Far Away Places ...

I started teaching again ten days ago and now our holiday feels well and truly behind me.  This term I have more classes and a routine more like a full-time language teacher.  I work Monday to Thursday and most days I teach for six hours, which with preparation time makes for an eight to ten hour day.  It's been good to see my students again and to say hello to some new faces.  Up to now all my students have been Chinese, but I now have a group of eighteen year olds which includes some Malays and a feisty bunch they are.

Looking back, I wish I'd written more about Sri Lanka and the experiences we had there.  One morning in particular keeps coming back to me when I was lying in bed at dawn in our B&B up in the tea country and as I tossed and turned I could hear church bells competing with the chanting from a nearby Buddhist monastery.  Haputale, where we were staying, is up at about six thousand feet and quite chilly at night and at dawn you can get some wonderful light effects as the tropical sun shafts in through the mist.  Lying under our mosquito net looking at the light through the bedroom window the whole impression was quite surreal.

Also I said nothing about our Christmas in the UK - it came as a surprise to realise it was our first for maybe eleven or twelve years.  Dad seems to be coming to terms with his lack of mobility and it was good to catch up with Jim and Audrey and all of Sue's family.  When I go back to the UK these days I feel both a powerful connection and that I am an outsider.  The more I've travelled the more English I realise I am, but at the same time my England now seems a strange place, eccentric yet orderly, much more like Belgium or Germany than I would ever have credited.  I still respect the British sense of justice and fair play and the willingness of people to have opinions about things and to argue the toss.  This was summed up for me when driving through Uxbridge I saw a "white van man" standing in front of a policeman and debating something, maybe a penalty notice, but you could see there was no real aggression to it, just two people exchanging their views.  There aren't actually many countries in the world where you would feel free to do that with a policeman.

On the other hand the UK also seems to me these days to be place where people have less and less real choice and more and more meaningless "virtual" options.  All the big supermarkets look the same, but spend a fortune shouting at you how different they are.  Walk inside and you can find three packs of tomatoes badge-engineered to look different from "basic" to "taste the difference" and yet the only real difference between them is the words.  "Hand-picked by contented Italian peasants and brought fresh to your table by Tesco/Asda/Sainsbury/Waitrose" blah, blah, blah.

I guess I'm just getting old.