The importance of certain days!

They know how to do public holidays in the good old-fashioned way here in Spain. Yesterday was the Feast of the Assumption, Mary going up to Heaven and all that, a public holiday all over Spain, and Italy for that matter, the 15th of August marking the Ferragosto, the start of the August holiday for Italians. Today is also a public holiday, but only in Vigo as far as I know. It might be the feast of San Roque or it might be someone or something completely different. Whatever the cause, Vigo is shut today. And, yes, just about everything closes - shops, supermarkets, banks. But cafes and restaurants remain open, as do breadshops, of course, as people want fresh bread and even cakes. If you are off to lunch with the in-laws you really should take a cake with you.

So Vigo has had two “festivos” on the run. The local wifi cafe has closed at midday as a consequence. The people who make a bridge when there are festivos, making a long weekend out of it, will have been making a huge great suspension bridge out of this one.

 When I was a teenager, working the summer holidays in a shoe shop, because we were a seaside town we stayed open on Bank Holidays, presumably in case anyone wanted to buy sandals on their day out at the seaside. Most places closed. The town was sort of half open, expecting to be full of visitors instead of local people. Those of us working the Bank Holiday in the shoe shop were paid time and a half to compensate for missing the holiday. The shop also cancelled its half-day closing - those were the days when shops closed one afternoon a week and town centres went quiet - for the duration of the summer. We didn’t receive extra pay for that though; instead we had another afternoon off some time during the week.

Nowadays Bank Holidays in the UK for small shops, big shopping centres and retail parks are pretty much the same as any other day. I doubt if anyone gets extra pay now for working the Bank Holiday. Sometimes bus services are reduced but it’s really only on Christmas Day that everything goes properly quiet. On Boxing Day and New Year’s Day they all go mad with the start of sales.

Another thing that happens here in Spain is places, small shops and cafes and restaurants, closing for a couple of weeks while the owners go on holiday. Or they put notices up about their reduced opening hours for the summer period. Even the library has summer opening times. They expect people to go to the beach instead of the library! Now, that does not happen in the UK, or at any rate not in the places where I have lived.

Yesterday was not a public holiday in the UK but it was an important day for some: A-Level Results Day. The papers all had photos of delighted students showing off their high grades. You rarely see pictures of the ones who did not make the grades they needed for university entrance.

We have long expressed our belief that a higher percentage of students receive top grades than when we were taking those exams, just as more students graduate with first class degrees than ever used to happen. We don’t believe that it is because students are cleverer than they used to be either! Whatever the cause, attempts have been made to “tighten up”. And this year, apparently, official figures show that the proportion of A-Level students achieving top grades is the lowest for more than a decade. Here’s some more stuff:-

 “The data also revealed that for the first time, there were more entries from girls than boys for A-level science subjects, while Spanish overtook French as the most popular foreign language to study. 

Overall, 25.5% of UK candidates were awarded an A or A* grade, the lowest proportion since 2007 when it was 25.3%.

Girls narrowly took back the lead in terms of top grades with 25.5% receiving at least an A, compared with 25.4% of boys.

* Boys took the top spot in 2017, following a long period in which girls had been ahead. However, boys still outperformed the girls based on A* grades alone, with 8.2% of entries getting the highest result, compared with 7.5%, respectively.”

Oddly, in my opinion anyway, the most popular subject this year was maths, being taken by 91,895 entrants but down 5.9% on last year. And, because there needs to be a bit of scandalous stuff, just hours before the results were revealed, leaked documents showed that students needed only an overall score of 55% to get an A grade in this year's maths A-level exam.

 There you go!

 We have no personal interest in the A-Level results this year. Of more interest to us are the GCSE results, due out next Thursday, which will decide what our 16-year-old granddaughter does next!