Life without chocolate!

Disaster!  

No one brought in chocolate today – though chocolate brownies did appear for lunch and mid afternoon, though that was by luck and not intention.  I have therefore taken to the bowl over boiling water and made another batch of my incomparable chocolates.  As I only have one purpose made mould for the sweets I have pressed into service the plastic trays from other bought sweets and just hope that the plastic has not become an integral part of the delight.  I have not yet had the courage to try and prise them out, so all is to see.

Tomorrow is a short day, thank god.  Though it is also a full one.  All my teaching periods of the day are one after the other, so I am not exactly relaxed by the end of the morning after teaching five periods on the trot.  However there is the “afternoon” to recover.

Tomorrow should also be the day on which my second tutor marked assignment is returned leaving only the longer literature essay and the examination to go before I start the next course.  I read through the examination preparation booklet this evening and the more is reassured, the more disturbed I felt.  I suppose that is because each examination I have taken has been presented as a sort of underhand trick, with questions specifically designed to trap the unwary.  The OU is, of course, above such dubious academic skulduggery and they take a Peter Brook like approach to examinations going out of their way to show that they have nothing up their academic sleeves!  This is so foreign to what I am used that I find it disconcerting to say the least!

Perhaps the most unsettling element in the whole experience is the time allowed for the exam.  There are three hours allocated, though they say that the exam can be completed in two.  As my previous approach to examination is to start writing at the beginning and go on writing until the end, I am going to find this unnatural expansiveness that I shouldn’t use very odd.  I do have time to get used to the vagaries of the OU’s approach to what should be a time of stress and grief, as the exam itself is not for another couple of months.  Time enough to worry about such things after the next essay has safely been electronically delivered to my tutor!

I am at present on the Third Floor to escape the appalling quality of television presentation of the Barça – Milan Champions League game.  The sullen silence from downstairs indicates that Barça are still a goal adrift.  A goal scored, I might add, as soon as I left the room!  Make of that what you will.

I am still assiduously add the discs of “The All-Baroque Box” to my insatiable hard drive.  The quality of the recordings that I have sampled so far is very encouraging and I am waiting to get to the dreaded Brandenburg Concertos to find out if these recordings will be the ones which finally get me to like this music that I know so well.  It is very odd, but these Concertos have always left me cold.  The version on Archiv is of Trevor Pinnock and The English Concert (on authentic instruments) from a 1982 DGG recording.  I live in hope.  Though it is not lively!

Amazon, a shameless organization if ever there was one, is now bombarding me with unmissable box set offers of CD form all sorts of companies.  None of which I can possibly pass by.  I can’t help feeling that I am, single-bank-accountedly keeping these music purveyors going and they are taking shameless advantage of me by repackaging old recordings and gulling me into forking out vast sums of money for stuff that I have already got!  Philips are a canny company and they are now producing “Limited Edition” box sets which I suspect are previous box sets with the discs put in a different order!  I trust that this is a grave slander and I must check and it if turns out to be untrue I will be delighted to withdraw my animadversions and throw money at a company which has taken a fair amount of my hard earned cash over the years!

I have just been told that Barça lost 2-0 against Milan.  O dear!  It may just be a result for you, but I have to live with the consequences far closer to home!  At least La Liga seems safe.  Please god!

It's not all bad!

One should be satisfied with one reasonable thing happening during a day but quite a few illuminated my sojourn in school this morning.

The first satisfaction was one which extended itself throughout the time that I was there and that was of nothing.  Nothing.  No reaction whatsoever to my conspicuous absence from one of the bone-grindingly tedious meetings that make up such an important part of the life of the School on the Hill.  No one said anything. 

Most satisfactory. 

It may be that the powers that be are biding their time and will “have words” later, but I trust that this is a clear indication of the way in which I can proceed for the sixteen or so weeks of my time remaining in the institution.  I have not worked out the number of week with any degree of exactitude, but I leave during the third week in June which is about four months with what must be a couple of weeks of holiday, leaving fourteen weeks of work, or 70 days or so – and counting!

My extended version of Chocolate Week has got off to a flying start with my home-made chocolates on Monday augmented by birthday chocolates from a colleague and extended today with home-made truffles with nuts, home made fairy cakes and a superb, exclusive shop-bought cake today.  A source of considerable satisfaction!  I only hope that other colleagues have been sufficiently shamed by the largesse which has been vouchsafed to them that they add their own offerings during the rest of the week!

Lunch (after my swim) was in our usual “jubilado” ‘Com a casa’ restaurant in the centre of town.  We timed our entry exactly and had one of the last tables available.  Although the place must be an absolute gold mine positively coining money, it is difficult to feel resentment (though not impossible, you understand!) because they offer excellent value for money by providing more than adequate food at reasonable cost.  My meal was of moist rice flavoured with chicken and rabbit, followed by pork, thinly sliced in a tomato based sauce with cubed potatoes.  The dessert was a cake Tiramisu.  This lot was washed down with red wine and Casera with café con hielo.  For about nine quid.  And the sun was shining.  Who can reasonably ask for more!

At the moment I am busily feeding the CDs from “The All-Baroque Box” into the welcoming terabyte of memory on my overpriced iMac.  The quality of the stuff that I am loading is excellent and I do not consider eighty quid for 50 excellent discs to be excessive!  This is a bargain whichever way you look at it.  Apart from its title of course which is terminally naff and totally unworthy of Archiv and Oiseau Lyre.  However, I can live with that.  I wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone who likes music from Monteverdi to Bach.  It’s all here!  Including, of course, people who are obviously insultingly famous of whom I have never heard: Johann David Heinichen ?  But I will get to know them and then speak of them as though they had been the musical themes for my childish whistles!

Marking has now built up into an insurmountable wall of infantile scribbles which do not beckon with any degree of allurement.  I am hoping that their combined weight will force me to do some marking if only to reduce the pressure on the joints of my right arm as I lug my briefcase from building to building!

Tomorrow sees me in school for the whole of a torturous day but, it is a Wednesday which is traditionally seen as the “tipping day” when are over half way through the week and therefore nearer the weekend to come than the weekend of past distant memory.

And at least I have one less distraction to worry about as I have now finished all five of the published volumes in George R R Martin’s interminable “A Song of Ice and Fire”, the latest read being “A Dance with Dragons”.  This vast novel has come to no final conclusion and, as far as I can see, the series is destined to go on for ever – or at least until people finally die from terminal frustration.  He has adopted the frustrating convention of giving his chapter headings the name of a character in the novel so you know before you start that you are going to bored witless by the inane non events of some of his more fatuous creations.  Even the interesting baddies have lost their allure and I frankly couldn’t care less about where the rest of this baggy saga is going.  Which doesn’t mean, of course, that I will not be tempted by one of the evil little Amazon inducements to get involved in the next instalment.  Time might soften the memory of all that ploughing!  Who knows?

But, the fifth volume out of the way does give me the incentive to turn to all those “scripts” (?) which I need to give back to eager kids desperate for some sort of teacher scrawl on them.  I after all, am waiting for my own tutor to return my work for the OU, so I do share the impatience of see what someone else has made of my innermost thoughts!

There is, however, the small but significant question of my work on Dickens.  I have decided that I prefer to read the novel on the iPad, because it is very much easier to highlight and make notes.  We will then see if I have managed to understand the instructions gleaned from YouTube about how to get my comments printed out.

As usual there is not enough time in the day for everything that one wants to do.  Which surely is a good thing!

Noise all around I hear! (10 letters)

It must be us!

We hate all our neighbours with equal venom: one has dogs that bark; another has a grandson who has to be talked to so the rest of the neighbourhood can hear; another has vile offspring with even viler friends; another has a wonderful house with its own swimming pool and yapping dogs, and so on.

On Sunday morning, however, it was The Shouties.  Immediately opposite us is a block of flats, but they seem to be an exercise in communal living because, as far as we can see, they are infested by one extended family.  And they shout.  They are unable to communicate in voices in anything resembling normality so whenever they are in movement they sound like riders in the Wild West keeping the cattle together.  There are at least three generations of Shouties living there and they are all characterized by the same proclivity and shout where ever and when ever possible.

At a quarter past eight on Sunday morning the Shouties started shouting and it gradually grew into a convention of the sotto voce challenged.  Cars appeared and parked in front of our driveway, more and more people appeared who greeted each enthusiastically and loudly.  More and more of these idiots turned up while some sort of manager figure clutching a sheet of paper yelled encouragement at each new arrival.

My usual strategy at this type of parking is to go out onto the street and take a photo of the car’s number plate with my mobile phone.  This usually gets a fairly rapid response as people in this area are not shy in calling out the mobile cranes to come and remove illegally parked vehicles.

Thanks to the alleged destructive behaviour of our next-door neighbours the post separating our two driveways has been knocked down.  This allows the dog owner to make a sweeping approach across our driveway to park (illegally) outside her house.  Her ineptitude is so great that the post made it impossible for her to approach her demesne, so the Family Effort got rid of it.  The last time they did this (they have done it three times) I took a photo of the back of the car showing the indentation on the bumper where it had knocked into the post and dislodged it.  Denunciations have achieved nothing, though it was pleasing to see her car towed away once because of her “parking”!

The Shouties eventually yelled away in their procession of cars and left the street to quietness and to me!

As the popular demand is for chocolate and more chocolate, “Chocolate Week” has been extended for another five working days and I have donned my pinny and tired to make more professional sweets than the last time.

My attempt to find marzipan failed again and I was forced to make some myself – at least I was able to get some ground almonds and then make the icing sugar myself too.  Not haute cuisine admittedly but more effort than I wanted to put in.

I have now produced a series of round, glacé cherry centred, marzipan wrapped, chocolate covered things which are hardening in the fridge even as I type.  They should almost be ready to be topped with a swirl of coloured gunge which I can apply from little pipettes with the coloured extrusion ready to be squirted.

I also found something which purports to be rhubarb.  It comes in a paper tube and looks like sugar and I think it is something related to a laxative but that did not stop my trying to recreate the mythical “White chocolate with rhubarb” bar that I found and devoured on one unique occasion and have never found since.  Even if the chocolates do not match the taste of the original experience, they should be useful and, how can I phrase it, easeful?

Today, Monday is one of the testing days for me as a two-hour meeting is scheduled after school and I am determined not to attend.  I will have to see how my absence is regarded.  Not only am I going to cut this meeting, but I am also planning to leave school early!  Such audacity!  I only hope that I get away with it: I am relying on my White Knight status to allow such unheard of liberties.  Perhaps I should go around muttering “Après moi, le deluge!” to remind people of what life could be like if I walk!

Sunday evening was taken up with much reading of Engels and writing something on the Forum which could count for a mark if I decide not to do the essay.  The response from the other students has been limited, presumably as they are all still ploughing their way through the text, but it is of little use to me as there is very little for me to respond to.  And in the right-on world of the OU “responding” is the heart and soul of our work!

The weather is soulless and dull and it has conveyed its negativity to the teaching staff – or to me.  And I want to go home.

Unfortunately the whole day (almost) stretches ahead with its forbidding length.  There is marking to be done (which was not done yesterday or the day before or the day before that) but it does not appeal.  I will read the first five chapters of Hard Times and make notes about the descriptions and add something more to the Forum and in the lively expectation of provoking some sort of writing from somebody else.

Intolerable!

There must be a formula for working out how much pure noise a pair of young children are capable of making; something like lung capacity times inclination plus the sum of space and reverberation to the power of adult irritation!

I have noticed more and more in recent times how much I am growing towards the living embodiment of a boring old fart that I used to turn my eyes to heaven about when I was a cynical schoolboy. 

The real paradox of life is that the seemingly ironic schoolboy and the superficially staid adult are both right and have total justification on their sides for their particular view of life and how it should be lived.  The difficult thing is that they cannot co-exist, even though they obviously do in my memory and experience!

Isn’t it in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe that when the children come to the professor’s house they are told that he doesn’t want to be disturbed by childish noise and they have to amuse themselves quietly.  But the professor is invigorated by the sound of the young enjoying themselves. 

I am probably conflating a couple of novels here but I do understand the contradiction between the youthful vitality and more placid contentment.  I also realize that irritation could have been eliminated by the use of a decent pair of headphones that presumably were not available for our harassed professor, and certainly not with the quality of music that I am able to access at the stroke of a computer key!  And behold the hysteria of kids being bathed is suddenly lost in a brilliant performance of Concerto for Orchestra by Bartok (with or without the accents!)

At some point or other I am going to have to do some marking.  I made the fundamental mistake of not doing a single script on Friday evening.  That omission means that the probability of my completing the marking that I have to do falls from the level of “high probability” to “vague possibility” at best.  There is more likelihood of my reading the first five chapters of Hard Times and submitting my thoughts about the presentation of the landscape through Dickens’ writing than there is of my putting a red mark on a hapless student’s paper.

And that is another thing.  I have decided not to use a red pen when marking.

There is of course real research to back up my disinclination to splash red on a student’s script.  We are told that red is the colour of failure and the more we write on a script the less a student values it.  We are told that it is a disincentive for a student’s improvement – and all sorts of other shit.

None of the foregoing makes the slightest difference to me.  I am not marking with a red pen because I cannot be bothered to buy red disposable fountain pens and I don’t like marking in red ballpoint.  Even with my disposable pens there is a difference in the flow of ink between the red and the blue and the black.  The one which I feel most at home with is the blue and therefore I have decided to mark in blue not matter what colour the kids have chosen to write in.  I can justify it in all sorts of educational ways, but it is basically because I prefer writing with a blue Pilot disposable pen.  So there.

As you can tell, I am working up to a prickly assertiveness because we are getting ever closer to a plethora of meetings to which I am disinclined to go.

The first test will be tomorrow afternoon when there is an overlong meeting to explain why we are changing our results electronic platform yet again.  Although I may not have to go to this meeting I may well be asked to cover other colleagues’ lessons to allow them to attend as, for a wonder, the meeting has been scheduled in school time.  I think.

I have delayed getting my password for school e-mail for as long as was decently possible – and beyond – but now I am firmly on the system and therefore I will have been official informed about the things that I will have ignored.  It therefore follows that some things I will be expected to grace with my presence.  This is obviously not my intention.  I teach: at all other times I am n/a and that should be respected.  I am only hoping that they are grateful enough that I am there to deflect the ire of parents who, not unreasonably expect their kids to be taught with a generous degree of continuity.  Which is what I represent.  God help us!

As a chunk of what I have recently purchased in terms of CDs I am now the proud possessor of “The All-Baroque Box” which represents an exhaustive selection of the Baroque holdings of a considerable number of recordings that I could not afford when I was in University.  Such labels as Archiv and L’Oiseu-Lyre were the ultimate in authenticity and high priced exclusiveness.  Now, at bargain price I have 50 discs of which the first two are of a recording that I bought in a record sale some thirty odd years ago! 

The records are long gone – their last place of residence being in the loft of the Pauls’ house where they lay for some time until the ceiling in the bedroom began to sag with the weight of the records and they were unceremoniously sold off to a grasping bastard in the indoor market for a fraction of their value!  Now, the crystal clarity of the sound (as it never really was on the records) delights anew!  And there are 48 other discs waiting to delight and instruct me!  Sooner or later the record companies are going to realise that they can get much more for what they are offering that they are being paid.  Until then I will take great pleasure in expanding my holdings of decent quality discs and gloat the while!

We are now beyond that magic time on a Sunday which takes up the school day.  The time left is equivalent to the normal time during the working week when things have to be done.  This is also the time where one realises that one has done nothing of what one proposed to do at the other end of the weekend when time seemed to stretch endlessly into the future.  It is yet more proof, if any were needed, that it is essential to do something on Friday evening if you expect to get things done before Monday and the start of school.

There is still time, of course, for me to get something done, but I think that I would rather type about the possibility rather than make possibility reality.

And I have put the new (and markedly more successful) chocolates into plastic containers ready for their being taken to school tomorrow to extend the Chocolate Week into its second week.

And now marking.