"The King is a thief!"

Eschewing the delights of Zaragozan evening entertainment and dining this evening, I find myself relaxing in the tranquillity of my hotel room with an empanada de carne (meat pasty), some beers and the wonder that is spotify.
*
It’s been a busy old weekend touring and seeing the sights of Zaragoza, but there’s also been the examining thrown in for good measure, and it’s this that I choose to focus on for today’s blog. For those reading that aren’t in the Trinity examining game, I should say that while these minor anecdotes really are minor, in the frozen wastelands of initial and elementary grade examinations (asking about colours and pets or, at higher grades, asking what people did on holiday), these offerings are as purest gold and worth savouring.
*
To set the scene, I’ve a couple of pictures of me at desks preparing to examine – handy things, timers. In the first picture you’ll notice that the windows are shaped in something of a church-like way for a classroom. This isn’t because I was in a converted church of historical merit, but because a lot of examining I’ve been doing has been in Catholic schools. Lots of them. The school windows seemed to be designed like this so that they’d let in less light (a psychological comment?) and make you think of the hallowed and symbolic environs of a place of worship, perhaps transforming the teacher into the role of a priest in a way that could evoke thoughts of transubstantiation. What that would make me as a visiting examiner, I shouldn’t like to comment for fear of blaspheming... Whatever the actual reason, I’ll say one thing for these Spanish, they do like their popes and their churches.
*
Further churchy influences can be seen in the second picture. Here I get the private joy of the head teacher’s office (itself with its own private toilet, albeit without an actual toilet seat, but with toilet paper) with a picture of Mary above my left shoulder and the blessed John Paul himself beaming beatifically from directly above me, as if giving me his authority to examine, just as Paul laid his hands on the first pope, etc...
*
One topic that made me prick up my ears was one by a lad on graffiti, and its value as art art. Getting in with the youth lingo, I asked if ‘tagging’ was graffiti or vandalism. On this he was quite sure, vandalism, definitely. On learning that he did graffiti himself, I tried to elicit an example of the first conditional (If you..., you will...). Asking him, “If a policeman sees you, what will happen?” he simply replied, “Run away”. Smart lad.
*
There was another lad who failed but was talking about denim and the history of ‘jeans’. Quite the topic as you might imagine. Anyway, somehow we got onto the king (quite the leap in topic) and he suddenly opened fire with both treasonous barrels, branding the king a thief for taking tax payers’ money and chastising the rest of the world for thinking that the Spanish were all lazy, having siestas all the time and doing no work. I asked him where he thought the stereo-type came from but he was unable to answer.
*
Another examiner was doing low levels and asked what day it was. The reply was that, “Today is yesterday”. Quite honestly, after a week of examining it really does seem that way sometimes.
There was one kid whose topic was ‘war hammer’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_Fantasy). After marvelling at the little model he’d come in with, painted with extreme care and attention, he went on to describe the gaming shop where he spent most of his time. Should you ever be in Zaragoza, you’ll know it because it has “three main shelves, one for war hammer, one for future and one for Lord of the Rings”. If you’re still in doubt, the owner has blond hair, a wife who’s 36 and a small child of 3 years old.
*
One girl was talking about her favourite band, La Oreja de Van Gogh, a band with no connection to Van Gogh except for being Spanish. Unable to sustain a topic on the band for a full five minutes (pitiful effort for a favourite band?), she veered off onto Van Gogh proper and the differences between Van Gogh and Velazquez, coving three topics in one.

*
To end this blog, I’ll leave you with a picture of the bin in my hotel room. A friend once commented that ‘confusion and cheese are the two certainties of life’ and if this is the case, one can only assume that kittens and biscuits are two of life’s certain pleasures. What the link is to the other caption is, I couldn’t / shouldn’t possibly say. However, as mentioned earlier, these Spanish do like their Catholicism.