La tortuga

“Miiister Aaaaaadam…?”

“Yes?”

“Thaaaaat, are there more melones in the world than boys?”

Snorted giggles ripple through the class, and I am obliged to take a moment to consider my position.

The lesson has deteriorated rapidly. Within the space of five minutes, we have gone from discussing what we expect to learn from our Evolution and Inheritance module to a question and answer session about the ins and outs of, well, the ins and outs, with accompanying hand gestures. So much for student-directed learning.

I look down at the owner of this latest inquiry. His grubby little elf face is etched with a maniacal grin. His eyes gleam through his permanently grime-fogged glasses. His head is cocked expectantly. I like him. He knows what he’s up to. I decide to call his bluff.

“Yes. Yes I suppose there are.” The class erupts in a whoop of delighted laughter. Suddenly I find myself longing for last week’s PSHE session, when we were discussing the moral conundrum of cannibalism. Talking about whether it was okay for disaster survivors to eat one another in order to remain alive was somehow more straightforward, even if I was a little unnerved by how emphatically one student said he would definitely kill and eat the other crew of his hypothetical lifeboat if he was hungry enough. “What if one of them was your Mum?” asked another. He immediately re-considered his position, looking a little distressed. They are 10, after all.

Anyway, I reckon I’d take most Raft-of-the-Medusa-style scenarios over this barrage of kids struggling to remember the English word for pene. Their questions range from the deliberately subversive (see above), to the existential (“But why do we have to do it that way?”), to those which require more careful handling (“Is it true that when a girl turns 13 her bits start bleeding?”), to those which seem to bear the heartbreaking mark of personal experience (“What happens when a baby dies inside a mummy’s tummy? How do they get it out?”).

To an extent I’ve been here before. I remember in one Year 7 Citizenship lesson having to field the wide-eyed panic of “CAN YOUR PENIS GET TOO BIG???” Likewise the quiet angst of “What do you do if people make fun of you for what’s happening to your body?” But this time it feels somehow different. These kids are younger, less embarrassed, and more catholic. I’m pretty sure our school policy is that we’re not even supposed to teach about puberty for fear of offending religious sensibilities (read parents). Our lesson on human evolution should be interesting then. Added to that, they’ve clearly been told something, and it’s clearly playing on their minds. What to do? To duck out now would surely be a coward’s work. Also, unless I let them take the lead, I may be faced with the grim prospect of actually having to plan my PSHE lessons. Shuddering at the thought, I plough on.

The questions keep coming, and I keep fending them off, cool and calm, unflappable and unfazed.  At least, this is what I’m going for. In reality I reckon I’m over doing the dour, and I just look grumpy. “Why don’t you laugh?” says one girl, her jaw hanging drunk with glee from the rest of her face. “Because it’s just science”, I answer stupidly, like someone who’s read half of the blurb of a book on the Enlightenment, or watched too much David Attenborough (I’m joking, of course. There’s no such thing).

 

I think back to my own sex education, which consisted of the whole year group watching a video in the drama studio followed by a half-hearted ‘any questions?’, which drew nothing but a predictable and frankly well-deserved “If you’re only going to get in trouble for it, what’s the point in wanking?”. No help there, then. Earlier, when I was in Year 6, there was the thermal imaging video of the erect penis. That didn’t really help either, and in a weird way felt like nothing more than a progression of the Magic Pencil. Then there was the pop-up book of course, my favourite, where you could make the sperm go in and out of the egg, after you’d pulled the lever that made them file along the fallopian tubes like Lemmings. Quick! We need a builder! Oh Shit, that’s not the builder that’s the digger! Why do they all look so similar? Fuck, now he’s got his pick-axe and he’s digging right through the pelvis. Bollocks, I’ll just nuke the level and start again. Except you can’t, because by this stage you’ve had a little cardboard baby. Thanks a lot.

Anyway, there are more questions. Luckily we’re getting on for 16:30, it’s Friday, and as long as none of them talks too extensively to their parents about this, we’ll be fine. I’m already in trouble because my classroom displays are not up to scratch.

“How do dogs do it?”

“Don‘t some people do it in clubs for money?”

“How do jellyfish do it?”

“The jellyfish that we saw it in Humanities, how does it do the thing?”

“Could 24 jellyfish kill a shark?”

“What about monkeys and turtles and birds and all the animals, do they all reproduce like we do?”

“Do I have to have children?”

I answer honestly, or at least quickly, which is a good replacement if you do it with enough confidence. Those that I don’t know go in the Question Box, which we introduced because my kids have more questions than I can physically answer and still be in with a chance of getting them ready for SATS. They also have a habit of shouting them out at random intervals and then arguing about them:

“What is the biggest animal?”

“That he say it Mister Adam. It’s a blue whale”

“Noooooo.”

“Djyeeeees.”

“Ah, and the elephant?”

“Chaval, the elephant is like a, like a, like a, like a…”

“It’s a mammal the whale?”

“Nooooo, it’s a fish.”

“It’s a mammal.”

“Ah djyeeeees?”

“And how does it make the milk?”

Anyway you get it.

Question Box questions are those that we can’t really deal with in class because they are too big/complex/off-topic/poorly expressed/nonsensical, and so are dealt with at some point over the following week once I’ve come up with a suitable response. My favourite so far is “What is the strongest turtle?” Honestly, Google it. The answer is Raphael.

Non-starters and duds aside (“Why does it look so disgusting?”) there are far worse ways to spend your time than finding out how jellyfish see, or how big bacteria can get, or why a snake has no legs, or whether I am, in fact, the boyfriend of Miss Rachael.

Being ambushed with a chaotic sex-ed lesson on a Friday afternoon is one thing. What would really scare me would be a job where I had to work with adults.

The box jellyfish, which has 24 eyes and a central nervous system.
Some species may be able to see colour.

Los ladrónes

On his return to the UK from Guadeloupe in 1979, James Callaghan, the then Labour prime minister, downplayed the economic difficulties afflicting the country – industrial disputes, continued strikes by workers in crucial industries, unemployment, power cuts and so on – and denied living in a time of ‘mounting chaos’. This comment was summed up in typical glib fashion by The Sun as: ‘Crisis, what crisis?’. I don’t mean to credit that particular paper with having contributed to my world view in any way, but this phrase does sometimes come to mind when I open the door of the Bunker on a weekday morning. To see the kids and their parents, stepping out of gleaming 4x4s that they struggle to manoeuvre round the car park, the dads in crisp white shirts and those kind of boating shoes you’re only allowed to wear once you enter a certain tax-bracket, the mums all teetering heels, intimidating sunglasses and faces botoxed to bursting, you can forget that you live in a country which, to believe the figures at any rate, is staring into the abyss.

Unemployment in Spain still stands at over 25%, with the rate more than double that for under 25s. In April, the national debt was around €990 billion, equivalent to about 95% of GDP. A bit of light Googling turns up this frankly hellish bit of kit, which is sort of like one of those clocks that’s supposed to tell you the precise time of your own death, but for an entire country. Of course, for all I know it’s as accurate as UKIP’s figures about Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants, but it certainly looks scary.

In addition to its financial concerns, Spain appears to be suffering from political dissatisfaction and disaffection. Nothing really unfamiliar about that though, and in fairness the Spanish still managed to muster a 10% greater turnout than their UK counterparts in the recent EU elections, although this is less impressive when you realise the figure is still less than half the electorate -around 45%. People who I spoke to at the time seemed to be playing an all-too-familiar tune of ‘the 2 main parties are the same, they don’t do anything/they only look out for themselves, there’s no point voting, etc’. When I asked a friend of mine before the election who he would be voting for, he said no one. In his opinion, the Left waste money, the Right withhold it, and the representatives of both are corrupt ladrónes to a man. Another didn't vote for similar reasons. The president, he said, was un inútil. Presumably this extended to all the alternatives on offer too. Thus, as elsewhere, minority parties did well. The elections saw a somewhat unexpected result for the left-wing eurosceptic Podemos, with 7.9% of the vote. Not bad for a party that has only existed since March. However, the ruling Popular Party actually held its majority, albeit with significant losses. Perhaps this is a sign of true voter apathy.

On the most recent of my triannual trips to the hairdressers, I got talking – with the help of the Romanian man cutting my hair – to a woman about her two grown-up children, both of whom are currently in the UK looking for work. What struck me was that both her children seemed to be in the medical profession in some capacity. I say ‘seemed’ because between my lousy Spanish, the noise of the clippers and the fact that she was behind me talking quite quietly I couldn't get everything she was saying. She definitely said the word hospital. Maybe they were in hospital? Anyway, if she said what I think she said, it would support one of the more depressing things that I've read about Spain recently, which ascribed a slight drop in the youth unemployment rate to the amount of young people leaving the country. If enough of these prove to be highly educated young professionals, then Spain may have to add brain-drain to its list of woes.

Oh, and the King abdicated the other day, but apart from shooting elephants nobody seems sure what he did anyway.

Taken together, all this does seem to lead you to the conclusion that - to quote a colleague of mine - Spain is ‘monumentally fucked’.

Of course to a large extent much of the above is just flimsy extrapolation based on anecdotal evidence collected by someone who is not an economist, has a shaky grasp of the language and who hasn't lived here that long. But then what did you expect? This is sort of a travel blog. At least I'm not in bloody Thailand.

At any rate the point I'm trying to make in a roundabout, A-level sociology kind of way, is that because of where I work, and the parents who – in brutal, sober truth – pay my wages, I don’t see much of la crisis on a daily basis. A few weeks ago we had a charity fun-run at school. One boy told me that his grandfather had sponsored him €100. That’s very generous, I said, how many laps of the course did he have to do to get it? No, the boy said, he’s sponsoring me €100 per lap. Suddenly his grandfather's offer didn't seem that generous at all, and once the kid had done over 20 laps, it started to become meaningless. I remember being told once that generosity should be measured not by how much you give but by how much you hold back. This place would turn me into a Christian, if these people weren't all Catholics.

True, there appear to be any number of crises that flounce and gnash their way breathlessly through the parental WhatsApp group every 48 hours or so, but these are much more in the order of ‘On the school trip yesterday Year 4 had to wait too long for food and water!’ than ‘Half of all young people can’t find a job’, and I'm not sure anyone outside of the padel court inner circle cares very much.

But leave the school gates and the signs are there. Chief amongst them are the almost ubiquitous vacant lots that seem at times to occupy not just the space in between streets but at times the streets themselves, their graffitied concrete skeletons hulking and creaking on crossroads, their stretches of empty land fenced off as if the dead scrub, thistle, broken stone and twisted plastic they contain were species in need of some special protection, or part of some upside-down conservation project. Perhaps this fencing off is highly appropriate, as these areas of scrabbling brown earth seem almost to stand as exhibits in a living museum; snapshots of Spain before the crash, the boom years optimism of their signs proclaiming new homes and new lives almost crass now amongst the creeping, brittle weed, much like the se vende messages that hang cracking and peeling from balconies and seem almost to be part of the structure of the buildings they adorn.

Halted and hypothetical construction is a common theme beyond the town too. On a recent school trip to a natural park and nature reserve not too far away, we passed through an enormous holiday complex owned, predictably, by the family of one of my students. Like all out of season holiday resorts, it looked like the last place you would ever want to go on holiday. As we drove though, my colleague started pointing out to me the various proposed and aborted buildings that littered the ciudad de vacaciones sulking on the coast to our right. Areas destined to be swimming pools, golf courses, bars and so on sat either side of the road, waiting silently for nothing to happen.

These spaces exist in a kind of purgatory, a land limbo. Un-useful to the humans that own them but unsuitable for nature to return to them, they await the judgement of someone with enough money, or enough credit, to turn them into something with purpose, or at least walls and a roof. Until then they remain impudently fenced off, lest someone misuse the land that is not being used for anything else.

Out of interest, the natural park we visited was one of the proposed locations for Disney Land. Obviously it never went ahead, but not for lack of funds. One of the reasons that the area of the park is of interest is that it sits on eight metres of peat which, thankfully, is not the safest foundation for rollercoasters and big pink castles.

It may be that the lack of construction has hit this area particularly badly, but to be honest it’s probably the same all along the Mediterranean coast. What is certainly true is that the big industry along this section of the Azahar is ceramics, which depends largely on construction to keep going. As well as rows and rows of orange trees, the train to Valencia takes you past several large ceramics factories, along with the omnipresent abandoned or unfinished buildings, converted by time into weird arboreta, trees growing trough their smashed windows, mossy plants hanging from sill and girder. Mounds of broken tiles glint blue and white in the sun. Once in Valencia you can of course visit the Nou Mestalla, second and as yet unfinished home ground of Valencia CF, the financially unstable, under-performing, Singaporean-owned, third most successful team in Spain and - according to Wikipedia at any rate - rivals of my adopted local club CD Castellón. After having seen Castellón and read a little about them, I assume that this rivalry is based on former glories rather than current form, and is probably increasingly one-sided. They may have come 5^th in La Liga in 1973, and been runners-up in the Cope del Rey of the same year, but when I saw them a month or so ago for the last home game of the season, which I later learned was also a relegation decider, the 16,000 capacity stadium of the now fourth-flight side managed to attract just 900 supporters. This setup has its advantages of course; tickets are around €5, you can pretty much choose where you sit, and at the end of the game you can go on to the pitch for a bit of a run around if you fancy it. In addition, Castellón must surely enjoy one of the largest ultra-to-ordinary-fan ratios of any club in the world. The Linea Albinegra come to every game complete with flares, drums and a catchy repertoire of chants, and sit shouting their hearts out in the first few rows behind gol norte. My experience of football firms is somewhere just below nothing, but these seemed friendly enough. Much less appealing is the contingent of hardcore boots and braces right wing fans (it would seem the Linea is politically on the Left) who sit at the southern end of the Nou Castalia, though not many were in evidence for my visit. On a good day, the two groups hurl abuse back and forth over the players and, the story goes, in the absence of any firms from rival clubs to fight (Valencia being too high and mighty to make the train ride up) they simply fight each other. Incidentally and perhaps predictably, the club’s fall from grace was partly due to financial reasons. Specifically, the club was relegated from the Segundo B (third) division for failing to pay its players. As far as I know this is something you pretty much have to do. Hardly surprising then that the Castellón players who, by a weird twist of circumstance, used to live in the flat I have just signed for were a little unreliable with their rent payments. Mind you, all that was only a few years ago; I assume the main reason that the team’s ended up where they have is that they’re not that good at football.

But enough about that. All this talk of smashed windows, unfinished buildings, failing football teams and barren land is probably a little depressing. Spain isn't just somewhere cranes go to die. (That noise you can hear by the way is the entirety of the Spanish population breathing a collective sigh of relief at my saying that. For a minute they were worried that my razor sharp analysis might have consigned them to history's slag heap). Things might be looking up. The country is actually coming out of recession. I definitely half-read the words ‘upgraded’ and ‘forecast’ the other day, though I can’t help but feel that a shift from 0.7%  to 1.2% projected growth will do little for most people and a lots for a few. On the vacant lot front, one of them up the road now has a big hole dug in it, almost as if they are planning to put foundations there. In a more creative use of space, another has been converted into communal allotments, where people are successfully growing all manner of veg. On the other hand, the recent performance of the national side will do little to lift spirits, but that football bit didn't quite fit with the rest of the post anyway, so it’s something of a side issue. I mainly put it in to break up the economic stuff, which is probably a bit dry when coming from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, let alone a slightly hungover primary school teacher who lives with lizards.

So, it seems there are at least a few reasons to be cheerful. Maybe in fact, as another Labour prime minister said in 1997, things can only get better. Or was it D.Ream? Either way, while everyone waits for that to happen, it’s undeniable that the region and the country are faced with a hefty task. What is to be done? Obviously I don’t know, but my Spanish teacher has an idea.

Unlike some other places along this stretch of coast – Alicante and Benidorm for example – Castellón is not touristy. There are various reasons for this. One reason is that it is, bluntly, pretty ugly, famously ugly in fact, and regarded by some as the ugliest city in Spain. Another is that, given that there are either more attractive or more well-established tourist destinations nearby, there’s not much reason to come here. I maintain that Castellón owes much of its lack of appeal to its location. Although it has a very nice beach, the town itself is actually around 6km  from the coast, the decision to build it there taken – so the story goes - in order to thwart pirates, who as is well known will not walk more than 4km to do their looting. The fact that the town does have a port which, necessarily, is by the sea and therefore not safe from pirate attack, seems then to be a bit of a logistical cock up. But never mind. I certainly sleep easier at nights knowing that I am safe from pillage and plunder at the hands of black-toothed, grog-swilling, lazy, slightly overweight pirates. After all, for all I know, what I think is building work up the road could in fact be people burying treasure.

Whatever the reason, there aren't any tourists here. Perhaps though, there could be. You may or may not know that Castellón has an airport. If you didn't know I wouldn't worry, and I certainly wouldn't go booking any flights, because since it opened in March 2011, not a single passenger plane has landed there. In fact the ‘ghost’ airport is something of a running joke. Built with 150 million imaginary Euros, and complete with a statue by the astonishingly bad local artist/sculptor Juan Rippolés, it’s regarded as a symbol of wasteful boom years spending. Carlos Fabra, the former president of the provincial government who oversaw the project, is currently serving four years for tax fraud, having decided he'd really rather not pay tax on €700,000 of his income. Ladrón seems to be a pretty accurate assessment in this case. 

However, the fortunes of the airport may be about to change, at least according to Emilio, as new owners have signed whatever documents they need to sign to get it up and running starting from September. He maintains that if people could fly here cheaply, like they can to Alicante or Benidorm, then the benefits of the town – beach, surrounding mountains and countryside, proximity to Valencia – would become apparent to visitors. When he told me I was a little taken aback; there seemed something depressingly familiar about tourism as a solution to Spain’s economic difficulties. Did people want Castellón to become a tourist destination? Weren't the Spanish a bit tired of hoards of drunken, pasty North-Europeans descending on their (sort of) seaside towns and stripping them of their character? Wasn't he worried about pirates? It’s not that we want tourists, he replied, it’s that we need them. In fairness he may be right. For better or worse, tourism does create jobs and wealth and as Spain seems to be short on both at the moment perhaps this should be considered a priority. On the other hand, while it doesn't rely on imaginary money, it does seem to be a solution that relies on money that belongs to other people, who could just as easily go and spend it somewhere else. Tourism also wouldn't make the town more attractive, but in fairness it couldn't make it much uglier. It would still be ugly, but it might be ugly with more money and jobs to go around. 

So is Castellón the next Benidorm? I don’t know, and by this stage you probably don’t care. But listen there wasn't a post for May so you had it coming. I'm minded to think that it will take a bit more than bums on barstools to solve Spain’s problems, but other solutions do appear a bit thin on the ground. Meanwhile, all is well in the world of the wealthy private school parent. There’s also a new king now. So that’s that. I just hope pirates don't fly Ryanair.

Relegation decider. 1-1. They stayed up.

Rubbish sculpture, useless airport.

La autotomia / El vampiro

La autotomia

Lizard season has been upon the Bunker for a few weeks now. Several mornings recently I’ve opened my door to find one basking on the step in the early sun, and I can hear them scuttle from my footsteps to and from the washing line round the back, just about catching a glimpse of their brown tails vanishing rustling into the flowerbed.

The Bunker, by the way, is the on-site teachers’ accommodation where I live. It’s so called because it has the grey, boxy and (almost) windowless appearance of somewhere you might shelter from a nuclear blast. It’s a bit like living in one of those big self-storage lockers, or a shipping container. Underneath the mattress on my bed previous inhabitants have scrawled the length of their stint, in a way that is just a bit too reminiscent of a prison cell. In all honesty it’s not too bad. It does in fact have windows, though not on the lizard side as this faces the school and the car park, and presumably the builders thought that parents might not enjoy the sight of the adults in whose care they were leaving their children wandering around in their pants. The fact that a good deal of the light from the window side is blocked out by two large billboards is probably a small price to pay for not being on constant show, and for not having to wear trousers the whole damn time. The kitchen is small but adequate; I have a choice of two sofas; a bathroom with what appears to be a regulated supply of hot water; even a spare bedroom, albeit containing nothing other than a bed. It’s the sort of place that would set you back about £1250 a month in London, and my commute is roughly two minutes. Despite this I am often late. Plus, I have a constant supply of rosemary as a bush grows by the front door, along with some pungent smelling pink flower with mint-like leaves, and a variety of other foliage that is home to big lumbering grasshoppers, hummingbird moths, a small yellow bird that I think is a kind of wagtail and of course lizards, of at least two different species.

On the whole when you open the door on them, the startled lizard hides in the nearest shrub but when last week Rachael –visiting from some windswept backwater called Madrid – interrupted one in its morning sunning, he ran not back into the undergrowth but inside the flat. Anyone who knows a bit about geckos and other small lizards will know that they can shed their tails when attacked, a move which either leaves the predator with only the tail to chew on, or at least creates enough confusion to allow the reptile time to escape – in this case to the initial safety of behind the sideboard and then inside the electric heater, from where he had to be ejected in a patch of flowerbed, by which time we had missed our train. This is autotomy – self amputation – and is practised by various animals including several different kinds of lizard (in this case probably a Mediterranean house gecko), salamanders, some spiders, and the African spiny mouse, which can shed its skin in order to evade capture. When a bee leaves its sting in you this is also autotomy, although given that the sting also seems to take with it the insect’s internal organs, resulting in death, I assume in this instance the goal is not individual survival but the protection of the group. Good old bees.

Turns out some geckos will perform autotomy not only if attacked but also if particularly freaked out, so it would seem the gecko that lives outside my flat is quite highly strung – assuming that Rachael didn't try to attack him – and was so startled by the opening door that he shed his tail. Like a really extreme version of wetting yourself. Either that or she trod on it. Also, what I didn't know is that – in order to distract the predator - the rejected tail retains movement, and writhes around for a few minutes independent of the body, which although interesting is a bit grimy. Don’t worry though, because the lizard might come back later and eat it.

So there you go; autotomy in neurotic house geckos. Every day’s a school day.

El vampiro

There’s that phrase or possibly psalm that says: ‘Out of the mouths and babes oft times truths do come’. Or something like that. I reckon most teachers wouldn't have to search too hard in their daily life to find examples where this is undoubtedly the case. Children’s somewhat unsettling habit of being uncannily honest and accurate about things that can make adults squirm is as endearing as it is terrifying. Then of course there are the times when they spew absolute nonsense, like the other day in science when one of them told me with great conviction that eggs melt. Eggs don’t melt kid.

Making the move from secondary to primary has obviously thrown up challenges. Some of these I was expecting; don’t trip over them; don’t expect them to get the difference between direct and reported speech the first time round; don’t worry if sometimes they make weird faces and roll around on the floor for a bit because fractions aren't that interesting; that sort of stuff. But some I was less prepared for, even though they seem obvious in writing; they don’t really get subtext or irony, weirdly; to them it does matter if someone took their pencil, even if they subsequently gave it back; whichever way you slice it, fart noises are funny; and more importantly, most will just say stuff if they are thinking it.

Of course, this isn't limited to primary. Anyone who’s ever taught in the depths of Y9 will know that it takes some students longer than others to develop the ol’ brain-mouth filter. It’s just that when it’s a seven year old telling you that your hair is messy and that you smell of coffee it’s somehow more disarming, because you know it must be true.

The fact that the change in key stage has also been accompanied by a change from state to private may also have a bearing on this. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t pretend to have been a crusading educator of kids from decaying and anonymous high-rises, steering them through the maze of violence and poverty that formed their everyday lives, protecting them from the spectres of gangs and drugs with the shining beacon of education. I taught French in a relatively leafy suburb of Essex. Not without its challenges obviously, but I’d be surprised if any of the kids I used to teach wound up in prison, or releasing a lyrically brilliant but virtually unheard of grime record. Even so, I think it would be fair to say that most of them didn't have maids. Much more ‘second car’ than ‘second home’. And their parents had more or less normal jobs. Jobs that you’d heard of. Stuff like ‘works in a bank, ‘architect’, ‘self-employed builder’, even ‘teacher’; not stuff like ‘professional footballer’, ‘pro-golfer’, ‘owner of four restaurants and a water park’ or the decidedly shady ‘something in North Africa’. Anyway point being that perhaps this background has imbued the students here with even less fear than the average pre-teen - the teenage years being a state of constant fear of absolutely everything – so emphasising and honing their ability to point out one’s foibles. But then, that could just be my liberal guilt talking. And you can’t resent them; they’re eight for Christ’s sake.

Either way, it took me all of three hours of my fist day to realise that they calls ‘em like them sees ‘em: ‘Mr Adam, you have purple round your eyes, you did not sleep well’ (for reasons which are unclear to me, they drop the surname here but keep the ‘Mr’). She was right; I hadn't slept well, largely because the next day I was starting a new job in another country in a key stage in which I wasn't trained. Thing is, it’s probably quite a big step for the average 8 year-old to get their head round this. To her I just looked knackered, and that’s what she said. Similarly, there was no arguing with the student the other week who they told me I had sweat under my arms and that ‘maybe I should change my shirt’. It is starting to get hot here.

There is something which should be said about the purple eye comment which is that, although that day I really hadn't slept well, mostly it’s just my natural colouring. My eyes are dark, and the rest of my face maintains a somewhat yellow tinge that has been described variously as ‘Scandinavian’, ‘Mediterranean’, ‘olive’, ‘waxy’, ‘sallow’, ‘ghostly’, and perhaps least flatteringly of all ‘grey’. In fairness to the kids, adults have in the past felt compelled to comment on my sunken features. A man in the pub once walked up to me and quite unexpectedly and not a little aggressively grabbed my face in both hands and held my head still so he could get a better look at it. He stared into my eyes for a while. I weighed up whether he was going to punch me or give me a kiss, and opted eventually for the former. Then he said simply, ‘You've got very dark eyes. That’s why I was looking at you earlier on’. I said I hadn't noticed. I had noticed; he’d been looking right at me for some time. Hence, I suppose, my nickname amongst some of the children - el vampiro - which emerged after a couple of weeks and, at the height of its usage, led some children to run away from me down the corridor in ‘fear’, crying ‘Oh no! It is Mr Vampiro! If he bites you, you will be a vampiro too.’ Thankfully, it seems to have settled down a little now, as has their habit of drawing pictures of me on the board in the morning, an exercise whose objective appears to have been ‘who can draw the picture that looks the least like Mr Adam, or even a human being’. If this is the case, the prize must surely go to the student who liked to draw me as a branch of the supermarket chain Mercadona, sometimes accompanied with an explanatory caption, but sometimes just left for the viewer to interpret. That was the egg melting kid.

Some comments of course are harder to stomach - or understand- than others. ‘Slow’ is an accusation that (perhaps appropriately) I am still struggling to get to grips with; I maintain that ‘old’ is a matter of perspective; and ‘feo’ is one that we had to have a little chat about. Some -‘Mr Gum’ for example- are just plain odd. The latest from one Y4 student is ‘Mr Puffin’. I quite like this one, not least because it comes with a full-on, head back, ear-to-ear grin, and is so strange that it’s pointless even trying to rationalise it.

However, some do have the ability to reach you in a strange and unnerving way. ‘Why are you so serious?’ is a question that keeps rolling around in my head, and one to which I can’t quite seem to find an answer, although it is probably just that at the time of asking I was trying to teach maths. It’s a hell of a question nonetheless. It’s a question that can keep you awake at night, especially when taken apiece with the character description of me written by one student, which read simply: ‘Mr Adam: tall, weird and sad’. I've been trying to work out whether she meant ‘sad’ as in ‘melancholy’ or, even worse, ‘sad’ as in ‘Warhammer collection and the novel of the game Halo’. If the latter, I can take comfort in the fact that this at least really isn't true, although I am able to identify all the flags of the World. Similarly, the all-purpose ‘bad’ is an adaptable and niggly instrument for all its bluntness. ‘How many minutes are left of the lesson?’ is another question that if taken the wrong way can cut through you a bit, and there is a knowing, prophetic tone to the disarmingly simple ‘Why are you always here?’ that could lead a man to madness if enough time was given to it.

But then, they’re only kids, just breathing air out of their mouths. Incidentally, the reason that student was doing a character description of me is that I appeared in the fantasy story she was writing. I was a gingerbread man who gets his arm bitten off by the Queen after failing to collect enough fruit. Apparently there are no unions for gingerbread men. It was an odd sort of compliment, but one which I took in the spirit in which it was offered; unknowingly.

Please enjoy below some highlights from the Mr Adam Gallery.

A classic example of the form.

With Kit-Kat and cheese.

March 2014

Notable for its use of defined limbs.

'Tall, weird, sad, crumbly'

La disculpa; Las fiestas

La disculpa

The Bunker, Castellón de la Plana, Valencia 25/03/14

Ideally I would have started writing this earlier on. It really would have made the whole thing simpler. I wouldn't now be faced with having to remember and synthesise everything that’s happened since I arrived into something that is hopefully interesting, at least partially readable and, failing both of those things, short. Also, being removed from the events themselves and not being spurred on by the fleeting energy of the moment only serves to heighten the feeling that there is no particular reason to write about them at all, being as they are just a bunch of stuff that happened to some people. Similarly, the cooling off effect of hindsight, combined with the slow burning of ever encroaching memory loss, makes the challenge of placing yourself back in those moments all the more acute, and raises the further question of whether to write about them as if at the time of their happening or at least shortly after – like a diary- or whether to recount them from a more removed standpoint, a little older and maybe even a little wiser – like a story. Which would you prefer to read? At this stage, probably neither.

But then again, six or so weeks after an event which I haven’t even mentioned yet (I moved to Spain), seems as good or at least as arbitrary a point as any at which to start keeping a record of it. Also I am on holiday at the moment and have a free morning. In addition, anyone who’s familiar with your average teacher training course will know that writing about –sorry, reflecting on- something largely insignificant that you vaguely remember from several months ago as if it is a) very significant indeed and b) much more recent that it is, might just be the difference between a ‘Good’ and a ‘Requires Sterilisation’. As for synthesising everything that has happened into something short, snappy and maybe even sexy, I'm quietly confident that this won’t be too much of a challenge. Once you get down to it, not a lot's happened. I reckon I've got about three posts max in me. I mean, I live in a car park.

Las fiestas

At the risk of confirming various stereotypes about the ‘mañana, mañana’ attitude of tax-dodging lay-about southern Europeans, the first post is about parties and drinking. I assure you it’s nothing but a happy coincidence.

I mentioned I was on holiday. Well, I am. It’s a local festival called la Magdalena, which celebrates the town’s founding in the 13^th century. At the time, the would-be inhabitants were living up in the hills outside the city, based around the Ermita de la Magdalena, which either gives its name to the hill it sits on or the other way round. The current church is a 15^th construction, so I assume there must have been something there before. Down in the plain below at that time was a Moorish settlement in what is now Castillo de Fadrell, a 12^th Century fort just outside the city. Round about 1250 Jaime I, King of Aragon amongst other things, either kicked or negotiated the Muslims out as part of his drive south and the establishment of the Kingdom of Valencia and gave the land to the people up on the hill.  A central part of the festival is a pilgrimage of sorts from the town up to the church, complete with a bamboo cane and what looks like a big bagel tied on with a green ribbon, for reasons I am somewhat unclear on. I assume it's just an olde-worlde snack. This is accompanied by the traditional Magdalena attire of a kind of of black painter’s smock and either a green or blue-checked neckerchief. I say pilgrimage ‘of sorts’ because on the Sunday morning when the procession takes place, most people seem to be either hung-over or still drunk from the marathon session the day before. In this sense the reverent, religious overtones of the word ‘pilgrimage’ may be little misleading. Make no mistake; Magdalena is a week-long piss-up. But at least it’s a piss-up with a history.

Perhaps the other highlight is the mascleta (daily at 14:00 apart from Sunday, because everyone is at church). As far as I know, this tradition doesn’t exist outside of the Valencian region. Mascleta are essentially fireworks, but much less colourful and about a thousand times as loud. In Castellon, the mascleta takes place by one of the town’s many roundabouts – this one adorned with giant multicoloured bamboo canes – and the finale, where the explosives are let off in breathtakingly rapid succession, creates a cloud of flashing smoke that looks like the inside of a hurricane along with a sound that genuinely makes your ribs rattle.

This is a tradition borrowed from Valencia itself, where mascletas, also at 14:00, punctuate every day of Las Fallas (Falles in Catalan/Valenciano), a festival that runs from 15^th – 19^th March, and is probably based on a medieval pagan festival to celebrate the start of spring (the spring equinox is 20^th March). Pagans being pagans, they like to mark the equinox by lighting fires. The story goes that the carpenters and artisans of Valencia would take this opportunity to throw out into the street and burn any unwanted work and wood from the winter. Sometimes people would make these into human form and dress them up in clothes. Occasionally they would make them look like members of the local community. With time, the piles of wood became ever more detailed and complex, and today the statues often satirise politicians, recount news events from the past year, and in many cases stand as tall as the surrounding buildings. In theory they are made of nothing but wood and paper but in reality owe much of their structural intricacy to polystyrene. These are the fallas/falles that give the festival its name. The people that build them are called falleras. Construction can take the whole year and the cost runs into the tens of thousands of Euros per sculpture. And then at around midnight on the 19^th they set them on fire. At some point during the history of the festival the Church intervened to make the last day of fallas coincide not with the spring equinox but the Saint Day of Joseph out of Joseph and Mary, adoptive father of Jesus and patron saint of carpenters. 19^th March is also Father’s Day and a public holiday in Spain.

None of that helps to explain the mascelta, but whatever its historical origins or significance, its main function in Castelló seems to be to announce the commencement of the day’s drinking.

I feel I should add a word on the drinking here, as I fear I risk painting the inhabitants of my current city as debauched borrachos to a man. First of all, it’s fiesta. It’s not like this most of the time. Secondly, Spanish drinking is not like British drinking. At home, the shortage of clement weather and large public spaces means that we are often obliged to squeeze our drinking into a few liver-pounding hours before the cold and the dark and the guilt of the whole thing make us return home at roughly 9:34pm, ideally bloodied or weeping. Here it’s different, at least at fiesta. You can pad around quite happily with a cold beer, go in and out of bars, have a little sit down for a while accompanied by some combination of pork and carbohydrate, get another beer and maybe a carajillo, chat, have a bit of a dance, stop for dinner at 2am and before you know it’s tomorrow and you don’t feel like going to work. True, it lacks the romantic self-annihilation of the British session, and there is nothing of the complex, coded intimacy of the pub, an institution which doesn't exist in the same way outside the British Isles, but it feels somehow more healthy, more open, more social. To be honest though, once you get down to it, it’s probably just sunnier.

It’s not just the open nature of the alcohol but also of the fireworks that characterise these festivals. Throughout both Magdalena and Fallas, loud sporadic bangs are heard in the streets, as people set off firecrackers and minor explosives in crowded public spaces. The main culprits of this seem to be small children and middle-aged men who really should know better. That said, coming from a family of pyromaniacs myself and having grown up with a Dad who not only goes back to lit fireworks but also attempts to make them work by sticking another firework in the side as a makeshift fuse, I feel quite at home amongst the mild chaos and risk of minor-limb loss that both Magdalena and Fallas engender. And like Dad says, when waxing lyrical about the halcyon days of a less litigious age, if you lose a finger it’s your own fault.

He’d also like the dancing.

Falla, Valencia

Falla de la Plaza del Ayuntamiento

 

Falla at Calle de  Cuba, Valencia

Lights at Calle de Cuba, Valencia

 

Falla before and after la cremà