Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

My Army days, all five of them in total, were nearly coming to an anti-climactic end. All that remained was to attend an interview with another stiffly uniformed soul-reaver, then it was the Mess Dinner later in the evening and some kind of farewell race programmed despicably early the next morning. Of course, this was the Machiavellian brainchild of another warped mind, clearly concocted to prod at the perfectly human temptation to indulge in some Rabelaisian hell-raising at the Mess Dinner after the three days of being led through the circles of Dante’s Inferno. It was a trap I was aware of, but one into which I fell headfirst nonetheless. At the interview I was informed that I had come first out of all the candidates in both the Military and General Knowledge tests. This, I felt ambivalently, could count as a plus for me, as when invading the next Third World country, not only would I be able to identify enemy armour and artillery batteries from blurred reconnaissance photos, b...

My new best friend, Number 24, the blunt Yorkshireman, really came into his own during the leadership tests. These comprised a variety of apparatus including scaffolding towers, planks and ropes, and unwieldy objects such as oil drums and ammunition boxes to be transported across gaping voids, all without touching the ground. Each of us in turn was taken aside from the group, briefed on the task to be performed, then ordered to gather our company together, pass the instructions succinctly on to them and lead them through to a successful conclusion. That was the theory, at least. Two Majors were in charge of this part of the proceedings, one an impatient, elongated ghoul and the other a frightfully well-spoken middle-aged gym mistress. The latter kept us jogging on the spot (there’s an awful lot of that going on in the Army) as we waited to be summoned to tackle the next asinine challenge. She also made each of us complete a verbal assignment whilst we were idling. Number 24 was in...

If I can blame anybody but myself for my failure to enroll at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in September 1995, it would have to be Number 21. (In order to strip us of our humanity during the Regular Commissions Board (RCB), each of our six-member unit was given a number from 20 to 25, and we were ordered around using these digits rather than our names.) I had taken an instant dislike to Number 21 when I had failed in a polite attempt to make small talk as we awaited the Scottish Sergeant-Major’s dressing down. He was the sour fruit of the county of Essex, and struck me as a charmless Thatcherite “there is no such thing as society, only individuals” acolyte. He was selfish, truculent and had mean little piggy eyes and a wayward conviction that he would be getting through the forthcoming tests despite, rather than with the help of, his fellow team members. Several times over the next couple of days his obnoxious ignorance provoked in me a strong urge just to seize him wordlessl...

Eighteen months is a long time, even for an accomplished procrastinator. I suspect the inordinate length of time that elapses between expressing an interest in an Army career and actually getting to the Regular Commissions Board in Westbury is all part of the cunningly devised system, a conceit designed to evaluate whether procrastination’s evil step-sister, self-doubt, is going to rear her ugly biscuit and separate some wheat from the chaff. I must admit that, by the time I arrived at the forbidding, barbed-wire encircled compound in rural Wiltshire, the officerly wind in my sails had diminished to a gentle zephyr, having peaked at gale force eight during the trial run in Beaconsfield three months previously. After that brush with the spontaneously combusting Colonel, I had suffered a motivational relapse and was simply going through the motions, driven only by a determination to show that, despite ample evidence to the contrary, I wasn’t a capricious bottler who gave up on things as ...

With the momentous decision to try to become an Army officer made, the eighteen-month escalator whirred into life and, for a time, I became a single-minded Sport Billy. I jogged daily, mountain biked, walked everywhere with a hefty backpack on like a total arse, gamely doggy-paddled the width of the local swimming baths - all based on Robin Eggar’s Royal Marines Fitness Course book, which allegedly duplicates the psychopathic regime employed when “beasting” potential Commandos on the inhospitable Devon moors. Of the five levels of intensity, I reached level three and decided to stay there – a man has his limits, and I have mine, too. (Incidentally, seven years on, I had to undergo back surgery to treat a herniated disc, something I still haven’t ruled out demanding MOD compensation for.) Then it was on to Beaconsfield, the Regimental HQ of the Adjutant General’s Corps, for a mock-up of the real officer recruitment tests. We were greeted by a Colonel and his bouncy young female Captain ...

I'm going to be lying low for a while, at least until all this has blown over. I was just lucky that Volkswagen Beetle was there to whisk me off to an undisclosed location. It's peaceful out here, I'm well hidden from the lupine corporate bankers. Show and Moby should join me soon, when it's safe to travel. Should you notice anyone snooping around here, I'm a blonde deaf mute with big tits who goes by the name of Barbara. More when I can. Meanwhile, please partake of the new poll at the bottom of the page.

I have been reduced by the fragile Brazilian electrical energy infrastructure to writing this in a Cyber Café. An entertaining Sunday evening's in-house pyrotechnics ended with a burnt-out PC, exploding lightbulbs (and I wasn't even singing), six hours of darkness and Show fleeing into a frightful panic and manning the lifeboats far too early. Tomorrow I have to don a suit and tie and head for São Paulo to take part as a Brazilian - English interpreter in a two-hour video conference meeting on high finance. I've never done this before, but have been compelled to make an attempt by economic necessity, natural vanity and a taste for some linguistic Russian Roulette. If I can pull it off, the TEFL chains could be loosening, if not, I could be arrested and end up on the chain gang. If it's the latter, I appreciate your support over the past few months and I will be writing an interesting blog from an inhumanly overcrowded cell in a São Paulo penitentiary, whilst offering En...

As some of you already know, today I went to São Paulo to do a voice test for a video production company. To be frank, it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Firstly, they told me there was no need to do my tap dancing routine. Then, barely three bars into “You’re All I Need To Get By” (the moving Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell duet), the woman, in a tone of voice I didn’t take to one little bit, demanded that I, “Just read the text we gave you, please” – some turgid piece about an electrical engineering firm. I was almost expecting her to shout, “Bring on the hook!” halfway through, such was her offhand attitude to my artistry. I read it, but had had so little time to get into character that I wasn’t at all satisfied with the result. Then came the feedback. I have an exquisite voice, apparently, but I need to “put more energy into my performances”. I explained that I’m into my second decade as a TEFL teacher. She crossed herself and suggested I practise at home. Shoddy, that’s how I’d ...

After my dalliance with the nation’s seaborne defence force, the rest of my university career progressed without further incident, except for an abortive attempt to join the Hong Kong Police. I think my problem was uniforms. Whereas most men spent their energies on trying to persuade sexual partners to dress up as policewomen, maids, nuclear plant workers, etc, I would cut out the middle man and amuse myself for hours in a matching set of khaki fatigues and a pith helmet (see picture – please note, this is not me). My colleague E, the demented bigot , was probably the one person who, more than anybody else, persuaded me that a career in The Army would be a step forward. A year into my TEFL adventure, he was displaying such spectacular symptoms of mental meltdown, accompanied by a raging self-loathing apparently based on the fact that his salary hadn’t risen significantly for about fifteen years, that I felt compelled to leave the burning deck before I too became accustomed to the idea ...

Being commissioned into The Army is not an obvious career move for a TEFL teacher, but it is a measure of my desperation to scale the wall of the TEFL Graveyard and bolt that, for a time, I considered it the most propitious. In a life replete with many a poorly planned venture, this was, by several furlongs, the most gloriously preposterous. Fortunately for the defence of the realm, the assembled officers at the Regular Commissions Board in Westbury concurred wholeheartedly. Indeed, I suspect that, twelve years on, more than a few of them are still dining out on my laughably limp performance during the gruelling three-day selection process. My unhealthy obsession with all things military started when I was a child. Whilst my contemporaries were into Marvel comics, 2000 AD and superheroes, I used to read Warlord, which was full of Second World War battles and other assorted slaughter. I also spent vast amounts of time and money on the quite pointless hobby of military modelling. By the...

Subsistence TEFL teachers are those who neither drifted into the industry on a whim nor decided that it was their calling. They are those enchanted, enviable souls who use TEFL as an easy-going means to earn a living whilst they concentrate on keeping their real passions a-bubbling in the foreground. I fancied myself as something of a subsistence TEFL teacher in the beginning and at various points over my stuttering career, but being a serial procrastinator with an unflinching tendency to do anything but what I should be doing, my attempts have been fruit-free up to now. (You don’t know what it means to me to have managed to start this blog and contribute regularly to it...) Subsistence TEFL teachers are a fascinating breed, almost as riveting in their driving passions as the oddballs who make of TEFL their own private Idaho. Over the years there have been writers, musicians, artists and, perhaps most admirably of all, a flamenco dancer. Imagine being English and dedicating a couple of...