My Corn Flakes Are Trying to Kill Me

We had it drilled into us before we came out here that teaching is about survival. And as you all know, the first rule of survival is about maintaining a healthy mental attitude.

Well, I think I’ve been doing okay – up till now, that is. Because, as we head into the final week of this Spanish spectacular, I fear that the first cracks may be starting to appear in my (don’t snigger!) hitherto impregnable psychological armour.

Here are some of the more worrying signs (or is that symptoms?) … 

• A growing and seemingly intractable addiction to corn flakes, which, being more of a muesli muncher, I hardly ever ate back in the UK.

• Mistaking the Mediterranean Sea for just a fairly sizable lake (I’m not making these up).

• Strange dreams – including one recently where I was trying to explain something to a clown with a green and white plastic face …

• This recurrent fantasy about the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the bit near the end when Indy and Elsa step into the inner sanctum and are confronted by the ancient knight and countless versions of the holy grail – except instead of grails its paellas! Only the true paella (the paella of a carpenter, made by said carpenter in his own home naturally) will bring everlasting life; the false paellas will bring death ...

• Finally – and this is really embarrassing – paying repeat visits to Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences, whose freaky architectural design (inspired, don’t you know, by Salvador Dalí’s immortal classic My Worst Fever Dream Ever: Visit to Santa’s Psychedelic Grotto of the Far Future) is the only thing that makes sense to me any more …

 

Sadly there’s more – but that’s all I’m willing to own up to at the moment. I’ll leave it to you good folks to decide if this is a normal case of teaching fatigue, or whether something more sinister may be at work …