In the mouth of the wolf

I leave on Wednesday the 18 of February 2009 to take up a teaching position in the South of Italy, the province of Bari, working in conjunction with a language College as an EFL teacher. I could be gone for quite some time. The prospect of teaching is quite daunting, I only have one year teacher training experience, and I done that while I was a postman; so not exactly well versed in all the dynamic and protocol of language tuition. The college know this but it still niggles in the back of my mind, in fact, niggling is too euphemistic, the fear is blaring in my mind: I am incapable. I will only humiliate myself in front of classes of eager Italians.

It’s natural to feel this kind of cowardice, but it’s futile to sit and dwell on the ‘disastrous’ possibilities. I’m quite fatalistic. So I dwell like a cow in a grass pasture: comfortably neurotic.

The flight is another issue. I don’t have a fear of flying so much as a fear of dying. I fly quite well but I can’t help feel I’m going on my last journey, literally, that until we have landed, I’m in limbo between life and death – being in the sky, being the closest we come ‘in reality’ to Heaven. I’m such a pompous little article; I feel such lofty notions of ‘death’ ‘immanent accident’ ‘mechanical failure’ ‘human error’ ‘pure chance’. I torture myself with these thoughts. It’s all part of existential dread. The dread of the possibility: taking nothing for granted.

I’ll keep the poetry coming and no doubt I’ll actually be hammering away at all aspects of English language and Italian, this will help no end on my writing in general, so I might actually start producing writing with more substance, more artifice, more ability. (I'll keep posting on the blog)

in boca lupo.

Ciao, ciao