Sniff!

The very weather seems to be conspiring against me when it comes to the necessity of revision.  The weather has been delightful and has encouraged me out on to the Third Floor where the spirit of review is willing, but the fleshly succumbing in a horizontal mode to our nearest star is an innate weakness in me!  However, I am buckling up my intellectual sinews and attempting to make an effort to get down to it in earnest.

It was a salutary reminder of reality that a friend when told that the exam was on the 10^th of October said, “Oh, yes, in a fortnight!”  Clinical, accurate and frightening.  I remain to discover if this wake-up call inspires me to productive action!

I have been studying the past examination paper that we have been given to calm our nerves.  It does appear that I will not be able to bluff my way through this one and they will require a fair amount of specific information – I may even have to remember the exact dates of King Philip II of my adopted country, as he and El Escorial are key elements in the discussion of relics that I intend to have on the 10^th of October in The British Council!  Or at least one of them – god alone knows what the other two “discussions” are going to about.

Going on the last examination, I fully expect there to be some sort of discriminatory questions (aka “trick” questions) which will send despair and confusion into the minds of the hapless writers attempting to give coherent responses.  Having learned my lesson from The Last Essay the answers that I write will be the result of assiduous mining of the phrasing of the question itself – and liberally sprinkled with OU key words!

The next course has virtually started with much writing of haiku on the pre-start forum.  And no, I am not going to write out mine – though they were of surpassing exquisiteness!

I have also been allocated a tutor, which is another step towards the start of the course, though the web site only opens officially tomorrow.  The course is not supposed to start until the 5^th, though if the last one is anything to go by we will be expected to work from the first day of the open forum and not wait for the official opening.  Which is a pity, because I will be doing “other things” and will not be able to play as full a part in the opening as I would like.  Although as this course is creative writing I could always channel my paranoia about the examination into art!

I have just received “The Blunders of our Governments” by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, a disconcerting explanation of just how wasteful and idiotic governments can be with our money.  The authors try and be fair saying that as governments go ours is not too bad; and as far as corruption is concerned the sorry tale of MPs expenses was headline news because such stories are not everyday in our country.  In Spain, however  . . .

The stories of waste are relayed with a prose style which is easy to read and quite colloquial at times and injects a note of humour into stories which would otherwise make you weep!  At the moment I am reading about the abortive introduction of ID cards.  I have already sighed my way through the fiasco of the Millennium Dome; the centralization of records in the NHS; the horror of the PPP of the London Underground; Black Wednesday and, my personal favourite The Poll Tax.  This volume will sit proudly beside my “Great Planning Disasters” book which also makes salutary reading.  In the introductory chapters it was also nice to get a nod to Profumo and Blue Streak which are scandals just at the limit of my political memory!

Even though the weather is still reasonable and sunny, my body has decided that it is well on towards the winter season and I have developed a stinking cold!  The only good thing that I can say about it is that this morning I was able to stay in bed for an extra hour or so feeling sorry for myself rather than getting up and going to school at the crack of dawn.  Because I would have gone to school and felt rotten for the whole of the day.  Which I did at home, but it is much more restful and numerous cups of tea made it all appear much more civilized.

Tomorrow more revision.

Grow, damn you!

There comes a point in every houseplant’s life when you have to say enough is enough.  Or, there is the strategy of accepting that a dozen leaves on a couple of stems is as good as it is going to get and that is OK.

I do remember that the plant on the dining table used to have flowers.  They were not wholesome British-type flowers with visible centre bits and radiating petals of a bracing and straightforward colour.  No, this plant was more of the cheaper end of the orchid-like plants; possibly a weed from one of the more exotic locations where temperature encouraged growth and depressed wages.  Who knows.  I chose it because it was vertical, cheap and had interestingly linen-white flowers of simple convolution.

But the flowers are very much a thing of the past and the leaves of the plant are of that evergreen-looking stasis variety where it is difficult to tell if they are alive or dead.  I do however push a few drops of water (and the odd cup of cold tea) its way from time to time to show that I care. 

There is a drooping, crinkled offshoot of a more virulent green - part of which looks as though it is literally unfolding – which would seem to suggest that there is something botanical stirring which might be worth tying to the slender stick which keeps the main part upright.

I do remember that Ingrid always had the knack of making any plant that I took down to Devon have a life well beyond the expectations of the shops in which I bought them!  One orchid I bought her became more of a hardy perennial than the delicately elusive whiff of strange beauty that is was for others.

I am inclined to think that the plant is merely taunting me with non-death rather than suggesting that it can bloom again.  But I will persevere and who knows, in the near future I may be using my Grown Up Camera to record its splendour!  Floreat flower!

Toni is now in Terrassa watching, so I am informed, his five-year-old nephew play his first game of club football as a striker.  I am in Castelldefels.  There are some things that . . . And watching five year olds play football is one of them.

Lunch was a sort of bolognaise with fresh pasta with what felt like chicken paste but which cooked up into something approaching mince.  Very nice it was too, through there was far too much of it and I felt that I had done a Paul or a Clarrie and cooked for too many people who were not there.  In a fit of economic intelligence I have saved the remains and will add curry powder and rice to make an entirely different meal tomorrow!  And I will add garlic, which I now realise I ignored completely in my gastronomic spurt!

Revision is not progressing with anything like the rigor which exists in my mind.  I think the basic trouble is two-fold: firstly, I am far too interested in what I am supposed to learn and find myself getting carried away in the reading of it rather than the learning; and secondly with the Disaster of the Third Essay I am now unable to gain the highest grade for the course.  I didn’t fail you understand, I was 33% higher than a fail mark, but I was 6% away from getting the grade I wanted for the writing.  And if you don’t get equal excellence in writing and examination then you merely “pass” the course.  Ah well, it is not as if these first level courses count for the final class of degree, so there is time to get my mind back into the OU groove and follow the instructions in the way that I know that I should have done.  

And revise thoroughly.

I am sure that it is in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” that kids get sent to a house owned by a professor/relative and guarded by a protective Housekeeper who tells the children that they need to be quite because a Grown Up is working.  When I read this (only child, always reading) I felt that this was totally unfair to children who, obviously, did not make that much noise and the “seen but not heard” slur was totally unjustified.

I am British.  I now live in Spain.  I am that Grown Up.  And the purchase of a high-powered rifle with telescopic sights seems more and more attractive as the howling, wailing Banshees who live in the houses two pools away cry aloud for destruction!  As they are Spanish children they all follow their national stereotypes and scream at each other simultaneously.  What their parents do, apart from fill their ears with liquid wax and weep, I do not know – but they certainly to do not restrict the decibels in any way, shape or form. 

God rot them!

Though they have now, it being dark, gone in – and the silence is wonderful.  Isn’t there a heresy that posits that good must be counterbalanced by evil and that as they are co-eternal and co-created one cannot be assumed to be better than the other, in the sense that evil needs to exist so that we can appreciate good?  Probably the ever-loving Roman church preached a crusade and extirpated such heresy with sword and fire, but only in the name of love.  Perhaps those revoltingly obtrusive kids were necessary to make me appreciate the finer delights of silence.  It is the concept of necessary evil!

Tomorrow Toni stays in Terrassa and that is supposed to be the ideal opportunity for me to get Iconoclasm nailed, so to speak.  I fully intend to write an answer on this theme as long as I can get the spelling of the fourth reformer (i.e. not Luther, Calvin or Zwingli, but the one beginning with M) firmly in my memory.  And did I know that Calvin was French?  Always learning!

And now I think I shall have recourse to my iPad not only to download the new operating system which I like on my iPhone, but also to indulge a little in the BBC programmes that are available at the monthly subscription that we distant Brits have to pay. 

One should always try and get one’s money’s worth!

Reality bites!

The essay is back!  With a mark not quite what I wanted. 

Our tutor has managed to stick to the working day limit for return of our work in spite of the fact that she was bereft of phone and wi-fi and therefore blind, deaf and disabled in modern OU terms! 

We have a mark and a short summative comment but no detailed response to the essay, but it at least marks closure on the written part of the course and I am now able to concentrate fully on revision.

I collected my new course material from the Post Office where I waited in a queue with a suspiciously large number of people collecting their undelivered packages as well!

At least I now have the stuff well before the opening date for the Forum for the course and well, well before the actual start date.  The Big Red Course Book is sitting on the table as I type, together with a Study Guide and various DVDs.  And I must resist temptation and wait until the requisite time before I start indulging myself!  I have my work to do on the present course working up to the examination on the 10^th of October and my collaboration with the new course from the 5^th of October will, of necessity be limited to “off-duty” moments when not revising.

The rain threatened for today has not yet washed the streets so I am considering throwing caution to the wind and rejecting a coat for by drink with Suzanne.

And I am not going to resist temptation, in spite of what I have just written and I am going to glut myself on the study guide.  So there!

What I actually read was the assessment guide.  A dose of reality to get you going!  The nitty-gritty of what will get marks and what will regarded as anathema.  The OU at its soulfully soulless best.  Kind words with hard edges.  But you know, deep down that it is all for your own good.  Enough.

Back to the present reality.  My returned essay was fifteen marks lower than the other two – which were high enough to give me a comfortable cushion of marks to allow for some aberration, but not for the fifteen marks miss that I managed to attain.  My own fault of course, even as I was writing the essay I was thinking that I was doing “original” research which was not what was being asked for.  And, sure enough one of the (fully justified) points made was that I didn’t concentrate enough on something which was not overtly mentioned in the essay title.  I took that as an opportunity to do my own thing, conveniently ignoring the more explicit instructions in the “advice” given to essay writers!

How many times have I said to a class that anything that the examiners “suggest” that they “might like to think about” should not be taken as an invitation but a direct instruction!  And then I ignore my own edicts!  That’s life.  But I still think that my essay had elements that would not have been found in others, up to and including an honourable mention of The Welsh Arts Council and writing about the “War” exhibition of 1970(?) which was a museum changing moment for me, and an experience that has had an on-going effect on my artistic appreciation ever since.  Whether those apercus were worth fifteen marks, well, put it down to experience and I am writing it down here to remind myself that I ignore my own rules about ignoring the rules of the OU at my peril!

Now that I have got that our of my system I can more fully devote my time to revision.  There is an outside chance that I might be able to recuperate my self-esteem on the examination, but that will take a damn sight more effort than that which I put into the last exam.  Something to aim for!

And something to start doing now.  If not sooner!

It's only money!

There is nothing more irritating that getting into a shop with an itchy credit card waiting to have its scratched soothed by the spending of money and finding that the shop assistants don’t really seem over-bothered to take your cash from you.

I am presently in the market to get a replacement chair as mine is disintergrating.  A combination of avoirdupois and sweat seems to have done for the thing.  I do not think that having a “relax” version helped at all, as the lounger element has never been entirely convincing and worked out to be just something else to go wrong.

Getting a replacement is not easy.  The cost of furniture in Spain is markedly more expensive than in the UK for reasons which are not in any way clear.  Our best bet is to go to a place in Sitges (well, a bit outside really) and see what they can offer.

What I really want is a high-legged, high-backed, cloth-covered chair, something like the chairs that they have in hospitals but not looking quite so institutional!  I fear that what I want is not readily available and what I am going to be presented with will be ugly and expensive.  Still, I am an inveterate shopper so even failure will be interesting!

With the prefect sense of timing and helpfulness which characterises the Spanish Post Office, I returned from my swim to find that they had “called” and found that we were “out” and so were unable to “deliver” the parcel sent to me.  I do not believe they attempted to deliver anything and, to be fair to them, they didn’t even write in a fictitious time – just a few crossed lines.  One has to admire the honesty of their duplicity.

The Forums in the OU have many students commenting that the various delivery services that are supposed to deliver the study materials do nothing of the sort and merely pop a slip through the letter box telling the putative recipient that they “failed” to deliver.  One writer on the forum was insistent that you should never be complicit in this form of anti-service and always demand that they pay a return trip to deliver.  I know where he is coming from but this is Spain and not the UK and I am going for the easier option and giving in!

Disturbingly, the package is described as a “sac” or bag, and that is only used when the original packaging has been damaged in some way.  I do not want to have a battered collection of learning materials.  OU stuff is printed on fairly heavy paper so there is a real weight to the total delivery, but if it is not pristine then I am going to write to the University and demand replacements.  Or perhaps I am being unduly pessimistic and all things may be fine.  But speculation never waits for reality!

I have also discovered FutureLearn which is a newish company whlly owned by the Open University but dedicated to mass free learning utilizing the expertise of partner universities and giving access to short courses which demand an input of 3 hours work a week.

Not knowing anything about it apart from thinking what little I did know seeming to be a good idea, I have registered for a course on commercial Brands and their influence and importance.  Starting in October.  Just like my OU course.  Not the one I am doing now but the next one.  I am sure it will all work out.

Friday is the day when I expect to have my essay returned

Tomorrow Suzanne and stories about the beginning of term. 

I must remember to take my little red book to jot down any ideas for Creative Writing that I can glean!