Estrangeiro in my own back yard

Globe-hopping is exhilarating and sad at the same time

There is an old Gaúcho proverb down in the south of Brazil that goes something like this: ‘Don’t jump over the fence when there are plenty of cows in your own field.’ Well, folks, that sounds a little like the story of my life – always heading for the greener grass only to find a field full of manure. In fact, fence-jumping, although glorious in its gay abandon, always seems to leave me with a deep sense of sadness. No sooner have I landed in a new field than I start to feel empty, scared, nostalgic. What madness have I just committed? Where are all those people that filled my life just weeks ago, those smiling faces, those warm human beings I once hugged on the other side of the world? Where did all those summers go? What the hell am I doing in Scarborough?

Does this grass really taste any sweeter?

So, I ask myself, what exactly did I learn during my last escapade, from upping sticks in leafy Surrey 7 years ago, soaking up that Brazilian sunshine in “lively port” Porto Alegre and landing back with a dull thud in gritty Yorkshire? Well, for starters, I still believe wholeheartedly that Travel with a capital T is priceless, and nothing in this life comes near it for enriching your spirit. But moving countries is an emotional roller-coaster that leaves your heart with a few missing pieces. And the worst thing about living abroad is not knowing how long it’s going to last and when the people and places right in front of you are going to become misty memories.

Parque da Redenção in Porto Alegre – now but a misty memory…

My barber in Brazil was a realistic sort of a chap. When I told him I was thinking of coming back to England he said something which could be roughly translated as, “too right, mate!” He continued: “Ask yourself what you are going to miss, exactly. I’ll tell you the only two things you’ll miss about Brazil: the weather and the people.” And in a way, of course, he was right. Yet even the weather and the people on their own amount to a sizeable chunk missing from your life, especially when you are shivering in a dark, damp Bradford bedroom. All of a sudden, Brazil’s many charms begin to replay in your mind, like a Thomson’s holiday promo video with your mates waving in the background.

Brazilian buffet lunches are a glorious ritual

Brazil is a beast of a place, a big busy sweltering ‘bagunça’ going backwards. Brazilians are always moaning that nothing works, but that is the charm of the place. In Brazil you don’t throw anything away and you don’t take anything for granted: on Friday you celebrate getting through the week in one piece. But despite the wild-west lawlessness and chaos, the people are easy to get to know and easy to love: they have learned to suffer the fools in charge and make the best of the warm days and barbecue nights. What I remember of Brazil are fleeting moments of joy, of feeling like a hero, a traveller who has been knocked about by a herd of bulls but is still standing and managing a smile. In Brazil the night is a child who only wants to play.

Moments of joy in dingy England are as rare as clockwork teacakes, especially if you live in a provincial outpost where the people look and sound like farm labourers with issues. In my little town, they think Europe is a place beyond the Urals full of foreign spies with garlic breath. But there are a few consolations: catching the Leeds to London express and fantasising about not going back; finding a booth in a light, airy Wetherspoons pub and working through the ale list; reading the Guardian horizontally on Saturday pretending to be the intelligentsia;  singing daft songs in the Spion Kop at Valley Parade after a pub crawl; wading through the £1 racks at Vinyl Tap in Huddersfield with an oscillating heart-rate and a toothy grin; eating battered haddock steaming with malt vinegar; and watching the sun and the empire go down at the end of the pier after another long summer night. 

Bradford is, shall we say, an acquired taste?

My biggest problem in England, according to social commentator David Goodhart, is that I am an Anywhere and not a Somewhere type. Somewheres grow up and stay put in their communities; they can’t wait to leave school, have conventional ideas and tend to become hostile to outside influences and stray souls invading their territory. Anywheres are rootless, university-educated drifters who move where the work is and tend to be liberal and egalitarian in outlook, identifying themselves within a larger, global image of citizenship. In other words, to the curtain-twitching nutters of this world, I am always an alien intruder who appears self-satisfied and smarmy; a suspicious bloke who doesn’t understand why the locals gang together and grunt like something in a field.

Many of the blues and folk singers I listen to always seem to be “moving on” in their songs, leaving town and heading over the hills, looking for adventure, new friendships, new loves. But life on the move is a long, sad song that gets sadder by the year and eventually leaves you with little else but memories. I may be proud to be an Anywhere drifter, but the Somewheres of this world, and there are many, have one big advantage over me – they don’t have much to miss because their lives and their friends are right in front of them and always have been. They certainly don’t envy me. In fact, they probably feel a bit sorry for a guy who was born in Bradford, ran away to see the world, and now has to face the fact that his beloved home town is only an hour away down the motorway (in a clapped out old banger). I mean, come on – who would be me?!

Brazil was a riot for Ronnie, but he missed warm bitter and Bird’s custard

Besides, I am getting a little too old for this adventure lark. Brazil was a blast, and sometimes I crave my old life back – my lovely students, those naughty buffet lunches, the warm nights, freezing beer and the distant sounds of gunshot. But I have to face the fact that Brazil wasn’t really me, if I am honest. Train robber Ronald Biggs eventually got fed up with Rio and craved his old life back, supping bitter down the pub and then popping home for dinner and puddings served with his beloved Bird’s custard. But even if his fantasy of slipping back into England had become a reality, which it didn’t, his new life would soon have become just as stale as the old one. 

As I get older, I may even have to settle down somewhere and grow old gracefully, whatever that means. At least I can take comfort from the advice a pal of mine gave me recently: ‘Don’t worry your head about old age’, he said. ‘It doesn’t last.’

Cowboys and Yorkshiremen?

Gaúcho cowboys stir things up in the 1923 revolution

There is a joke in Brazil that goes something like this: when a Paulista (from São Paulo) does business he asks, “What’s in it for me?”; when a Carioca (from Rio) does a deal he asks, “What’s in it for me and you?”; when it comes to the Gaúcho (from Rio Grande do Sul), he asks, “What’s in it for YOU!?” You see, the Gaúchos have a deep sense of rivalry, always suspicious that the other guy is on the make. In other words, I don’t care about getting one up myself, but I sure as hell don’t want YOU to get one over on me.

Are you a Red or a Blue? Answer wrong and you die

In Porto Alegre, where I live, there are two big football teams: the Reds (Internacional) and the Blues (Grêmio). Once, a Blue guy said to me: “Of course, I like it when Grêmio win…but I LOVE it when Inter lose.” You get the idea? When I first arrived here, a taxi driver spent the whole ride begging me to be Red. He even followed me up the driveway to the door, pleading with me NOT to be Blue – anything but that. He was visibly disturbed at the thought, animated with anxiety and frustration – he seemed to believe that if I turned Blue, one of his internal organs would stop working.

Hey, Mr Gaucho – watch what you’re doing with that pole!

The Reds versus the Blues – it seems like a schoolboy game, but it turns out to be deadly serious. The Gaúchos just don’t trust each other. One of my students once leaned across the table, fixed me in the eye and said: “I don’t trust anybody in this town, only my family and very close friends”. The following week he quit, so he obviously didn’t trust me either. This deep mistrust of the other guy goes back to the imperial wars here in the deep south: the Maragatos (Reds) against the Chimangos (Whites) – a bunch of cowboys fighting for independence and territorial rights. The embedded rivalry, now glimpsed in the fierce football enmity, still holds up progress, polluting political will and causing many projects to hit deadlock.

Players from Internacional and Grêmio go head-to-head on the pitch

But hang on a minute…is this bloated Gaúcho pride very different from the superciliousness of the Yorkshireman, I ask myself? That bloke who looks upon the rest of the English as hapless wimps or scheming sharks? There is an infamous Yorkshire expression that goes like this: “Hear all, see all, say nowt; eat all, sup all, pay nowt; and if ever tha does owt for nowt, allus do it for thissen.” Roughly translated, this means: keep your mouth shut apart from when you are eating at somebody else’s expense, and never do anything for nothing. Yes folks, Yorkshire is a land of grumpy misers who somehow feel above everybody else.

‘Are you taking the rise out of me, Yorkshire pudding?’

I once met a Yorkshire bloke in Rio – Howard from Leeds, to be precise – who would walk a mile to save 5 cents on a glass of beer. According to Howard, everybody was out to rip you off. This deep suspicion of other people is a kind of paranoia, a surfeit of bile, a lack of inner peace. Perhaps Gaúchos and Yorkshire folk hate themselves and project it onto everybody else; perhaps they both feel bitter about being treated badly somewhere along the line. Surely the cure for this cringing resentment is to stop being self-obsessed and give a hand to others. Doesn’t happiness come more easily when we begin to be kind?

Bradford fans go ape after equalising with arch rivals Leeds

One thing I have had to learn the hard way is to love my enemies, especially at Valley Parade, where the away fans always have the last laugh. I have had to swallow my pride big time, week in week out. Thus have I learned the joy of being humble. I can laugh at my atrocious team and at myself. I can rise above the rivalry and feel serene. So my advice to Gaúchos and to everybody else is to do a good deed every day. Why don’t you knock on your neighbour’s door right now and ask if you can help change a lightbulb or fix that dripping tap? Go on – you know you want to!

Leeds nutters (Howard must be in there somewhere…)

Needless to say, there are some inferior, deluded people who are just not worth our sympathy. I refer, of course, to Leeds United fans, known in Bradford as “Leeds scum”. When it comes to football rivalry, the mutual hatred between Bradford and Leeds fans is so strong that when the two teams meet, the devil himself sits in the stand hoping to get some tips. Come to think of it, it makes the battle between the Reds and the Blues in Porto Alegre look like a bun fight at a vicar’s tea party.

Like a rolling stone…

‘Hitch around the world before you get hitched, young man!’ Yes, grandad.

I don’t believe in forever. Forever only happens in fairy tales and my life is not a fairy tale, at least when I’m sober. Nothing lasts forever – not even love. When the vicar reads the marriage vows and seals the happy couple’s fate by making them repeat the words ’till death us do part’ I always feel a sense of wonder at the naivety of such a sentiment. The romantic part about romantic love is precisely that it doesn’t last forever: that’s what makes it tragic and yet irresistible. Time – that old chestnut – does not allow us to keep other people as our ‘possessions’; we are all essentially free-spirits.

Are you sure, kiddies, that you’ll still feel the same 40 years from now?

Not that I have been to many weddings. The shocking truth is that I have never been to one in my life, unless, that is, you count my own. You see, I was in my 20s in the 1970s at a time when youngsters prided themselves on being unconventional. Lovers were things that came and went like the seasons, part of the emotional journey from adolescence to adulthood. Getting married was seriously square. The important lesson I learned from promiscuity (yikes! – even the word sounds daring these days) is that finding your one-and-only precious ‘soul mate’ is a myth. We all have many soul mates dotted around the world; the tragedy is that we never get to meet them, especially if we tie ourselves to one person from the off.

These days we seem to have reverted to a kind of 1950s-style conventionality, when the aim of your early 20s is to find Mr or Mrs Right, get hitched and start planning babies. I have noticed that many of my former students in England, still in their early 20s, are proudly posting their marriage commitments on Facebook. Here in Porto Alegre, if anything, it’s even worse. Couples meet in the school yard and stay glued together until they march down the aisle 10 years later: ‘one life, one love’ seems to be their motto.

Hey – your soul mate is waiting for you in Buenos Aires…

Whatever happened to the brilliant idea of seeing the world before you settle down? Surely your 20s are the decade for getting as much life experience as possible, for being a rolling stone that gathers no moss. This learning curve naturally includes having a number of relationships as you navigate your way around the globe, finding love but eventually moving on. Travel adventures are just that: adventures – the very definition of the word implies something that doesn’t last.

Hence, From Bradford to Brazil is, was and always has been an adventure, not a permanent state of affairs – that would have taken all the fun out of it. The glorious state of Rio Grande do Sul is perfect for Gauchos, with their extended families, beach houses and rowdy barbecues. Anybody else here feels like an alien, especially foreigners like me. I don’t fit in because there is nowhere to fit me in. In fact, I can think of only three reasons for staying in Porto Alegre indefinitely: 1) having a prestigious, highly-paid job (salaried in a foreign currency); 2) being part of one of those extended families, instantly adopted by having married one of the locals; or 3) being too scared to go back and face the rat race at home.

Eat English cheese with a bottle of good claret and die happy

Inevitably, people ask me why I am contemplating a return to you-know-where.  Of course, I could take the question seriously and answer in a very measured way. I could say, for example, free healthcare, personal safety, established infrastructures, clean fresh-water systems, low cost of living, and so on. I could be boring. But the truth is, it’s the little things that pull me back like a fridge magnet: English sausages, English cheeses, pie and peas with mint sauce, watching Bradford City at Valley Parade and having a mucky curry afterwards, public libraries, record shops, charity shops, The Guardian, BBC Radio 4, central heating (yes, you heard me right)…the list goes on.

Best view in the world? Bradford seen from the Spion Kop at Valley Parade

Unfortunately, back in Blighty, I will have to put up with English people who don’t hug and kiss like Brazilians. That will be tough. And I’ll probably have to change the name of the blog – From Bradford to Brazil will have to become something like From Porto Alegre to Pontefract. As for my new life, like the blog itself, I will just have to make it up as I go along. But then life is a series of wondrous adventures – you never know who or what is round the corner on the B 69 to Dewsbury. As they warn me every day on the local radio news channel here in Porto Alegre, “Em vinte minutos, tudo pode mudar” (in 20 minutes, everything can change). Watch this space.

Have you heard the one about my life?

I was born in Bradford…lived in Brazil…buried in Scunthorpe. The End

‘If I wrote a book about my life, it would be a best-seller!’ How many times have I heard that old chestnut, I wonder. People presume that their own life is like a racy novel, beginning in the cradle and ending in the grave. All they need to do is write it all down. Evidently, philosophers describe this kind of thinking as ‘diachronic’ – treating life as an evolving narrative. But is life really like that? Don’t we all remember things in a muddle, forgetting most of it and piecing the rest together like highlights from a B-movie? How much of what we remember is reliable? More to the point, are we the same person all the way through? Am I really that daft schoolboy who clapped in the middle of a chamber music recital because I thought it was finished? Beetroot was the colour of my face (and the headmaster’s).

Surely we need to be selective about our pasts, dredging up only a few choice morsels. So, scratching my head, I have come up with a few incredible moments from the rich tapestry of my life so far – ‘from Bradford to Brazil‘…

A tractor factory is no place for a vinyl junkie…

1974: As a Bradford lad with very little between the ears, I found myself working in a monstrous factory, fitting wheels on tractors. One day an older workmate was boasting about his son passing university exams. Feeling jealous, I told him proudly that I had passed a few ‘O’ levels myself. He looked me up and down – observing my grimy overalls, oily face and unkempt hair – and said: “You! You must be joking. You are nothing but a filthy stink!” The next morning, as I approached the factory gates, I stopped and thought, ‘I can’t face it anymore’. So I went for a steamclean and a week later got a job in a record shop.

A cross between Jim Morrison and Rupert Brooke? Doing my homework for Bradford College, 1982

1982: Landing back in starry Bradford after 6 months in California, I thought myself a man of the world. I had also read the odd book on my travels. One night an old pal heard me and my new posh voice waxing lyrical about literature. “Eh, Martin”, he said, “you’re talking to your mates, now. Stop trying to sound like Oscar Wilde.” It was true, I had become a pretentious chump. So I cut my long hair short, bought myself an old suit and tie from a charity shop and enrolled at Bradford College: I went from Jim Morrison to Rupert Brooke in the blink of a town hall pigeon. After a couple of weeks on the course, one of my fellow students said: “What’s with the suit? You look like a down-at-heel insurance man”. Charming.

Irish writer Anthony Cronin once dubbed me a ‘playboy’ for some reason…

1986: I pitched up in London and was invited to look after the flat of a distinguished Irish writer, Anthony Cronin, while he went back to Dublin to think. As my passport was about to expire and I didn’t have a job, I asked Tony what I should put down as my ‘occupation’ on the application form. “Just put playboy”, he said. Then I did get a job, teaching English to foreigners in a school in the West End. One day, after a heavy lunch with an Italian guy whose English was appalling, we returned to the school to carry on with the lesson. Despite my Herculean efforts to keep listening to the guy, I nodded off, slumping onto the desk in front. I woke up with a bang as the student’s fist crashed down on the table and he shouted: “Wake up! I pay many money for this course!”

1992: On my first trip to Brazil, I headed to Rio and a job in an English school. As a single bloke, I was understandably looking forward to sowing my wild oats with a bevy of Brazilian beauties. I knocked on the door of the school and it was opened by a coordinator who welcomed me and attempted to introduce me to some other teachers. But it was lunchtime and the place was empty. Apart, that is, from one young woman sitting at a table marking her students’ homework. So, lo and behold, I was introduced to my future wife. Bang went any fantasies of dental floss bikinis – my fate was to be under the thumb for the next 23 years…

So sorry that I cannot join you, ladies…I’m getting married!

2000: It wasn’t enough for lowly Bradford City to have reached the Olympian heights of the Premiership. Oh, no! We had to STAY there. Needing a win on the last day of the season, we faced the mighty Liverpool (Stevie Gerrard, Michael Owen et al). One goal from Bantams captain David Wetherall did the trick, sending the fans at Valley Parade into hysterics. Having watched the game in a London pub and imbibed a skinful of Youngs Special Bitter, I went and laid down on Richmond Green to look up at the sky and thank God in his heaven. In retrospect, I don’t think he was listening.

My begoggled son Edward winning the World Cup for England, 2008

2008: As a proud dad, I watched my son, in goggles and gloves, win the World Cup almost single-handedly! Not the dastardly FIFA one, I mean the version for 10-year-olds in Chertsey. Guess which team he was representing? England, of course. Some of the other dads were not happy with the result and swore the match had been fixed. It had. Edward, my son, had accepted a bribe: if he lifted the cup he would be rewarded with a homemade cheeseburger and could stay up to watch Match of the Day on telly.

Erm, excuse me, are you sure this is the Richon Hotel, Porto Alegre?

2011: After selling up in England, my family and I landed in downtown Porto Alegre, Brazil, with 9 heavy suitcases on a sunny Saturday lunchtime. Our hotel was just yards away from the city’s teeming ‘camelódromo’ – a ramshackle street trader’s market full of cheap tat. What a shock! From the sleepy villages of Surrey to the chaos and human struggle of the Brazilian poor. I laid down on the bed in my puny hotel room, pale and shaking, believing I had made the biggest mistake of my life. I was wrong, of course. After a few beers I remembered that you can’t have real adventures without taking risks.

As for the next 40 years, I wonder what thrills await me before I shuffle off this mortal coil? A few more second-hand LPs to add to my collection, at least. What I really wish for is the chance to go back to 1974, where I started this little trawl through the past. It could all have been so different. I could have been a contender…

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hands…

England is not just beer and fish and chips and God Save The Queen t-shirts…is it?

In Brazil I’m known as a ‘Brit’, but I don’t know what the term means. I have a British passport, and yet I’m as English as a wet Sunday in Wakefield. If I was Welsh, Irish or Scottish, there is no way I would refer to myself as ‘British’. I would be proud of my nationality and make sure everybody knew I was not to be lumped together with the dreaded English! But, like it or not, I am not from any of those other, satellite countries, I am from England’s green and pleasant land.

Why do I always feel ill when England play football?

So, if I defiantly refer to myself as English, what do I mean by that? What is special about me? How is an English person identifiable? At the risk of unearthing a Pandora’s Box of stereotypes, I would like to suggest that the English do have certain characteristics that set them apart. This week I gave a talk about ‘Englishness’ to a group of Brazilian undergraduates, so I had to make an effort to find something tangible about the English that I could explain to them.

So, here is a list of characteristics and quirks I jotted down on the back of a buff envelope on the bus last Tuesday:

‘What an extraordinary use of a four-letter word – mustn’t let Aunt Dolly see this’

Sense of Humour: anathema to the English sensibility are people who take themselves seriously. That’s because we have an acutely-developed sense of irony and human folly. Showing off is sneered at mercilessly: ‘Who do you think you are?’ Self-deprecation is the English charm. That and satire, parody and general mischief-making. You should never be able to tell when an Englishman is being serious.

Writing: this is where irony pervades, from Shakespeare and Jane Austen to newspaper columnists and song lyrics. Through irony, the English reader, sitting on the Clapham omnibus, is able to smile at the intended victim and at herself. Irony is the distance we need from other people and their ridiculous behaviour; but it also mirrors our own pretentions and weaknesses.

English institutions are a joke, says John

Music: ‘quiet desperation is the English way’ sang Pink Floyd (nicked from Thoreau, I’ll have you know), but my touchstone for English rock is John Lennon’s A Day in the Life, a gloriously random, satirical swipe at English institutions which could have been spoken by a Shakespearean fool. Why are the English good at pop and rock? Because the good ones see through the bull. Take another look at the anarchic God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols. A fascist regime?

Acting: former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Peter Hall, famously quipped that the English were a nation of philistines who happened to be good at the arts. Mention the words ‘theatre’ or ‘opera’ down the pub and seconds later you will be nursing your pint alone and red-faced. But the English are born actors because they need masks to hide behind. England is a stage and everybody is having you on – that way the messy, emotional baggage can stay safely in the locker.

How to get all that gentlemanly anger out of your system: English cricket

Sport: forget football and rugby, the true English sport is cricket. All those school beatings and repressed sexuality come surging out on the village green where sado-masochism rules: the bowler wants to maim the batsman, and the batsman has to be deranged to face a 100 mile-an-hour missile whooshing towards his unmentionables. Besides, only the English could devise a game that lasts until the middle of next week.

Trainspotting? English people need hobbies for long dark winters

Hobbies: of course the English have hobbies – what else are we going to do cooped up in the house for 9 months? Train set builders, matchstick guitar makers, beer brewers, you name it. Most of us collect and hoard stuff to pore over through those long dark nights, filling little libraries with jumble-sale LPs and Narnia books.

DIY: an Englishman is a chimpanzee with a screwdriver. Pay somebody to fix my dripping tap? – you must be joking! Rewiring, plumbing, laying floors – us blokes are too proud to let you think we can’t sort it ourselves. The result? Most English ‘homes’ are jerry-built death traps.

Politics: conservative with a small ‘c’ it’s true, though the English despise authority and have a rebellious spirit: inside every timid gill-sipper is an angry young man barking to get out. Oddly, the most popular institution in England is a pure socialist invention: the NHS.

‘Continental people have sex lives: the English have hot-water bottles’ (or a secret copy of Fanny Hill)

Religion: the Anglican church, with all those robes and closet Catholics, is for wusses – the true English religion has always been hard-nosed nonconformism. With their wilful work-ethic, tasteless food, matronly black looks and a horror of the human body, the Puritans have spread guilt and shame far and wide in the ‘Sceptred Isle’. Many were those poor creatures who topped themselves rather than face the vicar’s wrath once their grubby copy of Fanny Hill had been discovered under the mattress.

This is where the list runs out, folks, though I cannot end this portrait without mentioning the secret that dare not speak its name: the English are obsessively tight-fisted and can spot a ‘rip-off’ a mile away. When an English person walks into a supermarket they make a beeline for the ‘Special Offers‘, even if it means eating a dinner of mini pork pies mixed with chicken korma and week-old sherry trifle.

Bearing all this in mind, you can surely forgive me for not being patriotic. But when the Three Lions sing the national anthem on the football field the hairs on the back of my neck refuse to stay down. The strangest thing is I always feel proud to see 3 or 4 black players in the England team. Why?

Being English doesn’t mean being white

I think it must be that I want the world to recognise that England has always been a country of invasion and immigration, from the Jutes and Guilherme the Conqueror to the Windrush Caribbeans and the parents of Amir Khan. England was never a land of quaint villages and polite white nobodies; all such images are, by definition, imaginary. In my experience, most English people have a dynamic, but healthy, love/hate relationship with the place. The London-based Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson once wrote a poem called Inglan is a Bitch. I think I know what he means.

 

 

Sorry, could you repeat that again, por favor?

My teacher says learning a foreign language is a piece of cake…and I LOVE cake!

If you’ve been following me recently, you’ve probably digested my instructions on how to become a fully-fledged traveller. Now I want to focus on the next stage: the day when you decide to settle somewhere for a year or two. This is the time when you reach another plateau, when you become that curious species known as the ‘expat’. This odd term conjures up images of lobster-skinned young males in rope-soled sandals and Hawaiian shirts guffawing together in a beach bar erected between two coconut trees. Sounds like fun? Well, I’m still looking for that bar, though I lost the fag packet with the address scribbled on the back years ago. 

Once you are firmly established as an expat, you have a big decision to make, especially if you are a native English speaker. How much of the lingo do you bother to learn? After all, you can get by in most countries with English and a smattering of the local language. So much so, that English speakers have become hopelessly lazy at learning other langauges. Many expats I have met socialize mostly with fellow English speakers and refrain from making inroads into their adopted culture and its native language. Why should they? These types exist in a kind of bubble, craning their necks to hear the Hartlepool football result every Saturday whilst crying over their cackhanded attempts to make toad-in-the-hole.

Don’t be a naff tourist – learn the local lingo!

But some of us like a challenge, and there is something magical about submerging yourself in another language and losing your clumsily conventional Britishness. So we try our damnedest to learn the native tongue, patting ourselves on the back every time we buy a pair of flip-flops without hitting a brick wall of incomprehension. Then comes the dreadfully painful day when we realise our so-called ‘fluency’ is mangled by a heavy accent you could cut with cheese wire. Curses! Why do I have to sound so foreign? Why can everybody tell a mile away that I’m from Doncaster?  What do I have to do to sound like Rafael? Eat more garlic or put a snail under my tongue?

You took the words right out of my mouth…

No, but you have to face the fact that every language learning attempt reaches a glass ceiling beyond which you may only venture if you are prepared to split your personality. To take that final leap into the unknown means leaving your former self behind. To crack the native accent, you have to reinvent yourself, to adopt a new persona. To copy all those tricky sounds you have to become a mimic, a barefaced ventriloquist who can fool a native for at least a couple of minutes. Believe me, this is so difficult it makes nuclear physics look like Candy Crush.

As an illustration, I will compare two Brazilian speakers of English I met a few years back in Rio. One was a young woman who had just returned to Brazil after spending 5 years in England. She came to me for lessons, but only 2 minutes into the first lesson I stopped her short and said: “Your English is so good you sound like a native. You don’t need me.” But as the lesson continued I began to notice how many little errors she was making – I had been fooled completely by the accent. She was the exception that proves the rule. The other case was a Brazilian teacher of English who, in a higher teaching diploma exam, gained the highest score for that year in the whole of South America. Her English was exceptional, virtually error-free, except for one thing: her accent was as heavy as a wheelbarrow full of church lead. You always knew when she was coming down the corridor of the school because the cockroaches jumped out of the window en-masse.

I clicked and clicked and clicked until I cried…

So, unfortunately, unless you have an ear for mimicry and are prepared to contort your precious voice into myriad new-fangled sounds, forget mastering the accent. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there is another intimidating barrier you come up against as a language learner. Teaching yourself to say a few things and be understood is all well and good. But how the hell are you supposed to catch the flow when people are rabbiting nineteen to the dozen? In other words, understanding is always more difficult than being understood: you can speak the new language at your nice, slow pace, but native speakers expect you to follow their rapid delivery, with different accents, registers and slang thrown in. Often you feel like shouting SLOW DOWN!, but that would only expose your incompetence. So instead you stand there grinning from ear to ear praying that the speaker hasn’t asked you a question and you’ve missed it.

I once had an extraordinary phone conversation with a tele-sales girl in São Paulo (phone calls are mostly nightmare in another language). She called me to discuss a new phone plan and before I could stop her, she had launched into a quick-fire spiel about the new services I should expect to receive . When she stopped there was a crackly pause and she asked if I was still there. I said yes (sim), and then tried ineptly to produce a summary of what she had just told me, missing out loads. This gave her a fit of the giggles. When I did get something right she said (I’m translating): “Yes, that’s it, Mr Martin!”, obviously trying not to laugh. Then the inevitable happened and she asked me where I was from (a sure sign you don’t fool anybody). I nearly said Bradford but thought better of it.

Sorry, can’t help you with that rubbish accent!

Based on the above, it always makes me cringe when somebody says they have a friend whose cousin speaks 5 languages fluently. “Really!”, I say, burning inside. “How nice for them!” Except I don’t believe it. Why? The key word here is “fluently”. Mastering a language is not like riding a bike or memorising the chapter of a book. To speak a language fluently you need constant, daily interaction with native speakers, reaching into all those distant idiomatic and colloquial spaces that all languages contain. Doing this in one other language would take up all your time, so how could you possibly do it with 5? Being able to get by in 5 languages is something completely different, though even that is commendable in my book.

I’ve never played Candy Crush, but I can say ‘cobbles’ in Portuguese!

So, if you just can’t be bothered with all this language learning malarkey, I have the perfect solution: get yourself a ‘sleeping dictionary’ – a boyfriend (or girlfriend) who is a native speaker of the language you want to learn. Geddit? A word of warning, however. Make sure your new, exotic love doesn’t speak a word of English or you could end up with a freeloading student on your hands. As usual, I speak from experience.

Is your TEFL ticket past its sell-by date?

Excuse me, love, do you have any bangers and mash?

Travel, travel and more travel – that’s what everybody would like to do, if only they had the time and the money. “See the world, lad, before you settle down”, my grandad used to say. Of course, he was right. There is nothing like travel for seeing how the other half live, delving into exotic cultures and then realising the limitations of your own. For some of us, travel can be addictive. We soon get bored with the easy life at home and yearn for adventure. When the travel bug gets serious, we want to throw off our tourist garb and settle somewhere for a while, learn the lingo, fall in love, submerge ourselves. But how to earn an honest crust?

Teaching English abroad is bags of fun when you’re young…

Well, if you are lucky enough to be a native English speaker, Bob’s your uncle! You can teach English, of course – what could be simpler? You were born speaking English so it’s as natural to you as falling off a lorry. All you have to do is talk…and listen to your sweet (but very slow) students without falling asleep. Eureka! Instant job, instant income! But hang on a minute…you know how to speak English, but you’re not sure how to, erm, ‘teach’ it. What about grammar and all that stuff? Well, to be honest, depending on how far-flung your destination is, you might get by with little or no previous experience. If a student asks you about the ‘Present Perfect’, you can always say you’ll do that in the future. Trouble is, if you go somewhere more popular, you might face competition from somebody ‘trained’: a qualified TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) teacher, no less.

Yes, folks, the world is choc full of TEFL teachers of every hue and stamp – the young and the old, the keen and the jaded, the settled and the shackled. In my experience, there are three predominant ‘types’ of TEFL teacher you are likely to come across on your travels:

Hooray – I’ve got my TEFL ticket to the world! How far is Timbuktu?

The Backpacker: this is the charlie who jumps off the banana boat in Rio and, after filling his nostrils with that tropical sea air and spotting the beach totty, bangs on the door of the first ‘School of English’ in view. He’s a chancer, an opportunist, but hey – he’s doing no-one any harm! Besides, he will most likely be paid peanuts but doesn’t care because he is only in it for the ride, ‘the craic’ as they say in Dublin. Come Christmas he’ll be on the plane heading back to Aunty Doreen and Uncle Derek in Darlington, no hearts broken. Believe me, there is wisdom in his nonchalance.

Forget grammar, Alfredo…let’s just chat till the pubs open

The Dabbler: these guys are by far the most common, thickly spread like dandelions in a prison garden. They arrive in their 20s on a Club Med holiday, get hooked on the sun and the laid-back lifestyle and end up drinking so much they forget to go home. These time-servers have a rudimentary knowledge of English teaching methodology, having completed a three-week crash course in Bournemouth in 1991. Or was it 1993? They can’t remember. As teachers they are popular types, ditching the dreaded ‘course book’ for something called ‘conversation’, which often turns out to be a teacher’s monologue about past exploits, peppered with personal anecdotes. Lessons may be extended if there is a bar nearby. For the dabbler, ‘home’ is a murky memory too scary to contemplate, a cold dark place full of stressed-out people with crippling mortgages.

The Pro: this power-dressed Iron Lady makes the rest of us look like supermarket stackers on a pub trip. She has spent years studying the whys and wherefores of teaching methodology and the science of language acquisition, finally being honoured with an MA in Linguistics from Utah University. She is Miss Serious and never gets her knickers in a twist. When not in the classroom overawing students with her knowledge, she can be found lurking in the corridors of TEFL Conferences in Milan or São Paulo, clutching a bunch of papers concerning the effects of modal verbs on mental health.

Today’s word is ‘cheek’…these are your cheeks – go on, feel them!

Different though they may be in many respects, these TEFL ‘types’ all face the same dilemma: whether to stick it out in the big wide world or whether to face the music one day and creep back ‘home’ to Bognor Regis. The key words here are ‘happiness’ and ‘job satisfaction’: if you have both of these, you are laughing. You may also be well-integrated into a new, foreign family and feel perfectly settled in your adopted homeland. But for those of us who haven’t embraced TEFL heartily as a lifelong career, endless days of ‘conversation’ – broken by the occasional detour into the dictionary of phrasal verbs – becomes steadily less rewarding.

There were two old TEFL teachers sat in deckchairs, and one said to the other…

After all, TEFL is not rocket science. Actually, it is much more of a laudable profession for those people who are non-native speakers and have had to study the language for years. I have met many non-native EFL teachers and they love everything about English, gaining much personal satisfaction from their achievements in a foreign tongue. Most of them put us native ‘buskers’ to shame.

Miss – how do you say ‘I fancy the pants off you’ in English?

So, as an old hand at the ‘game’, what is my advice to those of you considering the TEFL route around the world? That’s simple: definitely go for it, no question about that. Nothing comes close to the soul-lifting experience of living abroad. However, there is a caveat I must throw in: don’t put all your eggs in one basket (or all your verbs in the same sentence). In my experience, it is only for the very few that TEFL becomes an engaging and financially rewarding long-term career. Before you swan off to Beijing, you need to think seriously about adding more strings to your bow, or developing a parallel career. Then, if you end up back in Blighty with a backpack full of memories and empty pockets, you are not reduced to serving behind the bar at the Nag’s Head in Romford.

All those fabulous memories…but one day I might end up back in Wigan

TEFL may be a ‘ticket to the world’, but it just might not be enough to keep you abroad forever. As Spandau Ballet put it so memorably in the 80s, ‘I bought a ticket to the world / But now I’ve come back again / Why do I find it hard to write the next line / Oh I want the truth to be said’. ‘Writing the next line’ is, figuratively speaking, what you will have to do post-TEFL, so be prepared. Oh, and the name of the song? True, of course, like everything I write in From Bradford to Brazil! And don’t be late for class tomorrow…

The cheese is always greener on the dark side of the moon

I love you hate you love you hate you…Brazil is irresistibly infuriating

It’s easy to love Brazil. The sun floods the house in the morning, filling the spaces with light and lightening the mood of the people. As mid-day approaches, gaggles of work-colleagues appear on the streets, chattering and chortling as they amble towards the nearest buffet-lunch bar. In the late afternoon, people sit in the park with their tea bowls, sucking the green liquid and gazing into the future. When the light fades, the crickets come out to sing, filling the tropical night air with an elusive mystique.

I see a message…if only those beans could speak to me!

Some of my colleagues cannot believe I am thinking of heading back to the miserable grey skies of England, to the land of yob-culture, school bullies, boarded-up pubs, shops that shut at 5, small-minded conservative people and baked beans with everything. To a country where camping trips are ruined by the rain, where your body never throws off its clobber, where coffee is instant bilge, where town centres have been made anonymous by ugly shopping centres, where traffic wardens are repressed psychopaths and where a cheese and onion sandwich is the highlight of your day.

After all, living abroad makes you feel like a hero: what a remarkable feat you have managed, making your way in a foreign land and communicating in a foreign tongue, launched out of your cosy comfort zone like a jack-in-a-box! Surviving and prospering abroad is the sign of an intrepid adventurer, an infinitely resourceful globe-trotter, a multi-cultural maverick. When ex-pats in Brazil sit outside a trendy bar quaffing glasses of freezing beer and eyeing the talent they wish their cowardly mates back home could see them now! ‘This is the life’, they say.

As socialists, we promise to help…erm, ourselves?

But Brazil has hit the buffers with a dull, ominous thud. The Worker’s Party, who claim to be ‘socialists’ and have been in charge for more than a decade, have been exposed as one of the most corrupt governments in the country’s history. With mafia-like villainy, they have made Al Capone look like Homer Simpson. In the latest scandal, billions of dollars were siphoned out of Brazil’s huge state oil company, Petrobras. Now the country is financially broke and morally and spiritually broken. The local currency is up and down like Tower Bridge and the future looks, well, not exactly pear-shaped – more banana republic. Being here sometimes feels like living in the middle of an abandoned building site.

The middle classes have been revolting, huge swathes of them taking to the streets to call for the impeachment of President Dilma. They say they want a new Brazil, though I doubt many of them would be prepared to give up their servants – armies of the poor who daily spend hours in cramped buses on the way to clean house, cook and look after rich kids for a pittance. In many ways Brazil has never overcome the master-slave mentality that began when the Portuguese monarchy arrived here 500 years ago. Success, for a Brazilian, is not having to do the dirty work. Today, the professional classes may be working hard in their corporate suites, but they don’t lift a finger when they come home. The surest way to go bankrupt in Brazil is to open a DIY store.

Brazil versus England…the story of my wife             (I mean my LIFE!)

This potent mixture of political corruption, middle-class hypocrisy and exploitation of the poor is making Brazil much less easy to love. If anything, the recent displays of public anger are symptomatic of a country riddled with self-hatred. It’s very difficult today to find a Brazilian with much love for their homeland; most have become profoundly cynical. The tragedy is that, during the recent ‘boom’ years, Brazil did little to invest in public services: schools, hospitals and transportation are woefully underfunded. In this respect, Brazil has failed to throw off its ‘third world’ stigma. The irony is that, for a third world country, the current cost of living is astronomical. In short, nothing seems to make sense in present-day Brazil.

But perhaps the single most shocking thing about life here, is the blatant lack of policing and crime control. If the English police force is considered ‘professional’, then the Brazilian equivalent is a bunch of amateur clowns, so badly paid (and drawn from the uneducated poor) that they can’t resist colluding with the criminal gangs they are supposed to be catching. Many days go by here in Porto Alegre where I don’t see a single police officer. And this in a country where crime is rife and victims are shot dead if they react. One of my friends admitted recently she is just waiting for the day when a gun is put to her head and she hands over the keys of her car. If she accidentally screams, she might not live to tell the tale. When my son announced, with only a trace of irony, that if he had to stay living in Brazil he would buy a gun, something clicked in my head. That can’t be right.

Ben’s Record Shop in Guildford…I miss it like I miss being 12

And yet, despite all this angst, my reasons for being lured back to Blighty are mostly mundane. You see, I miss a lot of daft stuff – ebay, for example. The second-hand Johnny that I am has been starved to the bone. I dream of charity shops, used book and record shops, jumble sales, flea markets. I ache to buy a decent second-hand motor at a reasonable price (impossible in Brazil). I miss supermarkets with their half-price offers and vast range of imported foods. I fantasize about Wetherspoons pubs – in fact, any pub. I long to see clean water in the rivers, hear the smack of leather on willow and enjoy the light of those long summer nights.

Plonk me in Wetherspoons with a pile of newspapers and I’m as right as rain

There is nothing quite like a jumble sale to make you feel patriotic

Of course, there are a few serious reasons, too. Like free healthcare, for example – here in Brazil, like the USA, if you don’t have costly health insurance you take your place at the back of the queue and risk being forgotten. And being a rich country, there is at least some spending on public services in England and a modicum of respect for the environment. And, though I never thought I would ever say this, I want to live in a place with at least the odd copper knocking about; a place where criminals pay for their crimes if they are caught, which rarely seems to happen here. When I first heard gunshots in the middle of the night, I felt proud of myself for braving life in lawless, ‘wild west’ Brazil. But now I’m too old for Cowboys and Indians.

If I do set sail and leave these distant shores, it will not be without sadness, but with a heavy heart. If I do feel the odd twinge of hate for Brazil just now, it’s only because deep down I love it. Just play me a Djavan song and I’ll be in tears in no time. What makes Brazil warm is not the tropical climate, but the big-hearted Brazilians with their zest for life, despite all the struggle and strife.

The view from my ideal apartment…yeah, right!

In fact, if I had a sea-view flat in Copacabana, with armed guards on the door and a shotgun under the mattress, a constant supply of untaxed imported goods, a few dodgy friends, an English pub round the corner and a pair of binoculars I would probably stick around. But somehow I think that’s unlikely.

Why I hate New York…

Fabulous 57th Street…which is managing well without me

Dear New York,

Why do you haunt me and taunt me so? Don’t you know I can’t get you out of my head? It’s all right for you…you just go on being yourself. You don’t care about me. You don’t miss me. To you, I was just an ant scurrying around your shiny streets. Can’t you see – I can’t love you if you don’t love me back, if you don’t want me back. Say you want to see me again, please! Until then, I’ll have to keep singing the refrain from that old Shirley Bassey song, the one that goes: I love you, hate you, love you, hate you, love you till the world stops turning…

You think you are so big and important, don’t you, huh? The Big Apple. Who do you think you are? What have you got that Bradford hasn’t got, eh? You haven’t got Bradford City FC, have you? Ha ha! You haven’t got a big hole in the middle and Lister’s chimney! Come to think of it, what have you got that Porto Alegre hasn’t got, eh? You haven’t got footy star Anderson, late of Manchester United, have you? You haven’t got black-bean stew and funny Gaucho hats! So, just what have you got? Well, erm, here are a few things…

Why do I have to look through every single record in the shop?

Record Shops: dozens of them, full to the rafters with old LPs. Each record has one of those lovely, thick cardboard sleeves to protect the disc. Each record is a bit heavier, thicker vinyl, with sound quality to drool over. For just a few dollars – the price of a blueberry muffin and a regular coffee – you can get yourself albums by Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express or The Only Chrome Waterfall Orchestra. Tearing around Manhattan and Brooklyn breathlessly, I managed to plough through 13 record stores in 3 days, dislocating my shoulder with the weight of the bag. As Jeff Ogiba of Black Gold Records in Brooklyn says: “Records are the closest thing to a human relationship that I’ve discovered so far. I’m not on drugs.”

West 57th Street: if I could have chosen a better place to parachute into Manhattan, then my name wouldn’t be Herbert Butterworth. Bordered by Central Park, 5th Avenue, 7th Avenue, Broadway and with Times Square just down the road, this bit of the Big Apple is where the action is, where those in-the-know go, where the cool cats hang out – Bert included. And…just opposite my hotel was the coolest burger joint playing the hippest black swamp jive, hidden away behind a curtain inside the swanky Le Parker Meridian hotel.

Hidden gem on West 57th – the burger joint…worth going just for the tunes

Brooklyn Bridge: landed in Dumbo, Brooklyn 4pm (freezing the brass monkeys off), steaming cuppa tea 4.15, sprawling but neat second-hand bookstore 4.30, procured little bottle Wilson’s Whiskey 5pm (getting dark), climbed the 20 dozen iron stairs up to the bridge, knocked back the fuel and prepared to brace the biting winds 5.15, marched across the bridge with glorious views of the Manhattan skyline, landed Lower Manhattan 5.45, chilled to the bone, crimson-faced but exhilarant!

Was it the whisky that made everything look surreal on Brooklyn Bridge?

Greenwich Village: like London’s Soho in the old days, the Village has a kind of seedy, Bohemian feel, where every multi-coloured cafe, pub and shop is wildly different from the place next door. I even got sucked into the beat-up East Village, with edgy streets that seem to go on forever. I was lost and scared. I felt like Jack Kerouac…”an angel-headed hipster burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.” Wow!

My hero Jack Kerouac in NY 1953 – about to enter a record store, of course!

Carnegie Hall: growing up a jazz fan, the words Live at Carnegie Hall on the LP cover always filled me with awe and wonder, wonder and awe. Guess what? Carnegie Hall is on 57th Street – so off I went on Sunday afternoon, sober and civilized, to watch a little jazz group. Sitting in a cozy theatre room (an offshoot of the main auditorium) with the saxophone, piano, bass and drums just a few feet away, and knowing that Manhattan was waiting for me outside, was my kind of heaven.

OK, so New York can also get on your nerves sometimes. Like when you get the bill in a diner and there is a 20% service charge. That’s because the greedy owners don’t pay the waiters. Oh no – they expect you to pay them with a hefty tip! Many times Manhattan made me feel like a little, poor guy, like I shouldn’t really be there, like I should be emptying the garbage at the back of the celebrity party. And – get this – nobody speaks English! So annoying. I went to New York specifically to practise my American drawl (“What it is, bro!” and all that) and everybody, everywhere was chortling away in Spanish…shut your eyes and you could be in Mexico.

Why does New York vinyl taste so good?

But little niggles aside, I am still smitten…love-struck to the core. Every time I play one of those heavy LPs with Made in New York printed on the back I hurt inside. The trouble is, too many people already love New York, that’s why she doesn’t care a fig about little old me. But I am already planning my return – I am going to MAKE her notice me, even if it means shouting “Hasta la vista, baby!” in the middle of 5th Avenue. Start spreading the news…

 

 

‘How much is that brainbox in the window?’

Come on now…who doesn’t love shopping?

I shall scream at the next person who says Christmas has become too commercialized! The other platitude we hear at this time of year is that we have all become “mindless consumers”, drawn to the glittering shopping malls like moths to the light from a plastic torch. Surely it is shopping that keeps us together, gives us power, justifies our existence? Isn’t life a struggle to reach a point where we no longer have to worry about where our next plate of beans on toast is coming from? And if we try hard enough we can all get there, can’t we?

Who’s the guy with the fake beard?

Brazil’s ex-president Lula said recently that the aim of his Workers’ Party is not to make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. No way, José! Lula wants to make everybody richer. Pure genius, you have to admit. By “richer” I presume he means giving people more spending power. In other words, more money. And the big shop of the year is Christmas, of course. Which means driving lessons for Dwayne, a fortnight in the Algarve for Courtney and a big new telly for granny.

Paradoxically, perhaps, this end-of-the-year spending spree has made me reflect on 2014 as a year of myth shattering – a time when the money-God has not fared well. In fact, the authors of 2 of my 3 books of the year would be put up against a wall and shot by members of the Capitalist Billionaires’ Club if they had their way. Dare I say that over the past 12 months there has been a bit of a revolution in the way some of us think about life, the universe and property ladders. So, without further ado, here are my fab reading choices of 2014, in no particular order:

“So you’re telling me that inequality is part of the deal?”

1) Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century This is the French economist who tossed an ideological bomb into the swish corridors of big business and somehow got away with it. It takes guts to make such devastating claims about how our economic systems are rigged. Myths like this: there is no mechanism in capitalism for creating equality, as many of us naively believed. The profit motive is not philanthropic – how could it be? The notion that wealth trickles down from the creamy, luxurious top to the grey, muddy bottom is cobblers. The only solution, according to our Thomas? Start taking huge amounts of cash from the very wealthy (money they will never be able to spend) and invest it in education, health and job-creation schemes. I mean, what is this guy on? I hope he uses a police escort.

What Piketty is arguing, based on a mass of historical and economic evidence, is that wealth accumulates and becomes concentrated in the hands of – yes, you guessed – the wealthy. It is inevitable, therefore, that inequality does not diminish, but grows. And grows. Even Scrooge would have to admit that in the last 30 years the incomes of the wealthiest have shot up into the stratosphere, whereas the incomes of you, me and Bob Cratchit have stagnated. Or worse.

“Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.” Scrooge chides poor Bob Cratchit

Recently a Brazilian oil magnate involved in the country’s biggest ever corruption scandal admitted illegally salting away $20 million in a Swiss bank account, money that was “skimmed” from inflated contracts. The miscreant has now agreed to pay back a total of $100 million. My question is: just what exactly did he intend to do with all that money? Nothing, is my guess, because having it hidden away was the thrill: a secret stash of filthy lucre. And this in a country like Brazil, where 40% of the population live on less than $300 a month. Shameless.

Maybe I’ve been deluding myself. Maybe I was a fool to think that “equality” was something to be worked towards. Nevertheless, the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” will only stop widening when enough people stand up and shout. People like Piketty.

spend spend spend…that’s what it’s all about

2) Paul Verhaeghe: What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society What is wrong with us? Why do we feel lonely, guilty, inadequate, unlovable? I used to feel the same…until I let this Belgian professor of psychoanalysis soothe my worried mind. Now I understand the current “happiness crisis”. It stems from the way we judge ourselves: if we are not financially “successful”, we are losers. Over the past 30 years the pressure has intensified for us to “perform” economically as individuals. We have all become “consultants”, trying to sell ourselves on the open market we are born into. We have an identity crisis because we cannot remove the mask, the “marketing” face we put on every day to win approval. All our institutions – schools, hospitals, libraries – are now “businesses”, and making money has become sacred. We are mere pawns on the Monopoly board of life.

And, according to Verhaeghe, these anxieties have led to a worrying increase in psychological problems: self-harm, depression, low self-esteem and social phobias. When we allow market forces to judge our “performance” in life, we are bound to become anxious, even paranoid. In the neoliberal circus we are trapped in, there is little room for spirituality – a space that allows for self-awareness on very different terms. This has led to the blossoming of movements such as ‘Mindfulness’, a meditation-based philosophy which tries to bring our damaged souls back to life so that we can appreciate the small miracles that happen to us every day. But as usual, of course, the culprit for this psychological mess is rampant, free-market profiteering: the only game in town, the only reality we have in front of us. Adam Smith – I hope you are listening, you nincompoop!

It’s time to stop consuming and be mindful…

And finally…

3) John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths How about this – life is utterly meaningless! An absurdist farce, a sick joke! Surely not…surely there is order in this chaos, surely human beings are still evolving, there is a master plan and the name is “progress”. Erm, well – not according to Mr Gray, English philosopher and retired professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. You see, our ancestors believed in religion – the purpose of life was to be “saved”, to get into heaven. Then came Darwin. After that we put our faith in Science: advances in technology would keep making the world a better place to live in. So, the question is, are we – you and me – better examples of the human species today, after all this “progress”? I can’t see it, myself.

John Gray: progress is a myth

The problem is, we have swapped our faith in God for faith in the “progress” of civilization, as if “improvement for all” was somehow built into the future – a place we will surely reach someday. Gray exposes this kind of mythology as connected to the naive hopes of modern-day “humanists”. According to Gray, “humanists believe that humanity improves along with the growth of knowledge, but the belief that the increase of knowledge goes with advances in civilization is an act of faith”. So we are back to a kind of religious belief that things can only get better.

And all this because, as humans, we kid ourselves that we are morally superior to animals, whereas in fact, “human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion”. So, if there is no heaven and hell, no progress, no pride in being human, what the devil is the point of it all? Why are we here? Well, one thing we are here for is to learn from John Gray’s book and stop deluding ourselves.

We are just animals after all

Only when we face up to the meaninglessness of life will we be able to get together communally and make the best of it, not live as atomised individuals forever struggling to get ahead in the rat race.

Phew! What a lot of food for thought! I hope you enjoyed the ride. Actually, I have my own philosophy of life. It’s simply this: never stop asking big questions, try to become better informed, and learn to love your fellow-humans as you learn to love yourself. Oh, and don’t forget to get your mum a lovely present at the shopping mall…a very small one, of course. How about a book token?