I’m a
sucker for nostalgia and sentimentality, especially on
5/10/15/20 year anniversaries. Last September – my God, do I feel old – marked
20 years since I started university. 20 years! Inevitably at times like this I
reminisce endlessly and wax poetic and more often than not, share my
reminiscences with those who were a part of it. Last September I failed to do
so, and I wonder if my friends and former classmates had similar thoughts
(considering you are probably reading this, did you, boyos?) Anyway, I’m
forever saying to myself ‘this time 20 years ago I was…’ I probably get it from
my mother.
(It’s hard
to avoid the ‘time flies’ cliché, but it does really seem like it.)
This
month, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on ‘this time 10 years ago’, for this
time 10 years ago marked the start of a new epoch in the life and career of Pedzo,
one which he never envisaged taking him to where it has today. It was the
beginning of a new adventure, the start of my various hijinks and shenanigans,
sticky situations ad infinitum, all sorts of sordid encounters and wistful
peregrinations, all wrapped up into one: it was when I did my Certificate for
Teaching English to Adults, the 4-week course otherwise known as the Celta.
It was
probably around early March 2005 that I decided to do the Celta. I had just
applied for a post with the British Foreign Service whilst living in Belfast
and I didn’t like the way that sounded (a boring story for another time), so I
figured I’d get qualified to teach English abroad, as a sort of ‘2-year plan’
before getting a more ‘proper’ job. I’ve been down this road before, but that’s
the basic summary for now.
‘Who first
invented work, and bound the free
And holy-day
rejoicing spirit down
To the
ever-haunting importunity
Of
business, in the green fields, and the town
To plough,
loom, anvil, spade – and oh! most sad
To that
drudgery at the desk’s dead wood?’
(‘Work’,
Charles Lamb 1819)
After I
finished university, I had no choice but to start working full-time and man,
what a drag it was. All the blood, toil, tears and sweat, and for what? I
figured if I wanted to lead the life of a modern-day Oblomov, with nary a care
in the world and a life of indolent luxury, then why not teach English abroad?
How hard could it be, I figured, at least for a couple years anyway.
An Ode to
Indolence
‘I have an
idea that Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner – let him on any
certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled prose and let him
wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it,
and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it…How happy such a voyage of conception,
what delicious Indolence!’
(‘Letters’,
John Keats, ed 1970)
Splendid!
I would put in a few hours a week, make a meagre wage but sufficient for
getting up to no good and best of all, plenty of independence to carouse if I
so chose, but otherwise to read to my heart’s delight. There would be ample opportunities for buffoonery in all its guises. What better choice of
lifestyle could there be?
Thus, once
it was decided, it was just a matter of where to do it. It wasn’t a hard choice
– there were no courses in Belfast and elsewhere in the UK was prohibitively
expensive. A quick search to see about other possibilities and I opted to do it
in Prague.
Now, I had
heard from a few people about how strenuous and challenging and time-consuming
the Celta was. People told me I would work harder than I ever had before in those
4 weeks. They told me it would be a real test of my endurance, my character, my
inner-strength, that the Celta was a brutal exercise in blood, toil, tears and
sweat. Wait, wasn’t I supposed to be getting away from all that? Four weeks, I
suppose, was a sacrifice I had to make to get to the fun stuff afterwards.
And indeed
it was a battle. But not for the reasons I had expected.
Of those
reading this, some have probably got a Celta (and/or teach). I can’t imagine
there are too many people reading who are considering doing one. In and of
itself, it’s not that difficult or strenuous. I’m an idler by nature and so I
tend to procrastinate and then do everything in a flurry at the last minute,
usually getting it done to a decent enough standard. That means I can spend 75%
of my time idling and then a quick frenetic burst of activity is enough to get
it done.
No, the
reason it was such a challenge was all down to the delights and temptations of
Prague. If you’re going to do a Celta, and you’re serious about dedicating the
requisite time to doing it ‘properly’, do it close to home, or somewhere where
temptation won’t get the better of you.
I arrived
in Prague, on an overnight bus from Brussels where I’d been visiting from
friends, on an early Saturday morning at the start of April. Spring has always
been my least favourite season, but my arrival on a glorious, warm, sunshiny
day was only the start of a magical month of mayhem, full of splendid sunshine
with only the occasional bluster or rain. Flowers were blooming, birds were
chirping and Prague, always one of my favourite cities, was in great, sparkling
spirits.
There were
9 of us in total, none of us Czech, all of us a nice smattering of nationalities:
American, English, Irish, Welsh, Kiwi, Hong Kong Chinese, Japanese. We all got
on like a house on fire and there were a few of us who were all far more
excited about being in Prague than in doing the Celta. Let me tell you, Prague
is a dangerous place to try and be a conscientious, hard-working student. We
wasted no time in checking out the delights, often fooling ourselves into
thinking we would do some ‘lesson planning’ and ‘assignment writing’ at a pub.
Many a night we’d head out, books in tow, to sit down and brainstorm some
ideas. With beer half the price of water and coffee, and twice as tasty, that was
the obvious drink of choice to fuel our creativity. Trouble is, we never got
much done. One minute it was 8pm, the next it was 3am and it was time to head
home for a bit of sleep before reporting back to the school at 9am. It would
then be a mad scramble to furiously write up a lesson plan and somehow teach a
lesson in our delicate conditions.
Day after
day, the sybaritic cycle never stopped, almost like a washing machine: rinse,
soak, wash, spin, repeat. It was tortuous, but tremendous fun. I did, however,
pay the price when I got quite ill during my last week, even getting a
nosebleed during my final observed lesson. By the end of the fourth and final
week, I could barely breathe or speak, I was feeling so rough. This was also
the time when I discovered my love of spicy food – on the final day, a Friday,
my Celta pal Mark, an Irishman, suggested we get the spiciest curry imaginable
– he reckoned that would clear me up right and proper, prepare us for the
celebratory weekend ahead. I had never been a fan of spice up until that point,
though I’ve always loved a good curry. It worked a charm, and from that point
on, when it comes to curries, the spicier the better.
But oh,
was it all worth it. Great friendships were formed, fleeting romances were had,
indelible memories etched forever into our heads and hearts. I even got to
re-connect with an old friend from many years before: back in the early 90s in
high school, whilst living in Germany, my baseball team took a trip to
what-was-then Czechoslovakia, to a small town halfway between Prague and the
Polish border called Vrchlabi, where we took part in a tournament featuring
teams from Russia, Poland, Italy, the US and of course, [the former]
Czechoslovakia. We all stayed with a host family, terrified to be separated
from our friends, unable to communicate - none of my host family spoke a word
of English so it was sitting round the dinner table passing a phrase book back
and forth, trying to work out what the hell I was eating. For many years after
this encounter, Veronika, who was my age, and I would exchange letters. She
always wrote in English, with the aid of her dictionary, and for a while I
attempted to write in Czech, a tedious, painstaking affair. I eventually gave
up and just wrote in English – after all, Veronika was trying to learn English.
A brief foray into my distant baseballing past
And there
I was, some 13 years later, meeting up with my old friend Veronika, who was now
living in Prague, speaking English, reminiscing on old times. At one point she
introduced me to her friend Radka, who spoke not a word of English, and she and
I soon attempted to get on friendly terms with the use of a dictionary passed
back and forth, and drawings on napkins. That fledgling romance didn’t go very
far, but there was another little one that did. But alas, all good things come
to an end and at the beginning of May, it was time to say goodbye to my new
Celta friends, as we all embarked on the start of our newfound English-teaching
adventures.
A truly
unforgettable experience, to put it mildly.
Postscript
This blog
has gone in all sorts of directions over the past 6 years. Around February
2014, I was reflecting on ‘this time 5 years ago’ when I started my blog. I had
just moved to Kyrgyzstan, fertile ground for some great Pedzo adventures. Had
this blog existed in April 2005 up until January 2009, I imagine there could
have been some epic posts. But perhaps it’s a good thing it never existed until
it did.
I’ve long
kept a journal, though in recent years I’ve let it slide. I really started
keeping a detailed journal in September 2002, when I started my Masters at
Edinburgh. I kept an incredibly detailed version whilst in Nigeria in 2004, and
then kept one from Prague-onwards (summer school in England (2005), Lviv
(2005-6), San Sebastian (2006-7, Riga (2007-8)). Unfortunately, all of those
journals are back in America in a desk drawer in my room. I do revisit them
from time to time, and I’m sure that if I delved into my Prague edition all
sorts of emotions and memories would come flooding back. But then, the details
might be so overwhelming that I would hardly know how to process them all, and
certainly putting them down on paper, so to speak, would be a fairly gargantuan
challenge for a scatter-brained person like me. Perhaps it’s best that those
journals are where they are, and I’m left only with fragmentary memories.
There is
undoubtedly a whiff of pretentiousness in my use of the word ‘journal’. I
wouldn’t call them diaries, but I don’t know what else they are: random
warblings and disjointed, oft-inchoate thoughts of whatever was going on? A bit
too wordy, unless there’s a word to encapsulate all of that.
One of my
favourite writers was the late, great Paddy Leigh Fermor, arguably one of the
greatest travel writers who ever lived. I would never deign to even remotely
put myself anywhere near his exalted stature, but maybe I’m a bit of a very,
very poor man’s Fermor on a much smaller scale with what I’m attempting to do.
In 1933, when he was 18, Paddy embarked on a journey, almost entirely on foot,
from Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He kept a meticulous journal, which at
some point he lost on his journey. It was eventually found and returned to him,
but there were still pieces missing and he had to reconstruct much of what we
wanted to write from memory. Time distorts memory as well, so when one sits
down to write years after the fact, who truly knows how accurate your
recollections are. Paddy wrote the first of three instalments of his
perambulations, A Time of Gifts, in 1977. I’m not patient enough, and I may not
live long enough, to wait 44 years to write about my Celta and Prague, so a
mere 10 years will have to suffice. Not that long in the grand scheme of
things, but long enough to distort the memory a bit, and I’ve got none of my
old journals to aid me in my quest.
Where to
go from here? As I’ve said, this blog has taken on my many different angles and
gone down many different avenues over the years, with plenty of hiccups and
false starts along the way. With the 10-year anniversary of the Celta, I’m
tempted and inspired to reflect a bit on teaching English itself, in as amusing
and flippant way as possible, with a tinge of gravity for credibility’s sake
thrown in. So that’s what I aim to do over the coming months, with a dash of
the odd story or two to spice things up, along the ‘this time 10 years ago’
timeline, naturally. If I can actually remember anything.
In my next
post, I’ll start by talking about the worst parts of this job: in a romantic,
broken-hearted sort of way.
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