Sun is life!

Third Floor Therapy has somewhat restored my faith in this country and the fact that the “tangle free” element in my new earphones actually works is an added factor in my relative happiness.

I state this because I am typing this in a staff room which is not a factor in my general well being added to which my lessons happen one after another in an unbroken sequence.  The sun, however, is shining and that is what I need to focus on!

While I have done the marking that I am supposed to have done and written the exam paper that was also part of my workload for the day off, I am conscious that I have done nothing practical about what I need to take to the UK with me. 

This is not a variant of the British habit of assuming that any foreign country that you care to name will have none of the necessaries of life and therefore you have to take tea and toothpaste with you otherwise disaster will inevitably ensue.

I have to dig around to find my optical prescription and other bits and pieces which will jump into significance when I get to the rainy shores of my country and will help fill the hours that I am going to spend there.

By the time I have decided on everything that I have to do, my visit is going to take on the look more of a military campaign than a restful trip.

My book of British Short Stories is now well and truly read and I am more than half inclined to get the rest of the volumes in the series to replace the battered versions that lie decaying in my library.  On the other hand that is merely a waste of money and there are, god knows, other areas in which the money can be better spent.

It is a salutary thought that we are now in May and therefore I can write that I will finally be retiring next month.  I know that those words may be greeted with a somewhat ironic chuckle form those who have celebrated a sequence of retirements with me in the past, but this one is different.  Because it is real.

And reality will be that the extra money ceases to dribble into my bank account while the expenses, on the other hand cascade out.  But, as I mentioned before, the sun is shining, so who cares?

Even the music that accompanies my journey to school has improved since I started on the Mercury recordings (Volume II).  These digitally re-mastered recordings have a particular quality of crisp sound that is invigorating to hear especially when the choice of music is demandingly popular.  This morning I wove my way through the suicidal traffic to the jaunty sound of Gershwin.  It was, in fact just that little bit too upbeat for a school day after a day off, if you know what I mean (and all teachers will) and left me feeling paradoxically depressed.

It took a cup of Hammam tea – which is, as I am sure you know, an everyday mixture of green tea, dried dates and rose petals - to get me back on track.  I have been gifted a collection of exotic tea bags by Lydia and it has been a bewildering taste experience going through them.  They are, unfortunately, running out now and so I will soon be back to the quotidian decaffeinated variety.  Which reminds me that these are much cheaper in the UK than they are in our local Carrefour.

The chaos surrounding the proposed introduction and implementation of the iPad in September of this year continues to provoke anger and despair in about equal quantities.  Basic questions are still to be answered and even more fundamental guidelines have yet to be set – and school ends at the end of next month.  God help them all!

Meanwhile we have an examination today.  Gosh!  And another one on the Monday on which I am still in the UK.  And there are more next month which will eventually lead to the final mark.  Whatever that means.  I am becoming increasingly cynical about the “marks out of ten” which seem to define the educational system in this country.  But I have about one month and twenty days more of these things and then I can (O wonderful phrase!) “look back on” education rather than dread one’s personal involvement in it!

The resonant phrase of Adolf the Housepainter has been going through my head recently (especially when I consider the raw material in my classes) – “The future of our country lies in its Youth!”  Now that really is a sobering thought!

My long day’s journey through the morning is about to start and there is the threat of a meeting in the afternoon which I might have to attend.  But even this slog is lightened by the thought that I do manage to get away early and therefore miss the transportation ruck that is parents picking up their kids at the end of school. 

I used to think that it was only in five-a-side football that the human personality was displayed in its starkest colours - but picking kids up in the car at the end of school runs it a close second.  It also gives teachers an explanation for the attitude of the kids: if the parents behave so atrociously you at least have the glimmerings of an excuse for the kids’ own lack of tolerance and courtesy if such are their guidelines for human behaviour!  Or perhaps I am drawing too much from selfish double parking!

For the umpteenth-and-twentieth time I am sitting in front of a class that is sitting an examination. 

This is the only activity in which a normal class in this school remains silent and focussed.  By the time they reach secondary age all of our kids have a default setting for examination into which they click as soon as a paper is put in front of them.  This is the life they know and can relate to.  The ways in which the information is put into their skulls creates all sorts of problems for them, but the tedious way in which it is examined is doggedly accepted by all!

I have now changed classes so that I can get a different view of the top of kids’ heads as they scribble away at what I will have to mark before I go away so that the papers can be given back on the Tuesday when I return.

I could take the papers with me to mark, but I have bad memories of the last holiday I went on where the burden of marking was hanging over me the whole time.  Admittedly I finally completed the marking sitting on a balcony in a decent hotel and overlooking a small cove on the shores of the Med, but I cannot say that it is a particularly happy memory and, let’s face it, sitting in a room in Rumney with the rain falling promises a different level of misery altogether!  Better to get it done and out of the way today!

I will, of course, have a set of papers waiting to be marked when I return on Tuesday.  But that is next week and in the distant future when each new day brings me closer to that magic day in June when everything changes!

An almost full day, taking in a Departmental meeting to round things off.  The implementation of the iPad is still number 1 on the agenda though plans do seem to be a little firmer and help has been announced as the IT teacher has been assigned one period a week when he is the exclusive property of the English Department.  This is a small step, but it is at least in the right direction.

Tomorrow off to the UK, though a fairly late flight means that I will get to Cardiff after midnight and therefore I will be in the UK when my next course officially starts.  I have taken care that I will be fortified with the necessary technology to ensure that I am ready to play a full part in the initial moments of the new enterprise and my work is up and running.  Bring it on!

Meanwhile, as you might have guessed, this typing is the traditional displacement activity as I actively ignore the marking which is sitting in my brief case:

Make the most of it!

All my classes have informed me, with growing seriousness that, “Today is Friday!”

They are not as demented as they might seem as we have May Day off, but we do not have a Bank Holiday Monday to look forward to.  And going on the logic of the kids it will mean that Thursday is actually Sunday – and I have no desire to go to school then.  On the other hand, again following the childish thinking, it would mean that Friday is Monday and . . . it’s probably better to take reality at face value and remember that I am going to the UK on Real Friday and am having Real Monday off.  If you see what I mean.  Anyway we are about due for our Second Easter (don’t ask) and we get another day off then.

The interminable rain has stopped at last and I scurried out onto the Third Floor and did what I do best until wispy cloud spilt my little browning session.

I have resurrected my impossibly expensive (even with a swingeing Tesco reduction) wireless headphones and have discovered that they (eventually) work well with the iMac and the range comfortably includes the terrace of the Third Floor which meant that I was listening to an excellent version of “Orfeo” as the temperature cooled.

I have to remind myself that I have to write an exam paper and finish the marking of my sixth form papers and pack my case tomorrow.  It’s not all holiday.

I also have to finish off reading my St Jordi book, “The Penguin Book of British Short Stories” which has been absolutely excellent.  I thought when I first looked at it that it was a flashier edition of a book I already possessed, but I have realised that my version is of a much earlier selection and this one, edited by the late Malcolm Bradbury is a much more exciting read.  Many of the stories are to do with the creative impulse and form a fascinating commentary on a post Modernist approach to writing too.  It is the sort of anthology that makes you slightly sad the more you read because the delight is steadily running out as you use up each well-chosen story!

I am also conscious that I will be away from base at the start of my new course, so I will have to take my computer with me so that I can participate from day one with what we have to do.  I will have to remember to take my first piece of written work (which I have completed) with me so that I can post it from Britain – a day is important in the modern Open University!

I have also managed to book an optical appointment in a Tesco branch in a desperate attempt to get replacements (not the plural) at a price this side of despair.  I might even try and get some other view of my contact lenses while I am there.

This practical element is to compensate for what might not be quite what I expected this visit to Britain to be.  But that is something which is a negative view and, at the moment, there is no reason to believe that things are not going to work out in the way that I first expected.  We shall, as they say, see.

Meanwhile I am in full weekend mode and an much looking forward to the free day tomorrow – in spite of Thursday and Friday still retaining their old significance!

And Real Madrid have not managed to score in the first half of their crucial game against the Germans.  They have to pull back three goals and they have left it all for the second half.  They have it all to do!

And Barça tomorrow, with an even more difficult deficit to overturn.

One can only hope.

Write On!

Once upon a time there was a teacher who took his writing seriously and wrote conscientiously and studiedly each day.  But it has now been raining for three entire days and there is just so much that the academic can interpose between the elements and a sensitive soul visibly dissolving in the continuous downpours.

Just as a variant on the watery weariness at lunchtime today we had a taste of the Apocalypse with the sky turning an ochre yellow and Barcelona disappearing beneath a smog-like blanket of dirty water.  The thoughts of my kids in a Drama class immediately turned to eschatology but that was more a reflection of the unconscious queenliness that affects the little prima donnas I attempt to teach than a realistic assessment of what the atmosphere might or might not be doing.  I downgraded the eerie and entirely disconcerting phenomenon with an airily dismissive explanation involving reflected light on dust in the atmosphere. 

What I actually wanted to do was tear tiny cambric handkerchiefs to pieces in frantic displacement activity, or take ostentatious photographs with my underused iPhone 5.  But the class was difficult enough to keep on task at the best of times without having the End Days luridly play themselves out behind the sedate classroom windows, so I chose to downplay and redirect rather than give myself to the beckoning Dark Side!

The most noticeable development of the past few days has been the lure of the famous.  Having been tempted by the chance of proximity to sporting greatness, I have booked flights to the UK for the weekend to participate in the festivities attendant on the promotion of Cardiff City to what used to be the old First Division.  Sunday will see the City of Cardiff give a triumphal hooray to the achievement of the team and I will be there to experience something which the city has been waiting for the last half century.

On a far more prosaic, but personally more important level, I have also arranged for an opticians appointment in Tesco for the Saturday of my short stay.  I have tried to find a reasonable price for a replacement for my rapidly aging glasses but the price is indeed beyond rubies in this country and Tesco seem to offer a much more reasonable alternative to the money grubbing bastards trying to suck my money away in the immediate vicinity of my abode.

I am half resigned to discover that with all the thinning, lightweight, photo chromatic, progressive shenanigans that I demand for my glasses nowadays that the price will steadily climb until it is indistinguishable from the extortion on this part of the continent.  I hope not.  I put my trust in the ruthless competitive edge that sharp and heartless capitalist scorched-earth economics gives pseudo-monopolistic juggernauts because, after all, you know it makes sense and every little helps.

Meanwhile another sacred cow is mooing its way amongst us.  Yet another spate of examinations is about to unleash its deadening misery.  I am having to write some of the bloody things and then there will be all the marking – but at least I will be spared the true triple-misery of having to go to meetings about the damn things as well.  I have, I know I have, to be thankful for what are not in any way small mercies.

Talking of mercilessness, the nine or ten hours of meeting stretching over Friday evening and Saturday morning have left a residue of remembered misery and present resentment that are hindering the implementation of whatever it is that is supposed to be happening next term.  The situation is rapidly heading towards chaos and the suggestion that people come in and work for an extra two weeks at the end of term has staggered people!

I am beyond shock, and I have experienced numerous knee-jerk twinges when the knee begins to bend to whatever deities there might be for bringing my career in the classroom to an end within what can comfortably be termed a matter of weeks rather than months.  Technically, of course, there are indeed months (in the plural) to go – but we are talking single figures of weeks and that is something which takes the tension out of the shoulders!

Tomorrow is a “light” day, though I do have to complete my sixth form marking and make sure that I have done my bit to ensure that the examination for 3ESO is done so that it can be sat while I am in the UK. 

It’s all go!

Disruptive Day!

Happy St Jordi’s Day. 

This mythical saint is patron of Catalonia as well as England – presumably we Welsh did not have yet another saint to spare as we had provided one for Ireland as well as for ourselves!

Be that as it undoubtedly is, today is the traditional day here in Catalonia when books are exchanged.  In school we were given “invisible friends” and my delegated recipient was someone for whom I had an idea for a book and then immediately went on Amazon and relied on my “Premium” membership of that tax-shirking organization to get the book to me on time for today’s handover.  Amazon let me down.  My recourse was to getting Toni to write something in Catalan on a suitably ethnic card and leave that for my victim.  I have ordered the books (plural!) and I wasn’t going to buy a substitute and then have the bloody things arrive and not find a good home!

By a judicious mixture of silence and lying I have managed to deflect immediate attention from this lack and have lived to lie another day.  I hope the books arrive soon so I can infiltrate them unobtrusively into the right pigeon hole and let the person start reading.

My own book was a more than acceptable book of Penguin Modern British Short Stories augmented by a second-hand book that I had talked about not having read with a colleague – my donor was therefore not difficult to identify and both books are excellent and will be read avidly.

There was the usual disruption to normal school life to accommodate the festivities appropriate to the day.  The equivalent of the first year sixth did their own version of the St George story with the shining knight arriving to rescue the maiden on a kid’s scooter.  This skit is played out in front of the entire school, all sitting on the playground – even and up to the sixth form.  It is amazing what you can do in this school; and what you can’t!

I couldn’t face the actual prize-giving and additional chaos and so fled home for an early lunch in our old haunt – and very nice it was too.

We arrived back at the house to find, as seems to be de rigeur for me that a delivery service had arrived while we were out and failed to deliver a package.  I now know where all the depots are for a whole variety of non-delivering carriers.  This one was new and was in the next but one town from us (nearer than it sounds) and eventually produced a whole range of CDs including an amazingly priced set of Britten.  My listening pleasure travelling to and from Barcelona is guaranteed until the end of term!

One OU course may have finished, but the next is about to start and the school – the school is having more examinations.  Therefore more marking and less time to do what I want to do.  But I am sure that I will find the time – though essential periods on the Third Floor also have to be taken into consideration!

I have actually done the first of the exercises for the new course where I had to make comments on three short pieces of film in which three members of the course team illustrated and described three objects that are significant for them and have a wider significance.  A pilgrims symbol, a Greek vase and a mummified philosopher were their choices and we have now been encouraged to identify and describe an object of our own.  The writer of the course unit described his bit of the Berlin Wall as something of little intrinsic value but have significance beyond its appearance. 

I too have an Ingrid-donated fragment of the Wall – but I can hardly copy!  I have had a few ideas ranging from the little bunny that held a bottle of Coty L’aimant perfume which was the last present that I gave my mother, to a replica of the ceremonial anointing spoon bought to celebrate the coronation of QEII.  This was something promised to me from a very young age and actually given to me so long ago I cannot remember exactly when. 

But I think that I have decided what I am going to choose.  Something which has been mine for over sixty years and has a personal, political, historical and social significance.  That should cover most of the bases!

And now the task of getting the new music onto some of my machines.  Keeps me off the streets.

And Barça have lost 4-0 in Germany and that spells the end of their European dream for this year.  Oh dear.  To you this is just another football score; I have to live with the consequences!