What presents?

While our hopes were raised by the Post Office leaving a note telling us that they had failed, yet again, to deliver a parcel to us, those same hopes were dashed when on our getting the parcel it turned out not to be the books that we were hoping to get which would have completed part of our Christmas shopping but rather some First Day Covers ordered months ago.

I have to admit that I am rather pleased with that last sentence which I feel is positively Miltonic in its unnecessary complexity with clauses falling over each other to obfuscate and mislead!

My Covers have been delayed because they were sent back by the Spanish Post Office, as the address was impossible for them to understand.  The package was returned with the same address and, surprise, surprise they actually got it to me!  There is a special part of my soul which has been shrivelled to a desiccated walnut by my dealings with the Spanish Post Office.  But let it pass, let it pass!

Toni has just heard that he has been accepted on an IT distance-learning course to start in February.  The sheer effort it has taken to register has to be experienced to be believed – and he has yet to pay!  That in itself is a world-wearying experience he has yet to enjoy!  But we celebrated with a menu del dia (I mitched off school in the afternoon) and bought another part of the Christmas presents that are almost, but not quite, complete.

The dark night of the soul continues as I wrestle with the pros and cons of buying a new computer.  I was shocked at the complete lack of sympathy I got when I explained that I wanted to buy an Apple computer with a built-in CD/DVD slot and that the new iMacs did not have one.  One colleague actually used the word Luddite to explain my attitude!  And I prefer to link myself to Captain Swing!

The end result is that I am now in two minds – or rather one mind and a faction – about whether to take the plunge and buy in spite of my reservations.  I am prepared to be swayed by an educational discount!  I will return to the Apple Store and see what I can see.  And spend what I can spend!

Three days to go.  And I don’t mean days I have yet to complete in school.  Three days to complete the first of the assignments for the OU.  We have arrived at something approaching a final draft and there only remain the details of presentation and referencing to complete.  Thank god!

Tomorrow is a full day at school and so I will have a little siesta when I come home and then we will have to go out and try and complete the Christmas shopping.

And I have marking which I will complete tomorrow and then I will be free to plan the most efficient form of escape from the school that I can.  As far as I can work things out, my Friday should be, to say the least, deconstructed – and if I can’t take advantage of educational chaos, who can!

We now have to think about subduing our better nature and lowering our cultural barriers and bring out that icon of tastelessness, the Christmas tree.

I fear that there has been a rationalization of the number of strings of lights that we now possess – the Great Clean-up and Formation of the Tea Room on the Third Floor necessitated wholesale destruction of carefully garnered clutter of many years brought across Europe to fill out foreign space.  I fear to think about what I will not find when I finally unearth the decaying tree and its limited number of decorations.  One will put on what show one can.

Anyway the new bonsai of blue lights makes up for everything!

Only another week!

I think that I have been found out!  The dreaded event has taken place: I have been taken for a substitution for a lesson for an absent colleague!  And I think that there is more to it than that. 

This substitution takes place while we should have been having a Departmental Meeting.  In the afternoon.  And I was planning to slope off if I was not needed after my last taught lesson – which would have been an hour before lunch.  As it is I have to spend that hour, plus the lunch hour wilting in school before another hour of supervision before I can go home an hour early.  So this one bloody substitution means that I spend an extra three hours in school!  I sometimes think it is a good thing that I am looking forward only to another week of this torment!

I have been asked if I would consider extending my cover through to the end of the year – my only response was to laugh!

I am reading through The Hobbit which I have not read for many years and am finding it irritating because it is not the same as Lord of the Rings.  I know that The Hobbit is a book for children but I am finding it hard to get beyond the chatty and personal responses of the narrator who intrudes into the story as a guide for the kids but a distraction for the adult reader!

Characters and events are treated in a much more restrained way than the same people and similar actions are presented in the later books in the Ring saga.  For me, everything lacks edge and the bluntness is irritating.

It is also difficult to get the images of the trilogy of films out of one’s mind when reading.  For example, the presentation of Gollum is so shockingly appropriate in the film that it is his face which comes to mind when reading of Bilbo’s first meeting with this sad and frightening character.  You can hardly blame the films, I consider them remarkable versions of the story and it is difficult to see their excellence being surpassed in the near future.  At least not until CGI becomes a damn sight cheaper!

In spite of my qualifications about the quality of the story, I am still enjoying the read and, given the amount of time that I will have to spend in this place before my escape I will have made a substantial dent in the narrative by the end of the afternoon!

The one thing that I do not understand is how the filmmakers are going to make a trilogy out of such slight (as opposed to The Lord of the Rings) stuff.  I have since discovered that the filmmakers are going to utilize the film from the first two parts of the trilogy and then use the appendices from the novels to bulk out the narrative.

It also appears that Jackson has shot the film in 42 fps rather than the conventional 24 fps giving the final result what has been described as a photo-realist look, or what another critic described as giving it a shot-for-TV look which is much less positive!

Unless the dragon is made to be out-of-this-world amazing then I can see little scope for anything which will improve what we have already seen in the trilogy that we already have.  But I am a sucker for this sort of stuff so I will drink it all in and be delighted that Tolkien has been able to seduce hard-faced business men to stump up for another nine hours of fantastic (I use the adjective advisedly) entertainment.

My extra hours have passed pleasantly enough with genial conversation and a reasonable meal – even if I was trying to read the rest of The Hobbit.  Now I am in front of a class which I am supervising and they are having their five-minute chat which is their reward for working in silence for 30 minutes (or as near to it as a group of Spanish school children can get) which should take us up nicely to the end of the period and my quick exit!

Other people have now been speculating about what will happen if the person I am replacing does not make it back for the start of the new term in January.  I am not.  I have a contract to which I will be sticking.  And luckily for me the Head of Department also has a Plan B for this situation which does not involve my active participation in the on-going life of the school!

My early disappearance from school allowed me to go into Barcelona and scout out the offerings in the Apple Shop.  And meagre they were too.  I am looking to buy a new stand-alone machine and I have decided, vis-a-vis my recent harrowing experiences with my Old Enemy the PC, to buy an Apple.

Except they no longer supply the machine I want.  The new slimmed down iMac’s do not have a slot for a DVD or CD.  I suppose that the thinking is that anyone so sophisticated and technology literate as to want one of these gleaming machines would be well used to working in the Cloud and have no need for something as passé as a disc.  Well, I have not sold my soul to the insubstantial skies and I want a slot!  Which means that I will not get the “educational discount” if I buy an older machine from the shop which has become my other bank in Spain given how much money I deposit in it: MediaMarkt.

Alas!  My Plan B is foiled.  Although the earlier version of the iMac is on display in MediaMarkt with a plaque giving technical details and price, it is not for sale!  They have none, not even the one on display, I presume that it is some Apple Advance Apparition and does not exist in this universe.

Apple has shown, yet again, its arrogant dictatorial attitude towards its customers.  It expects slavish devotion (which it largely gets) even when it introduces a model which is clearly and demonstrably worse than its predecessor!  “Together,” says Apple, “We will progress towards a brighter future with the new iMac.  There will be no looking back.  What has been is no more.  There is only the future!”

Bugger them! 

I am in danger of turning to the dark side and looking more closely at the cheaper and more lavish offerings of the sleek and touchable houris from the wicked world of all in one touchable screen PCs.  They only have themselves to blame!

Toni is now in Terrassa indulging in Christmas shopping with his sisters and mother and, in a very real sense, I wish him luck.  I have to admit that it is my idea of a particular form of purgatory.  I am sure that he will get his reward in the next world.  In which he doesn’t believe.  I think.

I indulged myself for lunch and drove off to the Japanese restaurant and overdid it with a huge bowl of salmon sushi, along with other delectable morsels.  I kept up my “drying out” period however and made do with a mere bottle of fizzy water to accompany the meal.

Now an evening of music played through the mini speaker attached to the sliver thin Mac that I use as a portable.  This tiny, collapsible speaker made by X-mini (sound beyond size) is remarkable and it even has a blue light on the underside of the machine which gives a rather spectral impression of the thing floating as the light reflects off the surface it is placed on.  I have to admit that the sound quality is remarkable for so small a thing and it even comes with its own little tie-string bag in which to live when it is not in use.

I got the speaker at the same time as my new watch.  I cannot justify another watch so I will not bother to try.  So far I am very pleased with it.  It is an eco-watch in so far as it is powered by light, any light and will therefore never need a new battery.  It is also a perpetual calendar watch which means that it has been set so that it will not need to be adjusted to take account of leap years and odd months for the next hundred years or so.  The only negative aspect that I can see is that I will have to restrain myself from buying another watch and I will have to keep wearing the perpetual calendar one until at least next February just to see that the date is correct!

Setting the date is not quite as easy as one would have hoped and the watch comes with a detailed instruction book and a mini-CD to help you through the technical aspects of owning such a sophisticated timepiece!

Luckily, as far as I can tell the watch was set to British time before it was sent to me and so I simply had to adjust for the hour’s difference.  I have also set the Local Time alternative to British time so that it should be relatively simple for me to change when I go to the UK.  Flushed with success at these two processes being completed I then attempted to set the alarm (yes, indeed this watch does have one) and, even though it was a little trickier than the other two operations I managed that too.  I am not absolutely sure how to turn the alarm off, but I will need it for the next week so I can wait for the holidays before I attempt such a thing!

So far, no one (including Toni) has noticed it or made a comment about it.  As I wear short-sleeved shirts in school I will soon see just how observant people are!

In what I think is a well judged gesture, I have been invited to end of term drinks and tapas do with the staff at the local school in which I have worked for a few days this year.  I will not, for obvious reasons be able to go to the reception which is being held at 1.30 pm as I will be otherwise engaged in Barcelona - unless I can leave the School on the Hill early.  And that I doubt.  But we will see.

Tomorrow more work on the Wiki.  People in our group who have done nothing so far have suddenly reappeared and made suggestions which suggest that we might have to rewrite the pieces so far.  Well, I’m not.  I will do what I have to do and then I will be done.

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!