A newly old experience

I have to believe that what I am doing is for The Greater Good!

Tomorrow I go back to school.  Not, admittedly to the school on the hill, but rather to my local English speaking school to do a tad of supply work.

I could look on this unscheduled return to work as a way of paying for a lapse.

The Kindle Fire has come to Spain - after settling itself in well in other more fortunate countries of the world who get to grab hold of the latest technology rather earlier than we do in Spain.  As it was an electrical gadget it was something for which I felt an instant and sincere attachment.  My only problem was how on earth to justify it given the number of computers of various shapes and sizes that I have managed to acquire over the years.

Toni (for it was he) came up with the “it would be easier for you when you are travelling” excuse, which I grabbed hold of with both hands and bought one.  It is smaller than the I-pad and obviously more portable – but we are dealing with nuance rather than reality here, but I am much enjoying playing around with yet another gadget to keep me off the streets!

But three days more in school!  It has given me pause for thought, along the “If you can do three days then . . .”  But I think that the shock to the system will be salutatory and I will need Thursday and Friday for deep R&R to bring me back to normal.

It will be interesting to see if I can detect a difference in the kids from when I was last teaching in the school.

I also understand that there has been a building programme to enlarge the school itself so it will also be interesting to see how the dynamic of the place has altered to take account of the altered building layout.

I will be taking Geography classes for which, I have been assured, the “work has been set”.  I shall make no comment, even though the whole of my past experience screams out that the four-word phrase is open to many and varied interpretations – virtually none of which make the life of the supply teacher any easier.  But I get ahead of myself.

Thus evening I have spent clearing out the rubbish in my school case and decided what, if anything, I should take with me.  And a clean white shirt and tie and trousers.  I have been in shorts (and still am) for months and I have left it too late to wash any crumpled remnants than I might find!

My OU teaching material has not turned up yet, and the start of the course is three days away.  Today I received an email from my tutor for the course with the information that the tutor group comprises students in the North of England and Mainland Europe – which I am sure says something about the mind set of the OU, or perhaps the way my mind works when I speculate about why these two areas are lumped together!

Early to bed to compensate for the change in time which has not yet fully worked through the system so that I can be bright and early for my first day.  Again!

DAY OF DAYS

UNITED NATIONS DAY

Every year I try, for personal reasons linked to my birth, to pump myself up with bubbling enthusiasm for the only real inclusive international organization that exists in the world today.  It is, after all, the only forum in which the so-called democracies and the bloody awful dictatorships can blend their voices and come to conclusions based on the UN Charter which, after bloody all, every single nation has signed before it is allowed to join.

And every year my enthusiasm becomes more and more forced as the terrible reality of the leaders of our world flamboyantly failing to work together for good (thank you Ruskin) becomes more and more apparent.

Syria, for example shows up the frustrating pointlessness of diplomacy.  It is very easy to paint China and Russia (and one or two other nations that I will not pollute my mouth or rather my fingertips with) as the “Baddies” in the Syria Saga – and indeed their actions seem to me to be contemptible. 

But the “Goodies” are secretly delighted that those two nations stymie all attempts to actually do something about the crisis because then the Goodies would have to be seen to do something.  Which they don’t want to do because they are terrified of getting themselves involved in yet another insoluble situation in the East. 

So our Foreign Secretary wrings his hands and sheds crocodile tears, as he and our country do virtually nothing as our hands are tied as resolution after resolution in the UN is vetoed.  And tens of thousands of Syrians die.  And the situation of the surrounding countries gets ever more perilous.

However, what would the situation be like if there wasn’t even the fatuous game show of the United Nations in New York to allow at least a little of the animosity to be released in words and also some sort of diplomacy to exist, even if the absurd posturing of diplomats is like a particularly arcane version of a Japanese Noh play.

One comes back again and again to the wisdom in the old saw, “Anything is better than nothing” so, yet again, I will contain my scepticism (nowadays bordering on downright disbelief) and continue to celebrate the organization which, although it shares my birthday, is older than me.  I wish it well and I wish it was well!

My OU material is now officially lost.  The faint hope that it might be lurking in the recesses of the Post Office here in Castelldefels has been extinguished and I will have to wait for replacements.

As well as being United Nations Day it is also the day on which my OU course web site opens.  The computer, as you might expect, is an essential tool in the make up of the course.  Tutorials, essays, information, exercises and group work all rely heavily on the computer.  The range of information and the access to the OU electronic library links each student into world class learning resources.  I find it quite disconcerting, so it must be absolutely terrifying to neophyte students who are not fully computer literate.  It is an adventure!

The web site has revealed that all of the printed material also exists as PDF files and so I have been trawling my way through and found myself being alternately being delighted and appalled by what I am going to have to do in the twenty weeks following the start date on the 3^rd of November.

I have been allocated a tutor – which makes everything much more real.  

The deadlines of submission dates for tutor marked assignments have been set.  

The date of the examination is set, though not where I am going to take it.  

The OU system is gearing up to get going and then it should carry you along (in theory) and spit you out the other end with a number of credits which you are then able to add to, and finally create, a degree for yourself.

Toni’s contribution to my study has been the purchase of a book.  Yes, Toni has actually bought me a book.  I got him to write this fact on the flyleaf and sign it!

“Mil Obras Para Descubrir El Arte” is one of those large heavy Larousse books into which you can screw legs and use as a table.  I love it – even though the actual writing is in Spanish.  My Spanish vocabulary to describe painting, architecture and music keeps on growing – though it has to be said that some of the words are as useful as the Italian that I know from Operas!

We went out for lunch in Sitges – a lunch I might add that seemed good value when we looked at the beguiling list of what we would get for our €12.50, but which turned out to be almost double that by the time we had a drink and a cup of coffee with the meal.  The swine even charged for the bread!  And our sea view was limited! 

Having had a fairly substantial meal at midday we do not want to have a festive meal this evening so we are finally eating part of the Red Cross parcel that Toni’s mum left us which consists of a lentil concoction in a glass jar.  We will accompany this with a cream cake with a candle in it surrounded by thawed out red fruit and topped with vanilla ice cream.  I know how to celebrate!

I had an email from one of my ex-colleagues in the school on the hill who has a disturbing facility for remembering people’s birthdays.  She remembered mine – and I’m not truly convinced that I even told her!  Creepy!

I’ll end where I began, railing at the infuriating character of the human species.

I phoned up the Philatelic Bureau to question the non-arrival of a set of stamps that were issued in late September.  I was told that everything is late and that I shouldn’t worry, my first day cover would get to me to due course.  I then said that I would like to put on record my gratitude to the Bureau for their gift of a free album complete with pocketed pages for the collection of Gold Medal Winners.  It seemed to me to be a piece of simple courtesy for a generous gesture.  I was told my the operator to whom I was speaking that the “gift” had been the subject of complaints! 

I didn’t ask what these complaints were about the “gift” that they had been given, I merely sighed and thought of United Nations Day.  If the giving of a gift caused complications how the hell did that organization get through a day without bloodshed!

Makes you think!

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!