Counting the days again, again.

Once again I am in front of a class and they are trying to complete a crossword which has been devised to aid them in their revision for yet another examination – the last (surely!) this year.  Today is a solemn day, there is one calendar month left for me in this school.  On the 23^rd of next month I will be eating the seafood lunch and waving a tearful goodbye to my erstwhile colleagues!

At some point today I will have a ceremonial “Counting Of The Days” and then I will know exactly just how many 6.30 am starts I will have left before the wide and spacious days of my final retirement wash over me in a luxurious, yet impecunious wave!

This morning a colleague who has been on a structured gradual retirement i.e. working three days a week, came into the staffroom distributing largesse as she has only three days left and expressed shock at seeing me!  It shows how effective my sloping off when my teaching obligations have been completed has been that she has not seen me during her own limited time at the school!  One to me I think!

And because of various people going we had Cava with our lunch.  That is what I call civilization!  And we had arroz a la cubana – O joy!

I have been calm and collected today, not in a professional sense of course, but merely in terms of perspiration.  There is nothing worse than going out in the evening feeling grubby and meeting up with the bourgeoisie who are suited and booted and dressed up to the nines and feeling like something from below stairs!

At the moment, who cares, as I am, as you know in an exalted altitude – no Ceri, not on the Upper Levels - but on the higher seats of the Lower Levels.

There is an easy indicator of your social status in the Liceu – just look at the lights.  If the light display has nine individual bulbs in it you are socially acceptable, if they have fewer you are indeed in the Upper Levels and condemned to emit raucous cries of admiration at the end of a performance which you have only seen in the far distance!  Roll on next year when I am in the stalls.  Please God do not put me behind someone as tall as I am!

The performance I saw yesterday evening was underwhelming.  This performance of “Il turco in Italia” was, in my opinion generally undersung with the exception of Selim (Ildebrando D’Arcangelo) and Prosdocimo (Pietro Spagnoli).  The female lead singers were that sort of coloratura singer where technique is more important than musical smoothness.  Neither Fiorilla (Nino Machaldze) nor Zaida (Marisa Martins) were to my taste, though in the second act I did warm to the singers more as their voices warmed up.

The staging (Cristof Loy) was that sort of jokey hokum that only goes down well with opera audiences who will laugh at anything in sheer relief!  The curtain was up before the start of the performance with a lone caravan on stage.  As the opening after the overture was a chorus of gypsies I had a dreadful feeling that the whole of the chorus was going to emerge (to general operatic hilarity) from one small caravan.  Which they did – and a general gloom settled on my mind!

To be fair there were some nice moment among the naff – of which the arrival of the Turk via flying carpet was not one of them.

The orchestra under Victor Pablo Pèrez was, as usual, excellent and the chorus under José Luis Basso was stirring and eventful.

This was a production which failed to enthuse me about the musical quality of the opera and left me looking forward to The Elixir of Love which is my final show of this season.

On the way home at midnight I counted the traffic lights and this time they were 8-28 green in my favour.  That means that there are 36 sets of traffic lights before I hit the motorway for home.  Grotesque!  Though imagine if they had all been against me.  I wouldn’t have made it and would have had to turn around and go straight to school before I had managed to make home.

Technological Terrors!

Having, as I thought circumspectly, bought a half terabyte external hard drive to back up my computer, it was with something approaching total panic that I saw nothing but a blue screen when I attempted to load up Word this evening.  It was with a stomach churning, sickening recognition that I realised that this was the first time that I had attempted to use the computer since the “backup”.

Nothing daunted (absolute lie) I tried again.  And again.  And again.  And Word would not load.  Then Excel would not load.  To say that I was disconcerted would be a massive understatement.  It is at this time that you realise quite how much of your life is consigned to an invisible disc somewhere in the sleek interior of a Mac machine.  A Mac machine – they don’t have bugs, they don’t go wrong.

My faith returned.  I knew what I had to do.  And I did it.

Once restarted the machine worked perfectly.  I now view the “external” non-Mac hard disc with aversion bordering on loathing.  So much, I say to myself, for trying to be sensible!

Or perhaps it is what I have to do each time I back up.  This was, after all, the first back up that I have done since I bought the machine and it did say that there were more than 650,000 files to copy!  What the hell have I been doing over the past couple of years!

Anyway, all things appear to be well and I will not do it again in a hurry.  Though again it must be done if the cost of the bloody thing is to be justified.  Work in progress.

Tomorrow it will just one month to the day to the end of my time in Education.  Or at least in The School on the Hill.  My replacements are “in place” – two ladies one of who will be back from maternity leave and taking up a part time timetable and the other new lady who will take up the lessons left.  There will be, I am glad to say, no place for me even if I should have some sort of brainstorm and plead to keep my place.  My place is gone.  Well and truly gone.  There is no way back.  Thank god!

My illness of yesterday vanished during the night (an early night) and I felt bright and bushy eyed – or at least as bright and busy eyed as getting up at half past six in the morning allows you to be.  Nothing irritates Toni more than my ability to shake off illness in 24 hours which linger in him for tedious days and sometimes weeks!  Anyway I was fit enough to fill the entire “long” day with a mixture of teaching and marking.  Delight.

My Drama classes are moving towards a confidently predicted chaotic close.  We have a few weeks of single hour lessons a week to produce a dramatic production which is going to be filmed and edited.  Costumes, make-up, props, script and sound effects have all been considered and of my four groups (taking in the whole of the first year in secondary – all two classes of them) are at wildly different stages of unpreparedness.  In spite of the chaos, I am quietly confident that something will come out of this anarchy.  I can’t wait to see the results.  All of which will be captured for posterity on my iPad or the school camera!  Well, this chaos is more artistically productive than most of the rest of my quotidian teaching under the stern dictatorship of the textbook!

What the hell!  Tomorrow I start counting the days and that cannot be bad.

And tomorrow too one of my periodic visits to the Liceu to sit in my Upper Level seat and count the days that I descend to a better view in the stalls next year.  I ought to go down and find my seat and see exactly where it is and check out the sight lines, but I am not sure that I still have the exact coordinates!

I am trying to push from my mind the actual cost of this move from my present position to the solidity of the ground in that Temple of the Middle Classes!

Toni is studying furiously as his examination is now days away: two days, nine hours to be precise.  And counting.

My own exam is in the far distant future – or September, as it is sometime known.  And before that, some time next month, the results from my first exam.  I also have to think about what I am going to do next year: art or creative writing.  I am still inclining to creative writing at the moment, but I could well change my mind.  I will see how this course is panning out and then make my decision.

The first assignment for the present course is rapidly approaching and I have to admit that I am beginning to see possibilities in the title.  My self-indulgent reading so far has managed to change my perceptions entirely! 

Which is good going considering it is officially only week two of the course!

Rant!

In a breath-taking piece of political opportunism the beleaguered PP government of this benighted country is trying to deflect attention from their woeful inability to deal with the present disastrous and chaotic state of, for example the economy, by raising the perennially divisive and attention deflecting issue of abortion. 

They are trying to galvanize the ready prejudice of the right and the thousands with their carefully nurtured, religiously (!) dominated prejudices so that the important questions about the present state of Spain are carefully lost in a debate in which scientific and reasonable arguments are lost in a fog of dogma.

I am sure that there are well meaning and reasonable people who are totally opposed to abortion, but they should beware of their sincerity being abused by cynical opportunist politicians seeking to hide their maladministration and downright corruption in a sanctified miasma of pseudo-moral obscurantism on a topic whose controversial nature is sure to raise temperatures and lessen logic.

Although I am a staunch defender of the woman’s right to decide, I also believe that there is a real debate about the number of months that elapse before the foetus is regarded as viable.  These debates are scientific and medical and can be used by the so-called religious community to bolster their arguments, not to be ignored by them and the element of “faith” be used instead.

The Roman church, in this priest dominated country, where their status is enshrined in the constitution; where their tax affairs are greatly to their advantage; who siphon off money from tax returns; whose churches are rate free; whose pronouncements are anti-gay and anti-democratic – this contemptible Roman church is an eager co-conspirator in the deflection of real debate about their privileges, their crimes, their cover-ups and their signal failure to provide spiritual and moral leadership in a time of financial crisis.  A plague on them!

In the cold light of a dull day the preceding rant seems almost mellow given what is going on in this country!

Meanwhile in the OU Forums things seem to be slowing down.  I thought that I had a vibrant group of fellow students who would use the Forums constantly and provide real stimulation but that is not proving to be the case. 

Our present task to is produce a list of ten items that we own and then write a brief character sketch of the personality that has drawn up the list.  This could, potentially be very revealing, and however the individual has completed the task, it will obviously say a lot about the choices that have been made.

The point behind it all is to emphasise how we are defined by material culture, how our possession tell tales about us.  I think the hard part is writing the character descriptions.  Needless to say I rejoice in writing these brief but penetrating pen portraits and my obvious facility has driven my fellow students underground.  Again.  I will have to try and coax them out into the open again and sooth their tender feelings.

At the start of the course there were some intellectually aggressive postings or a professional nature which made me hopeful that a “keenie” had joined our group, but even his thrusting intimidation seems to have abated.  It’s a lonely old life as a distance learner when your fellow electronic companions don’t push the buttons!

Toni appears to be a little better, though he has had a rough couple of days.  It turns out that the whole family has been struck by the same illness (with the signal exception of my good self!) and the only common experience that I can think of (apart from the wedding where, if anyone deserved to be a little less than perfect it were I!) was the meal we had on Sunday in an overcrowded and almost unbearably noisy restaurant in Terrassa.  But the only common element in that experience was that we had food from the same kitchen, because our individual meals were various.  Another mystery, though Toni will hopefully be better when I get home at the end of this “long” day.

It is impossible for me to ignore the date and not begin to count, with growing mixture of desperation and delight, the number of days left in education or even Education! 

The end of course is the 23^rd of June and it is now mid-way through the previous month, so to speak so, apart from obviously not being just four weeks away, it is not so far that such a concept cannot be warmly thought about!  And good luck with finding your way through that sentence.

People here are tired.  Very tired.  And the summer holidays are regarded in much the same way as The Second Coming – though without the “rough beast” and all that apocalyptic crap. 

My poor colleagues have to endure a further week of torture after the departure of the kids, while I wave my cheery goodbyes with the general exodus of the customers.  And quite right too.  I still have not decided how to celebrate this momentous event. 

Again.  Though I bloody well will, I can assure you of that!

Survival!

My “untouchability” was again emphasised today by the complete lack of comebacks from my non-attendance at one of the interminable meetings held last night in school.  I have resolutely held to my determination to shun these pointless examples of witless viciousness as part of my personal crumbling towards final retirement.  So far so good.  Though I did feel a jolt of shadenfreude when I heard that the meeting closed one whole hour earlier than planned.  But then sense intervened and told me that any meeting that closed an hour earlier than planned had to be of inordinate length to make that something to talk about!  Well out of it, I think!

I am still feeling the lingering after-shock of the physical damage that indulgence wrecked on my fragile body over the weekend.  Indeed Toni has a stomach upset and has yet to rise from his bed.  I put that down to after-shock too, though Toni did nothing like as much as I did in the five and a half hours of eating that the wedding entailed!  Or indeed drinking!

The OU course has got off to a good start with work in the books and on the Forum taking up a good deal of time.  I am learning more so far and I am well out of my comfort zone so this is all to the good.  At present I am learning about the ways in which anthropology has been redefined since the nineteenth century and am having to confront new ideas – which is what it is all about.  There is more a sense of discovery on this course than the other one which is both exciting and also disconcerting!  However, armed only with a disposable fountain pen and fluorescent yellow marker I battle my way to knowledge!

The single item, which has made me happy in the last week or so, is something for which I have been searching for some time.  A chance glance at a likely hiding place for it on our way to the centre of Cardiff last week (was it only last week that I was there!  Impossible!) And I was raring to go.

The shop that I eventually patronized is one that has had a number of incarnations.  One of the “sheds” on Rumney “Common” (the only grass grows in cracks in the concrete) has now reinvented itself as a sort of outward-bound superstore (complete with discount card for which you have to pay) with all sorts of things that you never knew existed.

Rather than traipse my way through I asked the first assistant I saw for directions and was shooed off to a particular section of the store.  I diligently hunted and saw nothing.  Well, not nothing, I actually saw lots of interesting things, but not the one that I wanted.  My return to the assistant gleaned more specific locational information and there it and they were.  I bought two.

So now, each morning and each night as I take my rattling collection of pills I am able to wash them down with the contents of my collapsible cup!  Made in ringed stainless steel with a rather smooth and elegant cover to use when travelling, I am now happy.  No longer have I to cup my hands, no longer worry about using a fragile glass in the bathroom nor yet have to suffer the vulgarity of a plastic one – I am fully collapsible!  It is amazing how much sheer pleasure you can get for the price of a few coffees!  It is a pity that my remaining tastes and desires cannot be satisfied so easily and cheaply!

Back home, and Toni is still in bed feeling very sorry for himself.  He has now decided that the abondigas and Magnum ice cream were the culprits in his upset.  Though, it also has to be said that I too partook of both delicacies with no adverse side effects.  Ah well, horses for courses and colons for comestibles, as they say in this part of Castelldefels.

The weather has gone steadily downhill since an indifferent morning.  And the general joy of life has been substantially increased by the noisy fact that the adjacent swimming pool is being restructured with pneumatic drills and noise, noise, noise. 

And now it’s raining. 

O Joy!