Pig Sty Avenue

... do I get rid of this dirty big gap that seems to have opened up between each heading and the post's text? Eh?

He just wouldn't let it lie, would he? The emails from the 'Acting Project Manager' were getting barmier. Most unsettling were references by him to 'breach of contract'. And a list of intricate questions (for Padraig only), regarding our decision to walk off the job last Saturday. Most infuriating was the patronising tone, and the unspoken assumption that we'd put up with any amount of hassle and hang on a few more weeks to get a few hundred quid bonus at the end of the contract. We beat them to the punch, and with the old one-two at that. My email of resignation, giving seven days notice in accordance with the contract, went off at 2pm today. Padraig's, in similar terms, a couple of hours later. As William Golding had it, freedom is like the taste of potatoes. Any HP sauce to go with that?

I've never visited Southern Italy or Sicily, though I plan to one day. Of course, I love all the bits in the Godfather trilogy set there. And there was that episode in series two of The Sopranos. This church would surely look quite the thing in a suburb of Naples, say. Though it's not really a church, more a building that was formerly a church. There's a grander, but essentially similair one on Omar Mukhtar Street in central Tripoli. That one's been turned into a Martial Arts club, of all things, so there are grunts and groans and exclamations where the mass bell once rang. This one's disused entirely, it would seem, though perhaps it has some hidden purpose here and now. Storing posters of Colonel Mustard, perhaps? I'd go and have a nose around, but reminders of former religious freedoms are touchy here. Two colleagues spent a day confined in a police station after visiting a derelict Jewish cemetery last year. Makes you think, though, how things mus...

I'm typing this and then saving it to floppy in our snazzy staff room – I'll probably post it later from the local internet café. I've got a bit of spare time the noo because the students have left a bit early for prayers. Always a bit of a touchy subject here, 'prayer breaks'. There's a set prayer at around 1.20. You can hear the muezzin calling about ten minutes before that. Washing is an intrinsic part of the process. Today, there's no water available in this building, that's why I've let the studennts go a bit early. Clearly, from the evidence of my nose there's been no water to flush the lavatory either. Twenty six days to go! Is this picture thingy working yet? Been trying it for the last few days, without success. IF it works, these are two of my housemates. I got them from cornflakes' packets.

Yesterday, there was a very ugly scene. Maybe our Acting Project Manager was emotionally scarred at some kind of fee paying school in his tender years. Certainly, he decided to cope with our mutiny by behaving like an unenlightened head master in the 19th century. Did he really imagine we'd burst into tears and beg him not to tell our parents? He looked very taken aback to be told to stop being so fucking stupid, anyway. A great deal of shouting ensued. I did a lot of it, I regret to say. Hmm. Now all is well. Pad and I discussed matters last night, and considered giving notice; but this morning we appear to have won - the facilities at the new training centre are - hey presto! - splendid. Maybe they would have been like that anyway, without the need for all the shouting. This is the land of 'maybe' and 'no problem'. I doubt it. We'll never know. Still, a good shouting match clears the custard.

Lurkers or passers by: can you see a biggish picture of a victorian pub below? I can't on this system here.

... I've just spotted this new post pictures malarkey, which will cut out the need for 'Hello' and mean I can post pictures from here. Which will brighten the auldplace up a bit, eh? Anyhow, here's a picture of the Ben Lomond which i've just got off the internet as a test. If it works, i'll get out with the digital camera forthwith.

Here's a letter I've just written to our project manager. We were collected by the driver this morning and taken to the 'new' premises. There was no one to greet us there but we eventually found our way to the appropriate floor, and to a room which contained three chairs, some shelves and our books in boxes. We unpacked these. At about 8.50am Mahmoud was briefly sighted but he did not come and say hello. We presume he left immediately. So far as we could tell, there were no bathroom or refreshment facilities. There are ACUs in the classrooms, but no remote control with which to operate them so they are useless. It's not really possible to teach in this heat. To summarise the situation: • No ACUs • No LOCKABLE staffroom • No staffroom desk or table • No PC • No photocopier • No refreshments, including water • No lavatory • No local administration The last point is the most significant. To put it euphemistically, we were disappointed that GECOL were unable t...

Management, in the ying and yang form of Jeremy and Ali Sed turned up today unannounced and stayed for lunch. (I felt like a character in an inter war years bourgeois novel when I told Mohammed we had two extra for the table; he lived up to his part in the scenario by not turning a hair, and doing us proud). They were here to examine the 'new' premises. Jeremy had taken photos - it looks like shit. But what the fuck? My only hope is for compensation in the form of a day off amidst the confusion of the move; though, it must be said, there's a fag-paper's difference between a day at work and a day at home so far as enjoyment goes. March 2004 I first came out. Fifteen months? Fucking hell! There have been several holidays but, to date, I’ve spent almost 46 weeks actually in Libya. And I can safely say that each week has been more difficult than its predecessor. Forty six down, and four to go. I've come up with a clever wheeze. The big problem is that I'm ...

We still haven’t moved to a different building. Someone said that our classrooms (there are two of them) have been earmarked for offices to be used by GECOL big cheeses. Management here mark their status through foolishly oversized desks and offices. One peers at this as through a glass darkly, but it seems that there are constant power struggles within GECOL, wee empires coming and going, and that’s why the English teachers get shifted around. If we’ve got good facilities, then some apparatchik from the Training Department is winning the Office Wars. If not, then some other department is in the ascendant. Judging by most of our classroom accommodation during the fifteen months I’ve been out here, the Training Department has the military success record of Belgium.

We're doing directions and descriptions of towns; it was in the book, I wasn't taking the piss or anything. Deliberately. It was something like 'Describe the town where you live. What is there to do? What is there to see? What is there to eat?...' The students were totally scoobied by this. Eventually: 'There's a park!' Where? 'Opposite the bank.' I know that park: withered grass, some concrete walkways and benches, stunted trees. And of course no less than two fountains, neither working. That was it. 'Come to Zawiya and see our poxy park!' Should I have burst out laughing or into tears? The last three afternoons have, one gathers, been given over to Peoples' Committees. Our students have been a bit vague about this, though one of mine (mis?) translated the concept as 'Revolution'. He's a beginner, mind, but perhaps he knows something I don't. Someone who's read Colonel Mustard's Little Green Bo...

...what the fak's this?!

During that fifth week, you look behind and can see nothing. Ahead of you is darkness, too. Little things that you take for granted, you wonder if you’ve only imagined them: Radios Three and Four; a full English breakfast; calling into Murray’s club for a pint and a read of The Guardian. The cool nights. The greenness in the mornings. Most of all of course I miss Herself and all the rest of the family. Last week was horrible. This one looks much more cheery. Now we’re over ‘the hump’, or we’ve turned the bend, breasted the hill; and standing upon that peak in Darien, we can look at one another with a wild surmise. There’s a tiny dot of light ahead now. It’ll get a wee bit bigger every day. Padraig and I celebrated this significant weekend with our hubbly bubbly pipes and some grape juice. (I don’t know what we had been thinking of the other week when we mixed sugar and yeast with the grape juice, mind – I think it made it go bad: I felt quite ill the next morning.) Tom joi...

A somewhat low key bloomsday today. To understate the situation somewhat. Anybody passing by, or lurking, do drop in with a comment. Needn't relate to a particular posting. The odd 'hello' would be nice; it would also go some way to removing that nagging fear I sometimes get in the quiet hour in the afternoon when I can't sleep, that perhaps my flight crashed on the way here, and I'm in some peculiar purgatory. Spent an hour or two today going for John and Liz Soars with a (somewhat blunt, perhaps) scalpel. The autopsy revealed what I'd always suspected: 'New Headway' is highly successful bollocks.

There's this week's edition of the Jarrow Review of Books .

Ted and Tom teach the afternoons, Pad and I mornings. Monday evening when they came home they told us that we'd been deprived of our staff room, and that we had to instead take our breaks in the local administrator, Mahmoud's, office. I slept on this, and then Padraig and I talked it over at breakfast and decided that we weren't having it. We need a few minutes chill out time between lessons. Besides, we need to prepare exams, and I've been made responsible, (unilaterally by management and without benefit of extra remuneration, I might add), for exams and their security in the Zawia centre. Over a year's experience out here has shown us that exam scripts and answer sheets are sought out and traded. And Mahmoud's office, indeed any Libyan office, is like a souk, with almost everyone in the building processing through it, shaking hands, salaaming, photocopying and fuck knows what. It wouldn't work and it wasn't on. So we went in yesterday morning an...

Gadzooks! The heat! The flies! Opening my bedroom window is like opening an oven door - not an incredibly hot oven, mind, but hot enough to surprise you. And when it's as hot as this, the sky's always overcast. This is the start of the Harari Kibeera, The Big Heat. (Good name for a film, that.) I've been studying when not teaching. A couple of afternoons I've sat out with the hubbly bubbly pipe and "Under Milk Wood" or "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" on the MP3 player. I've managed somehow to get a cold. Probably a result of going between the extremes of air conditioning and the outdoors. I caramelised an absurd amount of garlic cloves (no hyperbole here, I mean ABSURD: dozens, about four bulbs' worth), and I munched my way through them yesterday evening; if that doesn't shake off the cold it'll keep vampires awayl; and everyone else, come to that. Night before last around midnight, as I was lying awake, I heard a sound, appr...

...shave your fat head! It works every time! Apart from that, a long weekend studying .

Tom is indefatigably, quixotically, pursuing his application for a visa to enable his wife to come and visit him. I tried and failed last year. Tom's efforts have taken on a surreal twist now: yesterday he visited an Indian doctor who managed to obtain a visa for his wife, to get the SP from him. Anyway, this doctor told him that holiday weekends are a very busy time in the hospital because huge families descend on the place to visit distant relations. "It's because they have no cinemas in Libya," was his verdict. I've hardly been out of my room the last 48 hours, immersed as I am in ELT Methodology.

This email from our Acting Project Manager has caused much needed merriment: If you have recently remarked on the how well turned out traffic cops are in Libya, it may not be necessary to read much further. Evidently being presentable as the 'public face' of an institution is important in this part of the world. Accordingly, as the 'public face' of an educational trust, we should all ensure that not only shirts but trousers bear the hall mark of having been pressed within recently recorded history (I suggest 5 days of wear as a geological maximum. If you only brought one pair of respectable work trousers, a second pair can be knocked up locally for c. 25 dinars.) Likewise the exposed parts of the cheeks should have experienced the tingle of cold steel at some stage in the previous 12 hours. Poor turn-out is bound to cause a degree of offence to the trainees and this may be communicated to GECOL management in time. If ever we want GECOL to exercise their discretion in o...

Here’s the Jarrow Review of Books , a guide to what Jarrafellas are reading and discussing in the Buffs Club, the Long Bar and in their lonely outposts around the world. (Yes, I know it's a trifle basic, with a template taken off the blogspot shelf and not edited, but give uz a break, I'm working out of a scabby internet cafe in a town no-one's heard of, in a country...well, 'nuff said. It will be improved.) Speaking of lonely outposts, here’s a picture of the balcony at the training centre where the students take tea. Now, I know we’ve become more than somewhat fanatical about Health and Safety in the UK (what my mate Christopher calls The World of Numpty), but that ledge is a foot high, and the drop on t’other side a hundred feet. And it gets really crowded at tea breaks. AND as you can see, they don’t give a bugger; fuck’s sake.

Strange weather: sometimes it’s very hot and still; and sometimes there’s a hot wind; other times the wind is cool. And refreshing. The sky is pearl grey now; yesterday it was orange with dust. It’s generally very humid. We’ve a long weekend coming up, with Saturday 11th june being American Evacuation Day. I’ve considered going away – to Malta, perhaps, for a beer and bacon binge, but I’ll save the money and stay here. Just getting into and out of Libya’s a load of hassle; and the Maltese aren't a welcoming people, so on the whole I’d not relax. The bottom line would be, I’d be paying a few hundred quid for bacon sandwiches and booze. SO the long weekend will simply mark the end of the fourth week, which comes before the 5th one, which is the half way point. And then June’s done and we’re into the home stretch. I wish I could post more positively, but I'm worn down by the ugliness of this place, and the dirty looks I get everywhere.

I've changed the default privacy setting to 'public', logged out and gone back in again, but it seems to have re-defaulted to 'private'. The flickr! Anyway, this should be a picture of my corner of the garden, hubbly bubbly pipe and all... We've found a new internet cafe, western-configured PCs, relatively quick connexions, air conditioning, no smoking, no whey faced youths downloading porn.

Today I actually started working on my MA - as opposed to saying to the lads in the house, 'Right, I'm going to do some studying,' just to sound important, because really I was off to my room to while away the evening with Caesar III. No, now I really am starting work, and it should help speed the time until I get home. The first 'module' (a daft word for a body of academic work, don't you think?) is on Methodology, and studying it should gave me more interest in my teaching here. And to sharpen me up and guard against subsequent fibs and malingering, I'm going to post my work on a new blog .

Is it the dust perhaps? I seems to settle over every surface, indoors and out. It’s very fine. I think it gets into the plastic casing of floppies and buggers them up. I was going to buy one of those USB storage units last time I was in Tripoli, and wish that I had now, because the floppies I use to transfer documents between my laptop, the internet café and the PCs at the training centre are forever losing their formatting. ‘The disk in drive A is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?’ So you lose all the data on it. That’s not the end of the world, because you’re merely transferring copy data. But it is inconvenient; not to say a pain in the arse. Speaking of which, I set up a new flickr account for the blog last night – the idea being to publish photos thereto. I can’t use Hello out here in internet cafes. I was doing something wrong last night. I thought I’d set the whole thing for public viewing, but apparently not. I hope to have it sorted out today. I le...

this isn't easy, in a overheated internet cafe, with an arabic configured pc, but bear with me... This should be the front gate of our house in zawiyah; and this the view from it. Crap photos, i know, but if this works, i'll be inspired to take some more interesting ones. Or something.

Went for a walk to the edge of town with Tom the other night, in search of babblers – but we’d left it too late, and the bats where flitting through the palm trees before we knew it. Making our way back to the road, we entered an area which could have been a wide spot in the lane, or a formless farmyard, and a fella getting out of a ramshackle vehicle gave us that suspicious and frankly sadistic look common to farmers the world over. Luckily, Tom has a friendly, charming character - which is helped along by being 6’ 6”, -and he shook hands with this son of parents related-before-marriage and smiled and salaamed us out of any nastiness involving guns or dismemberment and hasty burial.