Empty!

Poisoned Friday begins.

Although I am not going to talk about The Day of Horror tomorrow, its mere touching of my consciousness has blighted the traditional end of the week feel for a normal Friday.  However, in a normal teaching day it takes far too much energy to fuel red-hot anger and teach at the same time, so I am going to have to suppress my quite natural and understandable feelings of resentment and injustice under a cruelly hypocritical veneer of micron thick affability.

Enough!  I will reserve my true vitriol for tomorrow when the crime is being perpetrated.

The car continues to please and surprise.  I came to school today not warmed by the gloriously cumbersome symphonies of Bruckner but rather by the more astringent music of hummable pop stars – some of whom I could even name and in a few cases even sing along!  Any pop song that mentions, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” has got my vote!

I have found the cigarette lighter in the car.  Well, it would have been that in my dad’s first car (a Ford Prefect complete with running boards) with a pop out button with a red-hot element at the end of it.  On my last car the hole for the button was there but not cigarette lighter filling it and now, on this car the hole (with integral cover) is labelled 12V.  How times have changed – not even a nod towards the disgusting habits of the past!

While waiting at a roundabout at a set of traffic lights I pushed the brake button to secure the car.  I then went through a period of panic as I failed to get the car moving when the lights changed to green.  I pushed the button again – which did nothing.  I pressed on the accelerator – which did nothing.  I changed the gear lever – which did nothing.  I might add that all these “did nothings” were on a roundabout where consideration and patience are not the attitudes which are on prominent display.

Eventually after what felt like hours but was obviously a matter of seconds I lurched forward again and considered putting the air-con on to get my complexion back to something approaching the ordinary, but I drove on with my eyes on the road ahead and not on my rear-view mirror which I am sure would have shown drivers frothing at the mouth at the unbearable delays that my neophyte incompetence had caused!

I have not yet attempted a hill start, which is just as well as I do not know the holding capabilities of a stopped automatic.  I do have a handbrake so that ought to make things easy, but I have not been in a practical situation which tests my new driving ability.  Given the slopes around the school and the complete inconsideration of many of the drivers I encounter on a daily basis, I must find an opportunity to practice without the pressure of needy parents ostentatiously revving their engines around me as I try to achieve the smooth take offs of my non-automatic driving!

Recently I have found myself confining my reading matter more to the Guardian than to real books and this is something which I intend to rectify as soon as possible.  It will become another of my resolutions which seem to be piling up rather than forming a neat queue and which I seem to be making little effort to diminish.

I still have not returned to my daily swimming (most glaringly) and there are various others tasks and irritations that I am supposed to have taken care of but which flutter in the wind of neglect like forlorn kites tangled around telephone wires.  Something must be done.  And with an exclamation mark too!

I need to call into my Union, but that takes a major effort of organization and I may need to take Toni as translator as much of the vocabulary I will need is not everyday.  There is also the threat of the dentist.

Alas my “good boy” habits seem to have fallen into abeyance as far as these jumped up barbers are concerned and my natural reluctance to visit has increased steadily since the death of Mr Hamilton well over 40 years ago!  He was the dentist of my childhood.  He was the smiling face of dentistry for me: he allowed me to dress up in his white coat; he encouraged me to handle the instruments of torture; he gave me birthday and Christmas presents; he and his wife had me to tea as the sole guest.  In short he was a Good Thing and with him I felt no fear.

His greatest act of questionable kindness was to give me a tiny earthenware pot with a globule of mercury in it.  I had endless minutes of pleasure pouring the blob out onto a smooth surface, breaking it up into a multitude of smaller globules and then marshalling them all back together again before it was put back into its pot. 

The fact that such behaviour nowadays would probably get him struck off for giving a hugely toxic heavy metal to a very young child to play with does not in any way lessen the ecstatic delight with which I regarded such a wonderful present.  And I am sure that he told me not to eat it.  Which I didn’t, and have survived so far without lasting ill effects.  And it’s a bloody sight more than I have had from any other dentist I have visited!

I am not doing too well in the not thinking about The Day of Horror, and it is not helped by seeing colleagues’ faces crumple as they remember periodically and the misery of the ages descends on them momentarily as they attempt to shrug off the awful thoughts.

At least this evening we went out for a consolatory meal of tapas with a decent Rioja – and it has a different taste when you are eating it knowing that the weekend has not really started.  It is devalued by the contempt you feel knowing that the morrow will bring an empty, time wasting experience which, unforgivably encroaches on a sacrosanct weekend.

An early night I think so that I can muse on my hard life and build up the right quantities of resentment so that I am in the right mood for the meeting.

Sleep tight!

Always something new!

The inaugural trip of The Beast was successfully undertaken this morning.  I do not count the tripette to pick up Brian and Hilary yesterday evening minutes after I had taken delivery of The Beast and was a little less than confident about how the thing worked.

At least I can feel smug as I drive along because, not only am I saving money, but also I am helping the environment.  In the sense that I am not as polluting as the other cars and my carbon dioxide emissions are not as great.  So, to be exact I should probably say that my damage to the environment is not quite as much as others who speed past me and who do not have a hybrid engine or whatever it is that I have.

Having such an engine means that one can turn ignition on (or press a button in my case) and have the car leap into action in total silence.  One pulls away from the curb in a quite sinister lack of noise sort of way, and it can only be a matter of time before some unsuspecting pedestrian is mowed down by the Silent Avenger.

For the first time in my life I now possess an automatic – but there seem to be just as many options for driving The Beast than if it were manual.  The actual gear lever is simple: forward and reverse; but there is an extra setting for going down hills.  The actual drive forward has three options of total electric, eco drive and power drive – all achieved by pressing a handily located button. 

There are two brakes: one conventional and the other another button. 

Reverse, unsettlingly, has a beep like a reversing lorry and there are sounds the car makes which I am not used to in my normal driving.

All these things will appear normal and ordinary in a couple of days and I will have lost my fascination with the little illuminated picture on the dashboard which shows whether the petrol engine or electric motor is powering the car at each moment!

As with all new cars nowadays there is a continuing process of discovery as for example a questing finger unleashes a cup holder provoking it to lurch forward from the dashboard.  My mobile is now connected (allegedly) to the GPS and my automatic road toll payer is now established firmly on the windshield.

The most importantly (with Toni’s help) I have managed to link my iPod to the music system of the car and, at last, my full music library will become available to make the minutes stuck on the motorway in the mornings a little more endurable.

The pure mechanics are becoming a little easier with the difficulties in a fully automatic car being more in my expectations than in any hard to acquire techniques.  My hand still searches for the ghostly gear lever and my left foot seeks for a clutch which is not there; driving is a fully existential experience at the moment!

I must admit that I am enjoying driving at the moment and the linking up of the music system is about to make it much better.  It is good to have something to think about as you watch colleagues unravelling around you.

Please let me not give the impression that the cloth of my character remains unfrayed.  At this stage of the term adjectives like washed out, shabby, shredded and patched seem more appropriate metaphors to describe how I feel in what appears to be an unbearably, unendingly inexorable period of time that we have to stay before we are given time off for good behaviour.

Before we get to the Easter holidays we have the Meeting Which Dare Not State Its Day, to be followed in a sort of encore which Edgar Allan Poe would have been proud to drag from his diseased imagination of two consecutive days of after school meetings of the sort of pointlessness that makes a concept like “vacuous” seem positively crowded.

Today saw external examiners from the Cambridge examination board come and give our kids their oral examinations.  We are actively preparing for the next set of examinations, so that we can enter the next set of figures which seem to have a totemic significance for the powers that we, which is just as well because they have bloody little significance for anyone else!

Still, begone fond thoughts of education, and welcome thoughts about new gadgets which might be found in the car.

Another trip to school tomorrow and who knows what I might discover – and all to the music of an eclectic collection of music being played tune by tune in astonishing juxtapositions.

Times are changing

In the slightly pathetic way that one scrabbles around for the positive, I positively assert that it is getting lighter in the mornings when I am ready to leave.  I am still getting up in darkness, but it is undeniably lighter when I get to the car.  This means that it is getting nearer to the summer, and in the spirit of warm (nay hot) days I have now put on my first short-sleeved shirt, having discarded my unnatural wearing of jumpers, as a gesture of belief in long sunny days.  Roll on summer.

However, we have not yet got to the Easter holidays and the end of June seems a very long way away.  We have eight and a half working days to our long weekend; and the half day has already been reported to the International Court of Human Justice in the Hague – but enough of that, I swore that I would forbear to mention The Horror until the Day itself.  Then after we resume school after our long weekend, it is another nine working days to the Easter Holidays.  Then, after that brief respite, it is an altogether unbearable 49 working days to the end of the course for the pupils.  Not the end of the year for teachers, mind you!  That is another date entirely.  Sigh.

Another night out with Brian and another night of frustration as places chosen as suitable for eating were ruled out because of their ostentatiously closed doors.  We ended up in a beachside Argentine restaurant which, bless it, provided the necessary steaks and pepper sauce which made our visitors squirm with pleasure.

My own spaghetti had a distinctly odd flavour though it certainly was not unpleasant.

Toni did not join us for our repast as he felt that his presence was essential in front of the television watching Barça trounce some foreign team with Messi getting five goals.  The game was playing in the restaurant but alas the television screen was too distant to make out what exactly was happening.

An excellent visit is now over and the obligation is now on our making the voyage south to repay hospitality.

And I have bought a new car.

At least there's chocolate!

The six period day is over. 

Eleven lessons have already been taught this week.  And it’s only Tuesday.  And even more horrifically than that, having wound the lead around the plug for my computer I then left it at home. 

In school without a computer!  The horror! 

On the positive side I did gain a free period during which I started doing some marking, until I found out that I was actually doing somebody else’s!  It does pay to look at the names on the papers that you mark on automatic once you have started the mill going!

I did carry on marking until the tedium got to me and I attempted to get to terms with something else which was far more stimulating.  And then back to the marking.  Which I did complete, so at least I will have the latest results ready for the next meeting. 

I wonder when that is.  I wonder.

And Chocolate Week (incorporating cakes) continues with members of staff shamed into contributing their own offerings to extend a week into a fortnight.  

I hope.

Positive out of negation

My anger over the Saturday pointless meeting ignited spontaneously as soon as I set foot inside the staffroom this morning, more from the quiescence of my colleagues than the absurd imposition of the meeting on such a day in the first place.

The ethos of this place, such as it is, seems to invite total acceptance of one’s lot, with not even the token grumbling which is a healthy sign that members of staff have at least some resistance to the dictates of management.

The meetings qua meetings are bad enough, but when these impositions take up a healthy chunk of a sacrosanct weekend they are truly intolerable.  Except we will tolerate them and I, at least, will feel ashamed that I am knuckling under to what seems to be a malicious gesture of professional contempt.

Right.  That’s it.  I am going to spend the rest of the day moaning and then I am going to shut up.  As indeed I will on the Saturday when a stony faced silence is all that management can expect from me!

I suppose that I should have expected it after the cloudy and dull afternoon that we had yesterday, but this morning dawned bright and sunny with flawlessly blue skies.  So I am sitting typing this with my back to the view with the sunshine streaming around me but, apart from the heat on my back, I can ignore the bright invitation to leave the glumness of the school and return to the spaciousness of Castelldefels and the endless beach and the sea.

It is now that I need to think about the day totals that we have to work until various key holidays and we are even getting to the stage when it is allowable to work out the exact number of days to the end of the school year.  Again.

Today or tomorrow we should hear from Brian about his arrival in Castelldefels and we will have to work out which of the many restaurants in our town is the most suitable for our celebration.  I am tempted to return to El Elefant because that one allows for spicy (which I know he likes) and traditional-ish Spanish which will cover everyone else!

As his visit may cover a few days we will have to have a range of restaurants ready to cater to a variety of tastes!  What fun!

Well, Brian arrived and we started in the Basque restaurant and laced our conversation with Basque wine and an excellent selection of pinchos.  A delightful evening when we were able to catch up on a whole range of news.  We look forward to the next episode on Wednesday when we will go out for another meal!

Today has been remarkable for the fact that, due to an unexpected free I was able to get down to some creative work and do something that I actually enjoyed.  I managed to squeeze in some stimulating work in the middle of my marking which I was able to delay while I waited for confirmation of my mark for a piece of work which would then provide the clear indicator for the level of the other pieces of written work that I have to mark.  This is not an overwhelming amount of work to get through, but I don’t think it is going to be completed tomorrow when I have six periods to teach and therefore a limited amount of free time!  To put it mildly!

Chocolate Week (incorporating cakes) continues apace with two teachers contributing delights today.  A home made sausage like construction with nuts, biscuit and a delicious amount of chocolate was a huge success and a more delicate cake direct from France was equally appreciated.  And I hope that we can look forward to more!

Now to get some rest so that I can get through a hard day.