Setas time again

It has been showery on and off for a week or so, still very warm around 20 during the day and 15 at night - just perfect weather for fungi. We have a good crop of the ordinary kitchen mushroom kind growing right in the middle of where the boys play football. When you buy them over here you get a lot of mycelium on the stalks so I keep burying them in hay and other musty things here and there in the garden along with old sporing caps and it seems to be paying off. Lenga do bosque are just starting to show in our woods, Chanterelles and ceps are popping up just over the road and Sparassis Crispa is doing really well on the old pine trees. The musty woody smells are wonderful, I gathered this lot in a few mins earlier today, they were cooked and eaten within an hour and tasted wonderful.



Hopefully we are off on an expedition to a great fungi area near As Pontes on Sunday unless its really stormy.

nuts

Sam has set of for winter work in the UK we had a surprise Bday party the evening before he left, there is always a hole in life when good people are away for a while.

After a pretty rough day worrying about school and wondering what to do we took the boys to their usual late afternoon lesson with their private teacher, they were pleased to go and enjoyed being there which, to me, reinforces the fact that it is not them that are the problem. On the way home we stopped at a little capela half a km from home and in 5 mins picked a mass of chestnuts mmmmm.

Then we got home and the garden looks wonderful, the hens are clucking, the sun is still hot, I plucked a ripe passion fruit from the vine and my head is now in that nexus between loving somewhere and not wanting to be anywhere near it - what a frustrating place to live.

Back to school

School is not going well despite an initial enthusiastic start we are now back into daily depression and anger, the boys say the work is too hard, they get little support and the teachers just seem to shout at the children all the time. They find the school environment less than inspiring. Having peeped into Callum's classroom while looking for his teacher last week I see one black board, one switched off ancient computer, 4 blank walls and not a lot else. It looks more like prison than a learning environment. Before we moved here we read many tales from other ex pats of schools in Spain being better than those in UK, teachers being really supportive, their children being really happy etc etc. The experience we are having bears no resemblance to that image. The Head of the school we left in the UK told us they wished they could photocopy Callum and fill the school with copies of him, he had an outstanding talent for Maths and Art excelled in every subject and was highly motivated. His maths does not seem to have progressed much over the last two years, although we are really proud of the Art he does himself at home he gets very little chance for creative expression at school. As an ex primary teacher and university level educator I feel I have a fair insight into what is good and less good in education and am appalled by the provision and attitude we have met here. Both the boys go to private lessons and really enjoy them they like the teacher and seem happy to do the work and even ask to stay on longer than their session however they will do everything they can to avoid walking into their school ..Its time to look around at other schools again and see if we can find out just what rights to support we have. We do hear tales of other children getting way more support than we have been offered. Galicia has a lot going for it but not as far as education goes in our experience.