meish dot org: life, unfolding

Do you know how hard it is to get hold of a sieve in Bolivia? Let me answer that one for you: nigh on impossible. That’s not to say it can’t be done: only that buying kitchen equipment in the andes is rather more complicated than you might anticipate.

I like pasta. I’m rather fond of rice. I’m pretty partial to the odd potato. And herein lies my problem.

All of these foods are boiled, which means that they require some form of drainage before being eaten. Trouble is, unless you’re particularly adept with a saucepan lid (and I wasn’t – those bolivian pots are hefty blighters) you need some kind of drainage device. Like maybe a collander, or a sieve.

Ah, a sieve. I must have devoted a fair bit of time during my first few months in la paz hunting for this elusive kitchen equipment. Every time I was in the market, I asked around – “Hay un tamiz?“. Blank looks. Nothing doing. I was destined to consume soggy pasta for the rest on my time in the Andes.

At one point, I tried making a sieve myself, out of the spokes of an old umbrella curled into a circle, to make the outer ring, and then a hollow bowl of tinfoil stretched across the ring, covered with duct tape on both sides and punched through with a hundred holes. A rudimentary piece of intermediate technology, I’ll admit – but I’ve always appreciated a challenge, and thought that the engineering involved in sieve construction couldn’t be far beyond me.

I was wrong.

The first time I used it, it ungraciously bent at the handle and the entire pan of pasta that I’d just poured in got dumped into the sink. Not a good solution.

And then one night, walking home late from the cinema in a strange area on the other side of town, I saw a dazzling light spilling from a doorway on a back street. Drawn inexplicably to the light, I discovered, amazingly, a bright shop inside lined with shelves stacked to the rafters with shiny new pots and pans and tongs and pasta servers and…..sieves. Glorious sieves.

This was a very strange sight – partly because it was open and in business so late in the evening, in a town where they tended to roll up the pavements at about nine. But the main reason it was so strange to see a shop full of gleaming kitchen equipment was that shops – well-stocked points of purchase with their own premises and staff – were relatively thin on the ground in the andes. There were markets, of course – huge sprawling complexes of stalls bearing colourful displays – but shops as I was used to them were few. If you wanted bread or potatoes, you went to the market. If you were after dried pasta or fizzy drinks, you could usually find a little tiendita (my local one in Sopocachi Alta was owned by a mad American ex-pat called Robert who was married to a silent boliviana and who was once sick in my bathroom sink. But that’s another story entirely) but there just weren’t that many shops around.

I took one of the forty or so sieves off the shelf and headed for the cash desk. Four feet from my destination, a woman stepped in front of me.

“You want to buy that sieve?” she challenged in Spanish.

No, I’m taking it for a walk. “Yes, I want to buy it”

She took the sieve out of my hands, scribbled on a scrap of paper, handed me a slip saying “one sieve” and flounced off with my sieve.

Hmmm. I didn’t want a bit of paper which said ‘sieve’. I wanted a sieve. I started to feel all ‘ceci n’est pas un sieve’. This piece of paper was not going to drain my pasta.

So I turned around, went back to the shelf, picked up another shiny sieve, and headed back towards the cash desk.

This time my path was blocked by a tall (for Bolivia, anyway) man in a suit.

“Do you want to buy that sieve?” he posed.

As opposed to exchanging it for a scrap of paper? “Sure” I replied. He lunged for the sieve. I held tight. We had a little tug-of-war over it, until he emerged triumphant and grinning. Tucking it under one arm, he gestured towards the bit of paper given to me by the first woman. I handed it over and watched as he wrote “one sieve” on another scrap, scrawled his initials and then carefully stapled his piece of paper to the first with a tiny pocket stapler.

And then he was gone. I looked at the scraps of paper in my hand. I looked at the cash desk, where a huge queue of shoppers was starting to build up, all clutching bits of paper and waiting patiently.

In Bolivia, as in many developing and over-beauracratic nations, you swiftly become accustomed to considering queues (and journeys, for that matter) by their length in time, rather than metres. Who cares if a village is 20km away if it’s going to take the better part of a day to get there? This queue, in the only kitchen equipment shop in the andes, was a good hour long. At least.

With a feeling of deep resignation, I decided I really didn’t need a sieve this badly after all. So scrunching up the slips of paper in my fist, I made a move for the door. A security guard, small but fierce-looking, stopped me and gestured first at the paper in my hand and then at the tail end of the queue for the cash desk. He didn’t use words and I didn’t bother to argue. Apparently I did need a sieve after all.

So I got in the queue.

An hour of tired expectation later, I reached the front of the line-up. By this point it was well into the wee small hours of the morning (la madrugada) and completely freezing. My teeth were chattering, as I carefully separated the two identical slips of paper I was carrying and handed a single sheet to the woman behind the cash desk. After all, I didn’t need two sieves.

The woman took the paper sleepily, said “seven bolivianos,” and then stamped “paid” on the slip as I handed over my money. Then she handed the paper back to me and called “next”. No sign of a sieve. I stood at the side of the cash desk for a while, watching other members of the queue hand over their bits of paper, pay, and then get the paper back with a big red stamp all over it. No pans, not pots, no whisks and most pressingly, no sieves. They quickly walked out of the front door, past the churlish security guard, and then turned left into the inky night.

Puzzled, I followed.

Around the corner of the block, about two-hundred metres from the only kitchen equipment shop in the Andes, was a warehouse with a long counter at one end, and a long queue snaking all the way back to the other. At the front of the queue, I could just about make out a gleam of polished metal through the thin light of a single lamp overhead. A shiny soup tureen! This was my Eldorado, my city of lost silverware.

The queue shuffled slowly forward, and I shuffled with it, gradually closing in on my precious sieve. When I reached the front, I produced the red-stamped piece of paper – “un tamiz, 7Bs, pagado” – and waited for my culinary saviour to be delivered from the back room.

But suddenly, consternation. A mumbling from the shelves behind the counter. A sudden rush by all the present assistants (in matching brown lab-coats) to the origin of the voice. Furtive glances towards me, standing at the counter drumming my fingers on the surface to keep my circulation going in the frozen madrugada.

Finally, one man approached me, with a concerned look on his face. He explained very slowly that the piece of paper I have given him said one sieve, but here, he continued, we had two sieves. From by his side he produced a pair of identical shiny sieves tied together with string, both trailing a little tag with a number on it.

Two sieves. Two attempts to take a sieve from the shelf. Two bits of paper given to me in the shop. One sieve paid for. Two sieves tied together. Problem.

Sheepishly, I produced the un-stamped extra bit of paper from my pocket. I pointed out that it had been a mistake, that I hadn’t paid for it because I hadn’t actually wanted a second sieve – I only needed one, see? – but they were having none of it. A man in a brown dustboat frog-marched me back to the cashdesk in the shop around the corner, where thankfully the queue had almost entirely dissipated, and I shame-facedly handed over both slip of paper and seven Bolivianos in change. The woman behind the register looked at me sternly, and stamped my paper – pagado.

When we got back around the corner to the warehouse, I was taken straight to the top of the queue. My escort handed the piece of paper to another coated man behind the counter, who shouted to another man to get the sieves. Another man brought the sieves to the front desk, passing them to yet another man, who proceded to write laboriously in a huge ledger and on my scrunched up bits of paper the word “recibido – recieved”. He then passed the sieves to a further man, who asked if I would like them wrapped.

I dreaded to think how many more hands the sieve would have to pass though, how many more hours I’d have to queue and how much more complicated the whole process was going to get before I got my hands on the solitary shiny sieve I wanted. I quickly declined his wrapping offer, and finally, amazingly, took hold of my lovely sieves. Bliss.

The whole process had taken three hours and eleven people. My purchase of fourteen bolivianos – about two pounds – would have to stretch a very long way indeed.

There was this night at the end of my fourth year of undergraduate study at Liverpool – and I have to admit that, as it was just after the end of exams, we might have been a little bit…um…under the influence, and that’s ok because, you know, we were young and carefree and that’s what we did back then, because we didn’t care about jobs and life and social responsibility, we just cared about having fun, however remote and distant that feeling may be now.

Anyway, after a momentarily diverting interlude which involved placing an electric toothbrush on the end of one’s nose (“it makes your whole head buzz”), C, my then flatmate announced that what would be really really magnificently weird would be watching the cascade of playing cards that happens at the end of a game of computer solitaire.

Yeah. That would be kind of bizarre looking.

So with all the logic and enthusiasm that an altered state can summon, we switched on our shared computer and waited approximately four years for it to boot up. It was a very old machine – very very old – running Windows 3.1 and only useful for bashing out the odd essay, playing interminable games of minesweeper and teaching myself to use DOS. It gradually groaned into life, and we both pulled up chairs to the desk and got ready to play.

One thing we hadn’t really figured out was that in order to see the brilliant display of cascading cards, we’d have to play solitaire first – and win. Hard enough when in sober mind, this was not something we were capable of attempting half-cut, although by gum we certainly tried.

And then something odd happened. C said something frictive, and a little globule of moisture flew from her lips to the screen. It made a trippy pattern on the screen, refracting the light. We both looked at it. She did it again, this time on purpose – “pah!” – and the white screen came alive with rainbow polkadots which changed colour as you moved your head.

Stop for a moment. Let’s do a little experiment, shall we?

Lick your index finger.
Now dab it on the sceen over there in the white space next to this paragraph.
See how it’s made up of lots of different colours, refracted light? Now move your head a bit from side to side and up and down.
See how cool that looks (in a really really limited way)?
Now imagine you’re off your head.
OK, now imagine how thoroughly absorbing this activity was, at quarter to four in the morning, completely munged.

Now, bearing in mind that we were quite wankered – and you may well have been in a similar state yourself, at some point – you’ll forgive and perhaps even understand that we spent a further seven minutes that evening taking it in turns to shout “PAH!” at the monitor and gazing at the results with mirth.

You might even forgive the fact that we got a pint glass of water and sat flicking water at the screen, enraptured at the pretty patterns the droplets left behind.

But not even the most hardy of partyers could forgive us going to the effort of emptying into a spare teapot and then filling up with water the plant spray thingy from the living room and waving it gleefully in the direction of the poor computer monitor.

See, the thing is (and here’s a lesson in basic electrical engineering for you) – electrical stuff doesn’t get on very well with wet stuff. So with a damp fizzle and a surprised pop, the monitor died on us – no bloody wonder, frankly, and it’s a miracle we weren’t electrocuted in the process, because that would have been a tough one to explain at the autopsy.

We shrugged, switched off the machine at the wall and turned to something else for excitement – I don’t remember what; it was about half four in the morning, so it might very well have been sitting on the fire escape outside the house (where you could hang out and just about pretend that you were in a Noo Yawk apartment building, ya know?) counting cars, or something equally scintillating.

The moral of this story is that it wouldn’t have happened if we’d had something to amuse us in our unfortunate half-baked state – something which would have kept us and thousands of other bollocksed students captivated us for simply hours – and this is the reason that the Interwebnet is fundamentally a Good Thing, and I curse my studentlike cheapness for not shelling out for a modem until it was too late. Bah.

Probably the only reason Sam (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 a big mixed flat 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 – “Eh, Keith, you thurr?” 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.

There is a simple rule common to most student households (and for that matter, any household inhabited entirely by recent ex-students or stoners). This rule is simple in its interpretation and often extremely harsh in its execution. It is based in roots of practicality and common sense, and yet still some people choose to debate it. There is no debate. The rule is this:

IF YOU GET UP, YOU LOSE YOUR SEAT

What’s to debate?

This rule, at least in our student house in the second year, originated in the fact that there were six people sitting around listening to music and sharing a drink or a smoke in the evening, but only two comfortable seats. One armchair, which allowed the user to curl up foetally and nod off, and one large beanbag, which was uncomfortable and troublesome until the user learned the zen secret of beanbag mastery – to recline into it at 45° rather than pretending it was actually a chair. Sneaky.

Other seating arrangements in our living room ranged from the vaguely acceptable (institution-like leatherette bank chair) to the not-very-pleasant-at-all (floor), and so competition was fierce for the two prized pleasant places. But the rule was simple. If you got up from your seat, whether you were esconced in armchair heaven or getting a numb bum on the floor, you lost your seat – you lost the right to park your behind there, especially if someone else covetted the spot more. And that was that. Didn’t matter if you were going to the loo, to answer the door, to reach for the remote, to make a brew for everyone, to the off-license – if your arse vacated that seat for more than a few seconds, it was fair game, and someone could pounce on it. Harsh, maybe, but fair – and common practice in student households up and down the country.

One night at the beginning of second year, a bunch of us were sitting round chatting and doing basically nothing. I think there must have been seven of us there – the six usual housemates, and L, the slightly kooky girlfriend of one of the lads I lived with. L scared me, because she had man-hands and a terrifyingly earnest and penetrating glare. Since I mostly only met her at the end of an evening, when I was slightly the worse for wear, she inspired unrational paranoia and worry in me, and so I tended not to spend much time in her company, though I was sure she was a very nice girl really.

She was curled up in the armchair and I was on the prized beanbag, with everyone else on the floor or other seats, glowering at us with jealousy. There may have been a film on the telly – I can’t remember, because what happened next occupied my attention entirely, in a traumatic fashion. Suddenly, L piped up.

“If I go to the loo now, will somebody steal my seat?” Everyone nodded and grunted affirmatively. Absolutely. Those were the rules.

“But I really need the loo. Really really really.” We shrugged and pointed out the key seating rule again.

“But I’ve had a really hard day at uni,” she continued, “and I’m really really comfy in this chair…” No sympathy was forthcoming. Sam, her boyfriend, pointed out kindly that if we hadn’t been about to steal her seat before, we most certainly would do so now.

She pouted. She pleaded for a bit. She asked again. Nothing doing. We were utterly unsympathetic and all equally ready to pounce the moment her bum left the chair, especially now she’d made a fuss about it.

She glared at us, reached for her pint glass of water, which she drained while fixing us with her cold eyes. We looked on, unmoved.

And then, unthinkably, she crouched on the chair, untied her ethnic trousers, pulled them down and proceeded to pee in the pint glass, right there, perching on the armchair, with all of us watching incredulously, a defiant gleam in her eyes.

My jaw dropped in astonishment. Sam turned bright red. Mike muttered “bloody ‘ell” and the rest of the room was silent, save for the ongoing noise of liquid tinkling into a pint glass, which seemed to last for an unnaturally long time.

When she finished, she did herself up and placed the brimming glass on the mantelpiece beside her chair, settling down again to watch the film, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

We looked at one another with raised eyebrows. What. The. Fuck?

A moment later, Sam got up, shaking his head. L grabbed the glass, and proffered it towards him – “Sweetie, could you empty this for me?” – he gagged, visibly, and shook his head before he left the room.

One by one, we followed him, drifting off to our individual rooms, no longer interested in the film or the stealing of seats, still vaguely shaking our heads, trying to dislodge the mental image which remained of a girl, clearly barking mad, relieving herself in our glassware.

I still find it difficult to drink out of pint glasses at home.

Some aspects of student house-sharing are more guaranteed to cause stress, stomach ulcers, hernias, rifts, stabbings and other unpleasant social phenomena than others. Leaving a polite amount of milk is irritating, surreptitiously moving a girlfriend or boyfriend into the flat can annoy and completely failing to wash up ever is virtually guaranteed to grate (and probably cause an outbreak of salmonella) but as unpleasant as these acts are, they all pale into insignificance in comparison with the true student horror – the ritual splitting of bills.

Students, as you may already know through experience or observation, do not have much money. Educational priorities such as indian wall hangings, hair dye, beer and recreational drugs often mean that a student will reach the end of term eating spaghetti and vinegar, or fluttering eyelashes at mum & dad. You can bet that beer consumption will not decrease, though – there is always enough cash for a cheeky pint.

In an example of supremely bad organisation, the end of term generally coincides with the arrival of bills – phone, electricity, gas – unlike rent, which is usually (wisely) paid in advance, when students are relatively flush – or at least were, when grants were doled out on the first tuesday of term – “What’s this? Free money? Why thankyou! (Mine’s a pint of cider)” – the arrival of bills in the skint dog-end of term, however, is a nervous and fraught time, which inevitably leads to The Great Division Of Bills.

Each bill will have been issued in one person’s name, which means that they will be the one who gets chased by the bailiffs for failing to cough up. Although equally, risking a bad credit rating (and surviving) as a student tends to go down well with mortgage lenders when you get old and fat and boring (two years after you graduate). Go figure.

But the person with their name on the bill will have it in their best interests to divide and pay the bill as quickly as possible, which means that in their house-mates’ eyes they magically transform from NiceResponsibleFriend into EvilBitchTryingToScrewMeOutOfBeerMoney.

Gas bills tend to be the easiest to divide, as no-one can figure out what the complicated measurements and calculations on the bill mean- and besides, it’s only sixty quid, and in a house of six, that comes to just over five pints each, which seems fair enough.

Phone bills tend to be more complicated, though. The simple rule of thumb is that the phone bill will always bear no relevance to what you were expecting. This is because of the second rule of phone bills, which dictates that you will always use it more than you imagine. However, given that only one person in each house-share will have an aging relative in Penrith, it’s relatively simple to figure out who owes for what.

Until, that is, you come to the local numbers. Oddly, it tends to be the pizza delivery number that inspires the first scrap. All of you wanted pizza. All of you ate it. So who pays the 0.042p that the call cost? Likewise, even after everybody has claimed their respective calls and divied up for them, there will always be an outstanding £8.92 which no-one wants to claim responsibility for (or indeed pay).

But you’d think that the electricity bill would be the easiest bill of all to divide up and cough up for, wouldn’t you? I mean, after all, everyone uses electricity, and you kind of need it. But oh no.

In my second year of university, I shared a house in Penny Lane, Liverpool, with five blokes. On reflection, this wasn’t the smartest move I’d ever made, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I vastly underestimated how bad it could be. In the three months I lived in that house, all manner of random and worrying things occurred – which I won’t go into here, as they’d make far better fodder for another story. I moved in in September, and left in January, when I moved to Spain – which may seem a little extreme, but was infinitely preferable to communal living lad-style. For the most part, they were just rowdy and untidy, and I could deal with that at the time, no problem. But when the bills came around, life turned very very bad indeed.

P, a long-haired geordie architect-in-training, and usually the most laid-back person in the house, announced a couple of weeks before the christmas holiday that he was going to take a reading from the electricity meter before he left, and then another one when he got back, and that he would deduct that amount from his share of the bill when it arrived next term. Cue bewildered faces in the living room. You *what*?

He explained that it wasn’t fair to expect him to pay for electricity while he wasn’t there, because he was going away for all three weeks holiday, while others (like me) were working right up to Christmas Eve and then dashing home across the Pennines for the festivities, returning on Boxing Day so we could (in my case) flog books to well-fed liverpudlians during the sales. It didn’t strike him as odd in the slightest to ferret about in the cupboard under the stairs looking for the meter, in order to save himself a few pence on the next bill.

Sam, one of two philosophy students in the house (the other one also, confusingly, called Sam, and also with long hair and a band – the two were only differentiated by their accents – Sam S was from Preston, Sam B was from Gloucester) pointed out that he’d been away for a long weekend the month before. I chipped in that I’d been in New York for two weeks in October, and away just about every weekend at my boyfriend’s place. This cut no mustard with P, who started making noises about how people would use more electricity in December, because of there being more on television. This was a spectacularly weak argument – but not as weak as the next one he pulled out, about how because the weather was colder, people might use electric blankets, which cost a ton to heat up.

“Hang on a minute,” I said, “hands up everyone who’s got an electric blanket in this house.” No one raised an arm. “Any other heating devices?” Nothing. “OK then, I don’t think we need to worry about that. Next.”

The conversation went nowhere – P was adamant about his budget-cutting measures, and everyone else thought he was a loon. So after a couple of days of flogging that particular dead horse, raising his apparent insanity at any opportunity, we took a different tack. Sam put up a sheet of paper on the door to the cupboard under the stairs. I attached a pen with a bit of string. Mike, our resident Welsh (“I’m not Welsh! I’m from bloody Wrexham!”) engineering student sellotaped a calculator to the doorknob. Every time someone left the house, they crawled into the cupboard, took a reading, and noted it down. When they came in, they took another reading, and gradually the page filled up with elaborate calculations of kilowatt hours and units and VAT and all sorts, saved.

Soon, and probably inspired by the coming festive season and frequent indulgence in recreational substances, things got even more ridiculous. Sam B was the first to stand up, halfway through a movie, stretch and say “I’m not watching this anymore. I’m going to go take a meter reading so I don’t end up paying for the rest of this shit.” We giggled, but he went and did it anyway.

Soon, we were trying to out-do each other, much to P’s bemusement, taking readings when someone used the microwave, boiled the kettle, switched off their desklamp – Mike sat in the dark for two days, saying “If you want the light on, you’ll have to pay for it. I’m happy in the dark, man…” and I caught Sam S using a headtorch to brew up one evening, a spotlight on the mug in the dark kitchen.

The joke stretched so far that eventually there were pages and pages of numbers and ruled lines and workings-out attatched to the meter. Christmas came and went. The bill arrived. We attached the mighty sheaf of calculations to the bill and left it on P’s desk, to figure out when he came back from holiday. There was a week of silence, and then he split the bill six ways, meekly, and paid up. The whole incident was never mentioned again.

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, danling 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 hope 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?

In the eighties, student bars and buildings all over the UK were named after political prisoners, members of the ANC, and most frequently Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko.

At some point, there has been a Mandela House, Building, Hall, Gardens or Bar at:

• Bristol
• Swansea
• Sussex
• Leicester
• Sheffield
• Kent @ Canterbury
• Bangor
• Leeds
• Glamorgan
• Aberystwyth
• Queen’s (Belfast)
• Keele
• Durham
• Salford
• and my own alma mater, Liverpool.

Biko, meanwhile, proved slightly less popular, pulling in buildings and drinking establishments at (among others) Wolverhampton, Ulster, Manchester, Bournemouth, Bradford and scoring a double whammy for the Biko Mandela Building (Student Union) at the University of Glamorgan.

But in the nineties, the tide turned. Mandela was released. Beer went up in price. Student maintenance grants were cut and cut and eventually ditched entirely. Student bars started to acquire new names, after famous alumni or locals (Fonteyn in Durham, Lowry in Salford) or other generational heroes – Des Lynam. Rolf Harris. Larry Grayson. Zippy and George. Where were the political prisoners in the student consciousness of the late nineties? Where was the struggle and the protest?

My theory is that the decrease in student social consciousness can be directly linked to the decrease in student maintenance grants over the same period. A free education system fosters a mindset of social action and dissent, of sit-ins in Barclays and petitions against foreign governments. Social action is a liberal, middle class luxury.

I’d hypothesise that as students had to take more and more responsibility for their own welfare, fees and beer tabs, their level of social consciousness dropped rapidly, allowing them to focus instead on paying the gas bill and buying No Frills Cornflakes.

The Mandela bar is no longer relevant to students because it embodies a different generation of studenthood. The Peter Duncan Cocktail Lounge (sponsored by Absolut) is much more appealing, when you have to pay your own way.

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 feel 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 tomorrow, go and use it.

In 1996 I was living in a tiny community in Bolivia, doing fieldwork for my dissertation. That’s another story in itself – if not a whole book – but not for now. This story concerns itself with learning valuable cultural lessons, dancing on the roof of the world, and the reason I will never have a second helping of potatoes ever again as long as I live.

During the second month of my fieldwork, as the local foreigner, I was invited to the inaugural blessing of a new tree nursery in a tiny hamlet about four hours drive into the mountains called Inka Katurapi. With foreign aid, the village of about fifty people was experimenting with planting trees to prevent harmful erosion of the topsoil.

I didn’t think they were going to feed me when I got there so before I left my fieldwork site, I had a hearty Andean breakfast, consisting of potatoes. Now, potatoes in the UK come in three basic types: new, medium and baking. Potatoes in Bolivia however come in about 39 variations, with different colours and sizes and even tastes. Yes, amazingly, all potatoes do not taste the same. Anyway, beans (or even potatoes). I scoffed about a pound of potatoes before I left the village because I figured that would last me until the next meal (whenever that was going to be).

Driving over the Andes towards the village took about a couple of hours (there was impressive scenery, there were llamas). When I got to the village, nestled high in Los Valles, the party was about to kick off. This was not a fiesta, the other typical kind of Andean celebration, which involves drinking so much chicha (maize beer) that you go blind and waking up in a pool of your own (or worse, someone else’s) vaguely maize-smelling vomit three days later limbs aching from dancing the cueca, which is basically the Bolivian equivalent of Morris dancing and involves a lot of hanky-waving. This celebration was to be a rather more staid affair. There was to be a visit to the alpaca herd, a look at the nursery, a feast and then some speeches, they told me as soon as I arrived. Woah, hang on a minute, did someone say feast? Even though I’d eaten a few hours ago, appetite in the Andes is a funny thing and a little goes a long way, so my breakfast of potatoes was still weighing heavily on my stomach. A feast sounded like something I wasn’t prepared for, in an appetite kind of way.

So off we went to look at the alpacas and then at the nursery (yawn) and then there was the feast. In the middle of a muddy field on a steep slope, the entire village of about 45 people gathered around, bringing ingredients for the picnic. One person from each family brought an aguayu (a woven cloth used as a sort of backpack, if you tie it right (ask me to demonstrate sometime)) wrapped neatly around their contribution to the feast. Laying them down in the middle of the circle, one by one, they were unfolded to display the yummy contents within.

Quick caveat: I swear I am not making this up. Everything here actually happened, and I still have the scars (mental, physical and emotional) to prove it. Oh, and the photos.

Every single person brought potatoes. Every single one. Okay, a few people had also thoughtfully brought some llahua which is a scary foaming spicy tomato and chilli sauce that looks like the kind of spit you only ever see after a long dental operation, and tastes like burning. But aside from that, potatoes and lots of them. About twenty blankets worth. That, in case you hadn’t figured it out, is a lot of potatoes.

As the village guest, I got the village chair while everyone else sat on the ground. When I moved to sit with them, the head of the village, a man who wore a symbolic whip tied diagonally over his shoulder, shouted at me and gave me a guirnalda (a stiff floral garland that fits around the neck and over the shoulders and makes it impossible to move your arms from elbows up). So I sat on the village chair, higher than everyone and feeling uncomfortable. One of the women gave me an empty tin plate and indicated that I should help myself from the blanket. I quickly cottoned on that no-one was going to start on the food before I’d at least made a token effort so I headed over to the blanket, grabbed a few smallish spuds and a bit of red-spit sauce and plonked myself back down on the chair. My plate was immediately whisked away and the next time I saw it, mere seconds later, it was piled high with potatoes of every shape and hue.

There is one kind of potato in the Andes which deserves special mention here. Its name is the ch’uño and it is pure evil. It’s basically a freeze-dried potato which starts life sort of medium-sized and juicy and via a lengthy process of freezing and thawing in the open air, becomes a small black nugget which keeps for up to three years, usually in a sack in the animal shed, and tastes rather like the insole of a particularly sweaty hiker’s boot. It’s the kind of food that could only make sense in a region where shortages are common and something that is cheap, filling and easily-reconstituted is a valuable commodity. But it still tastes like shit.

My plate was piled high with ch’uño, of course, and I valiantly picked my way around them, trying to smother their minging taste in dentist spit as best I could. Like the polite girl that I am, I struggled but eventually managed to finish everything on my plate though I felt dangerously heavy. Bear in mind that there was also nothing to drink: no liquid to wash down the massive quantities of starch that were currently coagulating like a large boulder inside me.

They say that it only takes a pound of potatoes to kill a baby but I reckon you’d have to throw them very accurately indeed. Feeling full to bursting, I wondered what the equivalent starch tolerance level was for an adult female. I felt I was rapidly approaching that level. In fact, I FELT LIKE I HAD ROSEMARY’S POTATO BABY GESTATING INSIDE ME. Gah.

I turned to the head honcho with a strained but satisfied look on my face (I always was a good actress) and said, “Que rica! – most delicious” When I turned back, there was a woman standing in front of me holding a plate of potatoes dotted with ch’uno and red sauce. Hang on a minute. Is this Groundhog Day? Whatthefuck? I took the plate with a smile and a bilious lurch and started to eat. Again.

I did the best I could. All I can say in my defence was that as a well brought up young lady, my mummy taught me to eat whatever I was given. And so I did, even though I thought the effort would kill me, if the starch didn’t cripple me first. Once you’ve eaten a pound of potatoes, you feel full. Once you’ve eaten two pounds of potatoes, you begin to think you’ll never move again. By the middle of the third pound, you’re starting to wonder whether it would be easier to try and swallow one whole and choke yourself to death.

I handed the clean plate to the honcho, said “Thank you, but if I eat any more, I’m going to explode.” He laughed, took the plate and said words which I struggled to translate, but which I was sure involved the words “next course”. Sure enough, there was a second course … another traditional Andean dish – potato and pasta soup, which is basically another way of saying boiled potatoes and boiled pasta with the water left in the pan. They handed me a shallow bowl. I took one bite and blanched (no pun intended). I put the plate down on the ground, unsteadily and apologising profusely to everyone around. I’m sorry. I cannot eat another thing. I’m so sorry.

The relief on the faces of the villagers was obvious. I was confused, then suddenly, it clicked. In the UK and much of the western world, it’s considered polite to finish everything on your plate. In rural Bolivia however, if you lick your plate clean it implies that you’re still hungry, and so out of courtesy they will keep feeding you until you stop asking for more. The head honcho nodded at my apology, said sagely “You must have been very hungry indeed,” and then proceeded to give a lengthy speech in Quechua about the new nursery and all the benefits it would bring. I was extremely glad that the political tradition of long speeches was upheld equally in the Andes because it gave me a chance to digest.

My speech was not quite so lengthy and relied almost entirely on the artful use of sign language, stilted Quechua and a smattering of burps. No-one in the audience spoke English, and only a few spoke Spanish, which made orating problematic – though I think I came up with a crowd-pleaser when I rubbed my heaving stomach and declared “Mmmm … potatoes yummy”. Everyone smiled. On reflection, perhaps they were just relieved that I’d finally stopped eating. More speeches were made and then the honcho summoned for the band to start to play.

Have you ever heard an Andean band play? No, not those guys with the bright ponchos and the pan-pipes playing “El Condor Pasa” in Leicester Square … the real thing. Paul Simon wouldn’t recognise it, I can assure you. The village band consisted of five men with flute-like objects (quinos), one bloke with an enormous bass drum and a small child with a snare drum and a bad sense of rhythm. They played breathless synchopated tooting to a pounding rhythm. Everyone listened.

Then suddenly the head honcho stood up and said something in Quechua, waving in my direction. I fought my way through the layers of starch that had invaded my brain to translate it. Now…our visitor….to dance…future gerund…reflexive first person plural….

No wait, that can’t be right. I must have got that reflexive bit the wrong way around. Bloody grammar. He must have said, “Now we will dance for our visitor”. Surely. Surely. Oh god. Please. No.

He gestured again and indicated that I should stand up. Ah. Apparently my translation was right the first time: “Now our guest will dance for us”. And so, on wobbly legs and full of potato, I did the universal embarrassed uncle/Nelson Mandela dance, aided by the tight garland around my upper arms, making it impossible to move too much, and accompanied by sharp tooting and an urgent drum.

Thankfully, once the laughter had subsided, the women of the village got up to dance too, dragging me with them.

The dance consisted of holding hands in a circle and running round in a clockwise direction, then suddenly changing direction and running the other way for a bit. Meanwhile, two women would get into the middle of the circle and spin each other around. I was breathless, being 12,000 feet above sea level; full, having eaten three pounds of potatoes; thirsty, having not drunken anything since breakfast; and most of all clumsy, although that may have had something to do with the fact that we were dancing on a 45 degree ploughed field. The dance continued this way for a good ten minutes. Suddenly, I was grabbed by a short, fierce-looking woman in a bowler hat.

Now, many Bolivian women wear felt bowler hats, and some are fierce looking. But almost all of them are beneath five feet tall. I am not. I’m 5’9” and I towered over this woman as she grabbed my hands and we started to spin each other, one arm over the head. Because she was so short, spinning her presented no problem, and her wide colourful skirts spread out into a bell shape and brushed my legs as she span. But every time she tried to spin me, I ended up being smacked in the face by my own forearm. Repeatedly, with every turn. Not very graceful. And all to the sound of complex, breathy music, which after a while, sort of made sense.

So picture the scene. I was 12,000 feet up in the Andes, full to bursting, vowing never to eat another potato as long as I live, being smacked repeatedly in the head and tripping over my own muddy boots in a field full of people I could barely communicate with. I was breathless, dizzy and dancing on the roof of the world. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

Do you have a nickname? I mean, a nickname that isn’t a handle or \nick for online use only. Something people call you in everyday life?

Back last June, I started calling Dave Davo, for reasons which escape me right now, or are too embarrassing to admit. Nine months later, that’s firmly established as his nickname – practically the whole ukblogging community calls him that, and it feels as natural as hello.

My little sister is Binnie. My brother gets called Dewi all the time. I live with Davo and El Capitano, or Lucozade. I spent my misguided university years drinking tea in the linguistics department cafe with Bluey, Lotte, Peanut, Schmoo, Boo and Thor, among others. My friends include Meester Yan, Tops, Aga, KJ, Papa Franco, PB, Sness, Grum, Mongoose, World, Scally, Kat, Terrible Man, Nishlord, Roop and Wenders.

But I don’t have a nickname – never have, really. I’ve been called different things, in different countries (Margarita, Martita) and some people have given me sort-of nicknames (Mimp, Megza, Lavoine) but nothing has really stuck. I think the problem is that Meg’s short enough already – there’s not a lot you can do to it, really….

Any suggestions?

Later: OK, I take it back. A friend from university who I haven’t seen for seven years has written and berated me harshly for saying I never had a nickname. Apparently, there was a six month period in first year when I was known as Norris (as in Norris McWhirter, apparently because I was a mine of useless information and used to beat everyone at Triv. I find that hard to believe.), though I have no memory of this whatsoever.

Other suggested nicknames after yesterday’s appeal have included:

1. Meggles
2. Mezza
3. Pi
4. Megza
5. Meggage
6. MePi
7. Brian

Hmm. If any of those catches on, I’ll be stunned and amazed. I’ll also be slightly disturbed.