It's only a day that will pass!

I am in school in body though not entirely present in health.  I thought long and hard before I left home this morning as I was not entirely well after the misery of lying in bed during a glorious day of sunshine.

The moral blackmail which our school uses with complete unprofessionalism determined that I did not take the doctor’s appointment which was available for 3.20 pm today as my absence would have created chaos. 

We are already working with one person fewer because the head of department is in Canada collecting the kids who have been on exchange and we did not get a replacement for the days that she is going to be off.  There is my Making Sense of Modern Art which basically needs me to be there to teach it and . . . but you get the idea.  Because the school does not even try to get supply teachers the burden of absence is placed squarely on the department responsible, as if it is our fault that a colleague is absent!

My customary griping is made more pointed today as I teach five periods; do a lunchtime duty and have a collapsed class at the end of the day.  I am not, emphatically not, being paid anything like enough for this imposition – and I don’t feel well as well!

Hopefully I will scramble my way out of the Slough of Despond when the teaching starts – I always seem to get something of a boost when I do the job for which I am paid, though there is also the inevitable let down when you stop!

Lo and behold, when I get into school I find out that another member of the English Department is off sick with a bad back.  It was with total fury that I understood that the powers that be were trying to make me do a substitution on a day I was doing five etc etc.  Their crass incompetence had not noticed that I was actually teaching a class when they wanted me to do another.  Then they attempted to make me take two classes together when these classes are at different points in their reading.  I refused.

I am now, while still feeling like shit, in a towering rage and I will know exactly what to do when I get another doctor’s appointment in school time.  It is with weary resignation that I point out to my colleagues that management doesn’t give a hoot for any of their jolly hockey sticks approaches to saving money – they will take what you give and then demand more.

That gives a very biased view of our school which is filled with decent people doing devoted work – and being taken advantage of every single day that they stay in the place!

In a time of crisis and with unemployment running at over 20%, we should remember that every “saving” that we make and every extra lesson that we teach is taking away paid employment from a colleague.

The evening I have a visit to the hospital with Toni to look forward to as he goes to find out if the minor surgery he had six months ago has been successful.

I have existed today on a diet of cold water, as the idea of eating anything has not filled me with delight.  You can imagine how pleased I was that Monday is my duty day for the dining hall.  I had to stand there, watching hundreds of children much their way through things that my gorge rose at – so to speak.

The last effort of the day is in taking the collapsed class of 3ESO who are going to have the delights of a whole range of vocabulary forced at them.  There should be three classes, but with the absence of the head of department that have been collapsed to two.  One other member of the department is absent so I will be the only English teacher taking them.  At least the handouts have been prepared (with answers) and are ready for distribution.  Ironically given my present situation, the vocabulary is all about the body and medicine.  O Joy!

The kids, having started their day at 8.15 am, were not in the most receptive of moods and the behaviour was vile – but they actually did the work, which makes them rather different from their British counterparts.

As you can imagine, after a foul day in an uncaring school I was in no mood whatsoever to interact with human kind – it was just as well that no bloody drivers got in my way.

An excellent trip to hospital for Toni – who has now been fully discharged, was followed by a meal in a Basque restaurant.  I was allowed to eat a “steak” which was waver thin and fairly tough.  The potatoes were fine, but I still can’t pretend it was a satisfying meal.  And it was washed down with agua con gas.  Dear god, what have I come to!

Tomorrow is, however, another day and I trust that I will be back to what passes for normal for me!

Though tomorrow I have six periods to teach rather than the measly five I taught today! 

This is all going to end in tears.

Half a lost weekend

Friday ended with Suzanne and I enjoying a chat on the Third Floor interspersed with glasses of wine and nice things to eat.  The nice things to eat continued on Saturday when Toni, his mum and I went to our local and, for the first time for a long time I had poussin.  It was delicious, although Toni was contemptuous of the English word for a small chicken and intimated that it may have had its origins in France.  Which it did of course.

After lunch we went straight to a DIY store to get the bits and pieces for The Lamp.

The Lamp has been in construction for some time and comprises two glass cylinders, one inside the other, with the space between them being filled by sea glass.  The centre cylinder has a colour-changing bulb and it is held in place by a lid constructed by Toni and when turned on illuminates the sea glass in a very fetching way.  The sea glass (which I am reliably informed dates from the 60s!) is usually in white or green with some brown and it takes a hell of a lot to fill up the space on The Lamp.  We reckon that it will take the rest of this year to get sufficient pieces of complete this work of art!

In school on Friday John (via Julie) loaned me “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga which apparently won the Man Booker Prize in 2008.  On the strength of reading it I agree with the accusation that the Booker Prize is becoming dumbed down.  Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but it didn’t have very much in the form of depth to keep me thinking.

I thought it was more on a par with Slumdog Millionaire in its presentation of a radically different culture which is seemingly motivated by corruption.  I liked the idea of a murderer telling the story and I thought the direction of his writing to the Chinese Premier was also an acute and interesting detail given the development of the major countries of the Third World.  The detail in the book was interesting, but I thought it was essentially shallow.  But a good read.

Saturday night and most of Sunday was not quite so pleasurable as I had a recurrence of my illness from last Sunday: feeling cold and generally unwell.  This is not the sort of thing that I expect, especially as I have spent most of Sunday in bed.

The Family has been here since lunchtime and I have been very much the host in absentia.  I made one abortive attempt to get up at about 3 in the afternoon and lapsed back into bed within an hour.  I have finally come to some sort of wellness in the evening and I have managed to force down a couple of sandwiches made by Toni’s mum’s fair hand.  After a day of not eating, they tasted delicious.

Tomorrow seems to be dominated by hospitals as Toni goes back for a check in the evening and at the same time he is waiting for his physio to start at a health centre in town.

All this and teaching too!

Gad! The heat!

The pet topic of conversation is the weather. 

Our sultry times continue with old hands gazing at the sun and muttering that it is not normal at this time of the year for it to be so hot. 

The Protest Work Ethic part of me is now confidently expecting retributory weather to compensate.  Though disconcertingly I understand that the Old Country is also having something of a heat wave too!  That hardly seems fair or right!

Tomorrow early leaving and taking wine with Suzanne on the Third Floor.

If I have time during the day I might well print out some of the information about Chaucer that I have been getting together.  Thank god (yet again) for the Internet!

I am going to bed tired and waking up tired – but this is probably par for the course at this stage in the year.  My colleagues in Britain are already looking forward with growing desperation to half term, whereas we in Catalonia do not have that saving luxury – and late December does seem an awfully long way away!

Day by day.  Day by day.

Onward into the fourteenth century!

One colleague admitted to me this morning that my suggestion that we introduce Chaucer to the hapless pupils in the equivalent of our second form has left her with nightmares.

As far as I could make out from the welter of Spanish descending into Catalan that was the meeting that I went to at the end of school last night, the area of concern for the project that the kids are going to have to complete covers a period of some 400 years from the 11^th Century to the 14^th or 15^th!

Chaucer was the obvious writer of distinction – who is also interesting to read.  Having given the assembled company my rendition of the opening lines of The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in my own version of Middle English they stared at me with expressions ranging from incredulity to outright horror!

The most outraged was a fellow member of the English Department who had sudden visions of having to pretend knowledge of a writer who she had not dipped into!  I will have to provide a “Chaucer for Dummies” handbook.  Though I have to admit that my knowledge does not extend to the story that I have not and will not read “The Tale of Sir Topaz”, that long drawn-out ironic joke at Chaucer’s expense.  That is the sort of literature for which life simply is not long enough.  And after all, even his character in the Tales was interrupted and told to shut up.

I was thinking more along the lines of the play version of The Pardoner’s Tale.  This is a fairly simple moralistic story and the background to the character of the Pardoner will afford the kids hours of innocent fun.  Or something.

Nothing has been finalized, but as everyone knows that Suzanne is my “friend” and as she is the “Big Cheese” in Project Based Learning there is a fair chance that Chaucer will make it to the final cut!

Unfortunately this means that I will have my own work cut out to produce something that can act as an introduction to the work and the sort of language that he used.  Though I do envisage the use of Middle English being kept to an absolute minimum!

I think that other members of staff were equally shocked by the range of ideas that seemed to be flowing – all of which de-skilled colleagues and hinted at the range and extent of work that would have to be done if the project was to succeed.

It is a real and painful truth that that meeting, like ever other meeting in the world of education that I have ever attended, did not make my life easier.  Always by the end of the assembly there is more work to do and no consequent lessening of the work that you already have.  Still after more than thirty years why should I expect any difference just because the country is different!

Hope springs eternal!

Doesn't everybody have one?

Even a cursory reading of the lives of the Roman emperors will show that there are depths of decadence into which modern man barely shines a battered Pifco torch with its batteries on their last legs.  I however have gone that extra step down the slippery slope of naff indulgence and mixed metaphors.

Not content (who would be!) with a shower head which sparkles with multi-coloured LEDs when the water is turned on I have turned my attention to less salubrious areas for gentrification.

 

It all comes down to the fact that the bathroom suite in the en suite is a truly hideous, dark, pseudo-avocado colour that no one in their right mind would have had installed this side of the 1960s.  I have tried to lighten the oppressive gloom by a rather more pastel shower curtain and the judicious placement of white decorative towels, but the overall effect is one of a decade that considerate decoration forgot.

It was therefore with something approaching mild apathy that I noticed that the toilet seat was disintegrating and would have to be replaced.

Our house is actually owned by the agency that let it, but they preserve the fiction that “the owner” will do nothing to make the place better.  The central heating is leaking, ah, we are told “the owner” will have nothing to do with it.  This Dickensian transference of blame to a tight-fisted “other” when the actual owner is on the phone to us means that if we want anything replaced we have to do it ourselves.

Toilet seats are not expensive if you want a plain white affair.  And that is exactly what I wanted to add lightness to the cell like atmosphere in the bathroom.

And that was fine as far as it went, but if you buy cheap then you must accept the consequences.  Which were that, among other things, the paint started chipping off almost immediately.

And then there was Lidl.

Lidl seem to have an almost pathological desire that people buy hardware for cutting, curling, shaving, bending and shaping that I find vaguely exciting but essentially untempting.  There is however usually something odd and quirky which tickles my sense of acquisitiveness but I have learned by hard experience to avoid soothing that sense with hard cash.

Except.  Toilet seats were advertised.  Not just any old toilet seat but things of glory!

I am now the proud possessor of a toilet seat of transparent plastic embedded in which are shells and small stones with representations of starfish – very stylish.  But that is not all, oh no, indeed.

There are not only pieces of the seashore in the plastic but also a series of red LEDs which burst into subdued light when the seat is raised!

At night with the lights off it gives the impression of a volcanic circle of fire which, as you can appreciate gives a whole new dimension to defecation!

 

All I have to do now is to replace the sink tap with something a little more lively and the bathroom will rock!  Or I could stop now while there is some sanity left.

Yesterday was not a restful day – far too much teaching for that!  So the frivolous purchase was more than justified I feel.

Yesterday was the commencement of the “Early Start” approach to all my teaching days irrespective of an actual early start.  This way I avoid the frustration of the inevitable traffic build up that comes with setting off nearer to my actual starting time and I arrive in school (in theory) fresher and, more importantly, nicer than if I had snarled my way through the usual batch of bastards who only take to the road when I am on it!

It does make the day a tinge long – and when I say “tinge” you will appreciate that it is more than an understatement to use that word, but I will give it a week or so and then evaluate the approach.

The weather continues balmy and I for one will hear nothing against it.  To hell with lawns we, after all, have artificial grass!

Today I teach six lessons with the department coping (quite unnecessarily) with the absence (known in advance) of the head of department who has gone to Canada to fetch our exchange pupils and, just to make things more interesting another colleague has called in sick.  As there is no “coping” mechanism for absence this will create its own chaos.  Any attempt to get our department to help will be met with a stern and ever-so-slightly-hysterical refusal!

I have decided to keep a list of all the little “extras” that this school demands of its overworked teachers and I think that it will make very interesting reading at the end of the year – if I get that far.  I am now in a “collapsed” class, the first of the “adjustments” that we have had to make to compensate for the absence (known in advance) of the head of English.

This evening, after a six period teaching day I have a meeting which will last an hour; that too will go down on the list – a list which is going to be quite substantial by the end of the week!

This is the way to build up resentment - until something, anything, has to happen. 

Just what is lost in the future but (by definition) it is getting nearer all the time!

Toni now has a date for his first period of physio and we will have to see what effect it has on his wonky knee.  He is getting stir crazy and watching Real Madrid with hatred and loathing is no real substitute for free locomotion!

Hopefully Suzanne will visit this weekend and the drinking of Libalis will soften reality.

Sun and sounds

Try as I might I find that I cannot resist kicking countries when they are down.

This morning, after having been woken by the moronic barking of the worthless cur sustained by the ministrations of the lunatic next door at the sensitive time of 6.00 am I decided to make the best of a bad job and get up.

As I usually gain consciousness at 6.30 any disturbance at that time is the difference between dozing for a few extra minutes or being rudely woken fully.  I was fully woken by the piercingly monotonous yelp of the mindless beast so I was ready to face the day without the three hour lie in that I had yesterday – getting up at the luxuriously late hour of 9.30 am!

The view from the bathroom window is of trees surrounding what we fondly think of as the House of the Mafia.  A glimpse of the trees is important because the direction in which they are lying means that they are striped with sunshine if the sun has indeed risen.  The stripes were there, so it was a fine day.

Just how fine a day was revealed when I went up to the Third Floor and was able to lay out in the morning sunshine and pretend (with no effort at all) that it wasn’t September but a much more congenial day in the “free” months before the start of school!  God bless Catalonia.  Yesterday dull; today glorious!

Monday should mean the start of Toni’s physio and he seems to be getting steadily more mobile.  Perhaps a couple of weeks will see him walking normally.  With any luck.

Tomorrow also sees the departure of the Head of English in our school to Canada to bring back the group of our pupils who have been living with Canadian families for the first month of the term.

In spite of this being more than a three-day absence known about in advance there has been no attempt whatsoever to find a supply teacher to take the place of our colleague.  This means that classes will be collapsed and lessons taken by colleagues in school.  This course of action has been readily accepted by colleagues who actually take pride in the fact that we are “covering her absence internally” and asking for only one or two periods to be covered by colleagues outside the department. 

I, of course take no pride in this form of action at all.  I am disgusted at the supine way in which such unprofessionalism is embraced and point out on every occasion that what we are actually doing is denying a colleague work at a time of crisis when people are crying out for employment.  As we are also being paid at 2009 rates the eagerness to please an indifferent management is pathetically astonishing.

I can’t help thinking that some sort of crisis point is going to be reached when we have our first Saturday (!) morning meeting.  We are in school for eight hours a day; they think nothing of having two-hour meandering meetings after school – and in spite of that they schedule meetings at the weekend!  For sheer impudence it takes the breath away.

The opera season opens for me next month.  If there are any clashes between opera and brain-sucking meetings, I know which event will take precedence in my life!

My favourite paintings in Ceri’s exhibition have not been sold: the waterfall – a dark painting but dramatic and delicate at the same time with the rush of water giving a dynamism which is in strong contrast to the delicacy of the few slim trees at the head of the falls.  The other painting is one of convoluted tree roots which have an anthropomorphic feel.  The left hand part of the composition reminds me of a three-toed sloth the “wrong” way up with the snout of the creature pushing towards the very edge of the picture frame.  The left “leg” of the roots is a sensuous and sinuous vaguely female member seemingly menaced by an exposed creeping root emanating from the hunched and twisted muscle of root on the right.

The paintings are at present in the Albany Gallery as part of Ceri's private show and may be viewed at 

http://www.albanygallery.com/index.php?page=5&p=4

The right hand section is like the gnarled skin of some sort of prehistoric monster with the addition of part of a wire fence giving a Surrealistic touch of the mundane – though the mundane here given a disturbing force.  In the background is a bosky mountainside whose steepness forces the creature more into the foreground as it seems to make a slow ungainly progress out of the frame.

I think that this painting is a tour de force and its large size 42 ins by 43 ins must make a considerable impact on the viewers.

I do not think that it is an easy picture as the subject matter is unsettling and I am not sure that it would be a natural part of most living rooms, but it is a picture which demands attention.  I think that its size and treatment of nature would make it a perfect item to join a national collection either in the National Library of Wales or (where there are considerably more people to see it) in the Gallery of the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.  Where the National Library isn’t.  I think that the roots make a natural and appropriate gallery picture and the National Museum should snap it up!

Darkness has descended and I should do some marking, though the stuff that I have brought home is not the work that needs to be given back to students tomorrow.

I have decided to get up each day as if I had an early start and get into school early.  Traffic builds up very quickly and the later one leaves travelling into the city the more problematic the journey becomes.  Early morning traffic is lighter, parking is easier and it does give me time to get the day organized.  As I am teaching right to the end of the day on three days of the week it does mean that the days are very long – and on days with meetings it simply does not bear thinking about.

Tuesday is such a day when a little group of enthusiastic teachers meet to discuss the format of a project based learning element in the year’s calendar.  As this involves Suzanne I will give it my best shot – but it better not last longer than the scheduled hour!  Which means that I will have been in school for just under ten hours when I finally get away. 

God help!