Who notices?

I have coughed and snuffled my way through the day in an extravagant display of illness so that everyone is aware that I am selflessly giving of myself again in the cause of education.  And how am I repaid for this generous act of self-sacrifice?  Why, in the only way that most schools know how, by taking away one of my free periods!

This is a disturbingly new element in my school life.  I had considered myself the Sir Gawain of the school – aloof, perfect and untouchable.  Just like the myth of the Round Table so my status plummets from the rarefied heights of untouchability to the common level of my earth-bound colleagues.  This attitude does not bode well for my proposed approach to all school meetings i.e. to ignore them as though they did not exist. 

I feel the eye of Mordor is turned towards me and the Cracks of Mount Doom are in the far distant lands of June when at last the Keys of the School on the Hill may be cast away to be utterly consumed!  Until then I fear that I am now merely a member of the school staff and not someone who merely touches the grubby classroom when he is actually teaching and at all other times is hidden away behind the sacred veil of the OU, communing with the mighty minds of distance learning students.  We shall, as I so often say, see.

This evil period snatch has ensured that I will not be able to escape until the plague of all the rabidly inconsiderate parents who think that triple parking is a god-given right have descended on the school.  As I couldn’t give a pampered child’s Blackberry for their concern, I look at the bad parking parents with undisguised loathing and cut as many as possible with the highly honed stare of active ignoring that I have been perfecting over the years.  Even now am I building up my store of resentment to match the indifference of these selfish egomaniacs.

I can’t wait to get home to have an unrestricted cough in the salubrious surroundings of an ozone-fuelled environment.  Which reminds me, I must get some lemons so that I can sip my drink of choice and feel the warming comfort of traditional remedies lull me to health.  Although my breathing is not markedly restricted, I still think that I will rub a little Vick on my chest and gargle with TCP to feel the full effect of homely remedies.  The only thing missing from this medical scheme is Savlon and I am sure that I can find something to anoint with that magical cream.  And then, that is the full panoply of Mum approved medical that will have been arrayed for my amelioration.  If that don’t help then god knows I sure am in trouble!

I didn’t read much of Hard Times over the weekend and I really think that I need to get down to the hard slog of culling apposite quotations from the novel to flesh out the answer that I haven’t written.  I do have an idea for the heading quotation for the essay and the task asks for the student to pay “close attention” to a specific chapter in the novel – and Lord knows I am good at minute literary analysis, so it is playing to my strength.  All I have to do is write it.

I was right about the continuous assessment part of the course; I have already passed that section and, theoretically, I do not need the mark from the last assignment – but I am not doing this merely to gain a qualification that in fact I already have, but rather for the sheer delight in study, so it would be stupid and pointless to ignore any part of the course and I fully purpose to take advantage of everything that the OU has to offer!

My arrival home was met with reciprocating coughs, but at least my new box set of Tchaikovsky had arrived so I was able to have a mini gloat before we set out to our natural lodestone of MediaMarkt to get bits and pieces.  Well for me at least as I needed a new memory stick and some more cases for the increasing numbers of discs that I am buying!  Toni failed to buy some sort of static bangle that is useful when dealing with computers.  I had never heard of it but apparently he had worn one when he was working in GB.  I think that he will have to resort to the Internet to find one.

The rest of the evening has been spent working at Book 3 of my OU course and, through the reading about C19th industrial England and approaches to Hard Times trying to discover the essential key themes that the OU regards as important for the final assignment.  I am getting there bit by highlighted bit towards an understanding of the key terms for my future study.  The examination is now just under two months away, and then a month off before the next course begins. 

School is nothing more than an irritation which gets in the way of my studying!

What weekend?

This weekend will not go down in my memory as one to Mark With a White Stone.  It has been almost unrelievedly morose, well I have been anyway.

Friday evening began with a suggestion of illness which had developed into proper fleur de mal by the time I woke up.  There was, however, no time to feel self-pitying as Toni had to be taken to Terrassa to visit his aunt.  My return to Casteldefells saw a gradual declension from a cold can of beans for lunch, through the displacement activity of First Day Cover Reorganization and finally to early bed and unconsciousness.

Sunday dawned, allegedly, through the snuffling hump under the blankets took not a blind bit of notice of it.  Toni’s coughing return in the early morning after depositing his mother at the airport to go on her planned trip to Granada did not encourage me to leap out of bed and it was half past ten when I eventually crawled out to have my bowl of muesli and it was not long before I crawled back again not to re-emerge until gone seven in the evening.  This does not bode well for tomorrow, but next week is the week before the examinations (when is it not!) and my presence is important – so I have a week of coughs and snuffles to look forward do augmented by the ever increasing hysteria of pupils as they build themselves up to another paper exercise in fatuousness.

There is still a pile of marking waiting for me, though I fully intend to splatter my way through a few scripts that I have to make the effort tomorrow a little less intimidating.

The one thing I do have to look forward to is the immanent arrival of a massive box set of Tchaikovsky from Brilliant Records who have carved out a niche for themselves in the we-give-you-everything market.  In fact this is not as complete as the makers of the discs would have you believe, but the price is so good and the discs so numerous that one would be churlish to do anything other than gloat about ownership!

There is more than enough space on my hard drive to accommodate all the discs though I think that I may delay putting all the operas (or at least what operas they have seen fit to include) as I am getting progressively irritated by having vague bits of spoken recitative interpolated in automatically produced play lists.  I am trying to include some pop discs as well as there is nothing so invigorating as lurching from a piece of high art to low music in a heartbeat when the machine has decided what “song” to play next!

As is usual for me, I do not look ill at all.  I go throughout life bereft of the sympathy which should go with illness because I do not have the good grace to act the part.  I will have to cough decorously and dab my lips with my paper handkerchief if I am to get any with the same word of condolence from my colleagues.  Their sympathy will be heartfelt, if only because any absence is covered internally – the Supply Teacher being a figure of mythic proportions in The School on the Hill.  Even simple substitution is never guaranteed as classes are collapsed with the same regularity as Italian governments!

Still, every day is a day nearer to the holidays and indeed to The Retirement.  And at least for me there is an end in sight which is in a matter of months and not, as for the majority of my hapless colleagues, in a number of years or decades!  Let us be truly thankful for that! 

Late June is release, and who knows, it might even be before.

What is that white stuff!

A truly shitty day!  Cold and very wet with snow on distant hills and those a bloody sight nearer to Castelldefels.  As far as I can tell it has been raining all night and the sky looks determined to continue the nocturnal emissions throughout the day.  The skyscape is a truly British looking phenomenon and I can feel the familiar, easily remembered resentment building up because it doesn’t look as though I am going to get my statutory glimpse of the sun during any part of the weekend.

I hope that the unrelentingly depressing day does not really extend itself to the full 48 hours of escape from the School on the Hill, and that I will be writing with gushing enthusiasm about golden gleams touching my pallid skin before too long.  But I do not have much confidence in such optimism.

Toni will have to be taken to Terrassa to visit his aunt as she recovers from her heart attack and hopefully learns the lesson about giving up smoking for once and all.  I also have to get down to work on the Dickens essay and start roughing out ideas to include in it.

I am beginning to see that the “trick” with the Open University is to do precisely as you have been told to do.  My examination advice to generations of school kids is coming back to haunt me: “Read the question carefully and answer what you have been asked.”  I have now discovered that I have been giving good, solid advice throughout my career in education.  I now have to apply the lessons I have taught to myself!  Not always easy.

The essay on Hard Times is centred on ‘education’ and ‘family’ and we have been directed to specific parts of Chopin’s introduction to the Penguin edition of the text and to one specific chapter of the novel.  And we only have 1,500 words to complete the essay and that includes textual quotation and references.

By far the most difficult part of the assignments I have completed so far has been trying to keep to the word limit.  I suppose that I might have to admit, grudgingly, that I can be a trifle verbose de temps en temps, but the compression which is demanded of OU students makes the finished essays sound as though they have been composed by a literate version of Tarzan, with the compression needed to stay within the word limit while conveying all the information necessary necessitating a stilted form of expression worthy of that noble savage!  However, I am sure that what I am doing is good for the soul and it soon become second nature to me as I am drawn further and further into the OU Brotherhood!

I have now almost completely developed the illness which has been enthusiastically distributed through The Family.  Toni’s nephews, who I am convinced, are born-again Plague Annies or Typhoid Marys as illness invariably follows their visits!

The tulips on the table have now lasted almost ten days.  The light coloured ones are still relatively vertical, but the pinky purple ones are bowing down towards the wood.  Even in their dying state they do form a pleasingly harmonious arrangement though each move of the vase scatters more of the petals.  I must admit that I had forgotten how much I like flowers in the house – the moments of transient beauty are deeply satisfying and I fully intend to buy more.  The only problem is the source of the flowers.  We do not have a Tesco store near and the florists charge and arm and a leg for their wilting blooms.  We do have a Carrefour but the way that they keep their plants is inconsideration little short of criminal ineptitude.  The tulips came from Lidl but their horticultural moment has passed and there are no flowers for sale at the moment.  I will, however, find somewhere and keep up a splash of colour on the dining table.

Toni is now in Terrassa (which actually had snow on the ground, thought not on the roads) giving comfort to the sick and to the irritated – as his mother is now unable to go on a planned holiday as her sister is in hospital.  Things appear to be well and his aunt is in no immediate danger.

With everything that I could have chosen to do in an empty house, what I actually chose needs some explanation.

I sorted my first day covers.  Well, they needed to be done and I have a grandiose plan to set them all out in a different way so that the information contained on the stiffener card can be displayed.  I was shocked at how much sheer time it took to make a fairly small start on the reorganization, but I think that what I have decided to do is the right thing for me.  Each page will have a cover and some information to go with it.  This is really an extension of what I did with the Olympic stamps and I think that they look better for it.

I think, perhaps it is a nod in the direction of the teacher in me that I want more information than just the covers themselves.  It will result in a 100% increase in the number of pages that I will need but the good old Post Office has given me a boost by the unexpected gift of an album specifically to display the Olympic covers.  As I had bought albums and pages already it does mean that I have a surplus but not sufficient for my grandiose plans.  I have used up virtually all my spares and I have only managed to sort out five years or so.

I am also going to concentrate on filling up the remaining gaps that there are in my collection of Queen Elizabeth commemorative first day covers.  Unfortunately these are the early ones which are, by far the most expensive. 

I am also inclined to stop collecting if and when the Germanic dwarf ever decides to abdicate or die.  Stamps are becoming a more and more antiquated part of modern communication and commemorative stamps which one only sees on first day covers and rarely in “real life”.  If I am truthful they seem to be a simple money making enterprise now and little more.

Now that it is evening my throat and nose are getting blocked up and promise another night of discomfort.  I think a call into our local 24-hour pharmacist and getting a representative selection of the remedies which fill the advertising slots (and there are many) on Spanish television and get them into my system before the early start on Monday.

Sniff!

Oh, and the weather, in the best traditions of this place, did produce some sunshine before the day died!

Wet weekend

According to the depressing forecast we are in for an unrelentingly large number of days of damp, dull, un-Spanish weather.  Even yesterday, which was an unappetising day, had its little moment of sunshine.  It is a rare day indeed when there is no glimpse of the sun.  Admittedly I was indoors, making my lonely way up and down the swimming pool at the time of the moment of sunny splendour, but the roof of the pool is transparent and the walls are glass, so there is every opportunity for the glow to penetrate.  And it does do something to the feelings when you can expect a sight of our star during even the most unprepossessing day.  It is, after all, one of the reasons that I am here!

The last TMA has been returned and the tutor has made all the pleasingly right noises about my poem and justification that I could have wished for.  As far as I can work out, I have now done enough to pass the continuous assessment part of the course – but I must now put that behind me and concentrate on the next essay.  Even if it will be icing on the cake rather than the cake itself!

My quandary, if it can be assessed as such, is that I have a choice of three ways to proceed with the final assignment.  The most obvious course for me is to do the academic essay on Hard Times, but the other options of contributing on the Book 3 Forum or writing as essay on the historical background are also tempting. 

At the moment the Forum is not very productive, as few people seem to be contributing and, frankly, the history essay looks too text-book-derivative to be stimulating.  So, my real choice is to knuckle down and get on with Dickens and start writing.  Which is probably what I will do over the weekend.  Which cannot come too soon.  For me.

My return home was not quite the “and now the weekend starts – enjoy!” that I had hoped for.  Instead it was “everything is up in the air because an aunt is in hospital” sort of start to the two days of freedom.  An immanent visit to Terrassa is on the cards with other disruption a distinct possibility!

At least, where’er I roam I will have my library with me in the form of my trusty iPhone 5.  I am so prejudiced that I truly cannot tell if the phone is better or worse than my Samsung Galaxy, but I do know (or at least I think I know) that I am getting on better with the iPhone than I ever did with the Samsung.  Such is the power of Apple to those inclined to worship at the shrine; we are blind to any imperfections and cling to the True Way with the dogged faith of the zealot!

Surrounded as I am by coughs and colds, sickness and sore throats, debilitation and depression I am, at last having the good grace slowly to succumb to malaise and am gradually developing the symptoms of those around me.  The tickle at the back of the throat is surely becoming more insistent and the phlegmy cough makes the packet of tissues a necessary accessory. 

I will of course manfully fight the onset of illness, but I am no longer prepared to keep calm and carry on as in the old days and perhaps there is part of me which is hankering for one of my bi-annual days in bed to get better!

As part of my treatment I have just made a honey and lemon hot drink which is a sure and certain remedy for virtually anything, as any fule kno – ah, Stewart, that phrase is one for you as your memory lives on!

Depressingly there are still four weeks or so to the Easter Holidays and the Scylla and Charybdis of exams and meetings to negotiate before the days of rest are granted, but on hands and knees and with gritted teeth the days are passing and the summer is drawing ever nearer.

Not that you would be able to guess that from the weather that is afflicting us at the moment.  There is a sort of damp, grasping coldness which leaches out warmth from a body, especially one like mine the top half of which is clothed in a short sleeved shirt!

I have told myself that a short sleeved shirt is necessary for a number of reasons – not the least of which is that it is a bloody sight easier to iron than the long sleeved variety! 

The reasons are: I do not need to wear a long sleeved shirt because I am a mammal and warm blooded and do not feel the cold; the cuffs get dirty very quickly and you have to change the shirt or roll up the sleeves, so you might as well wear a short sleeved shirt in the first place; my newish watch needs light to keep the battery going and long sleeves restrict its power intake; wearing short sleeves in the winter in Catalonia is a source of wonder to the natives; short sleeved shirts are cheaper; short sleeves are eco-efficient as there is less to wash and dry . . . I could go on, but I feel that my case is made!

“The All-Baroque Box” has been fed into the iMac and I am more than pleased with the quality of the recordings.  Some of the stuff there is somewhat “difficult” for me – the Goldberg Variations, for example are for more rarefied tastes than mine, but I am determined to get through them all, even if it is one a day for the benefit of my immortal soul.  Recordings of music that I know well are on original instruments and have a crispness that is positively exciting!  I am looking forward to exploring the fifty discs in more detail over the coming months.

And there are other box sets which are almost unbearably tempting.  And I am not one to resist temptation: what is good enough for Oscar is good enough for me!