Notes from the TEFL Graveyard

My recent absence may be explained, if not justified, by my having moved to the warmer climes of Campinas , pronounced "Cam-penis", which pleases the 12-year old inside my shorts. Leaving my in-laws peering wild-eyed over the parapet of their own lunacy , bless 'em, we have left them to their lectures and bickering, finally transferring our worldly possessions to a place of our own, a move which has been a modest 9 years at the planning stage. If I'd known that would happen, I'd still be drinking lunchtime pints and eating scampi in the Dorset Soldier in Corfe Mullen of a weekend and trying to get excited about football on a big screen . Our worldly possessions have been packed, unpacked and carefully arranged, we await the arrival of our new sofa, dining table and chairs and TV stand unit thingy, netting has been strategically placed in front of our eighth-floor balcony and windows to prevent our 1.5-year-old from practising skydiving, though she does seem d...

The trouble with family visiting from the old continent is that they leave you in a worse state than they found you. Since mother and middle sister left, I've found myself exploring a morbid fascination for YouTube interviews with Morrissey , wearing my late father's sports jacket around the house and pining to, of all things, go rambling (here, crossing somebody's land is likely to land you with a cap in your harris at the very least ). Heaven knows I'm miserable now.

There is something deeply tragic about the TEFL school staff photo that to this day haunts my dreams. No offence to those being snapped, but it isn't hard to recognise the silent desperation hidden behind the wool ties, the sensible clothes, the pained haircuts. Normally, those involved are a motley crew aged anything between 20 and 65 - those at the younger end of the scale are still fairly normal looking, for the years haven't yet taken their toll. They entered TEFL due some kind of wanderlust , or maybe just some kind of lust , judging by the number of Tesco Value lotharios I have come across over the years. I remember a particularly smooth teacher of Italian parentage who used to descend on Bournemouth of a summer fancying himself as a modern day Lord Byron, entrapping doe-eyed latinas and chaperoning them to the beach at night, which, he claimed, was " guaranteed to get them in the mood ". Probably not surprisingly, his popularity with women was inversely pro...

The male voice choir I participate in has reached something of a plateau I feel. For over a year now, we seem to have stagnated, unable to see any marked improvement in our performances and still victims of the vices that have become commonplace. We start songs impressively, start to wobble, and by the end have sometimes completely come apart – rather than singing as a unit with one voice, it’s more like every man for himself . And much of the cause is cultural, it seems to me. I don’t like to criticise my adopted country, but I am going to make a rare exception and opine that I am living in the land of “that’ll do” . Choir singing, for example, is the pursuit of excellence . Our choir, being one of the few male choirs in the region, is met with standing ovations at every turn , largely because we are such a novelty. This is not to say it’s undeserved; to the untrained ear (there is virtually no culture of choir singing in Brazil, apart from local church ensembles, which are all ferve...

Yesterday I was just tucking into my jugged hare when the doorbell rang. My father-in-law answered it to a lady, returning to inform me that it was me to whom she would like to address an enquiry. Unaccustomed to lady callers , I descended to the gate and held a barely audible shouted conversation with my suitor above the rabid barking of my hound. "Is it you that gives the English lessons?" she enquired. "Not any more, I'm afraid", I snapped, snorting involuntarily , "I work with translation now, and I don't have time to give lessons." She appeared to crumple physically. "I can't believe it," she whined, "a friend of mine called you a while ago and you told her you weren't giving lessons any more," she went on, this revelation begging the question as to why she thought I'd make some kind of inconsistent exception for her . "It's for my 16-year-old son. Not even conversation?" Ah yes, conversation clas...

I remember reading a Somerset Maugham short story once in which the writer moves into a house where he is told one of his neighbours is a poet. Interested to meet the bard in question, Maugham decides to pay him a visit. When the gentleman opens the door, Maugham is immediately impressed by his physical appearance , and goes on to describe his keen eyes, noble face – generally, he is exactly what he expects a poet to look like, the twist in the story being that he’s actually called at the wrong house and is describing the wrong man . I was reminded of this story after a particularly vivid dream, which I won’t recount in full out of pure compassion. I don’t know how Freud did it, listening to all those people’s dreams – to me, it’s the most boring thing anyone can do , start to recall dreams to you. It’s just a load of mumbo jumbo, “I was in this dark place, which was like my grandmother’s coal cellar, but it wasn’t, and there was this huge carrot...” blah, blah, blah. Utter nonsense. B...

Keen-eyed readers who popped by in around June may remember a garbled message I posted (and swiftly deleted) relating to some fairly major legal difficulties I was facing , which, thankfully, turned out to be utterly baseless. Without wishing to go into the morbid details, suffice it to say that our attempts to adopt a young waif led to a rumour circulating in the region that there was a German child trafficker at large - and I'm still not sure which part of that double insult riled me more. I am delighted to say I have been fully cleared of all suspicions, with my moral integrity and island heritage more or less intact . What it has provided me with is yet another demonstration of the depth of the other-planetary madness by which this country operates, where criminals (and clowns, in the literal sense of the word ) are routinely elected to public office, and people hoping to adopt an abandoned child are criminalised. And people wonder why Brazil's attempts to secure a perman...