The TIM blog

-
Along with a group of other people I'm doing some bits and pieces for the blog of a local, English language magazine. I've added the link in the box to the right but, if you want to have a look it's here

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Put into mothballs

-
Image
I learn a lot about the country I live in by prying into the private lives of my students. Sometime last Autumn I asked the inevitable Monday lesson question about what a student had done at the weekend. The young woman in question had spent some time putting away her summer clothes and bringing out her winter clothes. I was impressed. Such order. Come Spring I asked the same student if she had liberated her summer clothes from their Winter storage yet. A couple of weeks still to go she said. I was relaying the story of this, to me, remarkable behaviour to another group of students as a prelude to a similar question to them. I didn't get very far. They all thought it was perfectly normal behaviour. They did it too. Today on Ondacero radio there was a mention of one of their more well known presenters, Carlos Herrera, talking about this very phenomenon on his show last week. Obviously this is a nationwide event in Spain. I'm pretty sure that we Brits don't do go thro...
Read more

Forty Years On

-
Image
I think it's Old Harrovians that use the song Forty Years On as the school anthem but I wouldn't have been too surprised if Maggie had started humming it as she pottered around the flat yesterday evening. Maggie works at José María de Lapuerta School here in Cartagena teaching five year olds English as part of the British Council Bilingual English Project. Last night she went to an evening do as the start of the celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of the school. She came back with all sorts of stories - about how the petroleum company Repsol first founded the school in 1969 and built the local housing as part of a "model village" type project for it's employees. She told me how well the school has been doing in the local chess league and how the school has also won a prize for the quality of it's excellence in sports teaching. She reminded me that the school had also won the "Silver Blackboard" (there isn't a gold one, silver is as g...
Read more

A bit bigger than 12 gauge

-
Image
If you ever feel the need to launch armour piercing shells weighing 885kg and loaded with 18 kilos of TNT a little over 35 kilometres out to sea then I know where you can find exactly the device to do it. 885kg by the way is about the weight of the current Fiat 500 car. Just down the coast from us at Azohía there is an abandoned, but well maintained, fortress that houses two rather fearsome looking cannons. The fortress was constructed between 1928 and 1936. The guns themselves were built by Vickers. Their barrels are 17 metres long with a calibre of 38cm. Not quite wide enough to launch that Fiat but pretty big nonetheless. You're going to need 20 pals to help you fire each gun and you'll probably need to fill in some official paperwork, this being Spain, but it would make you the envy of anyone who thought they were pretty cool because they owned a pair of Purdeys. Fabulous location too. Nice bit of the coast.
Read more