My lovely frog.

yule blog

Merry Christmas guys and guyitas. I hope everyone is well, and particularly that nobody was caught up in any way in the recent tsunami disaster.

It's good to get home for the festive season, although I'm finally getting my face fixed this year, which does not exactly induce Christmas cheer. Nevertheless, it's been a good week, to be rounded off in traditional mode by getting shitfaced in Birmingham for New Year.
As a family we are not really into the whole "Baby Jesus says spend" side of it, but I did get a cool Lichtenstein print and a nifty giant wooden frog with realistic croaking action. Other Chrimbo highlights included an interesting discussion about the names of Santa's reindeer (one of whom my mother inexplicably thought was called "Chancer." This engendered the creation of "Pusher,""Dealer," "Gangster," "Drifter" and "Rudolph the White-Nosed Cocaine Deer"), and gleefully watching my parents try to figure out what to do with the kilogram of parmesan cheese I brought back from Italy.

Now, since I started this thing, numerous friends have been hammering away at their keyboards like an infinite number of monkeys, so I am pleased to announce the following new links: Brock and Yubi's interesting hyper-intellectual blog, although I'm still waiting for an update - come on, there are two of you!; Blondebutbright's americosceptofeministoliberalite type rantings from Amsterdam; and finally, Rachel Lynn's madcap adventures in Hongdaeland - notice the correlation between the two variables, "time spent at Kids Club hagwon" and "desire for 'closure' on Stuart Little".

Peace out (on Earth).

mirandola: città chiusa

Like all sensible people, Italians love an excuse not to work. This is not due to laziness, simply a refined appreciation of the spiritual value of sitting at home in one's dressing gown, eating, getting stoned and watching schmaltzy crap on TV. To this end, shops are closed at lunchtime, and on Sundays, Monday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, and there is of course a wide selection of public holidays so that you can watch such televisual delights as C'è Posta Per Te in the name of the Lord. One such public holiday occurred yesterday, reducing Mirandola, a wheezing old bag of a city at the best of times to utter, post-apocalyptic stillness. I'm not even sure what the holiday was in aid of, but the Mirandolese were having their day of rest and that was that. And not just one day. It's traditional (a fine excuse for irresponsible behaviour in any situation, as trick-or-treaters, Old Etonians and Freemasons everywhere will concede) if a public holiday falls on a Thursday, to skive off work on Friday too, thus forming a ponte (bridge). But yesterday was Wednesday! What of our traditional ponte? This dilemma has spawned the finest word in the language - not gnocchi, or cazzo (fine words both) but MAXIponte! It is a fair tribute to the industriousness of the Mediterranean skiving effort that there actually exists a word to describe a Thursday and Friday on which one skips work because the one-day public holiday unfortunately fell in the middle of the week. And it's great fun to say, too.

Viva MAXIponte!

debt in venice

And suddenly, for the third weekend in a row, I find myself in Venice. It's an obscenely expensive, sickeningly beautiful city. These two factors are a winning combination for the local tourist industry due to the well-known economic equation beauty+money=romance. People throw away their money in a conscious display of gay abandon, hence the 15 euros you can pay for a coffee in Piazza San Marco, the 55 euros I paid for my dingy hotel room, and the frankly absurd cost of this internet cafe, which ker-chings in at seven euros per hour (although you'd be hard-pressed to associate the place with romance in any way). Now I am bracing myself for the cost of tonight's meal. Nevertheless, it is worth it, because it's impossible to get bored of the Romeo and Juliet scenery, and the sounds of the gondolieri crooning and melancholy strings which seem to be triggered by your mood like a cliched soundtrack. Fede always says, in her enchantingly Italian way, that the colour of the lagoon in the morning is a sort of harbinger for the day to come - a reflection of your psyche - and I'm inclined to agree with her. It's sometimes electric blue, sometimes pea green, or white, brown or a sharky grey. In the same way, the natural resonance of Venice means it can be romantic, threatening, confusing or sad, depending on how you look at it and what's going through your mind at the time. Whichever it is, though, it is always quite intense.

x'è ben!

It's been such a long hiatus that I really don't know where to start. I could begin by stating the fact that I am, indeed alive, but this should by now be self-evident to all but the most dense of readers (whom I've already contacted to give him a headstart). I could apologise for not writing anything, but anyone genuinely upset by my lack of posts needs to take a long, hard look at where they're going in life. Besides, I have good, solid, personal reasons for not writing anything since October, but this isn't the time or the place. I could start with some pictures of the amazing Alhambra in Spain, the breathtaking Basilica San Marco in Venice, or anything else I've seen in the past seven weeks, but alas and alack, my girlfriend has my USB cable. I could make like an essay-by-numbers Cliffnote monkey and Google in a couple of quotations, but I don't have the time today. So, I reckon the best policy is just to ignore everyhting and pick up where I left off...

Here I am in a small internet shop virtually next door to the school where I'm now working, in a small town called Mirandola near Bologna. I've been here for a week now (Mirandola, not the internet shop, doofus), and have grown surprisingly fond of the place. It's typically, charmingly Italian - bikes clank along cobbled boulevards, and a silly number of ice-cream parlours and pasta shops vie for the custom of about 30,000 inhabitants, most of whom seem warm, chatty and open. The food is great and the vita is dolce. It may be out of the way, but it's easy to get to Bologna, and on Sunday I went to see Fede in Venice - on the train, travelling across the lovely countryside, I was struck very suddenly by the realisation that I was extremely lucky to be on a train in the Italian countryside on my way to see Fede in Venice. It's a feeling which, as any TEFL teacher knows, comes and goes.

On the whole, it tends to come in the evenings and weekends, and goes away again on Monday morning. That I'm sat on a stool in an internet shop is testament to the fact that my school is woefully under-resourced. No computers, broken tape-recorders, a tiny blackboard... Last week I caused a crisis by borrowing the (not a) red pen. Computer access, something I usually associate with educational environments, is at least five steps away... Despite all this, the hours are easy, and the students are great. After a year of "the dog is in/on/under/behind the box", with kids too young and too culturally removed from me to understand anything but basic slapstick humour, I relish every single joke made and every single minute of meaningful conversation in the classroom, so teaching adults has, for me, so far proved to be everything it's cracked up to be.

Well that's the background, for starters. Secondi piatti when I have the appetite for it...