The days after!

Now, in the tranquil calm of the early evening I can look back over a day spent in demeaning but necessary chores.  “Demeaning” is not, of course, the right word – it’s just that I sometimes like to think of myself living above such mundane necessities as ironing, sweeping, clothes washing, tidying, rubbish gathering, shoe cleaning, door sponging, mat beating – and all the other –ing words which require quotidian physical effort.  Essential I know, but I am always defeated by the inescapable fact that you have to do them all over and over again.

This “activity” is tradition for me at the start of a major holiday – and what is more major than my (sixth?) retirement!  And I feel that I have achieved an –ing task worthy of such an occasion.

We have hard water of such toughness that I am surprised that it ever makes it out of the taps.  This means that anything that uses water rapidly takes on the appearance of having been set on some sort of coral reef as mineral accretions soon limit the life and certainly challenge the appearance of any machine that uses water.  Such a machine is one of our toilets.

I realise that last line gives the impression that we either have en suite bathrooms to every space in the house or that we are living in a public urinal.  Neither is true, so perhaps I should have said “the other” toilet.  Just above the bend inside the bowl and below the water line the build up of extraneous roughcast is most unsightly.  This mineral deposit has the tenacity of superglue and the strength of carbon steel.

Unbeknownst to Toni, for it is in his bathroom, I have been running a series of extended scientific experiments when he periodically decamps to Terrassa to watch his nephew play in increasingly prestigious juvenile football teams.  As his present new team is going to meet one of Barça’s junior teams I thought that it merited a Renewed Effort to get rid of the barnacle-like eruptions on the erstwhile smooth porcelain surface.

You have to understand that the calcium has resisted bleach and a whole range and variety of squirts, drips and sprays from proprietary toilet cleansers. I have even; donning rather fetching rubber gloves for the occasion, used wire wool – which I hasten to say that I discarded at the end of the abortive attempt to get the stuff to flake away.

I comforted myself, after all my efforts, with the saving lie that “it looked a bit better” but even I couldn’t convince myself that I had approached anything like success.

A colleague having recommended vinegar and/or bicarbonate of soda I called into Lidl after depositing Toni in Terrassa and bought a bottle of vinegar.  Admittedly it was apple vinegar, but I was sure that the principle was the same.

I forced the water away with a deftly wielded toilet brush and then applied the vinegar.  Any hopes that I had that there would be a fizzing reaction when the acidity of the vinegar hit the carbonate nature of the accretion was dashed immediately, but never despairing I applied half a bottle and left it to soak.  Overnight.

The morning did not bring shining whiteness, but again, using brute force and the other end of the toilet brush flakes, positive flakes were seen to detach themselves.  Buoyed up with incurable optimism I hit the growth with my second weapon, anti-calcium water softener tablets.  These (I used three) did fizz up in a most satisfactory manner and, with more force and an eventual second application I have now achieved something approaching pristininity – and yes, I do know that word doesn’t exist, but after all the effort that I have put in I think that I am entitled to a neologism of my own!

The bed is made, the path is swept, the tearoom is tidy, things and washed and ironed and I am bloody exhausted.

By way of relaxation I read a short book I bought when I was last in Tesco in Cardiff, “The Welsh National Anthem - its story, its meaning “ by Sion T Jobbins.  This is a polemical little screed which insults everyone who doesn’t speak Welsh.  It did however afford me a moment of pleasure when I discovered (as surely I must have been told sometime in the past) that the first public performance of “Mae hen wald fy nhadau” was in Tabor Chapel in Maesteg!  A place that I have passed time without number when visiting my grandparents. 

I have a little painting of a chapel in Merthyr by Kernick which reminds me of Wales and the nonconformist tradition and, although Tabor is a little more ornate than the chapel in my paining it is near enough for me now to associate the national anthem with it each time I pass!

Early night and quick early swim in the pool with water the temperature of which was just short of certain heart failure this morning.  A lazy time sitting in the sun and cloud listening to the sequence of music determined by my iPhone juxtaposing Stravinsky and “The Green Berets”!

Up to Terrassa for lunch and return to what will be a re-run of World War II as the night of San Juan advances.  Perhaps I will saunter along the Paseo and watch families and groups of friends settle down for a night of drinking!  It only happens on this particular night and it is always a shock as you see unexpected revelry involving alcohol and Catalans!  The authorities have banned fires on the beach – which were a tradition part of the night – though this does not stop everyone.  I hope there are fireworks so that I can attempt the Perfect Firework Shot which has, so far eluded me.

As the day advances the results of all the little booths selling the equivalent of penny bangers will be clearly heard and my only hope is that the sequences of explosions will finally put pay to the local infestation of rat dogs which emasculated men take for walks on thin strings in this area.  Their hearts must be the size of stunted peas and therefore the mere sound waves should surely do for them!  My heartfelt prayers for their destruction are never met and the bug-eyed, squeaking monstrosities do their impressions of Futurist Paintings as their twig legs blur as they try and keep up with a slow walking pace.  God rot the lot of them!

And then there are the kids.  On this long, long night they are obviously allowed to stay up even later than normal.  OK, Castelldefels is a seaside resort and when on holiday kids are given leeway.  Far too much leeway from a British point of view, but let it pass.  So not only will be have sporadic explosions but also the constant screaming of indefatigable children.  God rot them too.  Though they do need to survive and thrive so that their taxes can pay my pension.  Though, as it happens not in this country, so, as far as I can see they are a completely unnecessary luxury which, in these times of frugality, we can surely do without!

Tomorrow is a Bank Holiday and therefore my most recent retirement cannot start until the Tuesday.  However, even though I am not entitled to the couple of months off with pay that my colleagues who have worked throughout the year are entitled to, I find that I have had 14 days paid holiday pay allocated to me so my actual (most recent) retirement starts in the second week of August.  I will contain myself in patience until then and have a modest celebration!

Now off to a distant lunch.

The Real End Days!

Two hours on the trot with the 1ESO was not necessarily the best way to start the day. 

The first part of the lesson was going in to the Exhibition which is mounted by the Art Department each year and that was excellent – though we had to get in in a rather roundabout way as the doors were locked.  And the film wasn’t working because everything was switched off and . . . but the content made up for everything. 

The kids, given a relatively short time to take it all in, seemed pleased by the visit and I made them write illustrated letters of appreciation to Suzanne on their computers.  As someone who has had to live on benign neglect as far as her efforts have been concerned, she is going to have the shock of her life!

One of the less able, but obviously more intuitive children asked, perceptively that wouldn’t Suzanne suspect that I had incited them to this act of simple courtesy!  She will know immediately!  But I suppose that it is a sign of maturity to understand that knowing this is not to negate the positive effects!  They have much to learn.  Which is why they are in school, of course.

The timetable has been suspended for today and after my two hour stint with the 1ESO and the quid pro quo being that my time with 3ESO was taken away, I found myself with nothing that I had to do until almost 4.00 pm.  A nod, as they say, being as good as a laugh to a dumb hyena, so I departed in faith and fear and went out to lunch with Toni.

And very pleasant it was too – and this time both of us had a decent meal, apart from one false choice on Toni’s part involving the dreaded cheese, which of course worked in my favour and gave me a tasty extra morsel.

I am now back in school waiting to do my bit in a darkened room keeping recalcitrant schoolchildren from wrecking the furniture by showing them a film.  So, my last teaching lesson in my career will be babysitting!  I am sure that there is a moral to be drawn from that somewhere, but I will leave it for others to do the drawing of it!

So I wait.  Tomorrow the Big Day when the comedy will be over

I suppose, looking on the bright side, I could not have had a better “lesson” to end my career than babysitting a group of Year 7 pupils on the penultimate day of term at the end of that day – because it couldn’t have been worse.

Over thirty years of teaching experience and I was struggling to control a small group of off their heads students!  If nothing else it gives scaffolding to my resolve to give up.  Teaching I mean!  Though at the end of the day as I walked, shell-shocked from the classroom, I was probably ready to give up more!

When I went back to the staffroom I met other veterans of the Year 7 Campaign, all equally traumatized.  Thank god I am not going to have to cope with this year after they come back refreshed revitalized and ready for further frays.  My colleagues are, very sincerely, welcome to them.  And any residual ideas of the “odd day” of supply vanished in a spasm of concentrated horror at just how bad young people can be.  They are now, officially, someone else’s problem!

As another teacher said in rather more trying circumstances, “It is finished!”  My contract is ended, the money is in the bank and I don’t have to go back.  The Third Floor beckons and the OU material is begging to be studied and assimilated.

The “fiesta” was rather more subdued than usual with far fewer parents turning up – or so it seemed.  The Tóm-bola as opposed to the Tom-bóla was its usual odd self.  There is no competition in this event and the only amusement it affords is watching rich people deliberate over spending small amounts of money for a good cause.

The meal was excellent and the pleasing effects of the Cava Sangria were augmented by the stimulating conversation of my colleagues.  The speeches came and went with three colleagues being honoured for their joint efforts in giving three-quarters of a century of service to the school!

The best speech was given by a redoubtable Scottish lady who commandeered the microphone and, ignoring the increasingly hatchet faced directora regaled the company with a lively and amusing Cava-fuelled speech which almost ended in a tug or war over the microphone, but she won and continued to great applause!

The actual end was a series of kisses and hugs and that was it.  A career over and the spacious days of summer to look forward to.

Home and a swim: a clear indication of how the immediate future should pan out!

In the Old Days, after the drunken debauch that the end of the summer term usually entailed, I did all those things that the pressure of work precluded my completing.

There will be the ceremonial packing of the ties; the putting away the white shirts and folding the black socks.  The black shoes will be put back in their accustomed places and await their regeneration for funerals, weddings, operas and official occasions.

The subscription to The Guardian will be reactivated and my daily drive to the swimming pool will recommence.

Life without Institutional Education begins!

In school alone-ish!

The awful weather yesterday has given way to a bright sunny day today. 

Wonderful! 

This means that all the school trips planned for today can take place and the “customers” will all be somewhere else, leaving my good self and a selected and choice few in glorious isolation in a virtually empty school. 

Allegedly one of my pupils will take her English exam having pleaded incapacity merely because her arm was broken.  Wimp!  The interesting aspect of this delay is that she deemed herself perfectly capable of doing other exams, it was only with the English one that she felt the necessity of a few more days revision.  The minds of our kiddiewinks are beyond comprehension – thank god!

I was summoned during the day to the Management where the gathered worthies reminded me that I was about to depart (very significant that!) and thanked me effusively for my help during the past months.

The reality is, I am sure, that they will be relatively glad to see me go.  I have done my own thing to a certain extent and rejected the bone rotting excesses of meetings, lunch duty, library duty, playground duty and virtually everything else that has little to do with the actual work of a teacher!  I have gone home when I am not teaching and have generally voiced opinions which classify me as a terminally loose cannon!

Two more days!

An unexpected release this afternoon, as I was encouraged to go after I had put my results into the computer.  This is a sweetener for tomorrow when I am going to be used to cover classes in the Day of Chaos which is the penultimate day of school.  They have made damn sure that I am doing something at the start of the day and at the very end!  Nothing is for nothing!

There is marking that I am supposed to do – but who, but the most fanatical students, is going to hassle me for work when the lure of the summer holidays is uppermost in their minds!

Roll on!

As does the corruption and maladministration in this beleaguered country.

The Royal Family (for whom I have utter contempt) have been implicated in a series of scandals the latest of which concerns the Infanta who was the lucky (one almost might say unique) recipient of a massive error in her favour from the tax people.  It turns out that the “error” is so unlikely that the odds of its actually being an “error” are something like ten billion trillion to one.  We have been told that there is more likelihood of the Infanta being hit by a meteorite than this “error” actually being legitimate.  The repulsive puppet-like nasal idiot who apparently is actually a minister (!) airily keeps repeating the “error” theory in spite of the fact that he has no credibility whatsoever.  And that is because this bunch of shit-smeared chisellers who form our government don’t give a damn about what people think.  They insult our intelligences by their tissue thin “explanations” and as damning fact after damning fact piles up against them they emulate the Blitz mentality and “Keep Calm and Carry On!”  The completely untenable position of the government has gone well beyond the realms of ordinary fantasy and they are now living in some sort of Surrealistic Escher Universe where presumably their pathetic lies can be accepted as truth.  This country does not, it really does not, deserve this crew of self-aggrandizing wasters.  I do not like them.

The opposition are not much better, but compared to the present holders of office they are like unto the driven snow!

The water in the pool has now warmed up so that it is not a heart-stopping experience when skin touches that combination of oxygen and hydrogen lurking beyond the back gate.  I had an invigorating plunge this afternoon to celebrate the “afternoon off” after waiting the customary hour after having a meal in the Maratim.  I experimented a little by trying the ox tail – rich, oily and delicious.  As is usual my meal was excellent and Toni’s mediocre; that’s how the bread crumbles!

A little light tidying, the minimum of preparation for the morrow and perhaps getting the letter for my Financial Advisor ready that he has been asking for (without much success) for some time.  Perhaps one of the last courtesies that the School on the Hill can afford me is to post it off to Wales for me!

Time is running!

Me?

The axe has fallen!

In a pleasingly ambiguous and confused conversation I was “asked” if I “wouldn’t mind” staying on for Thursday afternoon to help cover classes which were going to be teacherless because of the evaluation meetings that would stretch their weary length along through the periods before the end of school and for a considerable time afterwards.  I could hardly say no.  Well, of course I could, after all I am virtually untouchable with only four days to go, but professional etiquette demands a certain restraint!

Friday is the fin de curso and is a day of general chaos.  I suppose that I do not need to be there, but again it would be expedient for me to give formal goodbyes as I finish my time in the School on the Hill.

Looking back it seems like an unbroken time that I actually spent there, in spite of the fact that my teaching is actually divided into four or five distinct contractual periods.  It remains to be seen if this last stint of work actually entitles me to anything of the money that I have paid in to a scheme from which, in the ordinary course of events, I am going to get nothing. 

Unfortunately I am not (and indeed never will be) a member of the odious ruling PP party and they are the ones, according to a television programme last night, who spend vast sums on the purchase of ham, trips, booze, private jets, helicopters, ties, suits, and lots of “presents” while publically they preach the sort of austerity and retrenchment that they flamboyantly do not practice themselves when they think that the gullible fools (as they obviously consider the electorate) who voted for them cannot see!

The pension payments that I have made in Spain will produce nothing for me, as you have to work for at least 15 years before you get anything.  Irene is finding this out and is now self-employed in order to boost her years of countable service.  I, however, get nothing.  Pay, yes – but pay out, no!

I am still waiting for my first TMA of the new OU course to be returned, and am a little apprehensive about the tutor’s response.  There was little opportunity for originality and it was far more a question of arrangement than research.  I am, however enjoying this course more than the first, but my enthusiasm is going to be tested by the immanent participation in the Wiki where a group of we students have to work together to produce a finished piece of written work which is composed on the Internet in the form of a web page. 

The obvious difficulties of trying to get a very disparate group of students to produce something which is coherent is exacerbated by the problem of language where not all of us are native English speakers and tactful rewriting is not always possible.

The work will also take place during the height of summer when half the people may well be elsewhere and not be in the frame of mind to do something academic.  The cut off date is the 1^st of August, which gives you some idea about how difficult it is going to be to coordinate and execute.  Ah well, something else to worry about in due course in the course.

I think that my final grade for TMAs has already been compromised by this first one and the Wiki is something in which it is notoriously hard to gain a decent pass, so that only leaves me with the last TMA to recoup my status.  Sigh!

We have now got on to relics and reliquaries and, this being the OU, their wider significance.  Philip II gets a high place not only because of his almost unrivalled collection of religious bits, pieces and odd body parts (including El Escorial which itself might be regarded as a giant reliquary) but also because of the way he is perceived to have used them.  They became a way in which he could give material form to an abstract vision not only of himself as a king but also to his House as a dynasty.

It is strangely comforting to consider that there are probably around a thousand people musing on the same sort of ideas at the same sort of time up and down Britain and across the continent.  A coterie sharing increasingly esoteric knowledge – I love it!

I have finally changed my shower curtain: shamed into that action by the presence of various petrie dish clutching scientists asking for samples from the more extravagant and unsavoury mould colonies established on its lower fringes.  As the mould was about to be granted nation status by the UN I thought it was time for a little bacterial genocide.  There is now a new curtain in place and the old one has been consigned to the washing machine for a “last chance cleansing opportunity” before being consigned to oblivion.

We have taken the opportunity to purchase two other curtains for the other bathroom and for the living room as well as a multi-coloured set of plastic drawers for the “tea room” – I am always amazed how spending a relatively small amount of money has a disproportionate effect on the look of things!

I do have to do some work this evening to get the remaining results into some sort of order so that I can get them into the system tomorrow.  Somehow.

My drama classes continue their chaotic way with four or five memory sticks doing the rounds for kids to download their film clips and make something of them with the programs they have on their computers.  My star pupil is fanatically devoted to producing something and assures me that I will get something soon.  It would be nice to see some sort of end result from all our efforts – but, as I keep reminding them, “process is all!”

Three days to go!