Lo and behold, we've got a pulse

Four weeks holiday in August. A week in Easter. Just over two weeks at Christmas. A few other days sprinkled in here and there. That’s over seven weeks of paid holiday. Yet for the past few weeks, almost every teacher has been complaining – me included – about how badly we need a holiday. This is all the evidence you need to prove that English teachers are the biggest bunch of moaners on the planet. We’re all coasting on fumes and struggling for inspiration and motivation…or so we say.

The funny thing is that I felt like this at the end of July, just before my summer holiday. I expected that to rejuvenate me, and that I would come back to Kyiv fresh and raring to go in September.

At this point, where to begin? I could make justifications for my unforgivable, lengthy absence - did anyone even notice? – but suffice to say that a lack of inspiration, serious writer’s bloc and a lost, directionless muse have all got in the way of my lack of motivation. I’m well into three-and-a-half months of my second year in Kyiv yet it’s taken me bloody ages to recover from my summer sojourn.

Perhaps it’s been the fact that I’ve been here sooooooo long – over 15 months now. By my standards, that’s an eternity: this is the longest I’ve lived in the same city since 2002, when I said goodbye to eight years in Boston. And this is the longest I’ve lived in the same flat for more than 12 months since I was 14 – and that was a looooong time ago.

This time one year ago, the old Layman’s Guide was in fine fettle. I was churning out posts detailing my epic, sordid, alcohol-fuelled nights out, stories of lost phones, theatrical shenanigans and rants about technology. February of this year saw Funfare for the Common Man unveiled with the intention of shorter, snappier, more frequent posts being the order of the day. So much for that – it lasted till July, and I don’t think I offered up anything short and snappy.

I’ve just arrived ‘home’ in New Hampshire, with my sister joining us just after Christmas, and one of my primary aims is to recap my four weeks of August travels in between my mother’s attempts to fatten me up and my father going on and on about my unruly, unkempt regular and facial hair and how Obama is the anti-Christ. I will also be spending lots of quality time with my cats: we have anywhere from 7-10 of them these days, as well as a vicious little dog that likes biting anyone who isn’t my mother. He’s a lethal beast.

Here’s the general outline of what you can expect. Try and contain your excitement:

Part I: western Ukraine: mainly somewhat in-depth write-ups of Lviv’s bar, restaurant and café scene

Part II: Slovakia: hiking excursions in the Low and High Tatras

Part III: Hungary: imbibing bull’s blood in eastern wine country and the arrival of Dr Wasabi Islam in Budapest

Part IV: Balkan capers with Dr Wasabi Islam

Part V: Shenanigans with the boys in Greece

I hope this little ditty will awaken a bit of my literary inspiration and give me the impetus I need to carry on. Watch this space.

For now, an ever-so-brief recap of September-December in Kyiv:

• a trip to Lviv in October
• work
• a weekend in Krakow (fun, as always)
• a stolen phone
• another theatre performance

And uh, that’s it. Exciting times or what!

Theatrical exploits, part III

Last year, it was the Brothers Grimm, where I played Slappy the Dwarf, Rumpelstiltskin and a TV show host.

Earlier this spring, I had a small part as Marshall Herrick in The Crucible. I also ‘directed’ a group of whippersnappers in a couple of plays as part of the school’s Drama Club, but I’m still suffering from nightmares over that and would prefer to forget it.

This year on 11 December, I had my biggest role to date. This was no literary masterpiece by any stretch, but it was still a load of fun to work on and I had my best time yet. We put on a play called Aeropeor, which was sort of a VERY poor man’s Airplane! I’ll attempt to describe the plot as succinctly as possible:

Incompetent airline employees at an airport in the middle of nowhere, with a Latin American theme. Big dictator and his actress daughter arriving. Snow problems, flights cancelled. Dictator goes missing. Staff panic. FBI on the scene, but they too are incompetent. Stranded kids causing havoc in the control tower. Turns out the dictator was kidnapped by one of the airport employees who wants to overthrow the existing government and institute a Marxist-Liberal-Conservative-Anarchic-Fascist regime. Rescue attempts, fights, love interests, fledgling romances, general incompetence and then the dictator and his kidnapper fall in love, get married and everyone lives happily ever after.

Yes, really.

Political Incorrectness Alert!!!

My two big dreams in life, as far as acting goes anyway, are to play a black guy and a gay guy. Well, not necessarily a gay guy per se, but an extravagantly camp guy. And that’s what I was in this performance. It’s fun getting into the habit of wearing make-up and in this show, what with all the rouge, eyeliner, mascara and lip gloss, I said goodbye to my masculinity for good. Or for a few weeks anyway.

As far as my acting skills go, I was happy with my performance and the reviews were generally positive. I even got gifts from my ‘legions’ of adoring female fans, including flowers, a lovely book/journal and even a pineapple. As far as my singing…well, that’s another story, something to work on. I did a brief version of ‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to…’ though with the lyrics changed to ‘it’s a free country and I’ll quit if I want to…’ based on my lines in the play (I get fed up with the incompetence around me, plus the fact that my potential love interest, the dictator’s daughter is an immoral, emotionless tart with no conscience or sense of morality, and then quit, only to come back near the end of act two, disguised as the driver, and save the day by drawing my gun on the kidnapper, that is, before the dictator decided he wanted to marry her, thus rendering my efforts at being a hero moot).

Anyway, what was I saying?

A holiday tradition is broken. Or, the closest I would have ever got to heaven

For as long as I can remember, dating back to 1998 anyway, I’ve always gone to a holiday performance of some sort, either a concert, opera, ballet or play around Christmas time. It’s one of my favourite traditions, and it looks like this will be the year it comes to an end – unless acting in something very vaguely holiday-themed counts. And despite the fact that we danced along to Feliz Navidad at the end of Aeropeor, there wasn’t really anything Christmas-themed about it.

Examples from years past:

• in Boston over the years, either at university or afterwards, or at times where I’ve gone home, there have been concerts (Handel’s Messiah), plays (the Santaland Diaries, to name just one), bawdry, risqué musicals (the Slutcracker) or ancient yuletide, medieval folk music (the Harvard Revels on a couple of occasions)
• in Nigeria, an afro-beat steel drum band playing Christmas classics – easily the strangest holiday show of all-time
• in Spain, a Mississippi Gospel Choir playing spiritual tunes, with an audience dance and sing along on stage to ‘Oh Happy Day!’ at the end
• in Latvia, the Nutcracker (boring and overrated – talk about anti-climactic!)
• last year, a Christmas concert, featuring a Ukrainian orchestra with an American conductor, at the National Philharmonic

And this year? Well, it was a double fail. I had planned on going to see Belinda Carlisle, but the show was cancelled at the last minute. Besides, it wasn’t a Christmas-themed concert anyway.

Really though, how cool am I?

Because some have asked

I’ve had a very productive year of reading (uh, what Russian?), and here are the highlights:

Raymond Chandler The Long Goodbye; John O’Farrell An Utterly Impartial History of Britain; Jonathan Franzen The Corrections; Fitzroy McLean Eastern Approaches; Paddy Fermour A Time of Gifts; LP Hartley The Go-Between; John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge God is Back: How the Rise of Global Faith is Changing the World; and Gregor von Rezzori The Snows of Yesteryear

Postscript

I forget who said this, but a couple of years ago I read that an elderly female British writer had this irrational fear every time she started a new book that she would die before she was able to finish it. She would thus, after reading the first two or three chapters, skip to the last chapter just to make sure she would know the ending. I wondered whether I would ever get to that point in my life.

And I did just days ago.

My flight from London to Boston was one of the rockiest of my life. The turbulence was unbelievable and the lights kept going out in the plane (I was flying American and the plane itself felt rickety; no wonder they’ve filed for bankruptcy, their planes are decrepit pieces of shit). Passengers were panicking and, thought not quite screaming, certainly expressing great levels of angst. Normally non-plussed in such situations, I even started to see brief snippets of my life flashing before my eyes. But my primary concern was that I had just started the fifth and final act of Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi, and I didn’t want to go plummeting into the ocean until I had finished it. So while others nervously held hands with their loved ones and swore eternal love, and where others might have desperately been trying to find a mobile signal in order to make one last phone call to that special someone, I sat there determined to get through the final pages of my play. Though my stomach was a bit in knots, I managed it, just as the plane righted itself and landed safely.

Happy Christmas.