The Office Christmas Meals

At The Employer’s offices for the last few days, and it’s been all go. The latest plan is that we fly out on 30^th December, start testing on New Year’s Day, and start teaching around the 4^th. There’s some doubt about my visa: it needs a number from a bureaucrat in HUDC. The complexities surrounding this number are enormous, given that it’s Eid al Adha in HUDC next week and most people in the UK give up work around mid December.

Because I’m connected to two related organisations, I attended a Christmas lunch with one of them, and dinner with another in the evening. The lunch was mostly teachers, and enjoyable (TEFL teachers are very good company, and the flow of free drink helped). A few others were liable to this double-dinner. With a couple of them I went for a walk between meals, (the first finished around four, the other started at five).

Arriving at the second restaurant, I loitered outside to phone The Wife, and when I went in spotted a seat next to one of the teachers from the afternoon, and I knew he’d be good conversational companion so I happily sat there. He was talking to someone else when I first sat down so I chatted to my other neighbour, who I didn’t know from Adam. I’d told him the methodology of wine-making in a country where it’s illegal, and lectured him on my theories about the politics of HUDC before he revealed himself as THE Big Cheese behind the whole fandango.

He told me a story about being summoned to HUDC by a “Free General”, one of those in the inner circle of who took power there a generation ago. He was told not to worry about visas. Sure enough, on arrival he and his lesser cheese were ushered through immigration and customs. After arriving at the hotel they were subsequently contacted and collected in a car and taken out to a large house in the country, with big gates on it. He confessed to some trepidation. They hadn’t contacted the British Embassy to tell them they were there, and here they were in a remote location to meet a senior member of a regime noted for its playfulness.

I suggested that his story meant that this whole project had the blessing of HUDC’s leader, (let’s call him Colonel Mustard), and he agreed that CM must indeed be aware of it and have given it his nod. I was tempted to ask him to make a phone call to sort out my visa number, but refrained.

Earlier that day my Head of Department (HD) had told me that, after next week, I would be on leave until I flew out, so I decided that another week at home won’t kill me, although it’ll rather drop Line Manager in the shite, leaving him to do the testing, which would be a pity because he’s shaping up as a nice bloke with intelligent views on The Pogues

Later, I got talking to a Happily Plastered Young Man who I thought, with the arrogance of one approaching middle age, must have been an office boy. LM later told me that he’s yet another Cheese, quite a big noise on a salary three times mine. He knew all about the visa and I think he told me that it could not be resolved, and I wouldn’t be flying out on the 30^th. Or maybe that it WAS resolved and I’d be going out then after all... Truth be told, I was well on my way to being happily plastered myself.

The coda was a chat with LM about Dowland, and a guarded exchange of views on the often naive comments made by his Line Manager, HD, at dinner the night before. (Yes, that’s right: the first of three large meals in 24 hours. The generous breakfast in my hotel, you’ll be pleased to note, I’ve hardly touched the last two mornings.)

The eating drinking and chit-chat with people I hardly know was a trifle exhausting. I drew on my store of a strange mixture of Anthony Powell and John Le Carre to get me through. And, an intense mixture of rich food and alcohol will do me no harm with two years of only occasionally broken abstemiousness on the horizon. Well, perhaps not that long, as I had rather airily told The Big Cheese: homemade wine is alcoholic grape juice after only a couple of weeks, but should be more like wine after six months. Theoretically. I hope I told him I was speaking theoretically.