Pig Sty Avenue

Next contract, we're going to stay, all eight, in a big house in Gargaresh - a 'posh' suburb to the west. Two bathrooms between eight fellas. I fear trouble ahead. Especially if there's a severe dose of Rommel's Revenge doing the rounds, and bathroom use is at a premium. Our Project Manager assures us, however, that the 'villa' (as he will keep calling it, though I doubt it has an atrium, much less a triclinium), has a 'magnificent staircase' and 'huge landings'.

Maybe it’s the lengthening days: it feels like I’m emerging from a journey through a gloomy and cheerless landscape. Last night, with Michael, Julian, Malcolm and wee Paul to a restaurant just to the back of the Kibir Hotel. Moorish tiles and lattice work: what visitors here might expect to see. The ‘t-bone’ steak wasn’t that good: seriously overcooked – there is no concept of ‘rare’ vis a vis a steak here, you can have medium or well done. Hmm. It was good to get away from the Al Wahat for the duration of a meal, mind. AND, it was noteworthy that the meal cost us, roughly, 20 Dinars each. The bloody awful food here in the hotel – which the company pays for – comes out at 30 Dinars a meal. This morning, still revelling in my depression’s disappearance, I went out in search of a hubbly-bubbly pipe to buy. A great success. I got one ‘complet’, that is, with all its bits, for 30 Dinars, plus a bit more for cherry flavoured baccy and some self igniting charcoal. Splendid. Set it ...

Spring’s arrived in Tripoli. There are some shrubs at the training centre – I have no idea what they are. The point is: the bees love the little pink flowers on them, and are out in great numbers. Other trees and shrubs are coming into bud. A cock sparrow sings its wee heart out every morning as we’re arriving for work. Today the sun is warm. I watched Newcastle beat Chelsea 1 – 0 the other night. THAT made me homesick: a live image all the way from St James’s Park; I’m thinking: home’s a twenty minute metro ride from there. I noticed that there was some old snow heaped up by the side of the pitch.

I've just read that Hunter S. is dead !

My students are tickled by our improvised noun, ‘hubbly-bubbly’, to describe what’s called in Libya a shisha, and in other Arabic countries a narghila pipe. Users of a certain herb in Britain would call it a bong. I saw a cheap and nasty one on sale in Newcastle during my last break for £60. God only knows what they’d want for the sort they use here, which you can buy new for between 30 and 50 dinars (that’s about GBP 10 – 13). Here they smoke tobacco in them, flavoured with molasses. Additional flavours are optional: apple’s very popular, and there’s also strawberry and ‘cocktail’. In the summer, I was teaching and living at a place called Imsallata, up in the hills. I was sharing a big house with my mate Padraig. There was very little to do. Monday marks the middle of the week here and we’d celebrate that by walking into the town and going to the café for a pipe. It’s a funny thing, because I gave up cigarettes a couple of years ago and I’ve become somewhat anti-tobacco sin...

Wee Paul, who teaches on the afternoon/evening shift, and therefore has his mornings free, managed to get my ticket changed to the Thursday: so I’m off home in 26 days. And counting. Watching the clock, and the calendar, is not a satisfactory way of living, and I wish I wasn’t. The trouble is, there’s nothing else to do. I’ve lived in several countries: Spain, France, the Czech Republic, Turkey. In each, you slowly – more slowly in some countries than others – become assimilated into a community. You have a local bar; you get talking to people, you learn the language. Usually, there’ll be British or American or Antipodean teachers who’ve settled there, perhaps cohabiting with or married to a local; there’ll be parties and outings involving a mixture of locals and foreign teachers like yourself. It’s a right laugh. It’s very interesting. It’s why I do this job. But in Libya… We’ve stayed in hotels, mostly, so automatically, you’re isolated from a community. And we get moved ...

The internet cafe i usually use has lost its connexion: 'maybe five minutes, maybe one hour...' in the Libyan way. And this place is shite - so i'll post later. Toodle-pip. PS: 'mumkin' is Arabic for 'maybe'; a word one learns early on.

Our driver, Salim, has been moved to other duties. What happened was, one of GECOL’s innumerable drivers had the vehicle he uses pinched from out side his home. Management decreed that all vehicles must thereafter be locked away at night in the company compound. This meant Salim had to get there by public transport, and then come to collect us. He was late several times. Our project manager complained. Meanwhile, management at GECOL realised it was impractical for the drivers to leave their vehicles at the compound, and for the last three weeks you could set your watch by Salim. Too late, though. Now we’ve got Mohammed in a minibus, which is more comfortable than Salim’s pick-up truck. And Mohammed’s a better driver. Still, over the last year I’ve got to know Salim, and his absence is a loss. Last night I walked to the Post Office to send a letter. Found a shop that sold Kellog’s Fruit and Fibre – expensive enough, though, at 6 dinars a box. And I got a battery for my watch....

The sky's orange; the air's thick of dust: best to stay in, with chocolate and Shakespeare in Love, on MBC2. GECOL have whisked away a load of students: they've joined some technical course, and there'll be a trip to France for them. A whole class in Imsallata has been cancelled, so now the project's one teacher too many. What larks! What next? Hilarious.

From my hotel window I have a view of the sea in the background. Away to the left, west, is the posh suburb of Gargaresh. To the right, the inelegant pride of Tripoli, Borj al Fatah tower. In front of me, occupying the middle ground, inconsiderately blocking a lot of my view of the Mediterranean, there are a gaggle of apartment blocks, some of which are clearly under construction, though none of them see quite finished. In the foreground there’s Omar Mukhtar Street, and between the road and the tower blocks, a funfair, which always seems very underused. Mind you, the weather wouldn’t endear one to the idea of a trip to the fair. It’s difficult to imagine now that this is the same country as I spent last summer in, when it was often too hot to leave the vicinity of air-conditioning, even at night sometimes. It’s now usually cold, windy, cloudy and raining. The students tell us that this is not a typical winter, it’s colder than usual. We think we get a lot of weather in Blighty,...

During the previous trip out here I would cheer myself up buying CDs on play247.com. Of course, I couldn’t get them delivered to me here. It was still cheering, a bit, to know they’d be sitting at home. And this was all part of a bigger plan, too. I need to rewind a bit: I sold my record collection, with almost everything else, when I moved to Spain in 1998. That’s a whole other story. But now I’m trying to re-collect it all, on CD this time. So that’s how I’m now listening to The Smiths, Hatful of Hollow, now. I’ve been saving it up for the last five weeks and it’s like uncorking a bottle of my youth, whisking me back twenty odd years to being a student, remembering the parties, the friends, the buildings, the clothes I wore: white baggy trousers, a red and white Indian cotton shirt. And the music sounds as fresh as it did in nineteen eighty whatever it was: Morrissey’s articulation of our comical anguish. And there’s never been anything else quite like Johnny Marr’s gui...

The company provides us with return tickets, but they insist on getting them for the actual end of the contract, Saturday 19th March, whereas we’re finished teaching on the Wednesday and it’s been, eventually, agreed that we can go home on the Thursday, though we must change the tickets ourselves. This involves a fee of GBP50, and a visit to the British Airways office in Borj Al Fatah. And that’s where I went this morning with wee Paul. We got sat down and told the young woman what we wanted and she warned us about the fee and asked us how we’d be paying, so I told her, and I gave her my ticket and she entered the details, and then the computer’s not working. Could we come back on Sunday? Well, no I’m working; and what, I wanted to know, was wrong with the computer? “The infrastructure cannot cope,” she said. There was no reply I could reasonably make to that.

The dreaded bend approaches. Five weeks, nearly, done; and a little more than five weeks to go. Darkest afore the dawn, and all that. In a week’s time, I’ll be able to see the finishing post. But now. Libya feels like a fun free zone. Nothing but shops. I could go to watch football, but I’m not a big fan, really. Once you’ve seen the museum, Marcus Aurelius’ Arch, the fountain in Green Square, and the Medina, that’s it, you’ve seen Tripoli. I’ve tried just walking about, but there’s not much to see, just streets with houses and little shops. (Although, mind you, there are oddities: a whole street of 500m or more given over to key-cutters shops). And there are cafes. Full of fellas. I gave up smoking two and a half years ago, but I have the odd shisha pipe just for the sake of doing something. The other teachers are all nice blokes, but I don’t have very much in common with anyone, and anyway I’ve been working with most of them, on-and-off, for nearly a year, so w...

I learned this week that Fiona’s visa application has been refused. No reasons have been given. That’s that – she won’t be able to come out as planned, indeed as suggested by our GECOL liaison fella, Ali Sed. We had planned that she’d come out and stay for four weeks. Naturally, we were both looking forward to this. A lot. And now we are… disappointed. One feature of life in Libya, especially any kind of official contact, is for the visitor to be totally scoobied by what’s happening. So much seems to be down to the whim of a particular bureaucrat. Is he some kind of apparatchik, who doesn’t like the thought of western rapprochement? Or a religious fundamentalist, a beardy-weirdy, ditto? Or was he just in a bad mood that morning – thirty-something, still living with his parents, slept in and missed his morning tadger-tug? Sentences beginning like: “But surely…”; “Wouldn’t it make sense to…”; If they want…” spring to mind. Forget about it. The only way to get thr...

When Libyan men are being businesslike with one another, in Arabic, they’re very loud, and you might even think aggressive. It must be a cultural matter, because the same style of discourse applies on Al Jazeera News discussion programmes. Mobile phones are relatively new here, and businessmen just love them. And every mobile user seems to love most of all the hands free option. So the other day we’re trying to have lunch, and there are four suits at the next table. One of them is trying-out each and every ring tone on his phone. Two of the others are shouting at someone we can’t see, for no visible reason, like schizophrenics. The fourth is eating his lunch, without a trace of embarrassment.

Our contract is divided into ten-week cycles. During the last cycle I stayed in a “Holiday Village”, by the sea, at a place called Janzur. Some wit amongst the teachers named it Camp X-Ray. The food was poor, but worse, it was repetitive. The waiter would say at every meal, “You like chicken, beef, fish?” as if he was offering the finest fare in the world, twice a day. And with your scrawny chicken leg, leathery “steak”, or tasteless fish, you’d always get a scoop of glutinous rice and vegetables stewed into anonymity. And this was twice a day. Every day. For ten weeks. So I’d limit my visits to the camp’s dining room to lunch, and bought a hotplate and saucepan. In the evenings I’d have spaghetti with garlic and rosemary; or flat bread lightly scorched on the hotplate with tuna and garlic mayonnaise. Sheer heaven. I love improvisational cooking. The thing is, you get all kinds in the markets here, incredibly cheap: garlic, of course, fennel, parsley, basil, every kind of spice a...