I’m not pleased. My flatmates have lovingly decided to cancel our internet, without consulting me and despite the fact that I’m the main user (and main payer). So from tomorrow I may not be online very much. The blog shall surely suffer, studying Greek may well benefit. I intend to try and steal someone else’s wifi for the next couple of week, but we shall see.

On Saturday I went to Galapagar with some friends I haven’t seen for far too long. Basically to hang around the swimming pool wearing very few clothes and dive in every so often when we got too hot.
It was an awesome time. Great to hang out with people I haven’t seen for ages, catch up and just relax with nothing on our minds for the day.

Today I started hanging out with the chess kids (mentioned here). I am, basically, a Nanny, a very cheap Nanny. But it was enormous fun. In case you haven’t noticed yet I love kids and it was cool to just hang out with a couple and be stupid all day. They are two girls, nine and eleven years old, and are lovely, very imaginative and open, happy to involve me in their games. We played It for a bit – I think I won; we went shopping (we let Dad do the work while we sat in the isles reading Mortadelo y Filemon); we played dominoes; we built a marble run and then pretended it was first a food factory and then a toy factory, our boss payed us handsomely; I taught the girls Chubby Bunnies – we didn’t have any marshmallows so first we played with cherries, then with a mixture of crackers and chocolate and finally with water (this is hilarious, messy, but hilarious); we played theatre, or some variety of it, where we each gave performances in turn while the others gave marks; and a bunch of other stuff. What a ball. Even working with children in school you can forget just how wonderfully imaginative they can be when completely unfettered, now I consider myself a fairly imaginative person but I realise I’m nothing when compared with theses girls’ free improvisation. Great stuff. I shall enjoy the next few days with them.

Apparently there’s some kind of football thing going on at the moment. Apparently also Spain is doing quite well. I only know this because every time there’s a match with Spain playing I can’t sleep for all the horns honking, people shouting and fireworks going off.

Actually, I watched a match, the Germany Turkey one. It was an accident of course, and I’ve got to say afterwards that I stand by not understanding the attraction of watching 22 idiots stumbling round a field for what seems like five hours.

okay! little by little things progress. I bought my tickets to Athens today – I will come back from Peru and, almost straight away, hop over there, stay in Athens for a couple of days on my lonesome and then head to the islands and groovy people for a week or so before hopping back and doing a little flat hunting before, hopefully, I start back at work.
I also got my Hepatitis A shot today – a rather complex process that involved first making an appointment at the vaccination centre (a months wait) then going back, receiving some of my shots (this was yesterday) and getting a prescription for the Hep, then going to a pharmacy, buying the drugs (complete with needle) from them and being warned that I had to keep it refrigerated myself before taking it to a doctor and getting them to jab me with it. This last stage was the most difficult because, and I know I’m being stupid here, I’m not registered with a doctor in Spain (its a phobia). Anyway I waltzed into a public health clinic and asked them very politely if they wouldn’t mind jabbing me – they seemed a bit bemused but did it in the end. So I’m now all drugged up now. My upper left arm feels like it’s carved of hardwood.

Did my vaccinations today, or most of them. So now I’m jabbed for typhoid and yellow fever, hepatitis to come. I also got my malaria pills.

In between all that I hung out with a friend from work and her daughter. We wandered Retiro and indulged in excessive tickling, also the picking of bogeys, and ice creams.

Ok, I suck, I really do. This has been the worst month in ages for blogging. I just haven’t felt like doing it, even though I’ve had more free time.
Spain has finally decided to realise that it is summer, weirdly late, and now of course it is too hot, and I could quite easily just sit in a bathtub of icecubes and moan all day… I could, but I won’t.

Today I am pleased. I have had a very productive day.

Yesterday we had a meal for all the staff at the school. The food was very very good.

I’m a bit frustrated that I don’t yet know if I can continue to work at the school. It is far from certain. This means that I could well find myself here at the end of the summer with no money in my pocket, no job and nowhere to live, a similar situation to when I first came to Madrid, only then I had money. This also makes all the goodbyes a bit weird. I ended up having three at the school. The first on Thursday, my last teaching day, the second Friday, when it was the last day for the kids and all was bedlam, dancing, and I got even more portraits, and then finally yesterday, the last day with the staff.

Somewhere, on a thermal, flies faith ‭–‬
Less a concept more a harlot undressing
To go to bed to sleep alone
But here the air is so very still
Lacks even that upward drift

To keep either wingéd beast nor
Weightless flotsam aloft
And everybody, everyone
Is snapping photo after photo after imagine.

On a straight sharpened edge
Words are weighed
Tainted a little by white wine
Tainted a mite by red

Or bodies discoursing or flesh
That somewhere languishes
In time that elongates to riddles

But by now
I am inured to goodbyes

Here’s an unexpected benefit to being a teacher – an unending supply of portrait artists – this is my facebook profile picture needs covered for the next eighteen months.
Today was my last day teaching the kids.
I don’t mean to boast but…
The two in the centre. One says, in English, “Yo are my favorite teacher” – though obviously not a good enough teacher to impart anything about spelling (and I don’t) and the other says, in Spanish, “Para John el mejor profe del Mundo” or “For John the best teacher in the World”.

:-P

Remind me why I enjoy this job again….

Here are three of the children in my grade two class holding their finished stories as mentioned yesterday. If you haven’t read the story yet, you should probably do so [pdf link] before continuing. So the children had to finish off the story… my own original ending had Dr Johnson ordering the children out of the lion – which they did so obediently, because they’re not so naughty after all, and then telling the lion off sternly for being where he’s not supposed to be and him slinking back to the jungle dejected. The children were much more imaginative. Most of their endings involved Indiana Jones arriving to solve the problem, and most of the rest ended with the death of everyone involved. But my two favourites went somewhat thusly:

And then the lion pooed the children out. – “Pheww! That smells terrible!” said Dr Johnson.

or

And then the lion ate Dr Johnson and then a wizard came and took them out of the lion, and then he turned the lion into a ballerina.

Ok, the promised quick catch-up… this is more for my own completionist (I thought that was a word, but possibly not?) tendencies than anything else.

I wasn’t blogging recently for two reasons. Firstly I got really caught up in making a video for the school – you can see a snippet if you’re on Facebook – as a record of the english exams and as a little portrait of the school. This took up a lot of time.
The second reason was the aforementioned new money-making opportunity, which consists of giving private English classes every day before my job at the school, which means I’ve had to start getting up at 5:30. My body has been protesting, and I lost the will to blog for a while as well.
It is interesting teaching very regular adult lessons again, completely different from working with the children, and each brings its own rewards. In fact the pupils in one of my classes asked which I preferred – teaching children or adults – and the truth is there’s stuff to love about both. I think I’d be most comfortable full-time with children rather than adults, but a mix is probably my ideal. I’m teaching a guy who is the general manager of a private hospital that has just been bought by BUPA (which, interestingly, if you say with a Spanish accent, means ‘poo’), and therefore has to start doing business in English. Interesting stuff.

In the interim then, what happened?

I went to an art exhibition of graduating Masters students (Masters, I’m led to understand, is a qualification that has just recently been introduced to Spain as part of trying to bring the further education system a bit more into line with the rest of Europe (A difficult process I imagine)). I’m afraid to say I was pretty underwhelmed. I don’t know if it’s because I’m old and jaded, but a great deal of what I saw seemed unimaginative and highly derivative. There was some particularly awful graphic design work, and a lot of the artwork fell into what I might tentatively venture as my domain, that is, vaguely digital in execution, and there was some truly dreadful photoshop work on display.

A friend who has been here in Madrid working in the filling part of her sandwich degree went back to The Netherlands. We had a little party to say goodbye on a terrace up high. I felt like my Spanish was nonexistent.

I went to lunch with a guy who wants somebody for his children to practice English with a bit during the summer. I’m not really what he wants, as I understand it the last couple of years he has had someone come for a couple of months who has stayed for room and board and a little pocket money and just hung out for the summer. But I’m going to go up and spend some time with the family, go on a few outings probably and charge something minimal.
His daughters are eleven and nine and were a lot of fun to meet. We chatted a load in Spanish and they introduced me to the delights of Brain Training on their identical pink Nintendo DSs, the younger one tried to make me watch High School Musical but I had to go and give a class, I imagine that I am going to be subjected to that at a later date though. Apparently the nine year old is something of a chess prodigy, I missed exactly what title she has won but she has a whole cabinet full of trophies. The father is a chess teacher who works at a chess school which is in the town where I work. Apparently this school has produced Spain’s national champion and is one of the best in the country. Something that I think is rather cool is that for a few months of the year teachers come to the local primary lessons and one day a week the fourth graders (9 – 10) have an afternoon chess lesson, some of my pupils are quite into chess.
I was tempted to ask for chess lessons in return for my English services, but I wimped out in the end.

One of the teachers I work with asked me to find a story that I could read to my class of seven year olds. I thought it would be a good excuse to write my own story, so I did. And you can dowload the pdf.

A little explanation is needed before you read the story. I wrote it specifically for this group of children and so it revolves around a joke that comes from class. A character appeared in the children’s English textbook called Dr Johnson. The kids picked up on the similarity with my name and have found great hilarity in calling me Dr Johnson ever since, despite my protestations. So I wrote a story about Dr Johnson. And they loved it. I was a little worried that one of the jokes was a bit obscure, but they seemed to get it. Although I wrote an end for the story this version doesn’t have an end, because I thought it would be fun to have the children write their own versions to complete the story, and they seem to be coming up with much better ends than my own. Hopefully I can share some when they finish tomorrow. I hope you like it :D

Good news, for us at the school at least, today we got the marks back for the English exams the children did a month or so ago. Looks like my optimism was justified. Every child passed, and the vast majority with good marks – all but one in my younger class achieved an A or a B, and the one who got a C we were sure was going to fail. In my other class we had five kids with top marks. There were a few little disappointments, good students who got lower marks than we’d have hoped. Perhaps predictably, as it was an oral exam, the marks favoured the chattier kids rather than necessarily the academically brighter ones.

Still. We are chuffed.

Well done everyone.

Large chunks of my computer decided to randomly pack themsleves in, dagnamit… working on a very slow fix now, also writing and illustrating a children’s story… not entirely sure why.

Ok, this is just a quick one before I crash between the sheets, to remind you that I still exist. I’ll try and catch up on recent events soon.

This evening a colleague had arranged for me to have a look around a TV station, today because Sunday nights is the the quiet time. It was really interesting. We watched the evening news going out live, had a look round the place. I was impressed to see that perhaps my analogue video editing experience may not be quite so obsolete as I’d thought. Although it was fun watching the broadcast and having explained how things work, the most interesting for me was as an archive and robot fetishist (for the latter see this video), was seeing the automated tape archive – robots ahoy! – and the stacks, good stuff, all very good stuff, right – I’m off to bed.

I’m having a minor site update… there’s a few more changes to be implemented but I’ve done a bit.
The most exciting news is:
Return of the Titles page!
You may notice there’s a little question mark button next to the titles of the posts again, this should take you to the Titulos page where there will be a short explanation of the title. I got bored of writing these last time, so no promises that I’m going to keep it up now.
Otherwise, I don’t know about anybody else but I’ve been experiencing really poor performance rendering the site recently, I think it’s to do with all the transparent pngs, so I’ve reduced the number in the design, but I may have to take them out completely, which will be a shame. If it’s not that then something else is causing the problems and I’ll have to track it down.
The other changes are mainly cleaning up my sloppiness when I designed the site. Gently does it.

So – we ate down on chewsday – swallowed the fat and came up chomping, thirsting, slavering for more, more, more wholesome rode the mission-day back hard, gunning the engine and feeling it heave, protesting, telling us what we should and shouldn’t do you learn buy the bucket load the boat shirting on its moorings and crawling back from high tide to noon slight and sun beats down regardless. What don’t you elect, and fabulous the etchings in the toilet, and refractions more dawn than dauntless and more down than gauntlet. What a sad long march with trumpets back on up from the pit and glancing back never hurt anyone that’s why they install these mirrors anyway, that and that it’s what the law says, oh isn’t it just, exactly what the law says the sweat on its skin glistening you’ll need a rubbing down after this one, you’ll need a backgammon an ace of spades and giant lucky dice roll he said you’ve got a gambling problem, I’d keep that under wraps if I were you not shove it in the face of every minor sidling through the door heard this is the place for underage drinking or at least can score a carry-out, he’s brought his schoolbag in for just that reason and left his books in the arms of a friend, get scooting sunny jim, you heard wrong the friends are laughing but they’ll probably send another one in to give a second opinion to scout the horizon, to run with messages into the hands of messages or the the front-line pushed past blundering the enemy and now scarfing up and down and back again. Oh cheap hash darling, it’s not what it used to be, or it’s a shame, a shame, a crying shame, they wouldn’t let you enter again, and you shaky on your pins.

[[By the way, this is just a test post to try things out with some new blogging software]]