boarding

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

I had my probation meeting today. No, don’t worry, it’s nothing to worry about – just the first part of the “settling in” process of the new job. It’s always good to get constructive feedback on your teaching, and even better to get positive feedback from kids, colleagues and parents alike. Emails remain the bane of my existence, my beast to be slain, and I dare to say that, had I gone into the teaching profession a hundred years ago, before the days of instant communication, I might even have been an exemplary teacher.

Most of all, however, I can’t help but find it delightfully ironic that my main piece of constructive criticism was that I still have a tendency to “say yes to everything”. Saying yes was something of a New Year’s resolution, and it’s been a bloody good one, to be honest. So far “saying yes” has given me: a new job, a short-lived but precious romance with an American beauty, a string of adventures from Paris and Prague to Poland, the chance to teach French again after several years’ oblivion, the title of Head of Debating & Public Speaking and, finally, a well-intentioned caution.

In fact, probably the only thing I’ve said no to this term was tonight’s post-carols drinks with the staff, and that was only because I’d have missed my train if I’d delayed even a minute longer.

I guess that’s just as well. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more exhausted after a Christmas term. It’s been pretty full-on, even by my standards.

I’m off to Poland tomorrow. Polish is absolutely not one of the languages I claim as part of my arsenal, so communication is going to be a bit ropey – but, hey, that’s nothing new to me. It has nothing in common at all with any of the languages I speak, so learning has been slow… on top of everything else I’ve had on this term. Sometimes I have to take a step back and think about all the plates I’m spinning at work:

Teaching French and Spanish to Years 7-13 (spanning two different exam boards for GCSE as well as A Level and the IB)
Heading up the Debating & Public Speaking events and competitions
Living on-site as a boarding house deputy and working two overnight shifts a week
Volunteering with a local school
Tenoring in the Chapel Choir and staffing any and all music trips
Attending as many home fixtures as I can to support the boys

No small wonder I’ve had no time for a relationship or driving lessons this term…! The stress of the latter might just have broken me, if I’d managed to fit my lessons in anywhere at all into my crammed schedule – which is highly unlikely. I think the only reason I managed last year was because I was six years into the job and had taught most of the kids for years, so I could walk straight from my driving lesson into teaching Year 10 GCSE Spanish without batting an eyelid.

Most rational teachers would be practically collapsing into bed tonight after a term like this one. Instead, I’m lugging two rucksacks across the country to catch an early morning flight to Warsaw, so that I can spend the first four days of the Christmas holidays in some bleak corner of Eastern Europe searching for wolves (or traces of wolves). I blame all that time spent reading The Tiger this summer. I’d be tracking Siberian tigers if I could, but I’ve traveled across the world once already this year in search of a dream, so I’m settling for an adventure a little closer to home this time.

At least it’s meant I have something to say in return when my students tell me about their Christmas plans in India, Florida and/or the Maldives. “Wolf tracking” seems to fall under the banner of decidedly unusual responses to the question “any plans for the holidays?”.

Thunderstruck is playing in the one functioning ear of my earphones. The train is fifteen minutes late but racing to make up for lost time. I’ve fired off the usual end-of-term fusillade of messages to friends and family, bursting upon the surface of my WhatsApp in two-minute intervals like an underwater volcanic vent. Old habits die hard. Thunderstruck was the great gift of my American adventure, and it’s been a real mood-lifter ever since. Unsurprisingly, it’s my most played song on Spotify this year.

I think I’ll listen to it a couple times more as the train nears its destination. I could use a boost. BB x