreating back had to endure from those hapless souls who were waiting for a machine, but their reflections in the window of the bank will haunt me!  God alone knows how long I was stuck there but Toni was virtually dancing with impatience before I finally emerged blinking into the cloudy, patchy sunshine.

Recuperation took the form of a double teabag pot of tea and an astonishingly expensive turron muffin – one can’t help feeling that such an establishment is first in line for closure when the crisis grips further. 

And my tea was exceptionally weedy. 

It was served in what looked like a tiny Chinese inspired cast-iron teapot in which the tea bags had been placed inside a metal filter which ensured that they barely touched the hot water.  I extracted the completely redundant filter (they were tea bags after all) and poked them about a bit in the water and eventually got an ecru coloured beverage and that, believe me, is better than most attempts at our impossibly complicated national drink!

Lunch in the Maritime: which for me was quail broth with butter beans followed by half a dozen fat prawns finishing with whisky tart (swimming in it my dear!) and iced coffee.  The red wine and Casera goes without saying.  Not bad for €12 and much better service than you get during the weekend.

Although the day started dull and cold it did brighten up a little and even allowed me half an hour on the Third Floor before comprehensive cloud cover forced me indoors.

This gave me the opportunity to look at my timetable for tomorrow and decide that the work that I have not done yet didn’t need to be done then either so I can relax and enjoy the opera this evening.

This is another opera that I do not know so, as I have not done my homework about it, there is a plain sheet on which the experiences inside the Liceu can be writ large!

I have decided to risk leaving the house at 6 pm for an 8 pm start.  It is only half an hour or so into the centre of the city from Castelldefels but this is rush hour and I consider (perhaps rashly) that four times the normal length should be enough.

The one good thing about traffic jams in this car is that when I stop so does the car.  If anything needs feeding like lights, or radio or whatever this is taken from the battery which has been charged up by previous driving.  The stop/start approach of petulant lines of traffic is perfect for my type of car with a hybrid engine which does all the irritating staggering on the battery.  But the delight of some sort of idea of economy does not make me relish the trip into the city at the unkindest part of the day.

To which the reasonable response is why not do this journey by bus or by train.  Alas!  If only!  I have no intention at my venerable age of taking the “nit” bus, where the Catalan for “night” does give some sort of indication of the vermin who usually fill such a conveyance.  And the trains stop running by the time that I come out of the opera house.  It is a far better thing to have a car available so that one can get home as easily and quickly as possible – and certainly when the next day is the first day of a new term!

I have just had yet another call from Toyota asking if I am satisfied with my purchase of the car.  This must be the sixth such call which shows concern with customer satisfaction verging on the paranoid.  It is certainly much more than Peugeot ever showed which is part of the reason that I am no longer driving one of their cars!

The sun looks as though it has shone as much as it wants to for today so I should go and get showered and ready to go off to the opera – but first I must try and find my opera glasses which I think I will leave in the car for future performances.

My ideal is to go to the opera by train and then stay in the city overnight and come back at my leisure the next day.  The cost of accommodation is little more than the cost of parking the car in the centre of the city and it makes for a much more pleasant experience.  The inconvenience of having school the next day makes this plan impractical at the moment, but there will come a time!

Irene is still keen on setting up a school and, after going through some documents and coming across old statements by dissatisfied teachers who had been connected with The School That Sacked Me, I can understand her urge.

It is wickedly wrong that a school so clearly unfit for purpose as that one should be allowed by the authorities to continue.  From regal disregard of the health and safety regulations to the bullying attitude of the owner and her general unprofessionalism everything about the place calls for somewhere better to be established to drain her pupils away so that they can have a proper education.  And nothing is done!  A school that has been accused of stealing money raised for charity – nothing is done!  Enough!  I don’t want to relive those times!

Focus on finding the opera glasses and looking forward to a last evening of musical pleasure before the alarm goes off at 6.30 am tomorrow bidding me drive off for a new term.

Actually there is one thing that I need to find before I go to the opera: my start of term tie.

Each first day of term I don my Munch tie which has a vivid version of “The Scream” printed on it. This is clearly the most expressive and accurate of all the ties that I wear - with the possible exception of the one which has Homer Simpson strangling Bart as a tastefully repeated motif on one of my other favourites!

Ties for teachers!

Cake, cake, all the way!

I am now getting thoroughly paranoid about the weather.  Today is more cloudy than sunny and I feel the usual resentment that is the natural concomitant for me for anything less than flawless blue skies with an unrelenting sun shining forth in refulgent splendour.  Still, after the excesses of yesterday my reddened skin needs some time to readjust!

Today is a Bank Holiday and a day on which Castelldefels can expect to do good trade with a full beach and people from Barcelona spending money as if it had gone out of fashion, but such a brightly dull day is not going to get people out of their flats and into the traffic jams just to sit huddled together on the beach pretending they are having a good time in the blustery wind which is still with us.  You have to be British to bring that sort of thing off successfully – after a lifetime of unsatisfactory Bank Holidays.

In Britain of course there is the alternative to the beach – the DIY shops.  Rumney Common (if you looked very, very hard it was possible to see a few wisps of grass pushing up through the paving stones as a reminder of what the area used to look like) was full of stationary traffic as the lemming-like instinct of the British for self-improvement shopping during a Bank Holiday took hold!

In Catalonia, however, the enthusiasm for 24-hour shopping has not yet reached British proportions and Bank Holidays are more like what they used to be in Britain rather than the free-for-alls that they have become.

Shop opening hours do take some getting used to here.  They usually open at about 10 am but then they shut at 1 pm and do not open again until 5 pm when they finally close for the day at about 8 pm.  It is always strange for someone from Britain to go into the centre during the afternoon and find a ghost town.  Saturday afternoons are as dead as any other time of the week.  Odd.

Some restaurants in Castelldefels seem to have opening hours that only the most learned clerks in the Middle Ages who spent their time calculating the date of Easter (and burning those who disagreed) could possibly understand.  There seems to be no positively agreed half-day closing in this place and some defy all logical understanding in the ways in which they run their businesses.  They are also capable of taking holidays in the actual holiday time which, in a summer seaside town would appear to me to be commercial nonsense – but it is part of the rich cultural experience that comes with changing countries!

Our swimming pool remains stubbornly empty – apart from the rather unsavoury looking pool of brownish water which does not seem to have drained away.  The pool’s emptiness is a monument to the god-given fact that nothing, absolutely nothing can be done during Semana Santa or Easter Week.  The world, apart from seaside restaurants which have not decided to be closed because of an indisputable right to whimsicality, does nothing.  

Government and its associated bureaucracy do nothing – but can find time to emerge from holiday to make announcements about the most swingeing financial retrenchment in Spanish democratic history in the hope that during a holiday we will not take it so seriously as if it were to be made during work time.  

This is a serious wake up call to the Spanish people, but I fear they are all too fatalistic to take is seriously and will bumble on denying the evidence of collapse all around them.  I say them because here in our little bubble of Castelldefels there is very little evidence of the so-called crisis to be seen.  Prices keep going up and people keep looking affluent.  I am obviously well out of my league living here!

 

The Easter 

lunch in Terrassa was excellent with a truly startling Esqueixada (salt cod with chopped peppers, onion, tomato, garlic, olives, etc – all raw in a marinade) which tasted different, in spite of Toni’s mum saying that she had done nothing special in its preparation.  We then had “blind man’s” fideua which means that all the shellfish had been taken out of their shells so, consequently, a blind man could eat it without difficulty.  Most civilized, even though there were no blind people at the table.

It is traditional at this time in Catalonia to have a Mona de Pascua which is a special Easter cake which comes in a bewilderingly various range of shapes and sizes.  The kids had one each baked by their ever-resourceful aunt; but other relatives had done their bit too.  We had one Bob the Sponge cake with chocolate house and figure; two Barça players on a chocolate pitch; a cake with a chocolate fish from Finding Nemo; a butter chocolate cake made by the grandmother and the great-aunts; a third chocolate cream cake made by the aunt and another cake that we didn’t actually get to see!  I tried as many as were offered and they were all delicious.

The highlight of visiting Terrassa however was not the food but the people.  The two teachers, Toni’s sisters.  They start school tomorrow.  And I don’t.  An extra day!  They looked at me with outright hostility when I told them.  And with increasing hostility as I reminded them at every opportunity that presented itself!

Tomorrow the last day of the holidays and time to do some tasks that a gained day when everyone is back at work!

The sun!

A lazy day, with my only concerted action being a swim followed by going for lunch!

The Device was a little more successful today; I entered the pool to the music of The Pet Shop Boys and left it to the music of Mike Oldfield – both of which I could hum along to!

The weather has been splendid although the wind has been brisk.  I have lost some of the ghastly pallor which is a sad function of working in school all day and having spiteful weekends which do not incorporate the fine weather of the working week!

The Third floor has been my retreat of choice for today as I am keenly aware that the holiday is ebbing away with only tomorrow and Tuesday left.

I have done virtually no work for school and there is still some that I have to do if my return to work is not going to be frantic!

While making a cup of tea I noticed three men, well one man, one kid and one youth going through the communal bin.  Our bins must be searched at least twice a day by individuals and groups.  One man comes around on a bike with a long hooked stick which he uses to prod around in the bin; another just seems to cast a cursory look over things and only takes larger items; another group come around in a van.  They seem to be organized and I would imagine that it is a full time job checking all the bins, which in our street are emptied each day at about 7.30 in the morning.

 I am sure that this activity is actually illegal because, as soon as the rubbish is put out it is technically the property of the local council.  I suppose that councils do make money out of the waste and that it is a sort of stealing, but I for one do not begrudge these people making a living out of this disgusting occupation.  As long as the rubbish goes I don’t much care how that is done!

It is surely a sign of the times that our rubbish is so thoroughly searched!  It may also be significant that the individuals and groups doing the scavenging do not look Spanish but rather Moroccan – and that opens up a whole other matter for discussion!  But perhaps I will leave that for another time!

Although I didn’t watch the game, I understand from the unalloyed glee from a certain person sitting on the sofa that Real Madrid have drawn their match and are now a mere 4 points ahead of the saintly Barça team with a Classico coming up in two matches.  All, as they say, to play for!  The hysteria in this household will grow and grow.

I have now finished watching the first season of “Torchwood” the “Dr Who” spin off concerned with a group trying to cope with various alien incursions set, beguilingly in the City of Cardiff.  Quite apart from the delight of recognizing various locations in the city, it does have a good group of actors playing the main roles and a more than decent script to play around with.  Although not all episodes are of equal strength and many are depressingly derivative in their main narrative impulse, they all have a particular flavour which keeps the interest.  At their best these episodes are both emotionally compelling and dramatically exciting.  The script and ideas work best when they are quirky and individualistic and I am delighted to note that there are two more seasons for me to watch.

I am a bit of a Johnny come lately to this series and therefore was completely bemused when I was in Cardiff ages ago to find a wall near the water in the Docks plastered with pictures and small votive offerings of plastic flowers which were all regretting Ianto’s death and asking for his return to the series.  As I had seen none of the series I had to rely on the Pauls to fill me in with the back-story to their extraordinary display of viewer affection.  Which they did, in bewildering detail.  At least I understand a little more now!

Tomorrow to Terrassa for Carles’ Name Day and a general eating of Barça themed cakes.

Blow, blow thou sunny wind!

The bedroom windows facing north always give a moment’s pause on waking as to whether the sun is actually shining.  It is only when I go into the bathroom and look at adjacent trees through the little window that I can tell whether or not it is a fine sunny day.

It was a fine sunny day.  Though, as it turned out, it was quite a windy one.  But to a man hardened on the cold sun beds of Gran Canaria it was as if it was summer!

Toni was indisposed and kept to his bed but I had a holiday to fill and so was not prepared to while away my precious holiday hours by doing nothing.  It was time, I decided, to try out the new music system for swimming.

It is now so long since I immersed myself in water for the purpose of arm and leg propulsion I did have a few doubts about my actual ability to move through that medium at all!

At least the swimming pool was open today and I found myself a bench on which to sit when once inside to prepare myself for the watery fray.  As I was just in shirt and shorts undressing was relatively uneventful but dressing in my full swimming gear was a much more complex operation.

Attaching the Device to the swimming goggles took minutes and then was finding of the bloody swim hat which is rotting away week by week.  Remembering to wear swim slippers was the next irritation followed by searching out the lock and key for the locker.  When everything was ready I marched into the pre-swim shower and worried about fitting the augmented goggles.

This was not easy.  The thing was too tight and it was difficult fitting it over the ears and making sure it actually fitted round the back of the head.  Eventually, clumsily and with growing panic about the length of time that I was standing by the side of the pool without entering the water, I eventually made an undignified splash and I was in.

I have to admit that my swimming to the sound of music was not an unqualified success.  It does work, and it works best with a sedate breaststroke; crawl tends to take the earpieces out of my ears.  It works more than it doesn’t, but it is very much a work in progress.

I also have to admit that I am a little self conscious about swimming while having a pink mp3 player with a flashing blue light attached to the back of my head.  But is worth it to listen to the selection of 80s classics that Toni has put on the machine!  There were even two Mecano tracks to help me on my way.

My first note left for Toni about my going swimming was unread when I cam back and so I decided to go and check out the new swimming pool that was supposed to have been established near the British School of Barcelona.  It exists, but it has not yet been given all its certificates by the authorities so it cannot be used.  I was show it via another building through two sets of windows.  I joined the sports centre and was given the first moth as a gift as the swimming pool was not ready.  I have no intention of using the Torquemada like machines in the gym, but I am tempted by the Padel courts.  An explanation of this game will have to wait for another day.  I now have two cards for competing swimming pools.  I have been told that the new swimming pool may become available over the next two weeks.

The new swimming pool is, I think, an excellent investment for me as it is on the way home from school and is within minutes of the house.  I could even think about going there on my bike – though that may be a ride too far!

My second note to Toni was also unread on my return and I discovered him languishing in bed, thoroughly unwell and refusing food and drink.

This lasted throughout the day but he was able to eat something I brought back from our favourite fast food place after an evening chat with Irene where we talked of great plans for the future.  As we always do.

Tomorrow, Easter Sunday – which means that there will only be a few days of the holiday left.  I really should do some school work, but the work I want to do is so time heavy that I cannot bring myself even to start doing it.  Such is life.

But there is an absolute minimum that I need to do.  Probably.  We shall see.

Some sun at last!

A day of clouds but not of rain. 

I found myself watching for the little patches of blue hoping that the sun would link up with one of them and shine on me!  It reminded me of my Christmases in Gran Canaria, stretched out on a sun bed in uncertain warmth but staying there because each minute was expensive and each fragment of sunshine had to be used to get to the required shade of brown sufficient to infuriate the pale stay-at-homes in Cardiff when they saw me at the start of term in January!

With such a short break at Easter in this country every day is equally important and with the rain and cloud I am getting quite panicky as the holiday drains away.  Still, there is the “gained Sunday” to look forward to as we do not start the summer term until Wednesday of next week.  And that means that I will have missed eleven lessons and a lunch-time duty which make up my Monday and Tuesday: result!  It also means a short week until the weekend.  But there is a price to pay.

Guess what we will be thinking about instantly on our return – examinations! 

I sometimes think that what we teach is totally irrelevant as long as we can divide it up into examinable chunks.  We have to get two complete sets of exams in before the end of term so that we can also have our last tranche of pointlessly long meetings and, then, O Joy, the longed for summer holidays – even if our “extra” pay is going to be ravaged by the rapacious government taking 3% of our total annual salary out of the money.  Bastards!

Thinking further about the Goya exhibition I saw yesterday, I find several responses vying for attention in my memory.  The first was amazement at the quality of exhibits and the number of iconic paintings which are now in Barcelona – albeit only until the last week of June.  The second goes to the centre of one of my problems with the paintings of Goya his use of painterly technique.

The series of cartoons for the royal tapestries are of various scenes of folk around Madrid.  “The Parasol” for example is a striking arrangement but the quality of the painting seems to be reminiscent of theatrical scene painting rather than the brush of a master.  His trees are particularly vapid looking more like a green cross section of a sponge than of any leafy matter!

The portraits were striking.  A couple of studies (?) of the King and a prince were amazingly sensitive with a real sense of the personality of the sitter being caringly brought out through the application of paint.  This portrait of the king as an elderly man is warm and generous and not the searing portrayal of him in the famous group portrait dominated by the King’s mother.  I have seen Goya portraits of the princes too which make them seem like ungainly toys, but this portrait of a prince is also of a boy and was touching, even loving.  With paintings like these it is easy to see why Goya was respected and admired by the royal family which in other paintings he seems to paint with a restrained savagery that you would not pay to have created!

The etchings are the etchings: they define a whole sphere of human inhumanity and they are timeless.  May favourite this time was the one from La Tauromaquia where the rampaging bull with a human impaled on its horns is caught at the far right of the picture which in the pens below the humans panic.  It is an eerie drawing with a surrealistic (perhaps too easy a word to use with this artist) sense of emptiness with the bull on a visual plane that takes the viewer a while to work out.  A wonderful work.

The madness and the irrational in Goya’s work attract me the most.  The Disasters speak for themselves but even the playfully disturbing compel attention.

This exhibition has a full title of “Goya – Lights and Shadows” and from the 90 or so works this can be taken literally and figuratively, and both aspects are a delight to follow through a career in which the personality of the painter is one which encourages and challenges.

This is a real treat and I must return – and perhaps reconsider my rejection of the idea of buying the vastly expensive catalogue.

The Delacroix exhibition (a few steps through the rain to the other large exhibition hall) was a less challenging experience but perhaps more uplifting.  I can’t say that I cam away with a different view of the painter but I did enjoy the sketches for paintings that were on display.  My favourite was a study for one of the Arabs on horses attacked by lions series and this sketch was quasi-abstract, a whirlpool of splashes of colour with the faintest outlines of clues which indicated the representational limits of a conflict of speed, colour, line and power.  It was a glorious canvas, and one I would quite cheerfully have walked off with!

Again this is an exhibition to revisit – though this one finishes in the third week of May so I mustn’t relax and tell myself that I have plenty of time otherwise (like exhibitions in the past) I will have to be content with a single visit.

I finally made an attempt to go and have a swim and was frustrated by the fact that the pool was closed, it being Good Friday.  I am tempted to go into town and watch the foreigners (the Spanish) labour through the streets carrying their idols on heavy rafts of carved wood, but I am not sure that I can be bothered especially as every fibre in my Anglican-Atheist being rebels at the idolatry of it all!

Four more days of the holiday left.

A good day despite the rain!

Two superb world-class exhibitions in one day!

The Goya exhibition to celebrate ten years of existence of Caixa Forum and the exhibition centre in Barcelona.  Brilliant paintings that I didn’t expect to see there.  Yes, there were the usual etchings but The Clothed Maja portraits and other paintings that must have left serious gaps in many collections.  Cartoons for the tapestries; “Black” paintings.  It was a joy to wander round.

The Delacroix was equally unexpected with major canvasses on show.

The only downside was the price of the catalogue for each exhibition, which I considered exorbitant.

Lunch was with Suzanne and pica-pica and delicious.