A little something

An excellent lunch in Barcelona at a Chinese restaurant where there wasn’t the usual stuff simmering in a serried row of bain marries, but rather a series of containers with fresh ingredients which the customer could hand over to the chef for him to cook.  Delicious.  And healthy as I treated the nice fried bits of Chinese food with horrified distain and restricted myself to fresh vegetables, seafood and fish.

In the interest of total accuracy I also have to admit that I had a chocolate covered chocolate ice cream on a stick as well, but surely the vegetables outweigh the evil of nice calories.  Don’t they?

I am now concerned about the material for the OU course not arriving.  I have decided that tomorrow is the day which I expect them to arrive (though I have to admit that I more than half expected them today) and they should then be available for me to read on the plane on my flying visit to the UK at the end of the week.

Please.

What next?

Catalan television is full of Independence and how to break away from Spain.  Programme after programme has the typical simultaneous shouting that passes for discussion in this part of the world!

More and more Catalans who I know are now stating with growing vehemence that they was to separate from the rest of Spain.

The Spanish government, led by the derisory incompetent liar Rajoy, seems to be going out of its way to antagonize the Catalans.  The latest piece of inconsiderate idiocy had one of he Spanish ministers talking about the “Spanishization” of Catalan children.  Sensitivity seems to have been sucked out of all the members of the ruling PP party.  They almost seem to be taunting the Catalans to try and do their worst.

The present political “leader” of Spain could well be presiding over the break up of the country.  There is no way that Catalonia would get independence without the Basque Country following.  And that just about winds it up for the rest of Spain.

I don’t think that the general population of the country realises just how near to almost total chaos and financial and political meltdown we really are.

Exciting times, but I would rather be reading about them in history rather than living through them!

I am still remembering little incidents described in “Events, Dear Boy, Events” which I cannot recommend too highly – and with my Kindle I can carry it about with me with no extra weight!

I have my books I can regard this unfolding catastrophe with a certain degree of detachment.  But my life is now here in Barcelona and the country in which I settled is not the one which seems to be developing day by day in a bankrupt country.

Though I have to say you have to look fairly carefully to see any real signs of El Crisis; bars and restaurants are full and the shops seem to be doing big business.  Just go into an electronics shop and people do not seem to be stopping their buying spree for anything with a touch screen!

Rajoy is becoming known in Europe as a byword for prevarication and he tries to disguise the aid which is needed to keep the country afloat.  The only clarity is that no one really knows what state the country is going to be in by the end of the year.  It is genuinely terrifying. 

But life goes on.

I look forward to my learning material from the OU as a sign and symbol of some sort of normality!

Sun!

Let’s respond to the important things first: the weather was good enough for me to lie out on the Third Floor.  It was not, it has to be said, summer. 

Lying there I was reminded of my stoical sunbathing which characterised some of my winter visits to Gran Canaria and the “sun” beds of Maspalomas trying to convince myself that the gusting breezes were not uncomfortable and that I really was warm.  And considering it’s the 1th of October one cannot grumble about being able to divest oneself of clothing and lie out in the open air without frostbite!

I have had the feedback on my “story” from Irene and in the nicest possible way she has told me to rewrite it.  I even managed to slip a passive in, when everything was supposed to have been written in the present tense.  She also asked me to add more modal verbs. 

I wonder how many of the present heads of English in Cardiff secondary school would actually know what she meant.  A few years of teaching English as a foreign language and lots of stuff that I sort-of knew when I was in Forms 4 and Five (or Lower and Upper Modern as one of our headteachers insisted on calling them - well, we may have been a state school, but we did go to school on Saturday mornings!) all that sort of stuff does eventually come back to you. 

And, it also has to be said, you learn a few other terms that did not exist when I was studying (or rather copying from the scientists) the grammar work that we had to do.  “Phrasal Verbs” for example are known by all language teachers, but not by ordinary humans. 

The English language is rich in phrasal verbs which are used as a form of cattle prod to keep the more obstreperous students in line by desperate teachers. 

Imagine that you are learning English and you come across an innocuous little word like “set”; you then make the stupid mistake of looking up this three letter scrap of language.  You find to your absolute horror that there are sixty or seventy meanings of this word and then you find the phrasal verbs: to set up; to set in; to set out; to set in; to set over; to set by; to set under; to set down; to set on, etc etc.  English speakers hardly think about using these verbs but to foreigners they seem wilfully vicious.

So my story should have been written with a little more care and attention to detail.  So, it’s back to the writing.  I think that the exercise that I said I was going to complete by the end of the week is going to be a little more difficult than I thought.

I have just heard that one of my hard done by colleagues whose dismissal from school was little short of scandalous has now, at last, managed to find a temporary job for a couple of weeks.  I wish him well, but I wish much more that the labour and union organization was more on British lines than the sometimes inexplicable forms that they take.

I am waiting for the arrival of my material from the OU and the first day covers of the Paralympic stamps – such are the future delights that I have to look forward to!

Oh no!

It’s that empty feeling; cold, a slight ache and a sick realization that time lost will not be made up.  Everything will have to be done again.

My reintroduction to the delights of study with the Open University is drawing near.  The course officially starts on the 3^rd of November, while the web site for my course opens on United Nations Day.  A day as I say each year is known only to the Secretary General of that august organization and my humble self – and of course those who I have been able to corrupt with my individual view of life and what is important.

So the course is, as it were, coursing towards me and I am eager to give myself something of a head start because, if previous study with the OU has taught me anything it is that “events, dear boy, events” (thank you yesterday’s book for reminding me of that useful phrase) inevitably jump up from nowhere and disrupt even the most painstaking of self-learners – and I am not one of those.  So, any little advantage that I can gain is worth garnering.

Taking the point of least effort, and knowing that it was a part (albeit a late part) of the course, I decided to re-read Hard Times.  Hardly an imposition for me.  I think that I probably have the edition which is stipulated by the OU, but I preferred to download a free copy from the Internet and read that on my I-pad.

As I read I learned how to highlight and then make electronic notes and spent a delightful time enjoying the writing and feeling smug that I was already well into a major part of the course.

With the printer out of action and being far too lazy to go up to the rain drenched Third Floor to find another one, I printed out nothing preferring to wait for the missing part of the new printer to be replaced.

This part was, surprisingly read for me to collect today, well within the two-week period that I was threatened with when I took it back.

And, having updated my Kindle content making sure that the books were available on my computer and I-pad I decided to print out the work that I had already completed.

And I couldn’t find the book.  I searched through the electronic library and, as they searched, the more I looked the more it wasn’t there.  All the work gone.

I was loath to voice my despair because I feared that the updating of the Kindle app. on my computer had done all the trouble and I had wiped out what I had written.

Frantic clicks on various menus brought me no nearer to the missing volume and it wasn’t until I realized that I was looking in the wrong library and my thumping heart slowed down and I realized that the work was all still there.

I should by now, of course, have made a copy because who knows what might happen.  But I haven’t.  Those who believe in modern technology must have faith!

Today I wrote my first “story” for Irene to use with the kids that she teaches.  These take the form of two page efforts of about 500 words with two simple English exercises. 

Each “story” should have some clear grammatical object and, for the younger children should be written in the present tense.  It was an interesting exercise and I am looking forward to Irene’s feedback.  If it is positive then I have said that I will try and write a “story” a day for the next week or so, so that we can have a body of “work” to discuss before it is presented to the kids. 

Who knows, there might even be a book in it!

Rain and reading

Torrential rain today and a consequent (and fully justified) disinclination to do anything other than read.

I have been gripped by a downloaded impulse buy book as dangled temptingly before me by the ever-ready leading hand of the Guardian.  The real trouble is that anything which looks interesting in the newspaper can be downloaded in an elongated moment through my Kindle.

The book which I have just finished reading is “Events, Dear Boy, Events” A Political Diary of Britain from Woolf to Campbell, edited and introduced by Ruth Winstone.  This is a sequential series of extracts from a hundred different diaries which makes for absolutely compulsive reading.  I have read it in very much the same way as I would have read a novel.  I recommend it without reservation – though if pressed I could probably make my own list of people and events that I would have liked included.

The delights in the writing are many.  I will only give a couple of examples as you should find the rest for yourselves and give the editor the benefit of some sort of payment.  However, who could resist Vera Brittain’s take on the Abdication Crisis and her take on the Duke of York becoming king, “I cannot believe that stiff, shy slow-brained man and his snobbish, limited little Duchess will do anything to increase the prestige of the monarchy.”  I love the description of the arrogant dwarf who I almost stepped on in an exhibition in the Royal Academy one time!

Gems like “The apocryphal and the mundane blend together at the Home Office like absinthe.  It blows your mind” and “It has been said that if a Labour conference makes you wonder why you are a member of the Labour Party, a Tory conference supplies you with the answer” fill the pages.  Pages you should read!

It is a highly partial reading of the political history of Britain but an exhilaratingly refreshing view.