Only a day left!

With a speed which is truly unnatural the four-day “holiday” is drawing to a close and there is time for me to wonder what I have actually done during it!

Admittedly, I do have a first draft of part of the joint assignment that we have to do as our far-flung Internet group of students gets down to the work that really has to be completed by Christmas.  It is far too long and full of interesting if fundamentally irrelevant material that I could not bring myself to leave out!  I now know more about the composer of “The Planets” and the writer of “I vow to thee, my country” than almost anyone else in Castelldefels – unless of course they happen to have done the course that I am following at present!

At least with something written there is the opportunity to rest for a while and indulge oneself in the heady pastime of editing.  Although I rarely do it with my own writing, I am quite good at wielding the blue pencil and slashing out sections of others’ work!  This time I have to encourage my faculties to be rather more self-critical than is good for me!

As most of the group appear to be concentrating on the other section of the work that we have to do, I am ploughing a somewhat lonely furrow and I have had only a single voice from the six other members of the group to keep me company, so I have been posting my thoughts basically to myself in an academic monologue to try and push myself into the flesh paring of the writing that I have done.

Tomorrow, rather than cut, I will actually add to the screed which I have already produced and then start the heart breaking work of consigning hours of work to the electronic dustbin.  I am sure that it will be good for my health!  Or something!

Friday saw the descent on our tranquil existence of two ever-charged and ever-active batteries – also known as Toni’s nephews!  Their energy is truly inexhaustible and they obviously recharge by draining the energy supplies of those adults around them!

Our lunch was planned to be in an absurdly popular pasta restaurant in the shopping complex that was built around F. C. Español’s new football stadium.  The complex is large, but not large enough to hide the delight of every true Barça fan that the team is going through a disastrous season and will undoubtedly be relegated at the end of it.

The queue outside the pasta place was ridiculously long and I muttered my complete rejection of waiting in it for bloody pasta (however good it was) despite one nephew doggedly standing at the end of the thing with his despondent mother dejectedly holding his hand.  Eventually, with the accompaniment of forced tears we moved away – to my horror towards a KFC!  This Scylla avoided there was the much greater threat of MacCharybdis, but we eventually settled on a tediously conventional meal – but only after a half hour wait!  And no, it was in no way worth the time we wasted standing in a draft caused by an automatically opening door!

I did manage to get some work done on the Third Floor when the kids were left with their aunt who had to endure the horror of their playing some sort of TV video game for a couple of hours to the accompaniment of their screams of pleasure or pain as the game swayed one way and another.

Saturday saw a brief visit to the Medieval Market in the centre of Castelldefels and the traditional buy of cheese from Majorca which is sold on one stall.  The one I chose was a mature crumbly cheese with a “rind” of spice which is edible.  The cheese itself is full of character with a bright tang in the first chew and a lasting aftertaste.  It is reminiscent of a farmhouse mature Cheddar but a little sharper.  It is utterly delicious (as indeed it should be at the price that I paid) and it is only with the sort of restraint that has kept me from a glass of wine since my return from the alcoholically liquid islands of my native land that I have resisted the temptation to carve and eat!

Lunch today was with Irene, who we have not seen for some time.  We had this in the hotel which is in the area of the sheds in St Boi and, even though the service was appallingly slow, it was delicious and with just that right amount of ponciness that I like in the delivery of my food in restaurants and hotels.  The starter was particularly effective with something purporting to be bacon mousse!

Irene’s delight at seeing the sea-glass lamp created by Toni has galvanized us both into thinking more commercially about how these can be produced.  Research and the buying of “glass drills” is just the start!

A life full of incident – and I have sent in an order to Amazon to make life just that little bit brighter!

A full day!

So, the end of a three-day stint – there is nothing like breaking yourself in gently!  The real horror begins on Monday when I face the startling reality of actually working an entire week in school.

Of course I have my cunning plan which consists of doing nothing of the sort.  As far as I can work out I have two afternoons off and an early release on another day.  I should be able to stumble my way along for the next sixteen days – especially as half a dozen of them are filled by weekends and holidays.  That leaves ten days of actual teaching and then it’s the Christmas holidays.  Which for me extend blissfully into the future, well beyond the return date for my hapless colleagues.

I am, at present, sitting in an empty staff room over an hour after the end of school time.  This is no dedication to my chosen vocation, but rather an enforced waiting for a colleague who is going to accompany me to the exhibition and life class that we have let ourselves in for.

I have managed to scavenge a cheese roll left over from the “breakfast” this morning, but I trust that I will get something somewhere to stave off the pangs of hunger which have been exacerbated by the inadequate roll rather than blunted.

This is going to be another of those days were the end result of an open ended commitment is going to be interesting to say the least!

And indeed it was.

Not least of the character forming experiences I had during the evening was driving through strange parts of Barcelona in the dark during the rush hour and beyond.  My Tom-tom did its work and, apart from some peculiarly Barcelonan flourishes of a complicated road system, it actually got us to our destination relatively unscathed.

Our meeting point was an artsy café in part of a convent (which I assume is now defunct) which was filled with those members of the macramé middle classes who rode rope bicycles and had spawned screaming kids.  The exhibition was of pieces of augmented calligraphy and there was a small group of earnest looking dilettantes plying brush and finger to show us how it was done.  Some of the pieces were vibrant and fussily interesting while others looked as though the aleatory had played an essential part in their construction – which is of course no bad thing unless it looks it!

Lydia and I had time for a coffee and a mere bite to eat before it was time to move on to the next part of our evening.

The art class was held in a small bar in the Born in the centre of the city, not far from the convent bar which seemed more suited to cules of football than devotees of art.  After being introduced to the rest of the class we made our way through a low doorway and down a Stygian flight of Dickensian brick stairs lit only by the flickering flame of small nightlights into a cellar where stools had been placed around the walls of the low vaulted room.

After further brief introductions our excellent art teacher whisked his way through one, two and three point perspective and practical ways to “find your eye line”.  After our whirlwind practical lesson we coated ourselves up and went out into the narrow streets around the bar and, with the aid of two sticks (don’t ask) we had to demonstrate to our tutor that by taking flat angles from the buildings around us we were able to ascertain our eye line and find the vanishing point.

Quite what the denizens of the night, who were watching us with some curiosity, made of our Cabbalistic gesturings with the sticks I dread to think, but I think that we must have looked like some sort of Wicca gathering trying to bring magic to the area!

Once back in the relative warmth of the cellar we went on to the second part of the evening which was drawing a naked man.

Lydia and I had previously discovered that Suzanne had failed to mention that far from being an introductory session this was week eight of a ten week drawing course, so we two were catapulted into the deep end of artistic endeavour.

It was a frighteningly invigorating experience and, apart from the fact that I couldn’t seem to join the guy’s neck to his shoulders with my pencil I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

To my undying shame, the end results of our efforts were all placed together in one part of the cellar studio and the model asked if he could take photos of the end results with his mobile phone!

Lydia and I have jealously guarded the fruits of our labour just in case any vicious person decided to publish our works of art on any social media!

Thanks to Lydia’s knowledge of the city we were able to drive back across the metropolis along an avenue where the lights were in sequence and what had taken us 40 minutes to get there took us barely ten to get back.  There is something exuberatingly forbidden about waltzing through green after green after green in a major city which banishes all thoughts of the tiredness that should come with the knowledge that one has been up and doing for over seventeen hours!  A very satisfyingly full day.

And now it is tomorrow and the first day of a four-day weekend. 

Life is good and the OU is calling!

Caught out!

I have been stymied by my own housekeeping!

My briefcase was ludicrously overweight, especially considering I had no school textbooks or marking in it!  The OU course books are solid things and with the bits and with the electronic bits and pieces that go with study it was full before I had the inconvenience of actual school stuff to contend with.

Having got up at some absurd time this morning for an 8.15 am start with Year 9 I found that I had time to rationalize my briefcase and exclude those items which I would have no opportunity to use during this period crowded morning.

As it turns out, of course, not only do I have spare time, but I have also carefully forgotten the marking which I should have been able to get completed this morning and left it on the coffee table in the front room together with all the other stuff which would now be useful for me to have.

One class has turned into a study period and I am left typing because everything else, including the marking that I have to do for another year I did not pick up yesterday and is somewhere else – lost between buildings!  It is yet another case of the best laid plans etc etc.

Today however will be a test day in my new approach to the Draconian plans which this place has towards teacher attendance.  According to my timetable my afternoon is free and I intend to put to the test the conversation that I had with the head of department when I agreed to work in the school until Christmas.  If I am not teaching then I am not here.  Accordingly I should have at least two afternoons when I can get on with the work that I actually want to do and two other afternoons when I can leave early to avoid the ridiculous amount of traffic that clogs up the inadequate streets around the school when the kids are let out.

I noticed with some degree of consternation that one small vertiginous street which was a major route of egress, which admittedly caused chaos when pushy parents used it in their over-the-top 4-by-4s to steal a march on other equally pushy parents, has now been blocked off and all the traffic has been diverted so as to create one cataclysmic traffic jam rather than two merely major ones at the end of school.  I do not intend to find out just how finger gnawingly frustrating these jams are and will softly and silently vanish away whenever I can.

Yesterday was the first full day that I was in school and it is depressingly easy to forget that I have ever been away from the place.  There are a few new faces in the older classes but everyone, obviously, is the same as when I left them back in the balmy days of last June.  Some people have indeed not really taken in the fact that I am back as I sit in my usual place and walk around as if I have never left.

One new face among the teachers is a man who I last saw in the School That Sacked Me.  At that time he was presented with a camera which was going to record his impending marriage and honeymoon.  Given the awful nature of the School That Sacked Me there was much speculation about whether the guy was going to be allowed to take his legal entitlement of a number of days off to get married.  But, off to get married he went and, as was usual in The School That Sacked Me, we never saw him again.  At least he has a fairly secure and reasonable berth now!

Seeing his face was one of those unsettling moments, common to teachers, where you recognize it but have a vague feeling that it is out of place.  If a teacher stays in one school for longer than a certain critical amount of time then pupils, teachers, parents and pupils who eventually become parents all become confused in the memory and this leads to a considerable amount of social embarrassment.  It took me a couple of seconds (and hearing his New Zealand accent) before I placed him.  I spoke to him with interest and sympathy until I remembered that, given the recent form of the Welsh rugby team, he more than represented the enemy!

I have now seen two teachers from The School That Sacked Me in other schools in the area and I suppose that I should be happy that they have escaped too.  I am sure that if I made a tour of the other English language schools around us I would find other survivors!

How that damn school continues to survive is beyond comprehension – though I am disturbingly informed that it is not untypical of the horrendous conditions that obtain in schools that are owned by a single, unsympathetic, unprofessional owner.  God rot her and all her works!

I suppose that finding out whether my slimmed down week (which still has 24 periods in it) has worked will only become apparent tomorrow when I will be able to see if my absence this afternoon went by unnoticed – officially that is, because nothing goes unnoticed in that place!

Tomorrow I have to be there all day because I have a lesson last thing in the afternoon.  And my day doesn’t end there because after school I am meeting Suzanne for the opening of an exhibition in Barcelona and then on to a life drawing class.  With naked people to be humiliated by my erratic pencil!

And talking of humiliation it is time for me to check into the website for the OU to find out what new developments there have been in the developing soap opera which is my course!

Never a dull moment!

OU in Crisis

Put seven people together for an Internet task which necessitates discussion and two decisions and spread these people out over Europe and what do you have?  In International Situation within minutes of the discussion forum being created.

I like to think that I have had some input in this co-operational disaster merely by saying that I had some proficiency in poetry analysis.  This introduced a complicating factor which has seen successively vituperative Internet posts so to such an extent that an arbitrator has had to be called in!  In this case our tutor.

I have to keep pinching myself to remind myself that what is happening is around the first tutor assignment in a first level OU course!  I cannot remember when I have laughed so much over a few electronic communications!

Seriously, I am thoroughly enjoying the course at the moment, in spite of the fact that some pieces of information are irritatingly difficult to find.  At the moment, for example, I am still trying to find the original 1908 poem which was the basis for the 1920 poem which became the lyrical basis for the 1921 “hymn” which is known as “I vow to thee my country” but which in its 1908 version was known as “Urbs Dei” or “The Two Fatherlands” – I know this poem exists but I have been totally unable to get my hands on a copy, or even find out if it exists in manuscript or published form.  Many people make reference to it, usually in the exact wording that Wikipedia uses!  I simply wonder how many of the authoritative people making reference to it have actually seen the words.  Ah, research was ever thus!

Toni is still not well but the antibiotics seem to be having some effect.  Another week of so of pills should seem him back to normal.

And tomorrow is normal in another sense for me.  Monday sees the start of a week of real teaching which will go on until the end of term.  I am beginning to wonder just what I have let myself in for with this unnatural extension of my career with yet another stint of teaching.  But it does pay.  I suppose.

It will be interesting to see how I feel at the end of the week – though I can always compensate myself with the thought that there is a time limited aspect to this jaunt into education!  December the 21^st and I am out of there!  For good! 

Meanwhile the soap opera of OU students at play will keep me entertained tomorrow when I start work on the music or continue with the poem and try and deflect the flak that bruised egos in the educational field start shooting when they feel intellectually threatened.  Especially when they are not!

And I have now read (via the Kindle) all three volumes in “The Hunger Games” series.  Thoroughly enjoyed them, though the third volume was the weakest in my view.  The first two are well worth reading as they take various ideas and make something new of them.  I like the anti-Utopian concept and the take on government is cynical enough to satisfy even the most jaundiced viewer of politics.  Though there is a happy ending of sorts, the whole thrust of the storyline is that nothing really changes and that power corrupts and the human species is basically unsound and prone to the most venial sins.  Optimism is in fact too optimistic a view to take!  Chimes in with the general feeling in this time of crisis!

I do like my Kindle Fire, which is more than I can say for my new wireless keyboard where the cursor goes missing for no reason and I have yet to work out how to get it back with any degree of consistency.  Teething problems.  I hope.

Now to bed to prepare for yet another day of work!