Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

I recently caused some controversy on my Facebook page when I stated that I was sitting in my room freezing with no glass in the window while working on the mother of all translations. But I stand by my assertion - I have never been so uncomfortably cold as I have in Brazil . Now, in terms of absolute temperatures, of course Brazil is not the coldest place I have been, by several packs of frozen produce. Demure debutantes have been known to swoon when gathered around my piano on hearing my tale of when I got off a superheated Soviet train in Moscow one February in the late eighties in a T-shirt, drowsily aware of a bit of a nip in the air, only for the platform display to reveal an ambient temperature hovering around a bracing -20ºC . Here, we rarely get below 10ºC, but with everything geared towards bermuda shorts, sandals and little shame, the stone floors, lack of insulation, tropical humidity and, in our case, shoddy glazing practices all lead me to recall stories of my shirtless ...

My interest in foreign tongues was first stimulated by Miss Watters , a shapely French mistress in whose classes, perhaps ironically, I never managed to fully concentrate on learning the language of Sacha Distel, such was the bewitching power of her recently-graduated beauty. Sadly, she didn’t tarry in her position, and before we knew it she’d gone, not with a bang, or even a whimper. I suspect she finally tired of all the dribbling adolescent attention , such as when the boys dropped items on the floor in her classes in the hope that she’d bend down and pick them up, thus exposing a glimpse of her ample cleavage , or the time when, on a French exchange trip, she made the unfortunate declaration on the cross-Channel ferry, “When we get to Cherbourg, I’ll head you off”, which drew the inevitable sniggers of the assembled lusty youth and the blurted riposte, “ Phwoah, yes please! ” from the rather unsubtle, not to mention unrealistically optimistic , Dave Wallace. Although I s...

When I told people during my enforced year off between school and university that I worked in “ a market in The City ”, it raised more than a few eyebrows. “Derivatives or futures?” they’d ask, pretending not to be impressed. “ Confectionary ,” I’d reply with a wink, the more enterprising immediately getting onto their brokers to make sure of they got their piece of the next rights issue from Bassets the Jelly Baby manufacturers . Nothing that I stated was false. Leadenhall Market is indeed in the City of London and is purported to be the place where Dick Whittington arrived in London (the real one, not Linda Lusardi , unfortunately). I did indeed work there in confectionary, selling chocolate from behind a tatty wooden stall in the company of a perpetually morose but likeable lad from Ewell. He had his own curious dialect, starting every sentence with “ Fackin’... ”, and appending the entirely unnecessary preposition “ up ” onto the end of almost all verbs . Apparently, his friend got...

Today is my last day at the school . It'll be a relief, not least because I've been combining it with ploughing my way through a variety of enormous translations , like a 16th-century Bandeirante hacking his way throught the Mata Atlântica, and various tribes of breakfasting indigenous peoples , with a razor sharp facão . Thanks to all who have sent their missives of advice, best wishes, and ego-eroding insults, the latter of which, the sages tell us, are the work of our greatest friends. I recently received an entertaining drive-by insult, which is the very stuff that makes the Internet such a bubbling cauldron of free speech. For those that missed it, here it is reproduced verbatim for posterity: Anonymous said... I am watching you AND your irksome architraves. Behind my veil I am LUGHING HA HA HA at your woebegone non-spark FAILURE OF EFFULGENCE. I am THE breakfast man. The spelling, the syntax, the inventive use of a moulded or ornamental band framing a rectangular openin...

I've done it . On Tuesday I finally resigned from public life as a TEFL teacher to spend more time with my family and my laptop. The owner of the school where I perform my daily masquerades tried to persuade me to stay, but, in a rare display of assertiveness, I held my ground and stated my decision was final. Now I intend to etch a better living from translation, though I'll be giving a few private classes and still teaching on Saturdays at my friend Bert's school. No more daily 60-kilometre round trips. More male voice choir singing. Less time for blogging. An urgent need to learn touch typing. Today, I was so made up about it all I got utterly arseholed on Brahma* at a birthday party in Piracicaba. And I don't even like Brahma. The end of an era. Thank fuck for that . * To avoid any confusion, Brahma is a popular Brazilian lager, noted for its bitter aftertaste. It is not a favourite steed of mine, nor a courtesan from the Indian subcontinent.

I'm tempting fate with this one, but I really am quite busy. Good luck! Move to a Third World country ; Cry yourself to sleep for the first six years as a penniless TEFL teacher ; In desperation, try to learn to become a Web Developer ; Give up trying to become a Web Developer ; Listen to your wife’s suggestion to use the skills you already have, instead of bumbling around trying to learn new ones * – then stubbornly ignore it; Try to become a Web Developer again; Give up trying to become a Web Developer again and return to point 2; Decide to use the skills you already have, instead of bumbling around trying to learn new ones – and pretend it was all your idea ; Become a translator and charge just below global market rates ; Sit back and enjoy profiting from the economic chaos that has engulfed the planet and turned exchange rates in your favour, like a Bond villain, or summat ; * Expletives removed for the sake of human decency.