Tea is not enough!

Although I am now sitting in a highly privileged position, on a lofty hill overlooking the whole of Barcelona there is something about the colour of the mist (I am being generous here) over the city which is not exactly comfortable.  I only hope that the pall does not extend this far up!

I am accompanied by that dull drone of distant traffic enlivened by individual exhausts and the rattle of passing motorcycles.  Although this is a southern country there is not as much use of the horn as you might expect from watching films which use the stereotype of the hot blooded Mediterranean type using the horn in much the same way as northern folk use the clutch!

I am outside on a bench with my back against the wall of the staffroom watching the school wake up.  The sun is hidden behind a mass of pines and so I am in the shade, but in a couple of hours it will be baking on the terrace.

Gradually the number of children flung into school an hour or so before their classes actually start by parents who apparently can’t wait to get rid of them are polluting the drone filled silence of the morning and behind me I can her the first resentful croaks of my colleagues staggering towards their first coffees.

On Thursdays and Fridays my lessons are all packed together in a most unsatisfactorily compact way which sees me rushing from one building to another in breathless confusion.

Smaller children have now added their piercing voices to the background soundtrack of the school and the first thump of a kicked ball is a descant to the high voices.

The smudge-brown blanket of pollution has prettified itself into a sort of pastel yellow and the first planes of the morning are sailing serenely (at least at this distance) across the city.

And now it’s time for my first cup of tea as I face a day of five lessons on the trot, a departmental meeting and an evening event of the school’s Literary Competition.  A thoroughly depressing prospect!

I am now not sitting on a sun-drenched bench but rather in a stuffy classroom with only visual rumour of the panoramic view that I could be looking at.  I have lost one lesson only to have it replaced by sitting in front of a first year class watching them filling out a Spanish language exam.  And I am still debating whether or not I will be justified in staying away from the meeting tonight.

This is the annual jamboree connected with the awarding of our International Literary Prizes (all capitals).  I do feel a bit of a heel even in thinking of not going because the administration is connected to a member of the department and she does look for support for her colleagues.  I think that probably the best I can do is to leave school as early as I possibly can and then make my way back in later this evening.  The problem there is that driving on the northern part of the orbital motorway is not exactly a delight at that time in the evening, and the only time that I attempted it I was almost late.  Though there again, I do not have a function in the event and it is merely a question of showing my face.

I have time to think about this because I have to stay for lunch and a departmental meeting in the afternoon, so there will be time for even more reflection and cogitation before I eventually decide on some typically selfish form of action!

Thinking about it, that last statement is unfair – after all, how many bloody years have I been in the teaching profession; I am surely entitled to some cut slack or whatever the phrase is!  Though, that doesn’t work in the case of teaching.  The customers keep changing and the ones at the end of a career are as deserving of a professional service as those at the beginning when enthusiasm makes up for lack of experience.

I suppose that a possible test might be to consider whether I would like to be a colleague of me or to be taught by me!  A daunting thought and one that requires a certain amount of mental gymnastics!  And one that I would be ill advised to go into as it might reveal (candid or guarded) far too much of my well-hidden essential personality!

After all my thinking I actually went to the Literary Prize Giving and listened to an astonishingly inappropriate talk on the brutal book “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote for a group of young writers.  Capote had visited the Costa Brava at some time and this, together with pictures of the graves of the slain characters in the “novel” confused rather than elucidated the central point of the talk.  Still, I recognized the guy from the television and he did at least speak in Spanish rather than Catalan, so I bumbled my way along understanding imperfectly while maintaining a mien of intellectual appreciation!

I fled as soon as was decently possible and we later went out for dinner in one of the restaurants along the paseo.  My pizza was excellent rivalling the efforts of the Maritime in time gone by, the Maritime I might add which was closed at a worryingly early hour.  To be fair I was bone weary, so it’s a little unreasonable to expect catering staff to be any more enthusiastic at working at that hour than I was.  But that’s life.

A worrying development in my life, which shows that I have my priorities in the right order and only worry about important things in life, is that my watch appears to have lost time. 

My new watch appears to have lost time. 

Admittedly the power source of this timepiece is light falling on some part of the machine that turns mere light into electric power, but the one thing that was clear was that The Time and the time on my watch were different.  And one couldn’t really say that Catalonia has been deficient in the provision of light in the last month!  I now recall with concern comments on the Amazon website which stated that the recharging ability of the watch was variable and even when left out in strong sunlight there was no guarantee that it was fully charged.  I have been lulled by faultless operation into accepting that its time is absolute and my faith is now completely shattered.  Again.  That’s life too!

Days have slipped by and no fingers on keys!

This weekend has seen the last of my revision.  Monday the exam.  As part of my preparations on Saturday I drove the route that I will have to take on the Exam Day by driving from School to the British Council.  Twice.  The first time I made a mistake by following the instructions to the letter and later realized that there was a degree of flexibility that I should have observed.  Which I did the second time around!

There appears to be parking near the British Council, but I should have enough time to panic and find somewhere else if the two places that I have noted as possibilities fail to live up to promise.

Tomorrow is going to be a long day.  Up at six-thirty and then teaching until five past one.  A drive to the British Council and the Exam.  A drive to the centre of Barcelona and an opera (Rheingold – just the sort of light relief that I will need!) and falling out of the Liceu at gone midnight to drive back to Castelldefels to go to bed to get up the next morning at six-thirty.  And this is supposed to be fun!

At least the weather has been decent – even if there have been more obtrusive wispy clouds than have been strictly necessary – and I have generally been able to take some advantage of the Third Floor and positions myself in the requisite position aligning myself with my favourite star.

The days pass and we are now over half way through April; May is looming and then it is June and escape!

More nearly and importantly in the short run, the website for my next course will open in two or three days time and after tomorrow I will be able to start work and build up a time buffer before the official start of the course on the 4^th of May.

My experience with my present course has Shown Me the Way to get back into the swing of the OU and its ways.  I think that I will get more out of this course than I did the last because I am a little more canny about what is important in the OU World!  At least I hope so.  This course will take me over the next 20 weeks and up to the examination in September.  October is the start of my third course and I am still debating about what to take.  My preference is for a second level creative writing course which will take me up to my first second level art course in 2014.

But first the bloody exam!

You ate what?

Eating one piece of toast during a barbecue still haunts me!  While the rest of The Family was cooking what appeared to be the entire herds of cattle and kilometres of sausage - I ate none of it.  I sat in solitary splendour in a patch of sunlight, reading Hard Times (for revision purposes) and trying to look pathetic.

Didn’t work of course and I even (by example and unnatural brownness) encouraged the white folk of Catalonia to join me and rapidly assume a ruddy complexion which will, I am sure, have developed into pure pain by the next day!  (I am not entirely convinced that the tense in that last sentence makes temporal sense, but what the hell!)

My tummy started playing up on Saturday afternoon and was only proclaimed safe on Monday evening.  This was achieved by my usual recourse of “taking to my bed” and staying there for the best part of a day until the illness was over.  I have a sort of kind of feeling that one day this one-day cure using somnolence as the major active medical element will fail me some time in the near future, but at the moment it is proving to be the most reliable remedy that I know.  And cheap too!

Monday (day) was a careful sort of time only enlivened by the receipt of a twenty-page letter of justification from a recently sacked colleague.  As it is written in Catalan I have had to rely on the pronouncements of others to understand the gist of what he has to say - but it has the potential to cause some unsettled days in our institution.  It appears that he has also sent the letter to parents and kids.  I am sure that is questionable from a purely professional point of view though it does add to the gaiety of nations.  But this looks like s story that can run and run.

Talking of which, that is exactly what I did at lunchtime today when my teaching duties had been done.  The only way I am surviving is to leave school when I am not “needed” – and I only hope that this form of escapism is allowed to continue until I finish in the place.  How many months are there?  Middle of April to middle of May to middle of June and a week extra.  In terms of weeks we are almost down to single figures!  O Joy!

Cardiff City are playing at the moment and all they need is a single point from the game to go up.  I have probably damned them by typing that but, if auguries are confounded and they do actually manage it, then I shall look out my football tie and wear it with pride tomorrow and explain the meaning to inquisitive children.  Please!  I have been saying all year that this time Cardiff is going to do it, please god don’t let me down!  I keep checking periodically with a sinking feeling. 

At the moment it is still 0-0.  And that result will be enough to see us up.  There are ten minutes to go, plus injury time.  I have tried and failed to listen to the radio on my computer and no television was available “in your region” so I have had to rely on the “live” reports which tell me that, pause, it is still 0-0.

And that was what the score remained and with the single point Cardiff are promoted and we are back where we should be.  I demand a Bluebirds tie to wear on the last day of term!

Bring on tomorrow!

Rest!

This weekend is most welcome.  The fatigue hang-over from a mid-week start last week, coupled with the actual teaching has meant that this Friday has been eagerly awaited as it has to administer the soothing salve which makes the next week of work possible.  There has to be a better way to spend my time than this!

The OU Elluminate tutorial session was preceded by total chaos on my part as my iMac refused to load the program to run it!  I was reduced to using the fading battery life on my MacBook Air to join the merry throng.  God knows what was going on there as the iMac has worked well with this program in the past but it added that injection of panic that makes things go better.  Sometimes.

How much use the tutorial was is debateable, but it was a sort of valedictory session for the course as we wished each other well in our future studies.  It was quite moving in a strangely distanced sort of way; who, after all, are these people with whom I have been exchanging messages for the last twenty weeks?  Our relationship has been of the oddest and most selective sort and will have to start all over again next month with the next course.  I suspect that I may find the same students on that course too.  I will have to wait and see.

This weekend is devoted to revision and a visit to Terrassa for lunch.  And I hope a little light start-gazing on the Third Floor!

The next stage!

Getting up is getting harder.  Another day of the week in which resentment was the overriding emotion dragging me back to bed.

The mobile phone alarm on the iPhone is just as irritating as it was on the Samsung and I am getting to loathe it so much that I am waking up just before it goes off so that I can turn it off before its insanely jolly noise irritates the hell out of me.

Today I didn’t get to it on time so that I had to fumble it to silence.  I had also inadvertently placed it on its power cord so that when it burst into life the vibrations were, for some reason connected to it being slightly off of surface, even more sonically pronounced than usual, using the unit it was placed on as a sort of sound box.  The lurch to wakefulness was more acute than is physically bearable when this sort of thing happens!

Once up I went through the usual rituals to get me to school on time and it is only the music in the car, thanks to EMI Eminence, than calms me down enough to face the day.  Though I have to say that a rousing performance of the 1812 Overture was not necessarily soothing this morning!

Today is one of my “long” days when I start at 8.15 in the morning and then my last lesson ends at 4.45 in the afternoon.  An absurdly long day with an overcrowded curriculum, but there is little chance of anything revolutionary happening to change the situation – and certainly not in the two and a half months that I have left in the profession!  I will have to remember to bring in my sandals and an ornate bowl so that I can knock the dust off my feet and wash my hand in a double gesture of rejection!  But how many will understand?  Though I should be used to unremarked gestures by now!

As my examination draws nearer so does the double horror for my colleagues of a Friday evening session followed by a Saturday morning session of work on the iPad.  In effect my colleagues will be working an extra nine hours during that week!  There are mutterings, which is a pity as the technological innovation is something which should be welcomed and celebrated – not berated!  But . . .

I really does say something for the length of the school day that I have now taught four lessons with one to go and at the end of the day I will also have had three free periods, a mid-morning break and a full hour for lunch.  When you put it like that the day is obviously absurdly long but, as I said previously, nothing will be done – especially not in a climate of financial cutbacks and job losses!  Roll on the good times again when workers can ask for reasonable working conditions without being regarded as red revolutionaries!

I started to listen to the coverage of the Thatcher Jamboree in Parliament when I came home from school but the (very balanced) coverage of the BBC raised so many bitter memories that I turned away and had a cup of tea.

I am, however encouraged today, Thursday, by John Wilkins sending me something forwarded by his son Owain which shows Glenda Jackson in full flow despite of the baying of backwoodsmen and saying what needs to be said about the toxic legacy of That Woman.  More strength to your rhetoric Glenda!

Yesterday was a tiring day and one not made any calmer by the appalling performance of Barça against their French opponents.  They really showed how bereft of ideas and motivation they were without the force of Messi (who, for the first half sat, or rather sulked and looked generally uncomfortable, on the bench) and how they were a different force when Messi (injured though he might well be) finally came on in the second half.

Toni sat fuming, not only because of the lacklustre performance of his team but also because he was watching on a laptop attached to the TV that froze at inopportune moments merely adding to his ire.  By the end of the game he would have sold most of the team at best and given away swathes of players at worst.  If they play like that in the next stage of the competition then their progress is going to be severely limited.  It makes one wonder yet again what is going to happen to the team post-Messi!

Today is the day of the last tutorial of my present OU module and coincidentally the books and DVD for the next one arrived yesterday.  I am getting progressively more nervous about this exam, in spite of the fact that I have studied assiduously and am conversant with the details of the content on which we are going to be tested!  One of my colleagues has just remarked, “Well, Stephen, what do you say to the kids?  ‘If you are well prepared you have nothing to worry about!’”  Yeah!  But this isn’t anything to do with the kids; this is me!  I will be very glad when it is all over.

On an altogether more positive note, the teaching material for the next aspect of my OU degree looks to me to tick more boxes than the course that I am completing now – although I see that the bloody Buddhists make it in to the teaching material again!  We have been told by the OU that the two separate courses that I am taking this year are going to be amalgamated into a single integrated course in the future, and I think that makes sense.  In fact, I can’t wait to get started - and I will as soon as the damn examination is over!

Later this afternoon we have our final tutorial with Elluminate (the on-line system) in which the full hysteria of distance learning students facing their first examination will be loosed on the world and will whip me up into further frenzies of frightened introspection!  Or not, who know, it might actually give me information which calms.  Some hope!

Meanwhile, teaching calls.  I only hope that the echo of that call does not extend into the afternoon, as I need to work myself up before the international meeting of the learners!