Back to the grind

My first attempt at a lemon and nut cake from my St Jordi recipe book went down quietly in the staffroom today.  

Those who tried in within my sight were complementary but all commented on how sharp and tangy it was.  That reflects my taste and it certainly is a cake that fights back – as well it should with the juice of three lemons in the glaze on top that is itself topped with their combined zests!  It is also very rich made as it is with butter and eggs and stuffed with nuts and pasas and a generous dash of single malt whiskey.

A mite crumbly for my taste but delicious and one to make again – though it might also be useful to stick more closely to the recipe and translate more than the gist of the thing!

I know that it is Wednesday, but it is a beautiful day and I am in school.  I know that there has been a two-day holiday, but it is a beautiful day and I am in school.  On the positive side I am now nearer to the weekend than I am to the start of the week and there is every chance that the new swimming pool will actually allow some swimmers into it by the end of the week.

I am still resting on my laurels about my immersion in the arctic pool and am still trying to work out why it was that the water was actually cooler on the parts illuminated by the sun than those in shade.  This is surely counter intuitive and against the law of god.  For a completely static container of still water I am at a loss to understand how currents of icy water managed to ambush me as I trawled my increasingly weary and refrigerated way up and down the pool.  There seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason for the sudden shocks as lines of liquid icebergs engulfed my body. 

I am convinced that the sea would not have been quite so vicious, but I have lost my crevice tool for removing sand from unfashionable parts of the body and I simply couldn’t be bothered with all the fuss of walking all that way down to a jellyfish infested (probably) sea.

This week is the false dawn before the full onslaught of examination fever and, of course the meetings consequent upon getting another mark out of ten for the kids.  There is still one Saturday morning meeting left this year but I am spreading my poison around and expect it to be changed – to a Friday evening!  I could still weep when I acknowledge that I have fallen so low in employment terms in this country that I regard that as some sort of triumph.  A triumph at a time when the government is taking 5% of my salary to make up for their own inadequacies in guarding the national budget. 

Damn them all to hell! 

And the sun is shining which makes it all so much worse somehow!

On the other hand one of my colleagues has filled up the Magic Box of Never Ending Chocolate and I have just eaten a British Malteaser and they simply don’t taste the same as the damned foreign ones!

After a fairly awful lesson with 3ESO right at the end of the day that left me tired and drained I lack the gumption even to go out on the third floor and take the sun to which I am justly entitled.

I may have to find the energy to go out and discover new sources of get up and go to find a present for Toni’s sister for her birthday on Saturday.

It’s now past ten o’clock and I am past tiredness.  We did go to a few shops and found nothing suitable for Toni’s sister but we did buy a hair cutter.  I pause here for the chortles to die down and would point out that hair does grow upon my head.  Admittedly the major covering of the pate is of gossamer delicacy but there is a rugged sufficiency at the sides and back.  And that stuff needs to be cut, while the lighter stuff needs more shaving.  Our last shaver has given up the ghost so this was a necessary spending.  It is now charging for the next sixteen hours so that the weekend should be a time for the falling of the hairs.

By the time our purchases and non-purchases had been completed I was in no mood to wait for my food and so, eventually, we made our way to our favourite haunt of La Fusta which undoubtedly serves the best patatas bravas in Castelldefels.

While we were waiting to be served we could not help noticing that the television was tuned to a pay channel which was showing the Barça game.  We stayed until it ended and Barça were able to notch up another win, but alas, it will not be enough to stop Real Madrid from getting the league cup.  Indeed as I type Madrid are two nil up against Athletic Bilbao who are not playing at all well.  If Madrid win this match then they will have clinched the league and, as with the last goal that they scored, there will be an explosion of fireworks around us to celebrate this win.

In Catalonia, celebrating Real Madrid is a direct affront to all things Catalan and Toni will be insufferable moaning and groaning about the “foreigners” by whom we are surrounded!

Madrid are now three nil up and do not look as though they are going to lose so I should stop now before I have to catalogue the victory of our hated rivals!

Holiday gone!

“Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami; “The Escape” by Robert Muchamore; “Young Sherlock Holmes – Red Leech” by Andrew Lane; “The Scorch Trials” by James Dashner; “Night Rise” by Anthony Horowitz

What a lazy writer I have been.  A weekend and two days of holiday and not a key has been hit by my fingertips – but I have been reading.  All of the above have been (with different degrees of greed) consumed by my good self.

Here are the opening sentences of the books in no particular order.

1.              She spoke to him before the world fell apart.

2.              As a baby Marc Kilgour had been abandoned between two stone flower pots on the platform at Beauvais station, sixty kilometres north of Paris.”

3.              “So you’re all set for money, then?” the boy named Crow asks in his characteristically sluggish voice.

4.              James Hillager thought he was hallucinating when he first saw the giant leech.

5.              The man in the black limousine had already circled the theatre once.

Some of the above read like responses to an exercise put forward by an uninspiring Creative Writing teacher.

However, the most surprising read was the one with the best title, “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami, an International Best Seller and much recommended by a colleague who loaned it to me – though he was not sure about the ending.  I have long given up trying to understand what “International Bet Seller” means, but if this book is one then I have not idea whatsoever what appeals to the great General Public.

This novel is part fable, part historical mystery, part fantasy, part philosophy and lots of other parts that I can’t be bothered to list.  It seemed to me to be a self indulgent, over long mishmash of a few of short stories that the author thought would blend together nicely – well, they don’t.  The references to Culture (the capital is intentional and ironic) are irritating at best and embarrassing at worst.  Surely all writers know that you quote Yeats at your absolute peril!

“The Escape” by Robert Muchamore set in World War Two during the occupation of Paris was much more successful; it tried less but was confident about its narrative structure and it told a rattling good yarn.  It was undemanding and at times seemed like an updated version of the Famous Five with serious bits added.  Perhaps I liked it as there was a ship called The Cardiff Bay in it, but its mixture of war, spies and child courage is a sure fire page turner.

The recent BBC award winning series based on a youthful Sherlock Holmes has spawned other spin-offs and “Young Sherlock Holmes – Red Leech” by Andrew Lane seems to be one of them.  This is a workmanlike story where little history lessons are given along the way to back up a story which takes in the conceit of Lincoln’s assassin being alive and at the centre of a conspiracy of disgruntled Confederates.  There are some nice touches which try to fill in the back-story of elements in the real Sherlock Holmes stories but it is really a constant exercise in the willing suspension of disbelief as one impossible event is piled on top of another.  But all in the name of good clean fun!

“The Scorch Trials” by James Dashner was an exercise in poor taste, using a vague back-story of global catastrophe to justify graphic descriptions of children being killed, maimed and tortured by an organization crassly named WICKED.  But, wouldn’t you just know it, one character reaffirms that “WICKED is good” just as we get to the end of this volume which leads seamlessly into the next rip-off paperback.

Horowitz is a safe pair of hands and this fantasy novel, “Night Rise” is part of a series in which Good (five children) battle against the Old Ones (evil) who are trying to get back into the world through a Gate and so on.  A simple reading of “The Trial” and watching “The Cube” and any form of inexplicable, arbitrary violence is allowable in a moneymaking enterprise.  Readable but unpleasant.

The opening sentences were: “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami (3); “The Escape” by Robert Muchamore (2); “Young Sherlock Holmes – Red Leech” by Andrew Lane (4); “The Scorch Trials” by James Dashner (1); “Night Rise” by Anthony Horowitz (5).

There have been two days of sunshine during this little holiday and I have turned a more acceptable shade of cream, but I am still way behind the dark brown that is always my goal!

On balance this has been a good break: plenty of reading; good meals; Family visit; moan with a friend; making a cake from my recipe book of St Jordi and, most important, my first dip in the pool.

I cannot pretend that the water was anything other than cold, but it was not the unbearable cold where you can feel your body shutting down in shock.  I did my usual stint of lengths and felt much better afterwards.

The club I joined on the understanding that their new pool would be open in a couple of weeks has still not opened but the last time I visited it I was assured that it would be open in days rather than weeks.  I of course believed them, though I could hear my colleagues voice in the background asking, in a world-weary way, just how long I had lived in Spain!  I live, as always, in hope.

As I am already a member of Castelldefels Municipal Pool you might be wondering just why I need to belong to another pool.  The answer lies in proximity.  I have to make a special effort to go to the Municipal pool but this “new” one is next to the British School of Barcelona and is therefore virtually on my doorstep.  It is virtually on my way home and I therefore have no justifiable excuse not to go to it.

I have also paid to use the Padel (sic) facilities of the place.  Padel is a mixture of tennis and squash played on a court boxed in with glass walls.  It looks interesting and I might well invest in some new kit and a racquet or bat or whatever it is that one uses to play the game.

I also intend to become a user of the Olympic Canal and get some rowing in.  I remember with pleasure my occasional forays into the lake in Roath Park and I would like to mess about on a boat again!

I am looking forward to Summer this year.

I am not looking forward to going back to school tomorrow though one must remember that Wednesday is the “tipping day” when one will be nearer to the weekend than the start of the week.  And we have had two of my worst days off: eleven periods and a lunch duty gone!

I will have to calculate exactly how many days are left before the end of the course and the departure of the kiddiewinks.

Keep ‘em rolling on!

Unexpected relief

In the bumbling way that I have with these things, I have just discovered that Monday and Tuesday of next week are days off.  I think at the back of my mind I realized that May Day was going to be a holiday but I don’t think I fully realized that there would be an extra day.  So, with the weekend this makes four clear days with no school.

I don’t know whether it is better to look forward to such a break or have it sneak up on one, but that is what has happened with the result that I am already beginning to resent the fact that I have to go into school tomorrow to do the day to get the “holiday” started!

I do have a vast amount of marking to cope with which may well have to be left to this holiday and then, almost as soon as we come back the next examination season starts with the consequent marking just before the next slew of meetings to talk about that marking.  All of this marking at least is leading towards the end of term.  We are going in the right direction!

There was little talk of the reduction in wages which speaks volumes for the attitude of colleagues in Spain at the moment.  I find it very depressing, but not really surprising.  The details are still shockingly unclear and there doesn’t seem to be the urgency to find out what exactly is going to happen!

I have started to read the little cache of books which I managed to acquire during our Sant Jordi celebrations from the bookseller.

The first volume that I read today was Kaimira: The Sky Village by Monk and Nigel Ashland.  This is a dystopian future in which there has been a disastrous war which has resulted in a constant battle between men, beasts and mecks (intelligent machines which had turned against their human masters) – so far so ordinary.  The USP of this book for teenagers is the construction of a Sky Village above China which comprises a collection of hot air balloons strung together linked by tightropes to form a moving living area.  The story is given a twist by some of the characters having biological and genetic alterations which give them a link with the beasts and machines.

The narrative is fast moving and uses the idea of science gone mad to inform some of the action.  It is basically an adventure story with augmented teenagers saving the day.  There is a forbidden interactive computer with a trapped evil spirit in the form of a computer which provides the link into the next volume in this series.  A good, but not great read.

David has also promised to loan me a book over the holidays.

A long day

I did consider wearing a black tie today to match the mood of depression I feel waiting to hear how much money will be taken out of my wages this June.  No one has any idea how much this is going to be and no one, apart from my good self, seems to have considered just what sum of money is going to be regarded by the rapacious government as the target from which the expropriation will be made. 

The devil, as they say is in the detail and few around me have even tiptoed towards wondering just what the “detail” might actually be.  They seem to be waiting for our paternalistic management to let us know what is going to happen as if we have no say in the matter. 

The fatalism that informs the lack of action in this place is truly depressing and there is a sort of decorum that precludes uncomfortable questioning.  It reminds me of the sort of mindless stiff-upper-lipism of the stereotypical stalwart English solider refusing to stoop behind cover to avoid flying bullets, the “Just not done, old chap!” approach that achieves nothing but picturesque, and messy, deaths. 

You can see the up-beat sort of mood that I am in approaching this meeting!  Which is, of course, after school so that we learn about how much we are not earning in our own time, or think of it as unpaid overtime to learn how much worse off your are.  I must stop this because this can only lead to mindless violence!

It now appears that somebody is absent.  Chaos!  As always.  And my day (which is “only” 4 periods long for the first time this week) is now under threat.  And we have to go up to Terrassa this evening for one of the nephew’s Name Day.  I only hope that we do not have to stay to watch Real Madrid as I will be totally exhausted by the time I get home bearing in mind that I will have an 8.15 am start to my teaching the following day.

The failure of Barça to reach the final of the Champions Cup has cast a further pall over the day and it even seems to have percolated into the consciousness of Real Madrid fans who are less than optimistic about their chances of success this evening.  All in all this will be a good week to look back on as having happened in the past rather than something to live through in the present.  As the old dependable assembly topic has it, “This too will pass!”

There is of course one thing guaranteed to make me feel more positive and that is the reading of books.  Unfortunately the books that I inveigled out of the bookseller who was here for Sant Jordi are in the other building.  But perhaps it is worth a journey just to do something reasonable and not connected with money and Barça!

The absent teacher did result in my being directed towards a class in my free period but the “other” teacher of the subject decided to take the two small groups together and thus let me preserve my free!  At last something positive in this most depressing of days.

Just off to bed after toasting Real Madrid’s lost fortune being beaten on penalties at the end of their semi-final battle in the Champions Cup.  I will not describe the scenes on jollity in one particular Catalan household as the final goal was slammed home and Madrid were out!  Sad.

Tomorrow I must write out the questions that I do not think were answered in the meeting about the reduction in our wages after school today.

Always something to do!

Not good!

A cold depressing morning, but one which appears to be lightening – which is more than I can say for my mood!

The meeting tomorrow when we are going to be told how much poorer we are (the use of the present tense is appropriate even though the money is not going to be stolen until the end of June) should be the opportunity for absolute fury to be expressed. 

Money, after all was the one element in life which united all teacher unions in howls of anguish – even the scab ones.  This was something that was real and immediate and when people spoke about it there was real passion in what they said! 

But what about the people I teach with now?  I think that they will be well behaved and docile - and I will feel like weeping!  Perhaps I am doing them an injustice and they will rise up in justified indignation.  Perhaps!

Meanwhile in the south (or possibly west) the weather (or east now I come to think about it) looks reasonable whereas where we are it looks as though it is straining to rain. 

You have to understand that my unrelenting negativity is fuelled by the horrible fact that I have to teach six lessons today. 

I know that I bang on about this every week but every week it is as if it is happening for the first time and my flesh crawls with the stomach churning anticipation of a day spent scurrying from building to building and culminating with two solid hours at the end of the day with a class of 3ESO. 

I am getting paid less by the day as the government snatches more tax and inflation takes the rest!

Though planning my extensive opera visits for next year by going through the complex prospectus last night perhaps gives the lie to my absolute indigence!

The six periods are done and I am exhausted but there is no time to relax, as I have to get in gear to support Barça in their second round game against Chelsea.  


They start the game one goal down and I think that they have a lot to do and I have just seen the team and, almost for the first time in my life, I have an opinion about the players that Pep is using and the formation that he has decided on!  I am not at all convinced by his decisions and I think that it has sealed the fate of the team and they will not be going to the final.  I hope that I am wrong but I am shocked at the dispositions of the players.  But there again, what the hell do I know about anything connected with football!

The line-up I saw was obviously speculation and there was a much more sensible disposition for the start of the game.  The first half has been gripping with Barça scoring twice but, disastrously Chelsea scored just before half time and that means that the score line is level but Chelsea will win on away goals if this score stands.  Things are tense here in Castelldefels as we wait for the second half to start!

And here we go!  The second half!

Bloody disaster!  


Even Torres scored!  


Bloody disaster!  


Drogba has become my pet hatred; he is a repulsive player, unsporting and vile.  His ostentatious praying was also deeply offensive and indeed hypocritical given the way he plays.  Chelsea has my malediction as it goes into the final.

Messi was awful and the team with god knows how much possession did little or nothing.  Messi’s missed penalty spelt the death of Barça’s hopes.  Considering how little I really like football I am shocked at how depressed I feel.  It was awful and, together with the crap display of football that Barça served up for the Barça v. Real Madrid game it has been a bad time for fans – and even for me!

Never mind, I can think about tomorrow and the money which is going to be snatched from my salary. 

A truly comforting thought.