Optimus Alive!

Indu, possibly, is shrinking. She gets smaller every time I see her. For the summer we both turn 30, and to celebrate the twin marvels of our continued existence and friendship, we are Doing Something, by Zeus! Namely, a sojourn in Portugal and the Optimus rawk festival.

By day, we desecrate monasteries, invade Narnian castles, gorge on egg custard tarts and drink gallons of red, red wine.

At night, the festival beckons. Tickets purchased on a grim January Sevillian morn are exchanged for wristbands and good taste is traded for bottles of desperado.

Interpol are interstellar. Black Keys: A+ for attainment, C- minus for effort. MGMT have very nicely applied nail polish, and that is all that should be said about them.

I confess I'm left unmoved by Alex Turner's snake-hipped writhing. His 3rd rate Shane Richie hairdo that does so much for Indu leaves me cold, but a polarizing taste in men is what has kept our friendship so fresh and enduring over the years.

The Libertines are dinosaurs, the zombies of rock. Pete Docherty on day release, still clad in railway captain's cap from an earlier appointment with playgroup, tearing through the set to get back to his choo choo trains, if only Carl would let him.

There is something so pleasing in two friends travelling separately from different countries to meeting in the middle. I remember a Christmas morning in Hong Kong, after a particularly distressing red eye from Tokyo, weaving through the unsanitised streets of Kowloon, and finding Alistair, boxfresh from London, all new haircut and Sainsbury's bag.

Another time, popping up in Rio, and there's Cass from Sydney and Abi from L.A. and it's midnight when we finally meet and the hostel people let us stay up til 2am talking.

"And you, of course are Jenny-from-Casablanca" pronounces the Istanbul hotel clerk, before leading me upstairs to the giddy, fantastical mirage of Annette and Rachel, after a month's spell in Morocco (a holiday which remains unblogged in hope of erasing the memory). In the clean white room, one of them is showing me the mini fridge, stuffed with beer, the other, for reasons best known to herself, is naked 'neath the bedsheets. They are giggling and tomorrow I get to spend all day with them. Now one lives on a little island off South Korea, and the other near Bath and me, soon, in Naples, but we will make these half-way points for each other.

Rock the kasbah

The worst thing about getting lost in the twisty turny identical lanes of the medina is having to walk past the same group of giggling 20-something boys each time you backtrack. I feel defeated and frustrated. And I'd thought I was so prepared for Morocco! Having survived India when I was a wee young slip of a thing and with my iron constitution. More to the point, I've read The Sheltering Sky three times and seen Hideous Kinky twice. But I still had no sense of direction.

Tangier is a city in the thrall of Laughing Cow cheese. A "La vache qui rit" logo hangs from every shop doorway. The streets are the domain of men; men deprived the company of women for too long. I am in my H&M burka today, hair firmly covered, so the heckling is disappointing. The next day, I experiment with briefer attire, and the results are no different. Only tagging along with Xavier, a brooding Frenchman, and Jake, a young American puppy with an entertaining line in logo t-shirts, render me invisible.

We ransack the market for lunch. Coriander in the air and fish heads in the gutter. It's not all beautiful. Tripe hangs from windows. A row of cow heads, skin peeled all over bar the furry nose. It must be picnic time.  We climb a grassy knoll and pool our spoils: a beautiful sour goat's cheese, wrapped in plaited leaves, baby plum tomatoes, a crusty wheel of bread and olives from the pick n mix stall. This is washed down with Hawaii, a product of the Coca-Cola company, doubtless banned by European health authorities because of the twelve E numbers needed to create its authentic fizzy coconut-passion fruit-orange kick. It's delicious.
 
Night shopping in the souks is great fun. Hostel Man cooks up our purchases then drives us down to the ice cream shop he co-owns to feast on the day's leftovers: almond, caramel, nougat and chocolate. It is all right to take sweets from strange men in Morocco, apparently.

Next day, the beach. We're joined by the love child of Julian Assange (a Dane named 'Mads') and South African Steve, a fellow English teacher living in Granada. Hitch hiking back, I can hardly believe that this is only Day Three. Of seventy four. It's nice, but a tad over indulgent, surely?

Fried sardines for lunch and tagine in the evening. Freshly squizzed orange juice and a little mouthful of sugared-pistachio-filo-pastried-delight. I go to bed each night uncomfortably full. In Seville, I grazed four or five times a day on little insubstantials. Now I'm presented with a wheelbarrow of couscous three times a day and expected to enjoy it.

Scant sights to see in Tangier, but after three days, I'm no longer surprised that Paul Bowles spent his 52 years here. I will be back.

It began in Africa

I had planned a holiday I would love to have gone on three or four years ago. Boats, buses and trains, cross-continental, rock pools. The works. I was Very Lucky to have two months of work to see Morocco and Turkey. I had a job, an apartment and good chums worth returning to. I had just turned 29 and still had my health. The sky was my oyster.

Instead, I found myself doubting my abilities to do this again, to haul myself from city to town to important ancient monument, and enjoy it. A year in Seville had made me soft, and the romance of adventure had deserted me. I'm incredulous that I have agreed to undertake this trip and rather hoping the thing won't come off.

I decide to ease in gently, spending a day on the beach in Tarifa, the southern most point in Europe, allowing me to
look out over Africa and get used to the idea.

Tarifa is windy. It screams through your ears and whips up the sand throwing haphazard showers of crushed glass against your skin. Sunbathing is not pleasant. No conditioner forged by the hand of man will unknot my hair tonight, but the pleasure of a breeze is so novel after the airless high 30s of the last month. Tarifa has a very high suicide rate. You either throw yourself into kiteboarding or the sea. The wind is that annoying.

You can choose between a dip in the Mediterranean sea or the Atlantic ocean. If the Atlantic side is grudge-bearingly cold, the Med is positively vindictive. The elements are against me today.

A final tostada by the harbour. It's a good one. There is nothing sadder than a lacklustre tostada. My last bit of jamon before it is replaced by cous cous and long hemlines and covered hair.

It takes just 35 minutes to cross from Europe to Africa. I reread The Heart of the Matter. Tales of ex-pats thriving in foreign climes. In the port of Tangier, Passport Man looks at my passport for a long, long time. It does look suspicious. Four pages dedicated to my undercover work for the Japanese embassy. Countless drug runs to Malaysia/Indonesia. A full page for India. A single day in Macau. He stamps over the top of the 2008 Marrakesh logo and waves me through.

Something sensational to read in the train

"Why would you bother keeping a diary?" asks Paddy, over dinner in the plaza after work. "There's no money in it. And it's not like anyone's going to read it."

This was an unexpectedly callous approach to the creative arts, coming from a man who is a published and prize-winning author. I didn't know how to respond, and but was not too distracted to snaffle the last chip.

Aye, there's no money in it, but wouldn't it spoil it if there were? The idea of it being weakened and marketed, tailored to a mass audience, instead of savouring the very private pleasure of turning verbs into adjectives... inventing words, playing last and foose with punctuation and the lore of grammar that I've spent the last nine months drilling into Spanish 10-year-olds.

It's a gloriously self-indulgent mental masturbation, messy and mine and all over the page. Unlovingly crafted for an audience of one adoring fan.

But then the summer comes, and solo travel throws up more bizarre scenarios, eccentric characters and non sequiturs than my inner monologue can handle. It's mandatory to reach out and touch. A little task to focus on while On Tour, and an excuse to write again, this year's diary being one I used less and less as my friendships grew sweeter.

So I'm excited and happy to have my little pet project again. There may be no money in it but I like the thought that someone is reading it.

A reconstruction

Thieves are awful, comforts dear sister Beth. They probably saw you using your kindle and were just waiting for you to go for a swim so they could take your bag.

But I know what happens at the end of Moll Flanders. Underneath the kindle, and now probably lying in a skip somewhere, along with a peach, a plum, a Spiderman pencil and 9 carefully hidden euro, is a yellow child's exercise book that's been carried around with me for the last three months. If your house was burning down, what would you save. Not you, Moll.

Me in written form. Stolen, lost and gone. My dear, darling, cherished security blanket. Or a sick sort of memento mori, marking the passage of time.  But until they're written down, thoughts reformulated and verbalised, does anything really count?

At least it wasn't any of your creative writing, someone points out. True. But wasn't it? Isn't it all a creation? Edit for highlights, embellish and rearrange? Were Beth and Roby really making sandwiches that night I came home, or were they on the terrace, asocially smoking and you didn't actually chat til the morning?

I have only been recording versions of events. But I can't let this just go by. This is another version of what happened between May and August 2012.

1) I read stories to Talia and Brandon, cut Peera's food and took Eloie to the toilet.We lived in a gated community for rich white people and the families of ex-pats. In the village, I ate wonderful chicken soup every day for next to nothing, and got addicted to deep fried bananas. I lived with Ann, Anne and Fiona, a lovely Scottish girl who told me to go and do a TESOL. Anne was spiteful, the kind of person who provokes you to eat their cassava chips in private. We watched The Disney Channel and lazed by the pool and never had change for the bus. The brittle Kiwi slept with the local men who told her she was beautiful. The Swiss girl swam a kilometre every day. After a while, I wanted to leave.

2) Trace the line that runs from his cheekbone down to his chest. Comb your eyebrows with my nails. You rubbed the perspiration from my forehead when you took the motorcycle helmet off me, every time. You wondered what our children would look like and I laughed and rolled my eyes but silently wondered too. I would never know what Bangkok looked like if I'd stayed with you. We fought. I told you not to come down to the harbour so you didn't and I resented you for it. That ridiculous "bushman" toothbrush you used. Fashioned from bark, or the root of some particular plant or some such. Activated with water only, you kept telling me to google it but I didn't because I'd rather tease you and afterwards I got your cinnamon kiss.

3) Same-same but different. The same as all the other cities, with an additional Starbucks where there wasn't before. This time it's Olympic-shaped. My favourite second hand bookshop had become a branch of my favourite cafe, and I was unsure whether to rejoice or rail at the gentrification. My friends, my family and former colleagues, working harder and longer than ever before. Nobody minds that I keep buggering off all the time. They still want me. The Circle Line doesn't join up any more. A fiver for a vodka and tonic.

4) An overly charismatic tutor with blond floppy hair at first irritated me, then encouraged me and finally inspired. I watched him teach the upper-intermediate class and I listened to him to talk to the trainees about it afterwards and I thought: this man has a calling. I do not. If this were a seminary for the priesthood, I would go to him, after vespers, and say: Father Chris, sometimes, I worry. I look at priest like you, and I feel so far away from your passion for your God. Sometimes, I doubt, Father Chris, if I am cut out for this. I'm a cheat and a liar and in this for the wrong reasons. I shouldn't be here. I'll never be like you. And then, a few weeks later, I have become a curious Christian, flicking through theology textbooks instead of Facebook in the lunch hour, and starting to wonder how to go about climbing aboard this particular bandwagon and then I realise I'm already on it.

That's not really what happened though, I don't think. It's not the same river, twice. I can't tell. I will buy another exercise book tomorrow. It won't have that annoying duck on, because Spanish stationery stores are better stocked than their Bornean counterparts.

The physical compulsion is still there. The only thing to do is write about it. 

Intrapersonal teaching

By the beginning of Week 3, we are in love.

There is no one else in our world, no one else understands us, and our poor, tortured, over-worked souls. We spin a protective cocoon around N, who may or may not fail, and H, the loveliest teacher but incapable of paperwork, which is of course, how you assess a good teacher. The jet-lagged Americans are Not Eating and stagger gauntly into our arms after noontime naps. We are cranky and weepy and chase our tails in a circle of stress and only have eyes for each other. It is Teaching Boot Camp crossbred with Big Brother.

We are a we, there is no "I" in team, Jenny! Even I concede to this, and stop fighting against the group work because perhaps it is not so bad a thing to be part of. Or to be part of things. They are wonderfully tolerant of me though, and my Intrapersonal Learning Style (my official diagnosis). I don't run every day now, because we are eating dinner on each other's roof top terraces, conversing over cathedral chimes, or netbooking together in the little cafe overlooking the fishing boats in the harbour, watching the sunset.

Teaching is an hour or two of The Jenny Show, a few times a week. A ridiculously curtailed schedule, down from 25, but then it has to be planned, meticulously, and that plan presented with accompanying rationale. "Distill the essence of your pedagogy and its individual linguistic aims" and other archaically worded forms of assessment.

And afterwards observations, observations of how you walked around the room, where you stood and how high you held your lovingly photocopied hand-out up, up to the light and the TEFL Gods. Someone else has copied down your instructions for each activity, word for word. Did you look at each student equally, did you pick on Juan Carlo more than Juan Maria? You know how he hates that. Your voice is too loud, too soft, too kind when correcting or simply used too much. The timbre of it, though, is so rich, an exquisite brown russet shade, I could almost smell the autumn leaves...

We watch each other teach, most humiliating of all, and soon tire of constructive criticism. We do T-rex arms in a row at the back of the room to try to put our favourite trainee off. We give each other the name of a fish before each lesson, and try to shoehorn it into lessons somehow.

Do you like Spain? asks Diego in class one morning. I don't know, I tell him. It's true. I leave the house every day, blinkers on, hurrying through the streets and into the language centre, don't look at Spain, don't look at Spain.

I remember that I know how to read, and pull Life of Pi from the untouched communal bookshelf. I have no idea when you are supposed to have time to read. I find my kindle shoved in a forgotten drawer somewhere, along with the Spanish textbook and a cardigan and my diary and other things that I don't use anymore. Moll Flanders. That helps. And going on day trips at weekends, to Seville and Rhonda and Tarifa, the southern most tip of Spain, where you can see Africa. I write my Materials Assignment looking out over Tangier. Another country, another way.

Viva Espana

In the last week of the TESOL course, the refuse collectors of Andalusia go on strike. The cobbled streets of Cadiz reek as the city walls begin to rot. I vary my route to school each day, testing new corners, avoiding certain plazas where the stench of festering tapas scorches the nostrils and turns the stomach. The Tall Ships Races begin, and scabs are paid to remove the worst of it from this year's bicentennial city. And in all of it the heat, the relentless, unwavering, toneless heat.

Underneath it, there we are, with the highest population density in history of Cythnias on a teacher training course (two-thirteenths). Phonemes and phonics and aims (subsidiary, objective and stage aims) and on Wednesdays, the passive tense is learned. Teaching begins, real live Spanish people, named Jose and Fernando and Raquel. Organic, living things, students that question and second-guess their teacher. My omnipotent authority toppled. The Japanese reign is over.

We are together ten hours a day, a tiny group embracing, encouraging, feeding back, cheering on, taking supportive fag n stress breaks in the square. After the first week, the space between our bodies begins to dissolve as everyone starts to touch. First an arm squeeze, then a shoulder rub then a full on bodily embrace. They collapse inwards, constantly feeding pet pressure dragon. But it is a persona, a way of being, a something to hold on to. People walk out of their classes, unable to continue, deadlines are unmeetable, two public break downs, three private and a pregnancy scare. There is a tense called Future Perfect.

I run, so hard, the first week. The group work, the group mind, crushing and encompassing all. I'm a recovering introvert, I explain, I can't do the group sessions. At 7, I dart from the rooms, flippity flopping down the stairs, into the square with children on new bikes and little girls throwing popcorn in the air. Streets teem with the 40% unemployed, and I weave, home to the empty flat, I must leave it before the lovely other girls get home, I must be alone, change and get out, rush down to feel that velvet squish between my toes, on the sand. On the beach, I can stare out at an infinite stripe of sea and sky, not just the back of Cynthia P's head or deep down into Joaquim's workbook, but stretching headlong into the distance, running along with me.

20 minutes and then I can leave a pile of moist pink clothing under my usual rock and I slink into the sea like a retarded sea creature, my legs useless, my arms begging to be used, and then another half hour later, my body is as tired as my mind I've achieved some kind of equilibrium, I'm me again and I will wear my flamingo dress tomorrow.

Home, and Robyn and Beth are making sandwiches and doing dinosaur impressions. And I will apologise for my behaviour and join in.