Or not as the case may be.

In the Metro train this morning we stopped at a station with the doors closed for somewhat longer than usual, which actually isn’t that out of the ordinary. After five minutes though the lights in the carriage went out, which isn’t particularly normal. So there then started a definitely filmic sense of vaguely crescendoing  panic in the packed carriage, with one guy standing by me getting increasingly fidgety in a very hollywood psychology kind of way. It wasn’t five minutes longer before people actually made a move and pulled the emergency handles to open the doors, which started off a particularly irritating alarm that was to be our friend for the next half an hour. Not much longer the train started up again, but the doors which had been opened using the emergency handles now refused to close, presumable a feature rather than failure, although the guys who came along to try and close them didn’t seem to know what they were doing. So eventually, after being stopped for 40 minutes, we were all herded off, onto a platform just as packed as the train which, empty now, inched out of the station, several doors still jammed open. The next train was sitting just behind it at the entrance to the tunnel, and it sidled in, rush-hour full. The doors opened and, such was the force of the people crammed behind me on the platform, I actually felt injected into the train where, once inside, I had to desperately scramble to not crush a small child. Needless to say the following journey was not a particularly comfortable one, and I got to school half an hour late and missed going on the trip.

Rubbish.

During my convalescence last week I watched a lot of films, including a fairly high proportion that I’d never admit to in public. One that I watched is High Hopes, by Mike Leigh, a film that I always return to when I’m feeling low. It’s the perfect feeling low film if you ask me, because you can weep in tragic despair, and chortle away in merriment at the same time.

It’s not my favourite film, not by a long shot, but it would place pretty high up, if not on top, of my list of good British films, If I had one.

Anyway, I was going to write a bunch of stuff about it, but I’m not sure what now. I seem to remember, in my illness-induced delirium, composing in my head a particularly fine review that compared the film to an Impressionist painting. It used the word ‘brush-strokes’ a lot. Be thankful that I can’t remember what I was going to write. Maybe next time I see it you’ll get treated to a stonking piece of prose. Anyway, it’s about Thatcherism, socialism, yuppies, disillusion, making relationships work, love, procreation, the late 80s, Marx, council housing, deeply flawed loveable types, absolutely abhorrent types, and it has so many superb performances in it I don’t think I could pick my favourite.

Coincidentally I noticed that the most recent Mike Leigh film, Happy-Go-Lucky, is showing in the cinemas at the moment, and indeed seems to be being pretty well promoted here in Madrid at least. So I caught it at the weekend, and thoroughly good it is too, though I might not be an entirely reliable witness, as it is about a primary school teachers and has a particularly humorous minor Spanish character (who went down very well among the minute crowd here). There is a particularly good performance by Edward Marsan.
Anyway, give it a look if you get a chance (and don’t let this particularly off-putting sentence from the wikipedia page actually put you off: “Poppy is a life-loving, irrepressibly cheerful, Pollyanna-type primary school teacher who is thirty years old, single, and infinitely optimistic and accepting.” If I’d read that before I went I certainly wouldn’t have seen it.

Ok. Been in a blogging deadzone for a bit. Partly while obsessing over You Mislaid My Secrets, mainly because I was ill in bed for the last week.

Let’s do some catching up.

So. 1) The Guardian has started putting the full text of its articles into its RSS feed, according to Google it is the first major newspaper in the world to do so. And that’s awesome.

2) Medical Objects, nice.

3) Weird on a number of levels – I recently refreshed the design of the wrdstore page, which has been long overdue, much like the rest of the site, and discovered in the process that some of my stories are blocked by the filter that schools use here to police their web access. Not sure what I’ve done to deserve that.

I say ‘are blocked’ but even more weirdly I noticed today that they’re not any more. It doesn’t make much sense to me that just by updating their appearance I could have skipped beyond the filter. Interesting.

4) I’m going on a school trip to the library tomorrow. Sounds like fun.

5) Charmingly Elisa decided to get ill right after me (we blame the yucky children) so we were able to reciprocate soup duty.

6) This post’s title was generated by the Random Romance Novel Title Generator.

snailsnail is very excited to announce its first new collection of poetry in nearly two and a half years: the fantastic ‘You Mislaid My Secrets‘. It’s short, just ten poems, it has the first snailsnail poem in Spanish, Mi Primer Suspiro, it has exciting animations, it is about regret, lost love, retribution, blame, self-delusion and spinelessness. It has been a labour and a half.

Please read, maybe enjoy.

Wow!

Still in going slow mode.

Some stuff what happened:

Friday, went out for the first time ever with my workmates, we had lunch, it was ridiculously tasty. In evening went out again and ate more good food in La Latina. Saturday hung out with Eli for a very lazy evening, both feeling very tired – still not up to speed with the whole work schedule thing. Saturday, can’t remember, probably animated all day. Monday evening went out for a couple of cañas with Rosita and another English friend of hers whose here half on holiday half to scout out the terrain while thinking about moving here – somewhat more organised than I ever was.

Still plugging away.

I wrote a story for school, you can read it here [pdf link, <1MB]. It is somewhat plagarised and was written with the vocabulary items ‘leopard’, ‘nervous’ and ‘hunt’ in mind.

The lack of posting recently has been because I’ve been too busy working on that other thing I mentioned, which is a short collection of poems that I conceived while I was in Greece. Things are coming along pretty well, and you’ve been seeing bits and pieces from the illustrations I’m doing for them, which will hopefully all be animated. Here is one of them completed.

I gave myself the deadline of the end of next week to finish – I think it’ll probably run over that, but not by too much.

Yesterday after work I went round to Elisa’s place as we had a slightly strange evening as we watched a Mexican documentary, Caminantes, which I could just about understand, and then I watched her clean the flat while keeping here company – apparently this was more valued than my actual efforts at cleaning might have been, I’m not sure what that says about me. And then while she carried on I cooked her dinner, because she’s too lazy to cook for herself and, frankly, she needs to fatten up somewhat. Now, she’s never exactly shown hints of a spare tyre, but she came back from Perú thinner than a stream of Hadrons (now what is a Hadron exactly? I don’t remember them coming up in A-level physics (oh…. I probably should have known that)).

Today at work I had my first class with the dreaded sextos – the final year of primary school and now the only pupils in the school to not have been through the bilingual program. Actually it went pretty well in the end, and I’m looking forward to having more of them, I only resorted to speaking Spanish once. And now I am going to cook some dinner, because I am hungry.

My dear mum did some church research for me and sent me a list of churches that might suit me better than the kind I found last time I blogged on this and so today I went to Amistad Cristiana. I went there for two reasons – one, it’s fairly close to my house – a twenty five minute walk away (I could have gone by metro but who wants to be underground on a lovely sunny morning) – and two, the main one, it was the only church on the list to have a website… and you know, I couldn’t go to a church if it wasn’t connected, or whatever. Seriously though, I did find it strange that it was the only one of the five she sent me details of, one of the others turned up zero google results, and the others just appeared in lists of addresses, without even so much as times of services. I still will probably try and find time investigate one or two of them though.

So then, how was it?

Well, fascinating, because it was exactly the same as every other evangelical church ever… which I find amazing.
Lots of people, of the right age group.
They meet in a bar (a bar I’ve been to in the past to see bands).
They started late, and spent at least 15 minutes before the service fiddling with the data projector, which still wasn’t right by the time they started.
The service was lead by a generic worship group – all hot young men on rhythm, lead, bass, drums, keys and one obligatory kooky instrument (in this case a saxophone).
And they had the requisite ridiculous number of notices, and everybody who said something started by saying there was a lot to get through so they’d be quick, and then proceeded to give their notice in the most verbose form imaginable.

And, well, time for a rant.
Most of you probably know, because I’ve banged on about it often enough, that it’s something of a bugbear of mine the weird language you encounter in the church which, to my mind, frankly sounds insane. It’s not something exclusive to the church of course but a feature of all groups of people – try and understand what’s being talked about if you’re plonked into a group of sociologists, geeks, teenagers, whatever – that which you’re not. But, for a group that, perhaps, no sé, would like to be inclusive, welcome outsiders, you think we’d try a little harder to not sound completely off our trolleys.
I think that actually a lot of people don’t realise what a Christian service sounds like to someone not au fait with the rites and phrasings but, if you’d really like to know how weird church is – learn another language in a secular context and then go to a service…

Anyhow, singing ‘How great Thou art’ in Spanish was fun.

And then, in fact, after the forty five minutes of notices, the message was given by an Australian woman – in English, with simultaneous translation – and it’s always a diversion two understand two versions of the same thing.

And then everybody packed off sharpish because they had to be out the building.

Spam of the day:

Our tree stands a statuesque 9 feet. We have tall ceilings, we thought. What we failed to consider, however, is that a tree’ s width is proportionate to its height. This you realize as soon as you cut the string that girded the once sleek fir…

Well, so much for staying in.
I ended up going out last night with my lesbian friends, which proved a fun way to spend the evening. I live pretty near Chueca, which is the gay quarter of Madrid, and it’s always a fun place to go out in, flirt with the transvestites, or whatever floats your boat. And it’s been a while since I went out out there, though I stayed in a hostel there for a week while flat hunting.
We ended up at a lesbian club with particularly rude staff and (of course) ridiculously priced drinks. But that’s the way of things.
It’s nice to be out again in a country that has sensible opening hours. It’s also nice being able to walk home.
Then today I met up for a coffee with a friend I haven’t seen in a ridiculous while and we wandered the city, which seems mostly to be what we do do when we meet up. I’m a wanderer so that’s all good.
Then I made some noodles.
Then I typed this.

I could go out but this time I think I definitely will stay in. I need to act my age from time to time.

So then, back to work. It’s kind of weird after three and a half months bumming round the world. It’s also still weird that you have to kiss your boss.

Everybody commented on my hair, I think they probably just remember the red it was the last day of last year, I thought in general I’d managed to present a fairly respectable experience.

I don’t have any of the same kids that I had last year, which in some ways is a shame, I’d have liked to continue the relationships I established last year, but at the same time it’ll be fun to teach a new batch (and a nightmare to learn all their names).

I am, once again, surrounded by female American colleagues, we have already had fights about how you spell behavior and they don’t know how to complete this sentence:

“_________you got any brothers and sisters?”

So there you go. Otherwise, I have been being cultural. And right now I am trying to decide about whether to go to a concert of experimental music tonight… I should because it’s a good opportunity, but I’m not really in the mood to be honest… so I think I might stay in.