. . . and it rained again!

At lunch today in our usual restaurant (much patronized by the retired and therefore a sure sign of good value) the people sitting on the table next to us did not seem to be fully engrossed in their food.

Lunch, even on a Friday when people are somehow different in their approaches to life with the impending weekend offering illusory freedom, is a time when things should be done differently.  The eating of food is not being at work – unless you are a food critic, I suppose.  It is a time when other concerns should be left behind. Especially when you are in a public space.

I have never believed in the so-called business lunch: you either work or eat.  You cannot, in my view, do both satisfactorily.  It ends up in indigestion – or at the very least in cold food and inadequate work.

Which is why I hate the mobile phone.

I possess one of course.  They are after all gadgets within the meaning of the act.  But I feel total loathing when I see one being used.

People do shout when they reply but this boorishness is not the aspect of their use that I object to most.

The most repellent factor that you have to deal with when you are with someone with a mobile phone is that whoever you are, the phone outranks you.

You are having a conversation and then the phone rings. If people have been uncouth enough to fail to set the damn thing to silent then the very best you can hope for is for the person to whom you are speaking to take out the phone and turn the bloody thing off.  That is at best.  What usually happens is that your partner will look at the phone before turning it off.

Have they been on tenterhooks for the whole time that they have been with you because they are expecting momentous news which is going to change the course of their lives?  No.  This is just an out of the blue call which breaks into your live conversation as if it has every right to do so.  This rude intrusion is then given the allowance of attention which it does not deserve while the callee decides if it outranks you.

I am infuriated by even a moment’s consideration given to the interloper and it puts me in a bad mood for the rest of the time together.  Not, of course that I haven’t done this myself, but somehow that’s different.

Anyway the woman who was having her meal had a fork on one side of her plate and a mobile phone on the other.

During the meal her phone started ringing and she picked it up, presumably noted the name of the person calling her and then, holding it in one hand while feeding herself with another, let it ring on until the other person got fed up or the answering service dealt with the call.  And this is a crowded restaurant.  And she didn’t look ashamed!  This is one area of modern life to which I cannot reconcile myself.

Life without my various computers is not to be considered, but without the mobile phone . . .  that is not in the same category.

And before anyone tells me that my smart phone is a computer with a phone added, the only time that I really wanted to use the internet computer link the bloody thing didn’t work – and that was in the centre of Barcelona and not in the back of beyond!

One girl in a class last year could not imagine being separated from her mobile phone for more than an hour – the length of a lesson.  She also admitted that she had gone out with a group of friends and used the text function on her phone to speak to someone on the other side of the table from her!

None of this stops my wanting to own an I-phone 5.  Sad person that I am.

The trip up to Terrassa was relatively painless with no holdups at the well-known bottlenecks on the motorway up to the city.

The meal to celebrate the name day of Toni’s sister was delayed because of dog shit.

Toni’s nephew was playing with his brother in a local park, fell and when he got up he found himself covered in smeared shit.

Dogs defecate in public.  I do not blame them.  In the same way, dogs bark – it’s what they do.  Blame for dog mess on pavements and neighbours being constantly disturbed by incessant barking lies squarely with the owners.  They have to clean up behind their pets.  In public areas which are used by children and humans it is not enough for owners to assume that grass equals a free-for-use dog toilet.  The serious illness and diseases that can be caught from animal faeces have been well documented and owners have a duty of care to ensure that they do not pollute the environment.

Barking is something which dog owners regard as an inconvenience that they are prepared to put up with as part of the cost of owning a pet.  They might accept this imposition but I see no reason that neighbours should have to.

Our next door neighbour has a collection of creatures who obviously love and adore her and she adores them – we often hear her simpering baby-voice speaking goo-goo nonsense to her charges first thing in the morning – and she goes through a routine of taking her pets out to poo on the pavements.

Unfortunately the creatures left behind bewail their fate in the only way they can and bark morosely and monotonously until she returns.  They do not learn from one day to the next that she is, indeed, going to return to them.  They are like those hapless humans who have catastrophic instant memory loss and panic when things change and they feel deserted.

She has constructed cages underneath the house for her dogs and we hear them throw themselves against the netting and then bark their complaints to the wind – or rather the collection of neighbours who are in close proximity to the barking beasts.

So leaving the barking in Castelldefels and then going to Terrassa and finding my meal delayed by an hour while a mother washes dog filth of her son did not do much more my sense of calm well being.

However, I will have an early night and find comfort in unconsciousness.

Tomorrow means case packing and light shopping.

And my OU stuff did not arrive.  I fear that it will appear on Monday when I am in Cardiff and I will have read trivial literature on the plane rather than settling down to real academic grind.

Such is life. 

Day by day

Why is it so much easier to swim well one day rather than another?  Today and yesterday I got the feeling as I was swimming that I could do a steady crawl all day. 

Load of rubbish of course; but even if the feeling is momentary it is a pleasant one and it makes the twenty minutes that I decide to swim pass that much more quickly.

For someone who likes swimming as much as I do I get bored with the activity very quickly, which is why I restrict myself to a mere twenty minutes.  For those twenty minutes I am engaged and I enjoy the exercise – any longer and it becomes just a chore.

I must admit that I prefer swimming just before midday, even though when I was in the UK I used to go for an early morning swim before I went to school.  The pool here doesn’t open until after eight in the morning and that makes it impossible to swim before work.  Even if I had work.  Which of course I do not have now. 

When it comes down to it I suppose that I’m just too damn lazy to swim early-ish in the morning.

Given the fact that the pool is near a school it does mean that unless I am prepared to get to the pool as soon after eight as possible the invasion of parents with big cars and inconsiderate parking habits means that it is impossible to find a parking space from eight-thirty about eleven.

Mothers use the parking spaces in the pool to ditch the car and take their kids to school and then return for a cup of tea and a noisy talk.  There is a whole social structure that I observe from the outside where I sometimes feel like an intruder as the only male sitting down and sipping from my double strength cup of tea – which is now prepared as soon as the proprietor of the café sees me.  Which is social progress of a sort.

My distance-learning package from the OU did not arrive today and so I am putting all my faith on its arrival tomorrow.  It is now just under a fortnight until the official start of the course and it is always a good thing to get off to a flying start by reading through some of the stuff before the date when you have to start.  Still, in theory I should have plenty of time to keep up with the work and the assignments – I would just be a lot more comfortable if I had the material to hand well before the start.

Toni is ploughing on ahead with his course which he will not be able to register for until next month and then it will not start until next February – by which time I should be well into my second assignment and the second “book” of teaching material which is part of the package.

I am still having little after-shocks from seeing Suzanne.  The only parking space I could find near the exit from the school when I went to pick her up was well up the hill and out of the sight lines of the pupils.  That was not intentional; I did a circuit of the school roads trying to find a place nearer, but the partial gap that I found was the only space.  I was able to watch, with mixed emotions, the kids leaving school after the sound of the lunch bell. 

Even at a distance I could tell which students were which.

This is a gift of short sightedness where a sufferer often has to recognize friends and relatives by their general hazy outline rather than by specific clear details.  Even with glasses I still find that I am looking through the wrong part of the varifocal lenses and not seeing a sharp outline, so I am relying on old myopic skills rather than tilting my head to bring another part of the lens into operation!

Eventually Suzanne emerged and we went off into Barcelona.

Seeing an ex-colleague is a strange feeling because the conversation is only slightly skewed from the conversation that you would have if you were current colleagues.  It is only, after all, six teaching weeks which is the difference between my professional status from last year to this, so there is only what Evelyn Waugh (in different circumstances) referred to the “bat squeak” of difference.  But it is a difference which is real and day-by-day you lose the quotidian pressures which unite a teaching force.

The pleasure that a non-teaching teacher (like alcoholics you are always a teacher, though sometimes a teacher who does not teach) gets is always something of a guilty pleasure.  The walking through town without the accompanying screams of the young; going to supermarkets and walking almost without pause to an empty checkout; having time to do complex tasks and stick to them until they are done; having time to read a newspaper properly – all these things are a delight, but one can never stop thinking of those still at which is archaically still referred to as the “chalk-face.”

It is guilt that one can master!

But I still have to admit there is a part of me that feels I should still be teaching.  I suppose this is as near I get to Masochism as I care to go!

Meanwhile I have still not packed for my flying visit to the UK and tomorrow we are off to Terrassa for another name day.

Time is in short supply.

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!