Not all bad!

In spite of an absolutely rubbish Monday, Tuesday was surprisingly pleasant – at least as far as the developing illness was concerned.  Although I probably sound worse than I did yesterday, I feel considerably better and even spent part of the afternoon sitting outside on the Third Floor letting the sun touch my face and give me that injection of Vitamin D that I have missed throughout the winter months!

There has been a new injection on the OU course as well as two new Forums have opened up and I hope this will encourage the other members of the group to contribute more than they have been doing over the last few weeks.  I have been immersing myself in The Preston Lock Out, the songs against the Preston Cotton Lords and political ballads of all sorts to give some of the background to Hard Times.  YouTube has turned up trumps again in finding folk singers who have added the tune and an authentic performance to cold words on the page.

I have given up trying to use my electronic version of the text as a study aid and have sent for the paperback of the novel courtesy of Penguin Classics.  One cannot flick from part to part in the novel electronically in the way that is necessary to be able to write a decent essay.  I can imagine that finding the necessary quote is going to be easy because you can find something by reference to a few words, but I need the text in my hands!

I am still buying CDs as if the house is an ark against the Philistine hordes - if I may be allowed to mix my metaphors in a particularly unsuccessful way!  There are simply too many good bargains around for me to dismiss them!

The Tchaikovsky box set is a delight and I have particularly enjoyed listening to the three unfashionable symphonies 1 to 3 which I have always enjoyed since I bought a (bargain price) box set of all his symphonic works in university – for which I was roundly sneered at, as Tchaikovsky was not really fashionable; far too tuneful and Romantic!  Ouff to people who can’t lose themselves in such gushing lusciousness, is what I say.  It’s their bloody loss!

The next lot of discs that I have sent for are rather more astringent with earlier music of a sparser nature guaranteed to delight.  And then I really must stop as buying discs seems to have become something of an obsession with me at the moment.  But, as I always say, I don’t smoke so I am allowed to squander money on things like this and I am, after all, keeping culture alive on the Third Floor!

I think by the time that I have finished keeping the recorded music industry alive, I myself will have to say alive until well into the next half of this century to listen to it all!  Which, as I fully intend to stay alive until I get back every single penny that I have paid in for my pension (with interest) is just as well because both things should come to completion at round about the same time.  My Uncle Eric, as I never fail to remind myself in dark times, has been drawing his pension for longer than he was teaching!  A real icon for the teaching profession!  A patron saint in the making!

At the moment El Clasico is in full spate with Barça a goal down after what I thought was a clear penalty (Breathe it not in Garth!), though as we are watching it via a computer feed the picture is not of the highest quality and the whole things stops from time to time at crucial moments and is more frustrating than entertaining and I am typing to calm my tattered nerves.  I don’t know what is worse, watching ill-defined splodges of colour jerk their way across the screen or listen to hysterical commentary with a frozen picture.

Toni is frighteningly calm and quiet because he has a sore throat and a headache (and a cough) and has, perforce, to remain silent and fuming!

Tomorrow is a full day and one during which I will have to write a contribution to yet another examination paper so that the Days of Horror at the end of next week will make full use of our own felled forest to add just that little extra misery for the students who seem to have been doing a whole range of examinations this week as well – though the logic of having an examination the week before an examination is beyond me. 

Examinations in the School on the Hill have become an end in themselves and educational logic has long since departed from what is actually going on. 

Ah well, I’m counting the days – and from the Easter holidays I might well be counting the hours!

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!