Well, we are at home now after an extremely long week of packing a hired Luton van that had definitely seen better days – it had a stereo with a cd player – and driving it down to a broiling Andalusia and then unpacking it into a house that was already full of furniture. 

Sonalee has finally finished at that school.  My legal action is still pending but it doesn’t really bother me much as long as it costs the school to contest it.  We are free of that place at last and are mightily glad to be so since it is one of the most toxic environments we have ever encountered despite our history of working in extremely tough schools in the UK.  The behaviour of the students there is absolutely appalling, worse than a school I worked in many years ago in Tottenham and worse even than Knowle West in Bristol.  You have to see it to believe it and then take more time to reconcile it with the fact that these children are the sons and daughters of the rich and famous of Madrid.

There are some genuinely nice kids there, it has to be said.  We both liked a number of them but they’re drowned out by the selfish, entitled brats that infect everything that happens there.  And the nice kids are also disadvantaged by the utterly cowardly and inept senior management team of sad old men who have been there 25 years and will not anything upset their future pension plans.  The only effective one, a woman, has resigned because she’s had enough.  In fact nearly 50% of the staff have resigned this year.  50%.  Only the worst schools in the world reach that figure.  They’re losing their head of English, Maths, Chemistry, Art, Geography, SENCO… the list goes on for quite a while.

I have worked in a worse school, but it was some time ago and it was in an area mired in deep poverty and social problems; you can kind of forgive it when you consider the circumstances.  This one has more money than Croesus sloshing around the place; it has no excuse.  I have never seen a school that is so afraid of parents.  It is quite bizarre.  It makes my school in Lisbon look like a beacon of success.  At least there when there were disciplinary issues they got dealt with swiftly and effectively.  At Kings, miscreants had lunch with the head of KS3.  Comparing the management of my Lisbon school and in Madrid is like comparing chalk and cheese. 

And it’s so annoying.  It doesn’t take much to stand up to horrible parents and wanky kids.  It requires some balls, true, but apparently those are missing in Madrid. 

What the whole episode has taught us is that reputations are often wrong.  And that the rich of Madrid really do live up to their reputations as arseholes.  And that you should never work for a school that is owned by a greedy global rapacious corporation.  And beware sad and rather pathetic old men who have been in the same place for 30 years. 

Our more immediate issues are that we have four sofas, four beds, two huge tellies, two microwaves and a house you can barely move in.  This will be fixed within the next few weeks or so.  Then we have the issue of being jobless.  Fortunately we are at home where we pay no rent or mortgage and where it is relatively cheap to live despite the price of cheddar going up from 2.79 Euros to 3.49 in the last year.  Food prices are soaring here. 

And we have been here before.  When we first moved here we decided to take a year off and to try to find a job that would excite us.  We did.  It was in Morocco and we liked it there and had some nice colleagues.  Then covid screwed things up somewhat but we found Lisbon and we loved it there because my school was run by a competent management team and I had some really lovely colleagues that we still miss. 

But all of this has happened in the last four years and we are tired of moving.  It is exhausting.  We’ve decided to stay here in Andalusia for the short to medium term and to try find some form of employment as teachers of English.  Sonalee has been accepted by online tutoring companies and I am an educational whore who will do any job as long as it pays okay.  The dogs love the campo and the cat…

Well, the cat has really pissed Sonalee off.  He gets the upstairs all to himself at night now but demands food in the early mornings.  Sonalee took too long to use the bathroom the other day so he decided to wee all over some of her clothes to show how unhappy he was.  She is, as I type, cursing Moroccan street cats loudly as the smell still hasn’t gone away after two washes. 

So here we are and here we will stay and try to get people to visit us and for us to visit our families and friends and be happy.

Some of them have already made us more cheerful.  My nephew and two nieces visited us in Madrid for nearly a week and it was really great.  They have turned out to be extremely nice, friendly, intelligent and respectful young adults.  It was a real pleasure to host them.  They were so lovely that I even agreed to do a tour of the Real Madrid stadium with my nephew.  Aye, I did it.  It was a bit crap to be honest.  We did, of course, take them for a curry in what has to be the best curry house in Spain.  Jack also came to our house in Colmenar Viejo and declared it to be an incredibly boring town.  He wasn’t wrong.

We also visited our friends in Guadalajara and that is not a boring town.  We haven’t seen them since their wedding in January and they were quick to remind us of how happy and trashed we were that night.  Why wouldn’t we have been?  They’re lovely and they have lovely friends and it was a free bar!  Anyway, we did the tour of the town which culminated in the best ice cream in Spain.  Not a bad day out at all.  We wish we could have done it sooner but we were so stressed out that we forgot what was important.

They have promised to come to Andalusia to see us.  As have our only work friends from Colmenar Viejo.  And this is an invitation that we are happy to extend to all whom we know.  We’re here for a while and we’re not going on another massive move for some time.  How can we?  We have four toilet brushes and only two bathrooms.  Decisions will need to be made regarding this important problem. 

This is one of the consequences of constantly moving around.  There are others.  Like we can’t vote in the village government elections because we’re registered in the north.  We are a bit gutted about this since we have come to like our mayor and her efforts.  Also, our friend Jan has become political and joined the local left leaning party and we would have liked to have supported her. 

But we do have a ticket for the Shit of Fortune.  Next Saturday a donkey will be led around the village car park and which square he or she does a poo in will win the ticket holder a thousand Euros.  It’s a big event with lots of men getting really pissed all day in the tent that will be banging out awful techno for twelve hours regardless of where the donkey has a dump.  It’s part of the life of the village and it’s nice to be here for it.

Sonalee is off next week to see her mum.  She’s very excited.  We’re off to the UK in June and I have promised Sonalee a hovercraft ride to the Isle of Wight.  Her excitement isn’t obvious.  What to do?

Ayubowan, 

Hasta Luego, inshallah

Ciao

Paul

PS Heard this on the radio today and it reminded me of how brilliant they were.    This version isn’t bad either.