Spanish Practices - Real Life in Spain
Society & Culture:Documentary
Today Biscuits and knickers
Day Thirty five of the Spanish Lockdown, the sometimes amusing, diary of a Brit in southern Spain under the 'Alarma' - normal life has stopped.
To find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com
Day 35
It is Sunday and day 35 of our Spanish Lockdown. We got up and had breakfast, and I finished my work in the studio. I needed to paint the bottom of the walls, I found some paint and it was still OK.
Normal life seems so long ago now, we are now into our second month and I think I have had enough, I can understand why all those Americans have come out into the street and demanded that they can reopen for business.
It does sound selfish, but there really is only so much lockdown that you can cope with. I really admire the Italians they have gone through hell and back.
Day 35 and I was thinking about school and had I had been better academically would my life have been different? It probably would, I do remember working at the BBC and the subject of which University did you go to? Well I didn’t go to University at all and when I told my colleagues they all looked quite aghast.
The BBC was a funny old place to work in, there were a lot of well-meaning souls who had never done a days work in their life. We used to have regular editorial meetings and everyone brought their copy of the Guardian to suggest news stories that we could perhaps cover on the radio station.
I brought a copy of the Daily Mail, on the grounds that according to the research most of our listeners were lower middle class, cab drivers, shop workers and the like and love it or loath it, the Daily Mail would probably be their paper of choice, rather than The Guardian.
It did not go down well, the only good thing about the Editorial Meetings that we got a tin of Rover Biscuits for each meeting to go with the tea and coffee. If it was an important meeting there were sandwiches with wine too. Unheard of at LBC. They did later, as a cost cutting exercise stop the wine and sandwiches, but the biscuits carried on.
I am not going to blame my schooling for a lack of University education, I was quite a lazy feckless boy, always a C on rarely a B or B plus. But I don’t think I was stupid, it was just like a lot of kids at school, the one size fits all didn’t work with me.
I neither fitted in or made many friends. After suffering a crazy sixties phonetic teaching experiment called ITA, after the first two years at school all I could read was this crazy language and not a word of ordinary English.
I did catch up, many of my classmates did not though. Then onto Junior school and a fairly undistinguished passage through the school. The final year there were too many pupils for the two classes, and I along with 10 others draw the short straw.
We were put with the year below us, sharing a classroom and Mr Pumphrey, Mr Pumphrey was one deeply unpleasant man. It was clear very early on in his career that he realised he had made a terrible mistake becoming a teacher, particularly at a school that served a council estate.
So he had little interest in the year he was teaching, what he did was to devote two thirds of the blackboard to his year and a third to us. He would write a list of things we should quietly be doing whilst he taught the rest of the class.
I spent a whole year doing, well nothing, I learnt, well nothing. I sat next to a really clever and gifted boy called Peter Chantry, he was doomed we were all doomed. We didn’t even get a chance to sit the school certificate it was a given that we would all go to Westlands Secondary Modern on the edge of the council estate.
Westlands Secondary Modern was typical of deeply underperforming schools of its time. A hideous 1960’s building, roasting hot in summer and freezing cold in winter with a rag bag of teachers that wouldn’t look out of place in a St Trinians movie.
My own real friend was Nick. He was six foot something and I was five foot nothing then, we made an odd pair. We both struggled with school, it wasn’t the best days of our life.
The Headmaster was a brute, whose name I forget but managed to cane some poor boy at Assembly every morning, not the same poor boy I hasten to mention.
There was hope on the horizon, the school was getting a brand new teaching block and upgraded status to Comprehensive, the trouble was the whole building process was going on around us, I remember that the wing that had the science labs, metal work and wood work rooms was shut and reformed.
So for woodwork we had to learn theory.. and trust me there is only so much you can learning about sodding wood and dovetail joints and the like.
We were luckier with science, they opened that part of the block early and we were treated to proper science labs, fully equipped a biology lab with the most amazing new teacher who inspired us all, she had come from industry and had worked for Bayer in Cambridge so really new her stuff.
Unlike my form teacher – Mrs Finding who spent most of her teaching career sneaking off to the reprographics room to be banged senseless by fellow English teacher Mr Boiley. When she wasn’t spread across the Roneo machine she would balance on top of the radiator and show her knickers off to the workmen below, building our new teaching block.
So it was really no surprise I didn’t go to University and I guess I was lucky that I got any kind of job at all, as it turned out I have had and continue to have a most wonderful and satisfying career.
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