The first bout of teaching is over. Today the students are doing a mock exam. The real thing is scheduled for Sunday next week, the 1^st June, although that is subject to the arrival of the papers.

The Advanced class are cruising along to the exam. All of them can pass, but there’s always the chance of a badly drafted test paper, or excessive nerves. There’s a student in that class who I’ve never mentioned, because he’s hardly been here. He’s turned up a few times recently, and he’s a horror. Literally. A cold stare, complete corpse-like non-communication except for staccato Arabic to his class mates, seeking clarification. Or, as T3 who teaches him in the afternoon, tell me, spreading alarm and despondency. She speaks and understands Arabic, and heard him tell the others that there would be “an explosion” here in July. One hopes he was speaking metaphorically. I’ll call him Nightmare, because he scares me.

Brokeback mountain has regressed. He does not partake in the classes at all, and conducts conversations with other students in Arabic throughout. To say that this is disruptive is to downplay in considerably. The other day even good students had stopped work and I asked them why. One of them told me that they were worried about The Yellow, the local idiom for government hired bulldozers, flattening the college.

I asked him who had told him this would happen, and of course he pointed to Brokeback Mountain. I asked where he got this information from and he characteristically refused to answer the question but said that the college would be bulldozed “with only English people in it”.

There’s some talk of helping the punctuality and attendance situation with some blood-letting. The current candidates are the worst attendees and most disruptive students: the Nightmare, Brokeback Mountain, and Pugsley.

We shall see. Everyone is jaded and stretched and desperate to see the end of this first few months. There’s to be no teaching now for several weeks, to enable us to design a new course, and (for me) to restructure the placement test. There’ll also be space for us all to take some holidays.