Prostitution in the Gulf

Where the mange dogs go to die or toying with prostitution

Prostitution has always been something I have had a natural aversion to, it just doesn't seem right to me either as a potential buyer or seller of services. It seems (in best pompous voice) grubby and corrupting and unimaginably degrading for both parties yet it does appear to supply a type of need. However, grubby and seamy as it may be I once lived in a flat overlooking a street in the red light district of a deep Spanish town it provided great street theatre for me and my pals up on the balcony with a glass or three of Rioja watching the amusing comings and goings. It also helps being on friendly terms with the genial women and and gypsy runners and minders in the local scoring bar watching genial whores hustle and the hustlers whore - the majority of clients seemed to then be nervous virginal conscripts who would then, a fleeting and unsatisfactory orgasm later, reappear with a cheesy grin and go and score a hunk of dope and a beer and then shuffle out with their pustulous pals. As outsiders we were treated well and were doubtlessly unaware, possibly wifully,  of any ugliness that may have been going on...

So I am well aware that the foul temptation of a quick trick does occasionally hit upon many a man good and true, especially in this part of the world in which new thrills and excitement are always sought and needed for Expatland, or at this soulless part, can indeed be a conscience free zone. Eyes can easily be turned by an exciting and tempting short deal with particularly dirty and filthy, certainly amoral folk. Yes, I held my nose and put in an application for a post to sell my undoubted talents, modesty and soul, definitely my soul, to some particularly nasty military carpetbaggers in Saudi a place I swore I would have nothing to do with, a place that is Yemen or Afghanistan with money and some medieval magic rocks, governed by superstition, a fucked up version of a messy religion and rich inbred men with beards. A candidate for the worst country in world. Yes, the Big Company - big in guns, oil, torture equipment probably too, they have (or had) shares in the appalling criminal Bush /  Cheney gang too. 

Of course, like all it's about the Very Large Salary, and great conditions - albeit in the modern Middle Ages - paid for teaching very rich, uninterested people laced with an odour of in-breeding...and then I would be surrounded, in a compound with the delights and frolicsome fun enjoyed by other well paid low life whores. It is the place where the dead mange ridden dogs go to scratch, rut, and die...I know I have met some. Refugees in the EFL world, once on the outside they tend to have a dead eyed glassy stare brought on by the soul shreading hell-Horrors they have seen and the contortions of conscience they have made, and many, disconcertingly, are called Colin.

Whither the idealism of career entry in education? Well, everyone has their price (yes YOU do)...do I? I have done the maths and (wistfully) most tempting and tantalising I could never need to suffer the indignity of being an economic migrant, being an educational wage slave again after three years. I would never have to consider the possiblity of walking into a secondary classroom again or have a McJob in an EFL languish school......it's a tax-free temptation that's for sure.

It might be a laugh, it might indeed be worthy, I might even touch a few lives. It does happen in teaching. I have been around, seen some mostly amusing but despairing things, I survived the worst of incompetent micro-management, feral students, unsupportive, failed parents and of course useless education ministers that prat Gove being the latest incarnation. I can keep my mouth shut and my head low, I can keep my face straight now when folk get all Bronze Age religious on me and try to convince me their fairy tales are true and that their god is better than the other guy's god. I can usually find the good things in a culture and people and always meet good folk on the EFL circuit who are not cat lovers, sports bores, terminally lonely, or need those special holidays in the Philippines but perhaps my biggest advantage is not being called Colin.

Choices choices....

Creeping torpor in Expatland

Well, fuck this as they say in the nose bleed inducing upper echelons of pointless professional development circles. Inevitably the initial glow of pleasure at the escape from the professional and mental constraints of living and whinging in the education micro-managed mincer of very Little England has since  receded. Not that I am complaining about life being too easy here and wish to be back there, oh no, pas de tout, as I might once have said, that would be very wrong and indeed a tad ungrateful. No, a four hour day suits me fine, I'm reasonably well paid but want a little more but not sure exactly what. Stupidity and wildness would be good but that last happened during the Bad Behaviour of Xmas and New Year when friendships were amusingly breached with ladles full of ire and umbrage lapped up slurpingly by those who really ought to know better...and they do, they too are just bored and wanted to imbibe bagfuls of ire and umbrage to give some meaning to the too long time they have spent in this pleasant but ultimately unlively neck of the Gulf. I suppose it is a kind of expat langour. Some turn to extreme exercise - triathlons, climbing, sailing (does that count?), others to bad choirs (only the former Soviet staff do amateur music well), fat unmarriageable women to house cats (a messed up concept if ever there was) and others, usually Brits and the running dog Aussies, to genial alcoholism. A worrying few have taken to religion, some turning Muslim.

...and now it's raining, proper biblical wadi rupturing rain showing up the rubbish infrastructure as cars, goats and stray excess children get washed away in a brown slurry of cheap infrastructure. Hey, it's all part of Allah's great plan so a bit of death and destruction is nothing to worry about. And like our crap snow days, they get rain days as the flooded roads, power cuts mean that no one has the slightest idea how to deal with anything which is actually a rather pleasant  excuse to stand outside on the balcony with a glass of wine and watch the kids frolicking in the floods as ours did in the snow before it became boring.

The earth moved for me

That was fun being part of the disaster up the road in Iran and Pakistan. There I was giving the class a most mild of bollockings, for that is what it was, when the floor started moving, tables vibrating. Very weird as I thought it was just me and feared another seizure was coming on but rode with it as I am a professional educator as my Yankistani colleagues are wont to say. While the floor was wobbling and furniture rumbling I continued said soft-toned to some of my lovely but  lazy students. It is all that is occasionally needed as they are brought up to respect their teachers and have Allah on their side but that is another story those off us working in the Middle East know all about.

Mid-bollocking however slightly manic Muna from the class next door, a lovely local colleague and source for local culture, asked me quaveringly whether the earth had moved for me. She was visibly scared though, she then asked the girls relieved at the relief from their bollocking if they too had felt something, which of course they had but were too timid to say anything for fear of speaking over a teacher. This was done first in English, then in Arabic and what ensued was some Richter scale madness as, in a fraction of  a micro-second, they had all gleaned from Muna and their dumb phones set to panic mode that they had been in a level 7.8 quake and we were all going to die.

Fortunately, being British and working in a world of excitable foreigners it  is beholden upon me to wield the cold wet fish of hard reality  which was drawn from my bag and liberally slapped in copious blubbering faces including that of dear Muna who I escorted back to her class from which her students had decided to flee in a Hollywood style screaming girly panic and that was just the boys. One look to mine - honed over many years of dealing with semi-house trained feral Year 9s called Jordan - left them sitting more soberly realising that, as the our media might say, a minor tremor had occurred in a far off excitable place, no Britons involved.

I shall now be marketing the t-shirt below in a range of colours and fabrics with the annoying but catchy  slogan as below, could be my way out of teaching......

Damn, I spilled my wine

There I was having a quietish  sundown excuse of a red out on the stoop with some genial pals and assorted children, when the now unsurprising news came through that a doddery old bag holed up for her last unwinnable stand in the Ritz had died of a brain attack. Yup, my worse instincts got the better of me  along the line of the bitch is dead, fuck yeh... so I performed a merry Irish jig around the aforementioned stoop. It was the instinct and frustration of growing up as a teen during the old bag's reign coming to the fore. How could it possibly not? Awful times.  I thought I was bigger than that but obviously not. The 80s tainted me more than I imagined likewise several million others.

The children around looked quizzical at the passing of someone equivalent to them as Harold Macmillan or Anthony Eden (who they?) were  for me at their age, at  least they or the outcomes of their policies  were not so divisive and damaging. The colonial commoner among us from Australia looked quizzically shocked but his pommie partner fully understood but rather than spill her wine chose only to join me in performing a round of ecstatic cartwheels and double backflips to accompanying fireworks and the Ode to Joy. Not intended, just knee-jerk instinct, as I suspect it was for millions of others.

A calculating woman with, for me and millions of others, rotten, divisive ideas and outcomes which ruined and disunited my country and made it a nastier, greedier place. Sure, well worn arguments have been had and doubtless will continue to be so as she, and those times, inevitably becomes an increasingly forgotten footnote. Arguably the best time to have celebrated was in 1990 when  she got stabbed in the front by her own as a liability for which the appalling Mail has been lamenting ever since.

That said, having an awful lot of folk crowing unashamedly at your death is the stuff of dictatorships, or demagoguery or regimes smelling cloying close to it. Ugly. Indeed, ugly in that the impartial BBC won't play Ding Dong in full in fear of upsetting the right which kind of puts her on a par with Mohammed in terms of sensitivities among some idiots and fools.



So, yes, were I back home I may well have been up in London, for old time's sake, waiting for some dumb fuck now underpaid overtime dependent plod, or overseas private plod, to make up an excuse to bash a few heads with Daily Mail sponsored batons and spuriously nick a few folk. It would only confirm that the legacy of Thatch has only been negative, nefarious and nasty.

 


May she sup well on the sulphur with her chums Saville, Ronnie, Botha and Pinochet et al. In the meantime good old Glenda Jackson seemed to sum it up well.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/video/2013/apr/11/glenda-jackson-margaret-thatcher-video

Appraisal, epilepsy and green ink

Now, last time I was appraised back in the make believe weirdo world of Goveland a year or so backit was of course by my then subject leader. Leader can only be  loose and vague as terminology, as the Northern Nazi had yet to develop any leadership skills beyond those that her beardy supervisor, the monosyllabic beardy neanderthal caveman had told her to do. In turn these had come down in tablets of stone from the swivel eyed head  who appeared convinced that the path to academic success was through dress standards. I'm sure little Govey would love that.

Caricatures they may be eh? Yet, as with all such things  they are easy and simple and redolent of slack thinking but based in a fetid slurry of tiresome truth which explains why I became one of the large stat of teachers who quit the profession in the UK this year according to the BBC. Yes, I was given a hard and rotten time and told I would have failed an Ofsted inspection for not having marked books in green ink. As simple as that. It didn't help that I raised an arched and skeptical eyebrow before sniggering like a 14 year old at the bollocks thus spouted by the insecure daft over-promoted woman and the SLT caveman who had spent plenty of the lesson observation texting. Needless to say this did my position no end of good. I knew that spending the next years of my diminishing life in such a place could not happen and that I was probably on my way out then anyway.

Dark but occasionally amusing times from a different chunk of  clunky time. How easy it is here though, a world away - how cooperative, how friendly and how good-natured. Just as I felt when I first entered state education in the 90s. The head didn't really want to know about the lesson, he assumed I could teach without having to follow narrow restricting teaching by numbers strictures. He was more concerned about how I was settling in to his country, what I thought of the students and how we could improve attainment. No complete and utter bollocks about marking green ink that's for sure. We talked briefly about the lesson he watched, went through his ticky box list  and as I thought he was winding it up, he then caught  me  by pulling out my health record, not something that has ever happened before and possibly not legal in the UK. Were unions allowed here I would certainly have questioned it.  What was the point of it all? He really wanted to about epilepsy. This being based upon the record of a grand mal full on seizure I had back in the last century which he had worryingly highlighted in green ink. Needless to say it took me off guard as it has never been an issue well, apart from when it happened - not at work thankfully. However, all sorts of  left-field concerns were raised. He went through a lengthy interminable pedantic list of pre-prepared 'what ifs...' which I had to try to assuage in detail so as not to be accused of being mentally ill,  possessed or in need of trepanning or exorcism  in the unlikely event of another overdose of electrical discharge, anything in short which could freak out deeply religious, sheltered students and some non-western teachers too.

It has never been a question brought up by anyone other than the doc  now a very long time ago. In the world of illness epilepsy just ain't sexy. It really isn't. As far as I know it doesn't get it's own awareness day where you can buy a  pretty ribbon to show solidarity and that you really, really do care. It can be subject to all sorts of myths and ignorance in the UK - fortunately being possessed or in league with Beelzebub are no longer among them.

Qatar Airways and fat religious women

Oh dear, I am getting slack in my mithering, moaning and whinging, life is obviously too good here or something.

Catch up time which after re-reading and re-editing still sounds borderline Daily Mail. Oh dear.

Yes, the half-term break here known as Eid was pretty good unless of course you happened to be born as a  goat. Tens of thousands of the gormless creatures were mercifully slaughtered by elder sons wielding traditional curved knives which glinted and gleamed in the midday sun as the point descended (in slow-motion of course) ceremonially and mercifully piercing the carotid artery of the beast in a feast and fountain of symbolic (unless you were the poor goat) spilt blood, representing one of the nomadic desert religious nonsense from superstitious goat herds back in  the Dark Ages. Sure,  I really ought to take more interest in such things but....I suppose the local equivalent of the Daily Mail, were such a rag to exist,  would have me down as one of those cursed foreigners who just won't integrate... but having lived overseas before they don't tend to expect or say such things...still live and let live and all that.

However, I wasn't around to see the bloodshed as I had headed back to Broadstairs and the ancient and reinvented tradition of Halloween resurrected gratefully by Tesco circa 2004 beginning the displacement of the  tradition of burning effigies of a catholic terrorist. It was a good break despite the comparative cold and not seeing Tottenham win a single game. I caught up with a couple of old colleagues from Kent's crappy coastal academy. Not a single cell made me wish I was there.

The return journey was an eye-opener. Qatar Airways, the airline of a tiny but crazily, obscenely, rich state which by rights ought not to really exist. A bit like Dubai and Saudi they got blessed with geography. Good luck to them - what to do with all that cash? Well they splashed the cash by 'buying' the 2022 World Cup as well as Harrods and large swathes of London and support now given to various Syrian and Palestinian 'brothers.'  Yes, Qatar Airways is comparatively cheap and as the self-declared 5 Star Airline of the world provides an  otherwise excellent service. However, the seating arrangements seemed to highlight the confluence of extreme wealth and stupidity. The airline seems to have a seating policy designed by religious fat women sharing huge amounts of Celebrations across the aisles and bizarrely travelling in pleb class with the likes of me. Travelling through the Gulf before it had often seemed that Business Class had been bought out by whole families which makes sense as the flight was delayed by more than an hour as the cabin crew spent time asking various male passengers to play non-musical chairs to assuage certain passengers a row in front of me who didn't want men sitting next to them. I had never experienced that before and  all the while various take-off slots were missed.

I had angry time to kill in Doha Airport (a hole) as my onward connection had been missed so along with a few other irate passengers, questioned the seating policy which was naturally denied by the harassed Qatar Airways drone who bought us off with free use of the closed lounge, and free use of the Qatar Airways phone while continuing to deny such a policy existed to the tune of 250 dollars in compensation.

In the Gulf

Now, it's been a few weeks I've been away from the stupidity of the  exam fixing Academy which was once a school in which I worked and lost my skills. I'm sure the AQA would have been concerned about the way exams went home with some teachers, I did inform them, but there was never any response from the gutless tossers.  Anyway that's foul, soulless  and sordid mismanaged history, well, it was MFL (among others I believe) actually but now I'm now happily ensconced down by the warm seas and white beaches of the Arabian Gulf - a strange and amusing place far from familiar people and places and far from the rot which  passed as a professional life working in a reprehensible self-deluding factory for that is what it was - with the head and assorted pointless lickspittles leading by fearful example grubbily begging the question as to whether teachers do make the best heads.

In terms of teaching it's great here- I have my courses to teach (free periods abound), one short meeting a week, voluntary PD to which you actually want to go, no tutor group (which I do miss ) but it is compensated for, but only just  mind, by paying no tax a bit like Starbucks, Amazon and various overly rich folk. Now there's a rarely made comparison.  Importantly, I am treated as a pro who will, like my new shiny multi-national colleagues, get on with our jobs in a professional and happy way. Everyone appears to get on and there do not appear (yet?) to be any politics not least as politics tend to be somewhat discouraged in the Gulf. 

There are no threatening misnomered learning walks from pointless over-promoted but insecure self-important HoDs (with personalised school number plate) or grunting unimaginative beardy SLT.  (Apologies to decent HoDs and SLT).  A once yearly appraisal is all along with supposedly anonymous student feedback. There will be observations but they are not in that slavish imagined box ticking way Ofsted would do...and marking in green ink is optional. We take turns to observe one another for differing practice which is what we used to do not so long ago before imagination and initiative were stifled by Ofsted inspired damaging neurosis and fearful paranoia, in the days when education, for me at least, was threat free and well,  fun.

For sure there are some downsides - no unions and any form of collective action is outlawed, the press self-censors, the driving is appalling (Allah's will and all that pre-medieval goat herd cack), and the call to prayer does bring to mind some kind of 50s horror zombie film. Then again back at the academy in coastal Kent the unions were moribund with people only joining them in case they were called for being a paedo and younger teachers were very Daily Mail in their view of them, so perhaps I'm not missing anything. Well, I'll know if ever I need one.

So Eid approaches which, incidentally,  is Arabic for half-term - the mythical work-life balance is back, balanced more in favour of life, the sun shines every day. Even better  my students, who have no idea what Lynx is, want to learn, kids don't stare at their crotches and smile as they don't dare text in lessons. My fellow colleague is not ground down by useless unsupportive management and boundaryless kids.

However, my inner cynic, honed by too long in my last coastal Kent crap academy, says that there can only be one way  from here when things seem  so initially good they can only go down...

...or not...?