Funfare for the Common Man

'Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.' Walt Whitman This was a trip that really made me feel my age, to borrow from Jarvis Cocker *. I’ve done plenty of budget travelling and backpacking in my time, and for the most part I still enjoy it – when you’re on the road for a month, you have to do so on a budget, let’s face it – but in my cantankerous old ways, I have a hard time putting up with the crap that comes with staying in youth hostels. Whenever possible, I opt for a single room, but in many cases, you’re still faced with lots of noise and other general tomfoolery (like loud, idiotic backpackers talking utter nonsense till the wee hours of the morning). I think I’ve reached my limit when it comes to sharing rooms in hostels, not that I was ever much of a fan of it to begin with. In Lviv I stayed at the Kosmonaut Hostel where I was kept awake every night by French and...

  I’ve got a lot of stories to tell from a month of summer travels, but let’s begin by going back into the past, to just over a year before my 2011 travels commenced. We’ll call this the PROLOGUE : Lviv: 16-21 June 2010 Regular and semi-regular readers will have different recollections of my tales from the summer of 2010: Romania-Moldova-Transdniestria-Ukraine-Poland. Much of that has been covered in varying degrees of depth on the Layman’s Guide (I especially love my rambling, blabbering Tiraspol post ). Interspersed amongst my ditties were missives about the World Cup, which I fear alienated a few too many readers. After my wretchedly poor World Cup preview, which provoked torrents of abuse and vitriol, I felt that I had to keep up some momentum and thus produced a few perfunctory pieces of inchoate bile where I ruminated on various matches and theorized in way too great depth. Blah blah blah indeed. I have also, from time to time, referred to the splendid ‘new’ collection o...

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 ...