A Week is a Long Time in...

Logging on just now, I noticed that my last post was dated 6 October by the software, although it appears as 7 October on the actual blog. And that means a whole week without posting anything. I don't really mean the blog to be a diary of my life, although it is sometimes inevitable. What has been happening is that I am going through the busiest 2-3 weeks of the year for those of us at the Centre. Teaching students whom you don't know is infinitely more stressful than teaching those you know, even those whom you know and don't much like. The routines are different, and one arrives home tired out and if there are any new ideas for posts, they are swamped by everything else that is going on.

Whether this accounts for the sparse postings lately I am not sure, as my friend the Inspector has posted but very little on his Charlton blog, for the simple reason that the Arsenal game 12 days ago was so traumatic, and there hasn't been any higher league football since.

As for the quiz team, in my last two mentions of it I had vaguely attempted to trace a parallel between whatever we did on Monday nights, and what Charlton might have been doing around the same time - not entirely serious, but oddly enough, this week, to coincide with Charlton's not playing at all, things were quite different for us, too.

Tuesday, 12 October was a national holiday in Spain. Spain takes its holidays seriously, and they fall on certain dates because they commemorate specific, usually religious, things. So there is none of this moving it to the nearest Monday, unless it falls on a Sunday. Feast days are taken as days off whenever they fall. 12 October is the celebration of the Virgen del Pilar, literally the Virgin of the Pillar, when Our Lady is supposed to have appeared atop a pillar by the banks of the River Ebro to Saint James the Great (patron saint of Spain), on the night of 2 January, 40 A.D., and told him to construct a church there, which he did. The pillar was, and still is, at the centre of the church, now the cathedral in Zaragoza, and named for Santa María del Pilar, and this is why many Spanish women are called (María del) Pilar, which I always thought was rather an odd name, though no worse than names like Jade or Kylie, I suppose.

Anyway, Tuesday being a national holiday meant that Monday was what is called a víspera, a word which is cognate with the English word vespers, meaning the eve of a feast day, and of course the atmosphere down our cosy pub was totally different, being more akin to a Saturday than a Monday. Not only that, three of our regulars were on duty with their wives or sweethearts, so those of us who remained merged with the remnants of another team. The pub was so full that a noisy birthday party group had to be accommodated downstairs in the adjacent space to us, and they were in no mood to respect a load of English speakers who were trying to do something as uncool as having a quiz. The questions were rather esoteric ones as well, as this week they were being put by the three young Spanish aeronautical engineers who are, surprisingly, great devotees of the quiz. Given their somewhat imperfect English, hearing them properly was well-nigh impossible with all the noise coming in from the adjacent room. To cap it all, we came fourth out of four teams, and despite three spot prizes, the evening, from a quiz point of view, could hardly be counted a success, though the post-quiz boozing was good, as we weren't going to be working the next day, of course.

So there we are: no game for Charlton at the weekend, and it wasn't really a proper outing for the quiz team either. Spooky or what?