I´m just after tendering my resignation.

The reason is that I need a weeks holidays in order to sit some cursed Law Society examinations at the end of march. In january my director had promised to give me the time off . However on friday last he announced to me that this was no longer the case despite the fact that I had him believe that they were the sole reason for my very existence ( a slight deviation from the truth ). Their alleged importance doesn´t seem to bother him and so on realising that he was not open to any compromise, I mulled over it for a night and then quit. I think that it was the right thing to do. I was sticking to my principles if not anything else.

It kills me because I hate the thought of not seeing my students everyday. In the last month my offsite classes felt less and less like work and more like visits to a friends flat. It is definitely a dangerous thing to do out here because the language schools are closing down each week by the dozen, while their owners are being marched off to prison for fraud. Lets hope I don´t regret it.

As for the study, well the highlighters and red pens have just been bought and so the next step is to get the head down and flex those brain musles. I´m not too worried about the short time left because after my constant spanish learning I feel as if my brain is on fire and can handle anything. It better be because I´m teaching for another two weeks and will be doing my study on the metro.

The people of the province of Navarra might be suing the Spanish Catholic Church for their Civil War collaboration with Franco, in the murder of 3000 Navarra Republicans ( comprising of the Socialists, Anarchists and Basque Nationalists). This follows a motion being passed by the Regional Government to officially recognise the civil war atrocities committed in the region. It is in this same motion that they have alleged the churches involvement.

It appears to me that the events of the Spanish Civil War are only being properly faced up to now, for the first time. Even my flatmates carry very strong feelings about the civil war with some having still living grandparents who during this period either suffered a great deal or were imprisoned.

I hate to break it to you but the weather is great out here. Twenty six degrees or more each day. Madrid seems no different from Dublin in the sense that it has a complete personality change with the sun and heat. People say that it is only now that I will start to have the true Madrid experience.

On the language front my spanish is still progressing. I really can´t get over the number of obscenities that the Spanish have in their language. I now realise that there is an extra level of insults and curses that the English language has yet to develop.