meish dot org: life, unfolding

Whilst at university, I lived with a man who had a habit of going to the loo – the long trips, shall we say, rather than the short jaunts – with the light off, and leaving the door ever so slightly ajar.

Once, I walked in on him, and in embarrassment said

“Oh, gosh, sorry”

to which his voice was heard echoing from the bathroom as I hastily shut the door

“No, don’t worry, it’s OK”

I never figured out whether it was just a linguistic twist or not.

I sort of hope it was.

When was the last time you went out dancing? Or, for that matter, the last time you danced anywhere? Subtle foot shufflings at gigs only partially count. I’m talking dancing here.

I haven’t been out dancing for years. Literally, years.

I’m trying to remember the last time. Might have been at an office Christmas do in 1998, drunk on a boat. I remember being on the dancefloor, at least, but not actually boogying. But that could have been it.

If not then, it could have been a few years before at a dire student pub called the Queen of Hearts in Fallowfield, Manchester, with my good friend Niki, on a random off the cuff evening out. As I recall, we met up on a whim in Solomon Grundy’s on Oxford Road before heading off in search of somewhere to shake our tail feathers. It was a Tuesday night in mid-term, and nearly deserted. The handful of customers who were in were laddy, drunk and leary. We danced for an hour to classic 80s sounds, and then bored of the gropes, headed home.

When I lived and worked in Aberdeen, I went out dancing all the time. There wasn’t that much else to do in the summer, when all the students had gone home, except sit and drink. Of course we did that, too, but wallets and livers and 6am starts conspired to make that particular activity less enjoyable than it might otherwise have been. So instead of boozing all night, we’d fuel ourselves with a few pints of cider, or something equally cheap and liquid, and hit the dancefloor.

The Triple Kirks. Oh Henrys. The Lemon Tree. The Mudd Club. Cafe Drummond. The Blue Lamp. Live bands. Eighties nights. Grunge, rock, goth and dodgy tribute acts. A couple of drinks, a couple of friends and a dancefloor, and I was set.

Some of the happiest times of my life, now I think about it. We lived large and out loud. We didn’t care who was watching, we danced to anything, everything, with each other, alone, or anyone around.

In Bolivia, I’d gone out dancing often. Sometimes dreadful places, meat markets, with briqht lights and a deadly combination of latino and euro pop. Whigfield. Mana. Los fabulosos cadillacs.

Sometimes tiny dancefloors at the back of poky bars where a beer cost 12p and a ginebra y tonica cost a fiver. We stuck to fizzy lager and danced the night away to Bon Jovi, The Smiths and Crowded House.

In the Cochabamba business district, we discovered Helloween, the only bar in Bolivia with a be-quiffed Morrissey devotee behind the bar. We exploited his fondness by adopting cod-Manc accents and demonstrating that we could sing along to every word of every song, translating as we went. He repaid us by keeping the bar open until five and “How soon is now?” on the turntable.

In Seville, I danced bulerias, tango, sevillanas and salsa. I danced to Ini Kamoze, Snow and the Cranberries. In Sopa de Ganso, there wasn’t room to dance expansively, so we shuffled rhythmically with arms above our heads and collected carnations shoved in our cleavage.

I’ve danced – well, voqued, strictly speaking – in a club called Alcatraz in Puerta Vallarta, where the walls of the dancefloor were mirrored and the man(olo) i was dancing with spent most of the evening touching up his hair in his reflection over my left shoulder.

I’ve danced in clubs in Liverpool, to repetitive beats with a massive grin on my face. I’ve danced in my college common room, and in village halls. I’ve danced in random clubs, like The Cube in West London – a favourite indie/goth hangout in the late eighties – and big tents on fields. I’ve danced to just about anything you can imagine, music-wise. I’ve danced at weddings, birthdays, and even a funeral, but despite all this, I realise that I haven’t actually danced in years.

I wonder why?
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When I was born, the doctor wasn’t there. In the maternity ward, the air was thick with humidity and women hollering for relief. My mum, self-trained in National Childbirth Trust breathing techniques, from a book sent over by her mum, remained relatively quiet, panting through the pain.

The doctor came to check on her and, when she saw how little pain my mum was apparently in, concluded that there was ages left to go before I made my entry. The doctor went shopping. Twenty minutes later, I popped into the world, protesting loudly.

My mum always said I was born within earshot of lions roaring, which always seemed fitting. If you’re going to be born in Africa, where better? The truth is, the lions were safely contained within the zoological gardens nearby.

Over the years, I’ve spent birthdays variously:

• sledging on teatrays in the Isle of Man;
• raising money for Comic Relief by standing outside BBC television centre with an enormous birthday card;
• eating dinner on top of a mountain, with a view over the Olympic mountain range, while serenaded by an opera singer;
• Getting my nose pierced in Vancouver;
• waiting for flowers in a run down tenament in Muirhouse;
• eating pancakes in Liverpool;
• dancing Sevillanas under orange blossom;
• in a moutain hut in North Wales, while people raved all night;
• eating welsh rarebit in a cafe-cum-bike-repair-shop in Liverpool, run by that bloke who used to be in Brookie;
• Having a shiatsu massage in a hut overlooking the Amazon treetops;
• on a rooftop in Soho;
• at work, and then in the pub.

Today, on my birthday, I’m getting ready to go on a three hour train journey northwards, closely followed by a three-hour train journey southwards. Every year brings new adventures, experiences and surprises. Every year is different, and new.

I must have that kind of face.

No, wait, scrub that. I must have that kind of mind. I always seem to feel guilty when passing through customs, even when I’ve got nothing to declare – which is always.

Well, I say always. I mean always as far as I know – because sometimes, you’ve got no way of knowing.

At university in the second year, I lived with five blokes. I’ve mentioned them before – they were the ones who were responsible for the electricity bill nightmare and the sorry tale of the seating rule. Anyway. Five blokes, all a bit lairy and crusty. All a bit alternative and long-haired. I think I was the only one who graduated out of the whole lot – and in fact, I may well have been the only one who finished the second year – but that was only because I moved out of the madness and went to live and study in Spain. They may be equally crazy there, but at least it’s warmer than Liverpool.

Now this may come as a shock to those of you of a sensitive nature, but sometimes, students do bad things. Naughty things. Illegal things. Not me, obviously – I’m as pure as the driven snow slush, but some of my student housemates indulged in – how shall we put this delicately? – artificial stimulation to help them through the exams and to stay up all night writing essays occasionally. This is not unheard of in student circles, though not everyone did it, and not all the time.

I was a loss when it came to stimulants – still am, in fact. More than two cans of diet coke a day sets my heart racing, and if I have a cup of tea after about five I’m up all night. I once took some Pro Plus the night I had to write three essays in the computer lab. They gave me such bad palpitations and shakes I couldn’t actually concentrate on Brazilian hyperinflation or the ritual uses of the cenote in Mayan culture. All I could do was wonder when my heart would feel normal again.

So no, I don’t bother with artificial stimulants. I’m too hyper and edgy as it is. Which apparently made my room the perfect place for the lads to hide their stashes.

I was not aware of this.

I wasn’t aware that one of them, Brummie J, had discovered that if you pried up the coloured bubble segment of a Natrel deodorant lid – say, mine for example – there was a small compartment which was just big enough to store half a gram of speed. I was not aware that he had discovered this by fiddling with my Natrel deodorant, and that he was keeping his speed in my bedroom, on the mantelpiece, stashed in the lid of my deodorant. I was not aware of this, and if I was, I’d have been fucking livid, believe me.

He, meanwhile, for his part, was not aware that this was completely out of order. It hadn’t occurred to him that as well as being illegal, what he was doing was also deceitful and downright stupid. Furthermore, it hadn’t occurred to him that if I went on holiday, I might possibly take my deodorant with me.

A flight there. Two weeks. A flight back. Completely oblivious.

Arriving back at dawn on a Sunday, I traipsed into the house, expecting everyone to be asleep after a heavy night. But there was Brummie J, pacing the floor of the living room.

“Oh thank god you’re back,” he said, helping me off with my backpack. That’s sweet, I thought. He missed me.

“I was so worried,” he told me, emptying my backpack onto my bed. Not like him to help me unpack, especially at half seven in the morning, but still…

The truth emerged. He’d stashed his gear in my deodorant, and then I’d gone on holiday. I was speechless.

Now, had I actually unwittingly smuggled a quarter gram of someone else’s speed through two sets of customs, or had the deodorant actually run out and been thrown away the day before I left? Or had it fallen off the mantelpiece and rolled under the bed during my frenzied packing, or been sussed and nicked by the other housemates? It didn’t matter.

I was incandescent with rage at the thought that someone I considered a friend (albeit a slightly flaky one) would be so thoughtless. The outcome didn’t matter. The intention and the lack of consideration did.

I moved out and went to live in Spain, and I gave up using that brand of deodorant.

Since then, whenever I pass through customs, I feel guilty, even though these days I’ll make doubly – triply, quadruply – sure that I’m innocent. The trouble is, I’m fine until I think about it. As soon as I think about it, I’m doomed. As soon as I become aware that behind the glass, people are watching my every move, I become Mrs Shifty. Then I catch myself and try to remember to walk like I’ve got nothing to hide because, after all, I’ve got nothing to hide. Then I look like a guilty person trying to look innocent. And then I get pulled over.

I once flew from La Paz to Lima with giardia. I don’t recommend giardia – it’s horrible, it turns you feverish and shaky and makes you vomit and crap a lot. The day before the flight, I’d dosed up on coca tea (a natural andean stomach-calming remedy) and planned to do the same in Lima, to see me through a night in the city and then twelve hours to Santo Domingo.

Stepping wobbly of the plane, I made my way to the baggage reclaim, to pick up my backpack before getting the bus to my hotel in the centre of town. There was a long wait for the bags to arrive on the carousel. I was shivery and shaky, and my knees threatened to disappear from under me. Pale and clammy, I glanced around nervously, looking for the nearest loo.

By the time I passed through customs, the uniformed officials had clearly been watching this nervous, sweating, pale foreigner get off a plane from Bolivia and glance around nervously while waiting for her bag. Pulled over. Open the bags. Paw through everything.

There was nothing to find, except one solitary coca teabag in my wallet. The guards’ puzzlement was palpable, so sure that they were about to make a bust. For one long, horrible moment, I thought that they were going to either cavity search me (not wise, when your subject has giardia) or arrest me for bringing coca over international boundaries, which could be illegal, apparently – though not strictly speaking in teabag form, especially when you can buy boxes of the stuff in any Lima tiendita, the same as in La Paz, plus Lima airport was stuffed full of plastinated coca-leaf souvenir keyrings.

The lead sweaty official berated me in carefully modulated language, explaining as he ripped open the remaining teabag (the only thing between me and a major gastric event) that coca is used to make drugs and that you shouldn’t bring it over the border, though obviously he’d let me off one teabag’s-worth for a small processing fee.

Bribes. You have to love them.

I paid gladly, stuffed my things back into my backpack and walked twenty-three feet out onto the main concourse, where I plonked down in a chair in front of a cafe and ordered a mate de coca while I waited for the bus to town. I glanced over and saw the sweaty guard behind his glass window, watching me, stirring his own tea, and smiling. He waved, and raised his gourd. I did the same, smiling wanly.

At one point, a few years ago, my friends used to poke gentle fun at me for always drawing maps using the objects on the table:

“So imagine that this salt cellar is me, and that ashtray is the corner of the road…hand on, can you pass that fork? Ok, that fork is the zebra crossing, and the mug, I mean the bus was going along here like this…”

My listening friends would start to chip in usefully:

“What’s this pepper pot?” “How about my lasagne?” “Can this glass be a bus stop?” and so on. Smart arses.

But I can’t help it: I’m a very visual person. I tend to wave my hands around a lot when talking, and frequently end up sketching things on napkins, bus-tickets, notebooks, whatever comes to hand, to explain myself better. I remember things visually and spatially and in relationship to each other, and I explain them better that way, too.

I have a visual memory. When I was studying for my finals in uni, I realised that the best way for me to remember key things like dates, quotes, definitions and key translations was to remember them visually. I would draw up elaborate A3 sheets in coloured pen, with words and paragraphs and numbers written in different colours, or underlined, or at a weird angle, or next to a doodle of a tree. Sometimes I would get other people to write things for me – my flatmate, boyfriend, neighbour. My landlord even wrote something once when he came around to collect the rent: in brown pen on the top right hand corner of a sheet – Banisteriopsis, the latin name of the most widely-used hallucinogen in the Amazon. I still remember it now. I remember because after writing the sheets, I would tape them over my windows, and then sit at my desk and stare at them. I would memorise the relationships of the objects, the way they were written, and then later, in the exam, I would be able to re-draw them in my mind.

That’s the way my mind works – I learnt that early on, and I figured out how to work around it: if I write your phone number on a bit of paper, I probably won’t remember it. If you write it down, I probably will. But I’m completely porked when it comes to type – now I use a PDA, I don’t tend to remember phone numbers any more. But I had to get a scribble pad for the device, in order to help me think. I think visually, with a pen in my hand.

I surprised Tom earlier. I was trying to explain how something worked, and he wasn’t getting it, despite my hands drawing elaborate shapes in the air, and so I suddenly whipped out a whiteboard from under the bed, and drew him a quick flow diagram.

“I cannot believe you own a whiteboard, Meg,” he said “and you keep it under your bed.*”

No wonder I’m single. Sigh.

* At which point, I must point out, Tom launched into a long postulation about exactly why I might keep a whiteboard under my bed. He conjectured that it was for precise diagramatic and businesslike explanation and review of sexual expectation and performance, including (in his own words), the projected orgasm requirement curve, and, most amusingly, graphs of expected performance figures: “If we look at the chart we can see that I am not required to perform any oral services until June, although there is reciprocal servicing required from late April.” Thank you, Tom. That’s not why I keep a whiteboard under the bed, boringly enough. Sorry to disappoint.

It was really hot that week. I remember the weather with the kind of clarity that comes with being a final year student living in a flat overlooking a park, watching people play frisbee, drink lager and loll about in the sunshine while I studied for my finals and wished plagues of pollen and midges upon them. Bastards.

It was the second election I’d voted in, but the first I’d paid much attention to. In 1992, I’d been living in the Tory-for-ever-and-ever constituency of Kensington and Chelsea. I sent in my vote in a tatty envelope from Mexico – taking part because I could, and not because I thought my vote would make any difference whatsoever. I voted Labour, a gut instinct grounded in a good socialist upbringing and a childhood under Thatcher, voting without knowing anything about policies or parties or personalities, voting in relief – not for, but against. As predicted, Douglas Fishburne (con) comfortably held on to his seat. The Tories held on to the country. And 6,000 miles away, I held on to a bottle of tequila and shrugged.

This was how elections worked, in my experience of watching parents come home from the polls, the results sliding in throughout the night – you voted, you lost, you carried on. 1979. 1984. 1988. The polls slid by, leaving us blue in their wake.

The only thing which made election day remarkable during the long decade under the Iron Lady was the possibility of a day off school as it became a polling station. For the pre-pubescent mind, a day of glorious nothing every four years and a handful of Baker Days seemed just reward for sour milk at playtime and no textbooks.

By 1997, my dwindling grant and hefty student loan convinced me that I deserved a little more from my government than a day in the sunshine. I paid attention to politics for the first time, bizarrely understanding it via my studies of Latin American political systems over the last 200 years. I reasoned that if I could figure out the mess and dishonesty and backstabbing of Chilean politics in the seventies, I could probably get my head around our own systems of government. Same difference, sort of, only less bloodshed.

I wasn’t registered to vote in Liverpool, where I was a student. So on polling day, I packed a bag full of revision textbooks and a walkman and set off on a train to the Peak District, where my vote was registered for various reasons. On the way over, I sucked up as much knowledge as I could about Sociolinguistics. I cast my vote at the town hall, turned around and got on the next train back to Liverpool, without even stopping at my mum’s cottage to say hello. On the way back to uni, I studied for my Quechua oral exam, the next morning, conjugating verbs about weaving and digging potatoes.

When I got back to Liverpool, I didn’t go home. It was five in the afternoon, and I headed straight for the 24 hour computer lab on Brownlow Hill, at the heart of the university, to write the last essays of my undergraduate career – one about Chilean Socialism 1972-1979 and another about the influence of US politics on Latin American economies in the last thirty years. The way I’ve always written essays is to think for a long time – thinking is an active verb, though, and includes reading, bookmarking stuff and jotting things down – and then to blitz the essay the night before it’s due in, because I need the discipline of a deadline to get things done. I set myself up in the computer lab with a stack of books, a walkman playing Faure’s Requiem and Ravel’s Pavane on a loop, spare batteries and a packet of mints, and got to work.

By midnight I was well under steam, and had reverted to the Meg-zone – writing two essays simultaneously in adjacent documents, flipping between the two periodically, raising arguments from one to the other, cross referencing bibliographies and quotes. I’ve always been a multi-tasker, and seldom does it show better than when the pressure’s on to produce. The third window I had open was a Netscape browser, with which I browsed the labour and bbc news sites for updates on the election. News was slow to come to the web.

By two a.m., most people had left the computer lab, and those that remained were either looking at porn or hastily assembling final essays, like me. Or possibly both. I heard a cry go up from the far end of the room, as someone shouted “Portillo’s gone!”, and I rushed to check the browser. Throughout the night, seats were won and lost, and I sorted out the economic difficulties of the southern cone to the tune of a requiem.

When it started to get light, at around half four, I put the closing full stop on both essays, ran spell checker and word count for the last time and hit print.

Emerging into a misty Liverpool dawn just as the sun was warming the sky, I walked slowly home, tired and wired. As I passed through Toxteth, I could hear the sounds of dying revelry in the morning light – people weaving drunkenly out of house parties, as election coverage came to a close. A man with rum on his breath, broad and bulky, accosted me by Princes Gate –

“Have you heard? Have you heard?” he questioned excitedly, “They’ve fucking gone, Labour’s in!”

He whooped joyfully, clapped me on the back with some force, and his drunken grin meandered across his face, eyes struggling to focus in the bright morning light. He wandered off towards the park, and I went home to sleep.

His confirmation of the result, along with the brightness of the morning and the anticipated heat of the day somehow made it seem real, more real than the official web updates, just hours before. Everything seemed more real, more involved, more personal. My country; my election; my vote.

After only a few hours sleep, I trundled back to the university to hand in the essays and complete my Quechua Oral. I didn’t speak about my prepared topic of potatoes and poncho weaving. I spoke about celebration in the Andes, about parties and people.

If you have a vote, please use it.

Probably the only reason Sam S (boyfriend of the girl who relieved herself in public, and my flatmate in the second year of uni) had got onto his philosophy course in the first place was that he had attended the interview off his cake on speed.

When asked to ponder that old philosophical chestnut “is that chair you’re sitting on really real?” Sam was in the perfect mindset to rattle on pointlessly about reality, consciousness, illusion, and all number of pontifications guaranteed to win him a place on a philosophy course, where such ramblings are tolerated – no, expected. Of course they flung the departmental doors wide open for him, and the poor lad spent the next three years (well, four if you count the year in the middle he took off to play in a band – and resit his entire second year) worrying about not being able to perform philosophically without being out of his tree on stimulants.

I lived with Sam in the first year, too, in self-catering university accomodation, where we were flung together with various other independent types – and a couple of weirdos – when he was smoking a lot of weed, presumably to aid in the writing of philosophical ramblings.

One night halfway through the first year, he woke me up at half two in the morning, stoned and visibly shaken. I asked him what was wrong, and he perched on the end of my bed and told me god had just spoken to him.

“I was just playing my guitar,” he explained.

Sam’s first love was his red electric guitar, and his favourite pastime when stoned was to put on some Hawkwind or Zappa albums, and wail and twiddle along to them, with full-on pedals and distortion blasting through through a cheap amp. I slept with earplugs for much of that year.

“I was really getting into this awesome riff – really wah-wah heavy and rocking,” he continued, “and I stopped for a second to get another plectrum, and then god spoke to me.”

“Bloody hell,” I exclaimed, “what did he say?”

“He said ‘nice riff, Sam’”

I burst out laughing, while Sam insisted in a stoned and confused manner that the lord had indeed congratulated him on a mighty riff via the medium of a cheap amp. And not a bleeding statue in sight. Hallelujah, it’s a miracle.

Further prodding revealed that god’s voice had been a little muffled and strange, distorted massively by the wah wah and the fuzzbox, and that he may well have had a broad Liverpudlian accent, which would undoubtedly have made the marxist theologians of the world happy, but which just served to confuse me no end.

And then suddenly, revelation.

We lived on a busy main road in the middle of Liverpool, a road frequented by mini cabs and police vehicles. A couple of weeks before, there’d been a fire alarm at another house in the block, and three fire engines had pulled up outside. No-one knew what was going on, but I discovered that if I left my cheap stereo on, but not playing music, I could pick up bursts from the emergency service’s radio frequency – “Ey, Keith, you there?” a broad scouse voice tinnily chimed out from my speakers as I watched the hubbub on the street below, “looks like some twat left the grill on. Bloody students, eh?”

Much to his disappointment, it transpired that Sam’s conversation with a deity could be explained by his amp picking up the random radio hissings of a passing cabbie – but passed through wah-wah and reverb, it sounded almost godly. Not so much “Nice riff, Sam” as “Where’s my next pickup, Reg?” probably.

Sam trundled off to bed, looking less pale than before, shaking his head and mumbling about how it was a great riff, though…

I’d been in Bolivia for almost a year, and I knew how to handle myself. I wasn’t a tourist, and I wasn’t a local – I was something in between, something infinitely more nebulous and difficult.

Lots of things had happened – lots of good and lots of bad – but I hadn’t once got angry or upset. I’d picked myself up, mentally dusted myself down and said “right, what can I learn from this?”. Pragmatic to a fault, even after being attacked, even after the riots, even after being beaten.

I was living out in the countryside, but I rented a two room apartment in Cochabamba from a kind family. A couple of weekends a month I would head into the town to stay for a weekend, enjoying the luxuries of running water and icecream, bimbling around the market for useful things to take back to my fieldwork site.

The market, La Cancha, is one of the biggest in South America, sprawling widely, selling everything from bikes (I picked up my rusty steed there for a handful of bolivianos) to fabric, vegetables and coca leaves. Everything you could possibly want. There were witches telling fortunes under low slung tarpaulins, women selling their hair, fresh cropped from their heads, stalls overloaded with fresh spices and detergent in glowing white boxes.

People knew me because I was a foot taller than everyone else, and because despite being white, I didn’t visit the tourist chunk of the market, where they sold pan pipes and cheap ponchos. I came to the local part of the market, because I was a local.

When my mum came to visit, I took her to the market. We ambled for a while among the witches and fresh meat, between bright spices and vegetables of all colours. Then, because she was a tourist, we hung a left and headed down the narrow alley to the tourist tat zone, so she could find a postcard to send to my sister.

We were standing at a stall, examining a stome-carved Pachamama statue, when I felt a closeness on the back of my knees. I spun around and found a man unzipping the outside pocket of my knapsack, reaching inside.

It didn’t matter that the outside pocket held only tampons and a handful of coca leaves. It didn’t matter that there was nothing to steal. I saw his lined, tired face, looked into brown eyes and suddenly – *spoink* – felt something snap inside. The red mist came down.

He turned and made to dart into the crowds, but I grabbed his arm. I held him firmly and could feel my own body shaking with anger as I lectured him in the most eloquent spanish I have ever produced – phrases born of passion and rage – with words of Quechua, the local language, thrown in for good measure.

“Don’t touch me! Don’t steal from me! I am NOT a tourist! I earn a bolivian wage, I am NOT a stupid tourist, HOW DARE YOU steal from me you PATHETIC LITTLE MAN..” I shouted in spanish at him.

Stallholders stopped what they were doing to come and look. My mum stood and stared. The thief trembled and looked scared. He tugged to get away and I shook him again, “Don’t. EVER. Do. That. Again. You hear me?”

He nodded quickly, and I released his arm, as he turned to go he made a stupid face at me, and I kicked him on the behind – hard. The stallholders and shoppers who had gathered around applauded. I felt the red mist subside, and then felt embarrassed.

I think I was making up for lost opportunities. For all the times I’d been hurt or attacked or abused in South America, for all the times I hadn’t been able to do anything about it, for all the times I’d picked myself up and walked away, bruised and scared and angry with myself for being vulnerable, for allowing myself to be a victim.

Finally, catching someone’s hand in my bag was the catalyst – everything exploded. One tiny man, halfway to stealing a tampon and a coca leaf caught the full brunt of my rage, because he had been too clumsy with the zip.

I wonder if he ever stole again.

Bet he did. Bastard.

After three months living in La Paz, someone in a bar convinced me to take a job with the Centro Boliviano Americano, teaching English as a Foreign Language for a couple of days a week. Research was going slowly, so it didn’t take much to convince me at all.

The interview for this position basically consisted of a brief chat with the principal of the CBA, a formidable Boliviana with a degree from some midwestern college and an accent to match:

“Oh, are you English?”

“Yes…”
“Right, you can start on Monday.”

In at the deep end, teaching four classes of students ranging in ages from eight through to adult. With no teaching experience whatsoever, a slim grasp of grammatical concepts – or at least, how to explain them: using them was no problem, it was just tough to remember the difference between verbs and adverbs, dangling modifiers and the like – and a stack of textbooks and lesson plans to prepare, I got ready to teach.

Actually, it was kind of a doddle. Teaching your own language is as hard as you want it to be, frankly, and I decided early on to abandon the carefully-prepared lesson plans and textbook conjugation tables in favour of more spontaneous, freeform lessons. We talked about an enormous range of topics, from football and travel, to being embarrassed on dates and cultural stereotyping of Bolivians – even the little kids, who couldn’t get beyond their pop preferences at first. (Whigfield – Saturday Night. I’m embarrassed and yet strangely proud to admit we spent one lesson translating the lyrics and teaching the students the dance. I may very well have single-handedly introduced the Andes to that little shuffle. Oops.)

I was a good teacher. I had more patience than I anticipated (always thought I’d be the kind of teacher that ended up going “What do you call that? A house? No, it’s a big brown squiggle. Come back when you’ve done it properly”), and gave more creative assignments than the kids had hoped for. I didn’t dwell on the finer points of grammar – not least because I had trouble explaining it clearly myself – and encouraged students to talk in class – in English, but about whatever they wanted. Ditto passing notes. Feel free to ‘fess up to fancying that boy in the back, but it’s got to be grammatically correct.

I developed a knack for deflecting troublesome queries with panache. If someone piped up with a tough question – one which had no immediate and obvious answer, like needing to know about radical changing verbs or the English translation for tengo ganas, I’d ask the rest of the class “does anyone else know the answer? Anyone?” and hope the question got answered that way – it’s always better to learn from ones peers anyway, I reckoned.

If the answer wasn’t given, though, answering the question became that night’s homework, for me as well as the students – I’d run home and bury my head in the textbooks, hoping I could come up with the answer before they did.

I remember how boring learning a language can be – especially if it’s not relevant to what you do when you walk out the classroom door. So we improvised, and learnt together. I taught them the difference between pants and trousers, though their textbook insisted that they learn to compliment each other on their pants. Wrong, wrong, wrong. [mental note: remember to tell the story about the dreadful pants/suspenders mixup sometime]

They looked bemused at me when I used funny English expressions and contractions.

“Now then,” I would start to explain, “this is what we’re going to do today – break off into pairs and talk about what you did last night for three minutes. Any questions?”

A number of hands rose from the class in front of me.

“Yes, Gustavo, what’s your question?”

“Meeess, what doss eet mean, ‘now then’? Presen’ tense, pass’ tense? What doss eet mean?”

He had a point. What does it mean?

What languages do you speak? Who was your favourite teacher? Have you ever taught anything?

The best teacher I ever had, since you ask, was not one of the obvious ones.

I had some cracking teachers in college and university – Sylla (Spanish), Theo (English), Rosie (Sociolinguistics and Quechua) – in their own ways, each of them inspired me to learn, extending the student-teacher relationship into friendship (whether that meant eating chocolate fondue at their flat or lending favourite books and urging me to read them) and I have to thank them.

But the best teacher I ever had was not my favourite. She was a woman called Ms Stacke and she was not an easy person to like. At all.

Ms Stacke (I think her first name may have been Elizabeth) taught me geography for five years in secondary school. She had icy blue eyes, and white blonde hair pulled up in a tight chignon at the back of her head. She was probably late forties, early fifties, and she was so difficult to impress. It drove me crazy.

Without sounding big-headed, I was sort of used to being able to sail through classes on flukey essays and general knowledge. I didn’t feel particularly challenged by any of my GCSE subjects (except maybe physics, but that’s another story) and the whole school experience bored me. I did a few exams early, and yawned through the rest.

Ms Stacke, however, was hard to please. However good my essays, however flawless my projects and presentations, she always wanted more. I remember getting 97% in my GCSE Geography mock exam, and she badgered me about the other 3%, telling me I’d made a stupid mistake. She never once let her guard down, never once made concessions for anything or anyone, always expected more, always pushed me harder.

She’d travelled a lot, and her eyes lit up when she talked about the San Andreas fault, Crater Lake, Mount St Helens. She made me want to travel more, to understand how geography applied in the real world. She refused to allow me to be satisfied with my classroom, my city, my life. She made me itchy for more knowledge, more experience.

When I won the scholarship to study in Canada, she was over the moon, though she didn’t let on until a whole year later. I whizzed through my GCSEs, acing geography with the only perfect score in the country. Still she never said a word. Not “well done.” Not “good for you.” Nothing. I clenched my fists and left for Canada, where there was no geography syllabus, and I was forced to take Anthropology instead.

A few months into my time there, I sent Ms Stacke a postcard of the San Andreas fault, from a trip there. I’d seen geography in action, and I wanted to thank her for making me seek out the knowledge and the experience. She sent back a postcard from Bournemouth and a stack of maps of Canada, which she’d been saving for me. She’d taken early retirement. She’d left London. She was proud of me. Goodbye.

I have seldom felt so incredibly proud as I did then.