Summer. Locked down again! Graduate employment. Preserving old Spanish.

So summer came back with a vengeance this morning. 20 degrees already when I went out for a run first, by midday it was up to 28 degrees. All my plans to run early and get the day started early went awry because my son phoned me as I ran through the village and I stopped and sat on a wall to talk to him for 20 minutes, just catching up on what everyone is up to at his end of the country. Then on my way home I met an old friend and stopped for another long chat. Before I knew it half the morning had gone.

But it was a fine morning with some good photo opportunities, including a basking blackbird.

I never imagined blackbirds, or indeed birds of any kind, sunbathing but there he was, bold as brass, catching some vitamin D!

Greater Manchester is back in lockdown, well a lockdown of sorts. No visits into people’s houses or gardens, even if it’s your family member’s garden, but it seems that you can still sit in a pub garden, sitting feet away from people you do ‘t know and who have been in contact with who knows what. It’s a topsy turvy world.

So my daughter and I planned an “adventure”, walking along the Donkey Line bridle path, where the trees provide some shade, and stopping for the small people to play in the park.

Apparently there has been a surge in graduate applications for teacher training courses, possibly because of the uncertain employment situation for graduates at present. “The pandemic has caused unparalleled disruption to every area of education. However, there appears to be a silver lining in the form of a big boost to the teaching profession in England. These trends are welcome, given the government has fallen short of its recruitment targets for a number of years,” said Joshua Fullard, senior researcher at the Education Policy Institute.

Optimist, cheerful Gavin Williamson, the education secretary for England, said: “Teaching has always been an attractive career, but it’s good to see a continued surge in the number of people looking to enter the classroom.”

However, Nansi Ellis, assistant general secretary of the National Education Union, said trainees who qualified during the lockdown were struggling to find positions for the next school year, as turnover is lower among current teachers. More topsy turvy world stuff!

Maybe the magic money tree could make it possible to employ more teachers, this providing employment, reducing teacher-pupil ratios and helping to increase the chances of deprived children catching up with the more privileged. Just an idea! 

Here’s something I read in yesterday’s paper:-

“Five centuries after they were expelled from Spain and eight decades after they were almost annihilated in the Holocaust, the small community of Sephardic Jews that lives on in the Greek city of Thessaloniki is looking to its past to help safeguard its future. On Tuesday, Thessaloniki’s Jewish community signed a deal with the Spanish government’s Instituto Cervantes to create a small centre where people will be taught modern Spanish while also learning about Sephardic culture and the exiles’ still-spoken language, Ladino.
Many Spanish Jews came to Thessaloniki, which was then part of the Ottoman empire, following their expulsion by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. The community endured and thrived over the centuries but came close to total destruction when the Nazis deported and murdered more than 90% of the city’s Jewish inhabitants.”

Now, years ago in the college where I worked we had a former Spanish teacher who worked as examinations officer to supplement his early retirement pension. In another bit of his life, for some reason, he went inspecting prisons. Quite how he was qualified for this was never made clear-but on one occasion he was sent off to Turkey to look at their prisons, in connection with Turkey’s bid to join the EU. While there, out and about one day, he overheard a conversation in odd but recognisable Spanish. Or perhaps he saw a notice in Spanish in a book shop window.

Whatever the actual circumstances, he got into conversation with the members of a Sephardic Jewish community there, still speaking the Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes, still understandable to a modern day Spanish speaker. This gives the lie, by the way, to those who say that Cervantes is unreadable; that is just lazy thinking. It takes a bit of work - I have done it - as does reading Shakespeare, but it’s worth the effort in the case of both writers. Presumably the printing press helped set the language in stone (in ink?) to some extent, give or take a few tweaks along the way.

 Fascinating stuff!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!