plans

Lo Barnechea, Santiago de Chile. 15.00.

Today has been a bit more of an admin day. One of my activities for next week fell through, so I spent a fair part of this morning re-arranging my plans with a couple of other agencies to keep my itinerary as close to the original as possible. It hasn’t been easy. I’ve been leaning heavily on AI, not as a lesson planner, but as a travel agent, and I have to be honest, I fear for the travel industry. ChatGPT and Copilot may need gentle nudging and correcting as they work, but they do a phenomenal job at trawling the net for deals, dates and travellers’ tales from TripAdvisor, Reddit and beyond.

I’m not the biggest fan of AI, but as an impartial entity to bounce ideas off, it’s an absolute doozy. It has really helped me to streamline my plans, keeping them within a very reasonable budget – especially important as my choice of location is not exactly famous for being a budget destination. I do often have to correct its mistakes, which is why I would caution any students of mine from meddling with it unless it’s on terms they understand – good advice for just about anything unknown – but as a rule it does a pretty good job at doing the heavy lifting.

I genuinely can’t wait – I’m practically chomping at the bit here – but I promised to keep it a secret, so I will leave just the smallest of clues in this post in case you want to hazard a guess at my intentions.

I’m currently sitting in the English office, listening in on the weekly department meeting on debating strategies and what constitutes a suitable number of poems within the Language A anthology. On my left, the windows open out onto the hill country around Manquehue, where I saw no fewer than sixteen condors circling shortly before lunch. That makes three days out of three this week where I’ve seen the titans of the Andean skies from my office. Normally it’s just the diucas and mockingbirds that pop in for a lookaround once the kids have gone back inside for the third hour of the day. On my right, the windows open out onto the enormity of the Andes to the north, still wearing a wintry mantle of snow. Further down the hill – just out of sight beyond the classroom blocks – are the school’s sports pitches. Our kids play rugby against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century clock tower and the Southwestern Railway. These kids have the towering heights of the Andes all around them. These are just the foothills: somewhere beyond stands the fearsome Cerro Plomo, reaching some 17,861 feet into the sky.

Upon reflection, by journey’s end, I will have spent an astonishing two months south of the equator this year. The last time I was this far south I was tracking mountain gorillas in the impenetrable cloud forests of Bwindi on the Congolese border.

I remember being of the opinion that Chile was a destination I was only prepared to visit thanks to some generous financial assistance with the flights, considering it otherwise a prohibitively expensive destination. I see now just how wrong I was. Not about the money – Chile is easily one of the more expensive South American countries – but about how much there is to see and to do.

I’m now genuinely considering coming back someday to pick up the things that I missed: Chiloé, Conguilio, Punta Arenas, San Pedro de Atacama and so much more besides. There’s simply too much to see here, even when you have five weeks to play around with, and for a naturalist like me, the fact that it pales in comparison to its megadiverse neighbour, Peru, means very little when a casual glance out gives you one of the most spectacular birds of prey on the planet.

Two weeks from now, I will be back home, a brief pit stop on the island before duty calls me to Athens for one last dance. I had a brief moment of nostalgia for it today when I popped in to help a colleague set up a game of Just a Minute to give her students a boost with their listening skills in debating. I love that game to bits – and the BBC Radio show from which I have poached it.

Two days remain. Let’s do this! BB x

Saying goodbye is never an easy thing to do. I’m certainly not particularly good at it. In fact, there are quite a few goodbyes I’d like the chance to go over again, given the opportunity. You know the kind: the ones where it was all too fleeting, or maybe you didn’t quite say everything you wanted to say, or maybe the real goodbye never came around and you were left with a last meeting that wasn’t really a send-off at all. Most likely you’ve encountered that oh-so-very British awkward goodbye at least once in your lifetime: the one where you say goodbye to somebody, only to bump into them a few minutes later. Don’t you find that situation crops up a lot? It certainly does in Durham, anyway…

For a chatty gossip like me (you’ll just have to imagine the deep sarcasm there), I don’t suppose there’s much point in an elaborate farewell. It’s only really an issue if you’re going to be out of contact for an extended period of time, like stepping off the plane into the abyss and severing all connections with the outside world. Which is essentially what I do every time I step off the train at Three Bridges. I have a phone, true, but I rarely use it. I think I sent a grand total of three texts over the last three months, and all three of them last Sunday. Radio silence on my part doesn’t necessarily mean I’m traveling – I’m probably a lot more talkative when I’m on the road – but it doesn’t mean I’m inactive, either. I simply enjoy going for long periods of radio silence. Anything that needs saying can surely be said best face-to-face, and anything that’s worth saying is always worth waiting for. That makes me quite a distant person, I guess – and not the easiest to track down. For somebody who spent almost all of two years on teenage texting tenterhooks, it’s a policy I’ve guarded jealously for some time now. So in that sense, setting off on another long adventure isn’t really all that different from any other end of term break, as far as contact is concerned.

I’m going off topic. I suppose I’d better come out with it. I’m heading off to Spain in two days’ time – less – to spend nine months working in a secondary school… and I’m not coming back in between.

The idea first came to me when I had a look at the Spanish school calendar for the coming year. That projected end of term date on the twenty-second of December shocked me at first, despite having been schooled in Spain at Christmastime before. It’s all about the reyes magos out there, and that’s not until January. I must have got it into my head early on, but it wasn’t until saying farewell (successfully, mind!) to Andrew at Gatwick Airport that it hit me: I want to be out there for the long haul. Taking a year abroad isn’t just about honing your language skills to fluency, it’s about growing up – and Lord knows I’ve still so much more of that to do. What better way than to strike out on your own for an entire year? Because that’s what it’s set to be, with my second Arabic stint in Morocco striking up almost as soon as I’m done in Extremadura at the end of May, meaning I won’t see the green hills of England again until August 2016, at the very earliest. That doesn’t trouble me as much as it should.

I’m going to miss autumn in England. No, I’m really, really, really going to miss it

The last few days have been wonderful for a last taste of England. I consider myself extremely lucky to live in one of the most charming spots in West Sussex, overlooking a dream-sequence of rolling hills as far as the eye can see, right up to the point when they tumble into the sea to the south. Autumn’s in the air, the forest is full of mushrooms and the buzzards that nest deep in the woods are cartwheeling noisily through the skies as usual. Morpurgo described them ‘mewing’ in one of his books and I can’t think of a better way of putting it. This is England, and I’m going to miss it. But there’s something in the air, telling me it’s time I should be moving on. Maybe that’s autumn. The signs are everywhere. The leaves on the oak trees are going a gorgeous golden colour. Out on the school rugby pitches the odd wheatear sits taking a breather, whilst flycatchers and warblers hurry on through the hedgerows snatching a quick meal on their way home. But most telling of all are the great flocks of swallows and the martins streaming on southwards overhead, and in a couple of days I’ll be following them. Maybe I’ll even see some of the same individuals swooping by from Villafranca. Who knows?

Ten points if you can see the buzzard in this one

The hardest thing for me to leave behind – besides the monstrous tapestry, which is never going to be finished anytime soon – will be the growing mountain of books in my bedroom.

A year and a half, five metres in and still slaving away

A year and a half and still slaving away…

It’s pretty daft, but for an aspiring writer, I’m late into the fold as regards actually reading. I got it into my head once that if I never read any books that contained ideas similar to my own, I couldn’t get done for plagiarism, because I’d never have noticed the similarity. How very typically overcomplicated of me. The end result is that I haven’t read a decent book – besides Pavilions – in nigh on ten years. At least, one that hasn’t been prescribed by my course. Now I’m motoring through them at lightning speed, assisted by all the iBooks freebies, an immense library at home (courtesy of my equally bookish mother) that I never truly appreciated, and an all-too brief visit to a real bookshop over the weekend.

So many books, so little time…

I say real to distinguish it from your average WHSmith or Waterstones. Seriously, this place had everything. All the historical fiction you could shake a stick at. The entire Hornblower saga. Flashman in abundance. Sharpe, Iggulden and even the master of the art herself, M.M. Kaye. All beautifully spined, deliciously musty and lovingly second-hand. A new gadget may be a good thing, but there’s nothing better than an old book. Mum found a particularly beautiful pair of illustrated Arabic dictionaries – formerly the property of a military attaché, as stamped. Oh, I could have died and gone to heaven. I was in kid-at-Christmas mode. If I’d had this newfound book obsession just two years earlier, I might have given languages the boot and applied for an English degree. The only thing holding me back at the time was a general reading apathy…

Today’s been the downer of the month for no other reason than that every so often I have a lonely spell where it takes a lot to lift me up. Fortunately I’m in the best place for it: start of term or not, the grounds of Worth Abbey are no less than the finest place I’ve ever encountered for soul-healing. Alright, so the stone-pine copse along the Raya Real with its attendant black kites just comes up trumps, but that’s not on my doorstep every morning. Not yet, anyway. Besides, when the loneliness birds come flying in, the open world is always there. Nature’s an unpredictable lady at the best of times, but she’s never let me down. I’ve said that before, and I’ll say it as often as it takes to drive this funk of mine away. Everything will look better in the light of a new morning. It always does.

Waldeinsamkeit – the feeling of being alone in the woods!

These are curious things to dwell on when home will be so very far away for the next eleven months. But home is where the heart is, and mine has been in Spain for as long as I can remember, and that’s got to count for something. Maybe she’s out there, and maybe she’s not. That’s not for me to decide. If fate decides to cut me a break and give me a good turn, I’m ready to run with it. But one thing’s certain: I will leave Spain fluent. If I can leave the country at the end of the year as bilingual as the grandfather I never knew, I’ll have accomplished a dream two generations in the making. Being a quarter Spanish will mean so much more.

I will be fluent. And that’s a promise. BB x