Days tick by

Today is the day that the kids in the first form of the school are trying to force their imaginations into the sort of shape that produces interesting and imaginative prose.  Or at least they are sitting quietly at their computers and tapping away with all the gentleness of autistic gorillas, leaving me time to type.

In a rush of early morning enthusiasm I have managed to get all my marking done and so I have time to indulge myself yet again by ruminating on my present position contemplating over seven working days to go before I am released back into the Elysian Fields of retirement.

As is ever the case, I am thinking too precisely on th’event and wondering exactly what sort of contract I have signed.  The period of time from the 30^th of November to the 21^st of December sounds like a reasonable number of days on which to assume that I will have earned enough to buy a new Mac computer – or have they been canny enough to pay only for those days in which I am actually in school? 

One has to consider that I worked only a Friday of one week and then worked three days in the next; it is only in this week that I face going into school for all five days!  What is the school going to pay for?  Have the two days been counted in my salary or are they paying me on a daily rate.  The basic problem is that I won’t really discover which is the case until I have left and been given my wage slip.  By which time I will have left and it will be too difficult to get any extra cash.

Why, you may ask yourself, do I not ask now.  Good question.  But I am bound by decorum and good taste not to do that.  At least, not until I have got Toni to translate my contract more fully and explain to me exactly what the school is paying for.

As I keep telling anyone who will listen, I am only here as a personal favour to the Head of English and so I do not expect to be taken advantage of by the school financial system.  Especially if the result of my labours is less than the price of an iMac.  And an iPhone.  At least!

Part of the strategy for this now involves “selling” my FNAC card to a colleague for cash.  The gift card was my leaving present the last time I tried to retire, but the camera that it was supposed to part-finance was much cheaper on Amazon than in a shop in the centre of Barcelona, so I was left with the potential to get something rather than actually having a gadget to play with.

Talking about delayed gratification, the camera from Amazon worked only for a few weeks before the lens refused to retract and I had to send it back.  Usually that is the beginning of a story full of hatred, resentment and vituperation about the callous indifference of Big Business – but not with Amazon, they appear to be the M&S of the Internet retail world!

My stamps, which I ordered months ago, resurfaced (as it were) in an anguished email from the supplier who told me that they had been returned by the Spanish Post Office with an address that they could not deliver to.  God alone knows what went on at both ends of that transaction.  My comfortable expectation that the stamps would therefore be delivered to me forthwith have not been realized and they are at present residing in the same place as the first batch of OU learning material is languishing.

But I live in hope that all things will be well and all manner of things will be well.  And I have the campaign of Computer Purchase hotly in my mind to keep me happy.

I have now carefully typed out the list of references for the blithe statements that I have made in my work on the music section of our group tutor marked assignment and it is now merely a matter of slotting the references into place and constructing a bibliography.  These are fiddly pieces of work and irritating in the extreme, but it also means that we are getting to the end of our task.  In time for the Christmas Holidays.  When I will be able to get back into a more comfortable regime.

The work on the Wiki for the OU is slowing down because we have reached that conventionally perilous stage where we think that we have done most of the work and all that remains is a little gentle tweaking.  This is not the case and, anyway, the major part of the assignment has yet to be written: the piece of reflective writing which counts for more of the final mark than the two pieces of writing on which we have been lavishing time and care!

The end, however, is in sight and with any reasonable luck we should be finished before Christmas and this will give me a chance to catch up on the coursework which has been relegated to second place at the moment.

The sea glass lamp for Irene has been constructed and is generally successful.  The bulb is the key element (apart of course from the precious sea glass) and we have hunted to find something which is a little cheaper than the one which is in the larger version.  We (well, more the guy in the shop) did find something which was a third of the price of the remote controlled multi programmable lamp – but then it doesn’t do as much either. 

The flagrant squandering of glass in the large version has become much more tightly organized in the smaller, but it is still an expensive item to make – especially in terms of time. 

On the other hand, it does look good and I am sure that Irene will be delighted. 

And that, after all, is the main thing.

The day before

A gloriously sunny day!  But, let us not be too stupid; I am enjoying the sunshine streaming through a window which is protecting me from the less than summery temperatures but allows the warmth of the sun to persuade me that it is not almost double digit December!

But it is, of course and with my present state of being un-retired I will have to face an entire day in school tomorrow with real teaching and real pupils in front of a real me!  The hardship of it all!  And just when the group work on the OU Wiki is getting to an interesting stage!

I think that most of the people in the group are concentrating on the joint work and not paying that much attention to the course work which should be going on in parallel with it.  I have to admit that there is something quite stimulating in trying to coordinate the input of what are essentially strangers dotted around Europe linked only the Internet and membership of a common course.

I have been left very much to myself in writing about the musical element we have to discuss, but I am actually looking forward to my work being considerately butchered to make it fit the severely limited word count that is part of the assignment.

This has been a strangely empty day with only a desultory trip to a closed shopping centre and (may I hang my head in shame) the purchase of a so-called meal from Burger King.  The “meal” cost almost €18 for two and certainly was not worth it.  Even more to my shame we both ate it with relish!  It was only after I had placed my order and the “chefs” were “cooking” it that I saw that I could have had my steak burger with goats’ cheese; although on closer inspection I suspect that the cheese had been formed into some sort of coated fritter so perhaps no exquisite food experience lost!

The afternoon should have been taken up with OU work but instead I indulged myself with an hour or two of films including the dramatization of the Cuban Crisis.  I was only 11 at the time the crisis started but it was still “two minutes to midnight” by the time I was twelve a few days after the crisis had developed in a fully fledged near view of the apocalypse.  Apart from the slightly hagiographical approach towards JFK, I thought that the negative view of the hawkish general and Chiefs of Staff surrounding the President seemed to me to be spot on.

Whenever I think about atomic weapons I am reminded that the actual strategy (surely a misnomer if ever there was one) was Mutually Assured Destruction known as M.A.D.  And this was official policy, a carefully thought out strategy which was supposed to make us feel safe in our beds!  MAD indeed.

I really do have to do some work before I go to bed and, of course, I have to prepare myself spiritually for the start of a full week of work for which I have but little appetite.

I am minded to buy myself a new computer, especially since the Windows monstrosity that I have on the Third Floor has been driving me to distraction.  I think that I am suffering from the effects of computational miscegenation in trying to mix PCs and Macs!

I think that the new iMacs look very stylish and I am sure that the bits and bobs inside will be more than satisfactory and I am also tempted to get an iPhone so that I will be completely Mac.  I know it is rather sad to have such unrequited loyalties to a mere brand, but I do remember my first “real” computer which was a Mac.

The Mac (in those haggard days cursed by the horrors of Windows 3.1 and before) was always the more friendly operating system and if you didn’t know how to do something then the way to do it was usually intuitive – what you thought ought to work usually did.  Well, more so that anything you tried with Windows.

All of the foregoing is of course merely the attempt by me to persuade myself that I should buy a new computer.  I can see how meretricious it all is, but I still can’t stop myself from doing it.

I like the conceit of getting my school to authenticate my professional standing and then claiming a discount from Apple because I am in education.  You never know they might also be amenable to my offering my OU student membership as reason enough to give me a reduction!

It is something into which I must look – and of course I need to do this quite soon before retirement claims me again.

I look on it as a sort of Christmas gift to myself, and given the fact that I am working right up until the start of the Christmas holidays I do not see why I shouldn’t be generous with myself!

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!