Blood and everything

You really know where you place in the pecking order of health is when you go to the free-for-all which is our bloodletting session at the local health centre.

In theory everyone has a printed-paper which details exactly how much and for what the blood is going to be drawn but as I was summoned by mobile phone message for this session I was paperless.

By the time I had worked out that I should probably go to the reception desk and get some sort of official permission to join in the fun they had called out the names and a rough order of people had been set.  The pathetic bleats of my name were greeted with the stern instruction that I came under the heading of “anyone else” and I should go to the back of the queue.

Given the collection of shuffling misfits who probably regarded this session as a major social event, I imagine that the nurse was used to the hard of hearing and the almost dead not quite getting it together well enough to leap to attention at the mention of their name and snap smartly into line.  If most of the aged persons waiting to give the red stuff had even made a partial attempt to get into place in time to the hastily read list of order of seeing, I suspect that only thing about them that would have snapped would have been their bones.

Having resigned myself to an almost last position I promptly sat down and took out my trust phone and continued reading the sci-fi novel which is almost completely incomprehensible but addictive at the same time.

A quick extraction and I was on my way – but on the wrong motorway and was duly held up in St Boi but not enough to miss anything more than part of the first lesson.  Ah well, better than nothing.

The kids have started counting down to the end of term.  We teachers have been doing this for some time, but been too appalled at the number of days left to admit it!

In the second half of this week we start yet another season of examinations; if they weren’t so revolting to set and mark the frequency of these pointless impositions would be amusing.  But they are and it isn’t.

Tomorrow six periods.  Sigh.

A day of two halves

An overcast day giving that traditional Sunday feel of indecisiveness; a day waiting for some better day to take its place.  Although Sundays also have a spaciousness that other days do not have there is always the Evening Dread where any teacher worth his salt worries about whether he is prepared for the morrow!

I have been thinking about the smallness of the demonstration yesterday.  The sector of education that was represented in that expression of unease is probably one of the most vulnerable in the country.  The people taking part were teachers in the private sector of education whose futures (as I know from The School That Sacked Me) are most prone to the whims of often ill-qualified owners.

Speaking with colleagues who have taught elsewhere I have found that my experience of owner-run private education has been matched, though not topped by other horror stories of what can only be described as bullies with money directing the professional lives of people much higher qualified than the moneyed boors prowling corridors seeking prey!

The Family descended for lunch and Toni and I had to pay a visit to our local restaurant to book a table for eight.  It was obvious that they were fully booked but as we are more than decent customers the owner made space for us so that we could enjoy the more than decent meal that our local always provides.

So good food and duty done to various mothers I noticed that our dutifulness had been noticed and the impenetrable cloud cover had disappeared and bright sunshine was bathing the beach and the good old Med.

I am still capable of being surprised at what in Britain would be cloud cover for at least the week being dissipated in hours and the sun showing itself again here in Catalonia.

I spent the rest of the afternoon (after the obligatory walk which I was tricked into joining) sitting in the sun and listening to two bickering boys and watching the weariness of their parents!

Tomorrow I start the day with a blood test and then continue it by trying to find a parking space somewhere near the school because I will be arriving after my normal time and it will be cars all the way!

I am building up to my last opera of this year which will be on the 14^th of this month.  As far as I can understand the impenetrable instructions for next year, I think that I already have my seat from last year (this year) reserved for next year.  The only thing I need to do is try and get tickets for any other events not covered by my season ticket.  And that is not even remotely easy.  Believe me.

Bed is calling me as this weekend has not been very restful and there is nothing worse than taking a sleep debt from the weekend into the working week.

To bed!

Days pass

This is how a day should end, not with a bang but a long drawn out suspiration of anticipation leading up to the time of escape.

It is always a

And that was where I finished typing the day before yesterday!  There is a bone weary emptiness of fatigue that only a teacher knows!  And that was me at the end of the day yesterday.  I didn’t even manage to drink a reviving cup of tea before the siren call of my bed was too alluring and I succumbed.

As is usual in a fractured week (we came back on Wednesday) the tiredness quotient is much higher than in a normal week.  I must emphasise that does not mean that I want fewer days’ holiday to ensure a Monday start, but it is a fact of scholastic life that a mid-week start means more than a week’s worth of fatigue waiting for you by the weekend!

This weekend I have a demonstration and a birthday party – both on the same day and so I am going to have to juggle things if the day is to work out satisfactorily for all concerned!

To lighten my mood I have sent away for a box of goodies from Amazon.  The CDs are there to fuel the cultural element in my daily treks to school and the books because they are books and I am not suddenly going to start rejecting the drug of choice that I have been taking all my life!  If I could find an effective hand-held dog barking repellent it would be the final detail which would make my life more complete and more importantly tranquil.

On the anti-animal front I shocked The Family by purchasing a power water pistol for use against the marauding cats who whip up our local dogs to frenzies of unbearable noise.  As many of our local canine pests are of rattish derivation the noises they make range from recognizable barks to other worldly creaks and squeaks so it is therefore imperative for these animals to have a relaxing environment so that they do not feel the need to use their vocal chords to signify to their uncaring owners that they have sighted a canine intruder – or whatever it is that produces the sounds by the inbred grotesques by which we are surrounded.

I have tested my new weapon, and from the kitchen window the kill-zone reaches to the furthest limits of our demesne.  I think that another loaded water pistol by the gate will allow me to soak the moggies if they ever (as they do) dare get into the back garden.  And cats, having grossly inflated ideas of their own significance, are quite prepared to move only a humiliatingly small distance away from a gesticulating owner and then sit and wash their paws.  When I have finished with them they will look as though the have been washing a bloody sight more than their paws!

And that was where I finished typing yesterday.

Today has dawned sunny with only the creak of some rat-dog to spoil the beauty of the sun.

Barcelona for the demonstration and then Terrassa for a birthday celebration.  Never a dull day for me!  Though tiring – always!

The meeting point for the demonstration was unknown to my GPS and so I had to guess my way there.  Driving down the Diagonal is always frustrating at the best of times but is especially intolerable when you are pressed for time.  I made a unilateral decision that the Jardins de Gracia where at the junction with the Diagonal and looked for a parking place near there. 

Amazingly the place I found, or rather waited for when I saw a driver leaving his place, was near a Gaudi house and therefore not something which one would have expected to have found.  It was very tight, but I made it (under pressure) with relative ease.  And even the parking charges were not excessive.

I asked a very helpful lady who walked me through the steps to getting my parking ticket to point me in the direction of the Jardins and after a couple of minutes walk I was there!

Our demonstration was relatively small and very middle class.  We were all teachers and their familiars and very select too.  I met Steve who was arranging the whole demo and he gave me a rakish red cap to wear.

When, eventually we were ready to set off I collected a red CCOO flag and was good to go.  When we were about to start I was ordered by Steve to hold the banner at the front of the march so, with red hat, red flag and red whistle I could well be on the news this evening looking mildly uncomfortable by resolutely holding my share of our Union banner!

We marched to the offices of the regulatory body and dumped symbolic sacks of the worry that anybody working in the educational sector has as a normal part of their professional life.

While the sacks were piled up against the entrance to the doors and during the speeches that were being made, in the best traditions of slapstick a charlady appeared and started throwing the sacks away while haranguing the organizers no doubt bringing up concepts of Health & Safety and things of that sort.  It added just that touch of farce to an otherwise important situation!

Toni has wrapped his sister’s birthday present and even bought his Mother’s Day flowers which were wrapped in the garden centre.  We are now ready to go to Terrassa and Toni is of course packing the portable computer which he uses to watch pay-for-view Barça games for free.

How I am going to stay awake for the next few hours I do not know and I will have to rely on the car’s memory of the way back to get me home!

And to top everything the Chief Scumbag has been seen next door.  This is disastrous as it means that the whole Family Scumbag must be getting ready for their intolerable summer stay. 

Horrible thought!

Let me push that to the back of my mind and look forward to the birthday party!

Back to the grind

My first attempt at a lemon and nut cake from my St Jordi recipe book went down quietly in the staffroom today.  

Those who tried in within my sight were complementary but all commented on how sharp and tangy it was.  That reflects my taste and it certainly is a cake that fights back – as well it should with the juice of three lemons in the glaze on top that is itself topped with their combined zests!  It is also very rich made as it is with butter and eggs and stuffed with nuts and pasas and a generous dash of single malt whiskey.

A mite crumbly for my taste but delicious and one to make again – though it might also be useful to stick more closely to the recipe and translate more than the gist of the thing!

I know that it is Wednesday, but it is a beautiful day and I am in school.  I know that there has been a two-day holiday, but it is a beautiful day and I am in school.  On the positive side I am now nearer to the weekend than I am to the start of the week and there is every chance that the new swimming pool will actually allow some swimmers into it by the end of the week.

I am still resting on my laurels about my immersion in the arctic pool and am still trying to work out why it was that the water was actually cooler on the parts illuminated by the sun than those in shade.  This is surely counter intuitive and against the law of god.  For a completely static container of still water I am at a loss to understand how currents of icy water managed to ambush me as I trawled my increasingly weary and refrigerated way up and down the pool.  There seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason for the sudden shocks as lines of liquid icebergs engulfed my body. 

I am convinced that the sea would not have been quite so vicious, but I have lost my crevice tool for removing sand from unfashionable parts of the body and I simply couldn’t be bothered with all the fuss of walking all that way down to a jellyfish infested (probably) sea.

This week is the false dawn before the full onslaught of examination fever and, of course the meetings consequent upon getting another mark out of ten for the kids.  There is still one Saturday morning meeting left this year but I am spreading my poison around and expect it to be changed – to a Friday evening!  I could still weep when I acknowledge that I have fallen so low in employment terms in this country that I regard that as some sort of triumph.  A triumph at a time when the government is taking 5% of my salary to make up for their own inadequacies in guarding the national budget. 

Damn them all to hell! 

And the sun is shining which makes it all so much worse somehow!

On the other hand one of my colleagues has filled up the Magic Box of Never Ending Chocolate and I have just eaten a British Malteaser and they simply don’t taste the same as the damned foreign ones!

After a fairly awful lesson with 3ESO right at the end of the day that left me tired and drained I lack the gumption even to go out on the third floor and take the sun to which I am justly entitled.

I may have to find the energy to go out and discover new sources of get up and go to find a present for Toni’s sister for her birthday on Saturday.

It’s now past ten o’clock and I am past tiredness.  We did go to a few shops and found nothing suitable for Toni’s sister but we did buy a hair cutter.  I pause here for the chortles to die down and would point out that hair does grow upon my head.  Admittedly the major covering of the pate is of gossamer delicacy but there is a rugged sufficiency at the sides and back.  And that stuff needs to be cut, while the lighter stuff needs more shaving.  Our last shaver has given up the ghost so this was a necessary spending.  It is now charging for the next sixteen hours so that the weekend should be a time for the falling of the hairs.

By the time our purchases and non-purchases had been completed I was in no mood to wait for my food and so, eventually, we made our way to our favourite haunt of La Fusta which undoubtedly serves the best patatas bravas in Castelldefels.

While we were waiting to be served we could not help noticing that the television was tuned to a pay channel which was showing the Barça game.  We stayed until it ended and Barça were able to notch up another win, but alas, it will not be enough to stop Real Madrid from getting the league cup.  Indeed as I type Madrid are two nil up against Athletic Bilbao who are not playing at all well.  If Madrid win this match then they will have clinched the league and, as with the last goal that they scored, there will be an explosion of fireworks around us to celebrate this win.

In Catalonia, celebrating Real Madrid is a direct affront to all things Catalan and Toni will be insufferable moaning and groaning about the “foreigners” by whom we are surrounded!

Madrid are now three nil up and do not look as though they are going to lose so I should stop now before I have to catalogue the victory of our hated rivals!

Holiday gone!

“Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami; “The Escape” by Robert Muchamore; “Young Sherlock Holmes – Red Leech” by Andrew Lane; “The Scorch Trials” by James Dashner; “Night Rise” by Anthony Horowitz

What a lazy writer I have been.  A weekend and two days of holiday and not a key has been hit by my fingertips – but I have been reading.  All of the above have been (with different degrees of greed) consumed by my good self.

Here are the opening sentences of the books in no particular order.

1.              She spoke to him before the world fell apart.

2.              As a baby Marc Kilgour had been abandoned between two stone flower pots on the platform at Beauvais station, sixty kilometres north of Paris.”

3.              “So you’re all set for money, then?” the boy named Crow asks in his characteristically sluggish voice.

4.              James Hillager thought he was hallucinating when he first saw the giant leech.

5.              The man in the black limousine had already circled the theatre once.

Some of the above read like responses to an exercise put forward by an uninspiring Creative Writing teacher.

However, the most surprising read was the one with the best title, “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami, an International Best Seller and much recommended by a colleague who loaned it to me – though he was not sure about the ending.  I have long given up trying to understand what “International Bet Seller” means, but if this book is one then I have not idea whatsoever what appeals to the great General Public.

This novel is part fable, part historical mystery, part fantasy, part philosophy and lots of other parts that I can’t be bothered to list.  It seemed to me to be a self indulgent, over long mishmash of a few of short stories that the author thought would blend together nicely – well, they don’t.  The references to Culture (the capital is intentional and ironic) are irritating at best and embarrassing at worst.  Surely all writers know that you quote Yeats at your absolute peril!

“The Escape” by Robert Muchamore set in World War Two during the occupation of Paris was much more successful; it tried less but was confident about its narrative structure and it told a rattling good yarn.  It was undemanding and at times seemed like an updated version of the Famous Five with serious bits added.  Perhaps I liked it as there was a ship called The Cardiff Bay in it, but its mixture of war, spies and child courage is a sure fire page turner.

The recent BBC award winning series based on a youthful Sherlock Holmes has spawned other spin-offs and “Young Sherlock Holmes – Red Leech” by Andrew Lane seems to be one of them.  This is a workmanlike story where little history lessons are given along the way to back up a story which takes in the conceit of Lincoln’s assassin being alive and at the centre of a conspiracy of disgruntled Confederates.  There are some nice touches which try to fill in the back-story of elements in the real Sherlock Holmes stories but it is really a constant exercise in the willing suspension of disbelief as one impossible event is piled on top of another.  But all in the name of good clean fun!

“The Scorch Trials” by James Dashner was an exercise in poor taste, using a vague back-story of global catastrophe to justify graphic descriptions of children being killed, maimed and tortured by an organization crassly named WICKED.  But, wouldn’t you just know it, one character reaffirms that “WICKED is good” just as we get to the end of this volume which leads seamlessly into the next rip-off paperback.

Horowitz is a safe pair of hands and this fantasy novel, “Night Rise” is part of a series in which Good (five children) battle against the Old Ones (evil) who are trying to get back into the world through a Gate and so on.  A simple reading of “The Trial” and watching “The Cube” and any form of inexplicable, arbitrary violence is allowable in a moneymaking enterprise.  Readable but unpleasant.

The opening sentences were: “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami (3); “The Escape” by Robert Muchamore (2); “Young Sherlock Holmes – Red Leech” by Andrew Lane (4); “The Scorch Trials” by James Dashner (1); “Night Rise” by Anthony Horowitz (5).

There have been two days of sunshine during this little holiday and I have turned a more acceptable shade of cream, but I am still way behind the dark brown that is always my goal!

On balance this has been a good break: plenty of reading; good meals; Family visit; moan with a friend; making a cake from my recipe book of St Jordi and, most important, my first dip in the pool.

I cannot pretend that the water was anything other than cold, but it was not the unbearable cold where you can feel your body shutting down in shock.  I did my usual stint of lengths and felt much better afterwards.

The club I joined on the understanding that their new pool would be open in a couple of weeks has still not opened but the last time I visited it I was assured that it would be open in days rather than weeks.  I of course believed them, though I could hear my colleagues voice in the background asking, in a world-weary way, just how long I had lived in Spain!  I live, as always, in hope.

As I am already a member of Castelldefels Municipal Pool you might be wondering just why I need to belong to another pool.  The answer lies in proximity.  I have to make a special effort to go to the Municipal pool but this “new” one is next to the British School of Barcelona and is therefore virtually on my doorstep.  It is virtually on my way home and I therefore have no justifiable excuse not to go to it.

I have also paid to use the Padel (sic) facilities of the place.  Padel is a mixture of tennis and squash played on a court boxed in with glass walls.  It looks interesting and I might well invest in some new kit and a racquet or bat or whatever it is that one uses to play the game.

I also intend to become a user of the Olympic Canal and get some rowing in.  I remember with pleasure my occasional forays into the lake in Roath Park and I would like to mess about on a boat again!

I am looking forward to Summer this year.

I am not looking forward to going back to school tomorrow though one must remember that Wednesday is the “tipping day” when one will be nearer to the weekend than the start of the week.  And we have had two of my worst days off: eleven periods and a lunch duty gone!

I will have to calculate exactly how many days are left before the end of the course and the departure of the kiddiewinks.

Keep ‘em rolling on!