Change of Plan

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Giens Peninsula, Hyères, Côte d’Azur. 9.56.

It’s raining outside. I turned off my alarms out of courtesy to my companions, but the dissonant blare of a flood alert woke us all up around 8am anyway. The Giens Peninsula is enveloped in a thick cover of white cloud, out of which the islands of Petit and Grand Ribeau seem to come and go. I haven’t got out to explore yet, thanks to the inclement weather. With the flood warnings threatening the thin strip of sand connecting us to the mainland, we could well be stuck here today. It feels very cut-off from the world.

Now seems as good a time as any to come clean. Five months remain until I turn my life upside down and leave the UK for good.

Over the summer, while I was working in Santiago, I was made an offer that was very hard to turn down: a permanent post as Teacher of English Literature in the school’s Senior Department (the equivalent of our Years 10-13 in the UK). That might seem like a complete u-turn on the last eight years of French and Spanish teaching experience over here, but in more ways than one, it’s the natural evolution of my career, which has already become extremely literature-heavy. This was always the plan: to teach MFL to the stage where I had mastered both French and Spanish to the point where I could capably deliver advanced literature in both, take an SEQ (Subject Enhancement Qualification) over the summer to add English to my roster, and then use all three as a sledgehammer to break into the Spanish education system. They can take away my ability to work across Europe as a citizen of the EU, but they can’t take away my will. You might call it my personal revenge against Brexit.

I hear you. Chile is a pretty big sidestep to reach that goal – over 8.000km to the side, to be precise. But let’s be realistic: just how often do opportunities like this come around? Here, at last, is a chance to bypass the additional expense of further training and (quite possibly) the need for a degree in English Literature. It’s the job I always wanted, and while it might not be in Spain, it is in a Spanish-speaking country. As the bandits of Skyrim would say, that’s close enough.

It’s not just the job. It’s the lifestyle. I’ve been living and working within the British boarding school system for the last eight years. I ran the calculations through AI this morning and was genuinely alarmed by just how much of my time I’ve given away over the years. Factoring in Wednesday and Friday nights, Saturday mornings and occasional Sunday duties, I’ve lost well over a year of my life to the boarding school world. That’s pretty humbling – and it might go some way to explaining how so many of my friends appear to have found the time to meet their partners, tie the knot and settle down already.

It’s not just the amount of time but the quality of it. I’m not working every hour I’m on call, but I can’t do anything or go anywhere. Little things like house assemblies and tutor time mean I can’t disappear on a Friday night, even if I have no lessons to teach on Saturday morning. Spontaneity – the freedom to improvise that I hold in dangerously high regard – is hard to exercise in such a world.

Moving to Chile means leaving that world behind. It means finding a place of my own to live, where I can live by my own rules. It means commuting to work (which, I’ll be honest, I have missed). It means losing an immediate community – and the additional incentive to go out there and find my own. It will be a more costly existence than the one I have known for the last eight years, but that is what the last eight years have been for: to make this change all the easier.

I will have to leave everything behind. I have five months to get rid of all the furniture I have acquired over the last ten years or so, as I can’t take any of it with me. I won’t be sad to see the back of it. I won’t be parted from my books, so I’ll have to find them a home until I know whether this move is for life. This is all a lot easier said than done, of course, but I can’t help feeling I’ll be a lot happier starting from scratch. As long as I have my journal, my camera and my health, I’ll be OK.

It goes without saying that my wildlife bonanza over the summer has played an enormous part in swaying my decision. The fact that I might be able to see condors from my office every week is surreal. The whole of South America will on my doorstep. Peru’s keys to the Amazon. Brazil’s Pantanal. Argentina’s great whale migration. Chile’s magnificent pumas. All of the little things: hummingbirds, mockingbirds, meadowlarks and caracaras. Having pelicans, albatrosses and enormous sea lions within a couple of hours’ reach at weekends. The summer just gone was without a doubt the happiest of my life, and I would dearly like to be that happy forever.

It’s no guarantee that She will be in Chile, but with such an incredible wealth of wildlife to see every day of the year, I don’t think I’ll have all that much time to contemplate. I’ll be much too busy seeking out pudus, kodkods and tucúqueres to care all that much. If I find Her along the way, I’ll consider it a bonus. All the same, it can’t hurt my chances: Santiago’s population of seven million is sure to be a better place to start than Taunton’s sixty-one thousand.

It will be quite easily the most dramatic move of my life so far. I’ve lived in a number of places – Uganda, Morocco, Jordan and Spain, of course – but most of them were very much intended to be temporary. This could be it. I will certainly treat it as such until I know otherwise.

I’m not relishing breaking the news to my students, but I’ll have to do so sooner or later. My job ad went up today, and with the interviews due to start shortly after we return, it will only be a matter of time until they put two and two together. That’s partly what this is all about – reasoning it out to myself before I have to spell it out to them. Knowing what to say. Hopefully they’ll understand.

The New World is calling. Like so many before me, I must leave my life behind and seek my destiny across the sea. Knowing what you know, having read what you have read, can you blame me? BB x

Too Long

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Gare de Toulon, Côte d’Azur. 18.30.

The train to Hyéres is delayed by forty minutes, so I’ve stepped outside the station to get some fresh air. The Côte d’Azur is still in the grip of Storm Adam and the skies are the colour of steel, though they look almost blue beyond the sickly glow of the streetlights.

Clouds of cigarette smoke. Black and green olives rolling across the pavement from the trees standing outside the gare. The cheery sing-song jingle of the SNCF echoing over the rush of the wind and the casual drawl of the Provençale accent. Effortlessly chic Toulonnaise girls talking into earpieces, Eastern European sans-abri moving their blankets out of the rain, a Hispanic couple chatting away in slow, heavily accented English and a number of other accurate but overused cliches.

It’s good to be out of England, though. Two weeks without work would have driven me mad with boredom.

The train was delayed by around fifty minutes in the end. At least one of my companions was getting extremely jittery by the lack of signage on the notice boards, even as the train’s departure was seemingly imminent. Thank goodness I’ve been trained on Spain’s AVE and the last-minute-madness. After the rush for the subway in New York this spring and the gauntlet of flights going to and coming back from the Galapagos this summer, it will take a lot more than a ghost train to get under my skin.

France hasn’t ever grabbed me the way Spain has since the start, though I daresay I haven’t ever given it the chance. This is probably my eighth or ninth trip to France, if you include at least three day trips to Calais (and you leave out any holidays where France was simply a staging post), all of which add up to a little over a month on French soil. I’ve lost count of the amount of time I’ve spent in Spain, but it’s almost certainly closer to four years than it is to three.

The Côte d’Azur gets a lot of attention of the summer variety, but it’s quite beautiful under the iron skies of autumn. I’ve packed for the cold, but I wouldn’t begrudge the odd day of sunshine so I can enjoy the Mediterranean once again – it was so blissfully warm back in the summer. There’s talk of curfews because of the violent protests erupted across France right now, so I might not be going for any 3am swims, but I’m looking forward to being (relatively) tech free for a week or so.

If it weren’t for the comms-heavy side of my day job, I’d quite happily sack off the WiFi and go off grid. I miss those blissful evenings back in my year abroad days – before data became a universal thing – where leaving work meant leaving the internet behind. The amount of reading I managed to get done! There’s just no comparison.

I’ve made it to Hyéres. My final destination is the Giens Peninsula, some four kilometres to the south. It’s late and the sky is threatening rain, so I don’t quite fancy walking it. The taxis here are expensive at 40-50€ a throw and the three or four Uber drivers in town are reluctant to accept what is probably not a very cost-effective return journey. But I’m not that bothered. I’m confident we’ll get there somehow. BB x

Age of Schism

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The Flat, Taunton. 20.56.

As the time of New Bryyo came to be, the old ways faded. The cries of joy from those who honored Science covered the angry shouts of those who mourned the old ways, the Primal Traditions.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

The world is changing. The England I grew up in – rather, the England my parents grew up in – is slowly fading away. Regional accents are disappearing before the ceaseless march of RP and MLE. Kids start secondary school with no knowledge of any of the old country dances but an in-depth understanding of all the machines that can be found in a gym. In order to facilitate our constant push toward a genuinely multicultural society, we have relinquished a lot of the traditions that made this country unique.

Much of this change can be chalked up to the inevitable march of time. However, whenever a culture feels it is under threat, there will always be those who make a stand.

Reading the above, you might be forgiven for thinking I’m on the same side as the people who marched on Taunton today. I’ll set the record straight – never in a million years. This whole jingoistic, xenophobic and fundamentally Eurosceptic fiasco utterly destroyed my hopes of moving back to Spain, forcing me to seek employment on this rock for the last ten years. As far as I’m concerned, the right has a lot to answer for – up to and including the murder of my great-grandfather and his friends back in the 1950s. All the same, I remain committed to my philosophy that you must be prepared to listen to all points of view, even if they go against everything you believe in, if you are to truly understand the world and your place in it.

That’s why I popped into town today, to see the protest and counter-protest taking place in Taunton. My great-grandparents all but gave their lives to make a stand against fascism, so it would be remiss of me to turn a blind eye when something so significant comes to town.

I heard them coming from the ground floor of Waterstones. They’re weren’t particularly great in number – maybe a little over forty, all told – but they were hard to miss. A considerable police escort flanked them every step of the way. An angry-looking crowd, with shaved heads, full sleeves of tattoos and dark sunglasses. Some of them carried the English flag, others the Union Jack. One or two carried placards demanding support for Christian values. One carried a tattered yellow flag bearing the five red squares of the Jerusalem cross, the ancient symbol of the Crusaders.

I wasn’t expecting religion to have anything to do with today’s protest. Another tradition that we are slowly losing here is our faith, though we are by no means the only country in that predicament, with regular church attendance falling around the world.

Tenconi, the UKIP Leader, was the special guest in town, leading the march on the Taunton Police HQ. To his credit, the protest didn’t turn ugly as we feared it might, though his choice of words gave me serious pause for thought: these are the demons, they are the ones we must defeat… At times it felt like I was watching a very British take on Bible Belt Baptism.

One of the fellas had a shirt with the words “If my flag offends you, I’ll help you pack” emblazoned across the front in big black capital letters. I could do with a pair of strong arms when I inevitably leave this country someday, though something tells me the words were not intended for me.

I wonder where this will all lead? Like Tolkien before me, I mourn for the passing away of the old world. A student of language and culture I may be, but I do regret the ease with which we have so readily traded away parts of our own identity as a nation for this thing called “the future”. When I was at university, I remember getting slapped down for voicing that idea by peers who went as far as to say that England either didn’t have a distinct culture to speak of – which is grossly ignorant at best – or worse, “didn’t deserve to have one for what they did to the world”. As a child of at least two cultures myself, identity means a lot to me, so I’m not sure how to feel about it. It just worries me that the same people who are trying to make a stand against the slow death of the old ways are all too often the kind who take that line of thought too far and turn preservation into purification. Change is a necessary and ultimately inevitable part of life, but it can be a painful experience, especially for those who stand in its way or its wake. It’s a tightrope, holding onto tradition while ushering in the future. I certainly don’t envy any politicians right now.

I’ll muse about this some more. My thoughts are hazy. I just wanted to jot down my observations as the far-right march on and into the distance, on my own doorstep, no less. BB x