Sad but satisfying

21^st October 2012

When you have a day which is close and muggy you have the opportunity to rise above such stultifying weather and forge ahead with a new project or give in to the sense of entropy and vegetate.

I chose the latter course for yesterday and did nothing.  I fed and watered myself and read the newspaper and that was basically it.

I refuse to feel the guilt that such a giving-in to indolence should encourage; I look on it more as a day of preparation for the journey and return which is facing me this evening.

As the trip is so short it is difficult to feel much about it – apart from the fact that it is a necessary one to show support for my cousin in our shared sense of loss.  And given the number of people who travelled from Scotland to Stewart’s funeral and had to make hurried departures from the house to catch various trains to go back to whence they came I can say little.  The distance between Barcelona and Cardiff can actually be covered in little more than three hours if you are going via Bristol as I am.  A couple of hours to Bristol and then about an hour from Bristol to Cardiff.

But you are supposed to get to the airport two hours before your plane is supposed to depart.  There is the delay in getting off the plane and getting the car.  At least with the new crossing there is less chance of being held up on the Bridge than there used to be with the other one.  So I will actually start off at eight in the evening and get to Cardiff (having gained an hour in the difference between time in Spain and time in the UK) by about one or two in the morning.  Ah, the delights of air travel.

I am packing a coat of some sort.  I have not worn a coat since I came back from France, but I fear that I may have to indulge the British weather a little.  I am also wearing jeans and not shorts.  In Spain I aim to wear shorts until late November and in some parts of December, but I am not so jejune to believe that I can do this in the country of my birth!  We shall see.  The last time I went to the UK I was delighted by the weather and was even able to have breakfast sitting outside the café – and we had to move because we were not in the shade and the sunshine was too intense!  Fond hope for the end of October I fear!

Monday, surely, will be the day when my material from the Open University arrives.  That will give me just over a week until the course proper starts on the 3^rd of November and I had hoped to be a little more in advance than that to give myself a flying start.  Still, the fact that Toni is studying as well is an incentive to take things seriously and make sure that the cut off dates for the tutor marked assignments are merely reminders for me rather than ominous fingers of doom as they were the last time I attempted OU courses!

Just over a week and a half after the course has started I am back in the UK for a more extended time with commitments right, left and centre which are going to take up my time.  It is recommended that you allow fifteen hours of study time a week for the course which is over two hours a day.  A couple of days lost and you are already up to three hours a day and that is difficult with the best will in the world.  But these are cavils provoked by nervousness of not having the material this near to the start of the course.

United Nations Day looms when, not only will the traditional celebrations take place, but also it is the opening day of the website for the course.  You see, everything is now related to the OU!

Nowadays you do not have to get up at the crack of dawn and watch, through bleary eyes some academic lecture on BBC2.  I can well remember crawling towards the television and sitting close enough to see what was going on because I had not put my lenses in and clutching a cup of tea wondering what the hell I was dong and why!  Now there are DVDs and anyway the schedule of the BBC is too full to allow academics to do their things and do them with Beatle-style haircuts and in black and white!

Now for a shower and a change into my British clothes to prepare myself for the rigors of modern travel.  At least I have my newly-found Nano to soften the edges of boredom which strikes me as soon as I have passed passport control!

Today – 23^rd October 2012

An hour waiting in the plane on the runway was not the best way to start the journey to Bristol on Sunday evening.  Although the plane was full I managed to get a seat on the front row between two people who looked daggers at me as they thought that they had managed to keep a free seat between them.  The harsh element of their disappointment was that they had kept the spare seat from almost the whole of the loading of the plane until I, the last person to board claimed it!

Leg room was the only thing that kept me sane while we waited and waited for a new slot to fly because the rain had taken our allocated slot away from us.  Rain?  A little rain?  So much for modern technology.

A further irritation was the fact that my hand luggage, the only case I was taking to the UK, had been tagged as something which needed to go into the hold.  This is because so many more people are taking substantial cases instead of putting a large case in the hold.  This means that the overhead storage gets filled with remarkable speed and you are left bewailing the wasted time as you stand sullenly with the other zombies waiting for the carrousel to jerk into some sort of movement.

Luckily my bleats of injustice were listened to and I managed to get my case on board in the overhead rack, though it was nowhere near my seat.

I eventually arrived in Cardiff at about 1.48 am and Pauls Squared (bless him!) made a cup of tea and made a more than generous ham sandwich to keep body and soul together.

The funeral of my aunt, the reason for my visit, went very well with a short but clear service and an enjoyable get together afterwards.

My late aunt was a forthright character (I discovered two or three of us had used the word “feisty” to describe her on our sympathy cards) and it is difficult to regard such a vital woman as dead, so her character is irrepressibly alive in our collective memory!

In a welcome return to eccentric clergymen of bygone days, the young, chubby faced vicar who took the service was accompanied by his liver coloured Labrador who lay contentedly behind her master as he conducted the service.  And, as the coffin was hidden behind the curtain in the crematorium the vicar picked up the dog’s lead and led the rest of us out of the chapel.

Paul was not in the best of moods when he finally came back from school so to lighten the atmosphere we went to an Indian restaurant and had a truly excellent and reasonably priced meal in The Spice Island in Rumney.  By the second or third drink we were all feeling a little more mellow and getting up the next day was just that little bit more difficult!

However, get up we did and, with the usual delays along the Avon and under the suspension bridge I made good time to the airport.

Once through the increasingly arduous security I got out my new Rowling, “The Casual Vacancy” and started to read.  In spite of the fog in the area which was delaying a plane to Jersey the climactic conditions did not appear to impede our progress and the Barcelona plane was not delayed.

The problem with getting something to eat and drink and going to the loo and carting around a case and a very large book is that something has to give.  And I lost the book.

The book was bought in Tesco and I paid nine quid for it rather than the list price of twenty.  I was annoyed.  And the flight was being called.

I trudged resentfully to the gate and waited discontentedly for the queue of Celtic supporters to make their noisy way into the plane.

At this point the particular sort of luck which is the positive counterpoint to my feckless unconcern made itself felt.

For the first time in my life (at least in an airport) I heard my name being broadcast with an invitation to return to Security.

And there was my book – linked to me because I had used the card and addressed envelope from Hadyn as a bookmark.  Time after time I am saved from my own unconcern.

The flight back was uneventful, apart from the Celtic fans momentarily hosting the cans of beer that they were drinking before returning them to another part of the plane!

The fog and drizzle of Bristol gave way to bright sunshine in Barcelona as one of the Celtic fans exiting the plane remarked in a delighted tone to his colleagues, “It’s just like July!”  They should be so lucky!

A disconsolate Toni was raised from his depression by going to a new restaurant for us in the centre of town called, “Tast” – and I have officially designated it as “A Find”.  For €12.50 we had an inventive and delicious meal with the only drawback being there was but a single glass of wine to accompany the repast.

The rest of my Olympic First Day Covers have arrived with the surprising addition of an free official Philatelic Bureau “Gold Medal Winners” album to put them in.  God bless the Philatelic Bureau – though they do not appear to have sent me the “Olympic Memories” FDC which should have been issued in late September.  I think another phone call is in order.

As indeed has been necessary for the OU material which has still not arrived.  A very helpful lady told me that another batch has been sent – which should mean that the original shipment will arrive bright and early tomorrow!

I will be glad to be back in my own bed – and tomorrow is United Nations Day! 

Hooray!

. . . 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.