theseus and ariadne

hello readers. i write to you from deep in the circuitous labyrinth of bureaucratic nonsense, also known as applying for a work permit in belize. i can only just see a little twinkle of light through the thick undergrowth blocking my vision, it is a maze denser than the densest jungles and with deadlier animals than the deadliest snakes or the fiercest jaguars waiting to catch you out at each turn. it is a mind -mumbingly soul- destroyingly heart-breakingly laborious and ridiculous process of which kafka and dickens would be proud. it reminds me also of a scene in catch-22 that we watched just the other day when captain major was promoted to major major by dint of his surname being major and he has no experience for the job. the first thing he does in the job is to decree that nobody can come to disturb him when he is in his office with questions of any kind, but once he has left his office for the day then they can come in to see him. he will only be seen when he is not there and if people come to see him when he is there they must wait until he isn’t there to be shown in to see him. talk about hitting the nail on the head. i won’t describe the ins and outs of our labyrinthine daily life in actual detail as it makes me want to kill myself - only to say that to achieve said task of obtaining said work permit we must achieve sections a b c d e f g etc to z, and to achieve section a alone you must sub-achieve sub-sections 1 2 3 4 5 to infinity ad infinitum nauseam. even at night there is no escape from it. my dreams are panic stricken and stressful, i am running from one place to another trying to pack a giant suitcase with items i can’t quite remember where to find and with a giant clock ticking slowly down to the time of my train departure, and the conductor looking at his watch and then at me running all over the place, then i realize that of course that pair of socks won’t be here on the train platform they’ll be back at home i must get a taxi to find them but oh no now i’ll never make the train, i’ll call bert to bring me them, but my mobile has the numbers missing so i can’t dial him so i look for a sock shop then realize there are other more pressing things i need to do in the last 4 minutes before the train leaves. all the time the running around i am doing is like wading through waist high mud, the effort expended is not matched by the movement forwards, the input/output energy efficiency graph is all wrong. i wake up exhausted. i long for a system to just make a little bit of sense somewhere at some point and i now understand why england gave belize up in 1980….though really they could have left it in better shape, i am quite ashamed of them.

onwards to a happier and more intellectually satisfying subject: this week i looked up lots of words hitherto unknown to me, that i had been keeping a list of from reading midnight’s children and love in the time of cholera. here are some of the most interesting:

my favourite: atavistic: relating to or displaying recurrence of a genetic feature that has been absent for several generations; relating to or displaying the kind of behavior that seems to be a product of impulses long since suppressed by society
marasmus: process of emaciation associated with malnutrition
intransigent (at last a word that describes me!): stubbornly or unreasonably refusing to consider changing one’s decision or attitude
lanceolate: tapering to a point like the head of a lance
desultory: happening in a random, disorganized, unmethodical way, eg a desultory conversation – passing from one thing to another (maybe i am intransigently desultory)
benighted: unenlightened intellectually, socially or morally; also – overtaken by night or dark (archaic)
ataraxia: freedom from worry, peace of mind
prestidigitation: sleight of hand used in performing magic tricks
germaine – wasn’t listed in the dictionary, can anyone shed any light? or perhaps cast any illumination? or elucidate, clarify, enlighten, reveal, explicate, expound?

this week i met 3 new people from england:
1. david who runs the fish shop halfway down the hill into town. he is from glasgow and worked in the police in yorkshire for a long time – helie i wonder if he was one of the ones that got you for nicking those penny sweets from woolworths? he is a very tall and very talkative chap, we knew we’d be in there a while when he said ooo come in sit down sit down (we sat down on makeshift stools made of a small ladder and a little ice chest probably full of fish), it makes me nervous when people stand up in me shop sit down have a seat now where are you from what are you doing here i’m from glasgee meself worked in your neck a the woods mind for years ay all over those places dewsbury halifax huddersfield til i did me spine in came to belize in the army loved it stayed here i was in the states for a while mind married a belizean lady she’s called mary oh excuse me me phone’s ringing [peers at mobile phone and hands to me] can you see who’s calling me luv please is it yammie? me – yes it says yam] hi yammie ach yeah we do got snapper in at the moment yeah listen though how are ya i’ve not heard from ya since when was it now och yeah back in march wa’nt it – we tried to leave with our fish after a while, he followed us talking at full speed down the road, we got to the car and started getting in it and wondered if he was going to get in too and keep talking to us as we drove home and gosh what would we do if he did. he was lovely though and so was the fish we bought from him which bert cooked in lime juice all wrapped up in a tinfoil parcel.

2. paul the glass blower from somewhere in england i can’t remember. he has also been in belize 18 years and was also in the army here and is also married to a belizean lady. hmm quel coincidence and all in a matter of minutes. paul was far more taciturn, invited us to his glass blowing studio for a cup of tea. i’ve always wanted to see how glass is blown so this is very exciting. perhaps he will blow us a cup of tea into a mug down a glass blowing funnel. we saw him again at the market the next day, i was in a towel as i’d just swum in the river in my cycling clothes as i had been cycling and had nothing to wear except a towel so was sitting in the car in my towel looking kind of strange i suspect. i explained this to him and his wife but they took it all in their stride and i liked that.

3. a girl called rachel eteson who i must have almost met many times in bradford, she went to my school but had left when i started there to go to a different school and we know lots of the same people but had never met in person. when me and bert visited john mcafee the other week he had called us a few days later to say here is someone that thinks she knows you and she said is your brother called jim and he has a friend called chad etc. she is living in san pedro working in property management, i said cool we’ll see you next time we come to san pedro. in the end she spotted me at chaa creek where we go swimming as she was there with a friend and saw me and thought i looked like jim which i do, and figured i lived in the chaa creek area and had an english accent so it must be me. and me it was.

films we have watched this week: the aviator (brilliant), trans-siberian (fair to middling), the endurance (amazing story)
food we have eaten: rice and vegetables, rice and vegetables, sausage and potato (it made us feel sick and we discussed reverting to vegetarianism), pancakes with orange and sugar, bert’s amazing fish supper, swiss chard (cooking right now as i write this) straight from mick’s vegetable garden, mocha rum cake from the sweet shop, ginger nut biscuits
music we have listened to: cara dillon
things we have almost bought this week: a beautiful 1981 westphalia campervan for sale for $5000, absolute steal, in florida, we would have sold the truck and gone up to get it and driven it back and then lived in it to save money. it had of course gone. we continue the search
amount of different plans we have made for if/when work permit application procedure defeats us into dribbling wrecks and we have to abort ship man overboard: about 1,000

i read about a book that someone has written in which every sentence includes a negative. i read a few sentences of it and you don’t actually notice too much, it’s very clever. like it would say it wasn’t yet 5pm instead of it was nearly 5pm. i might try to write a book in which every sentence includes an oxymoron i will call it the bittersweet hotcold darklight book.

i am drinking some orange juice at the moment with ice in it which reminds me of a while ago whenever i had orange with ice in it after a while of drinking it these little seeds would appear. i obviously panicked in case they were poisonous disease-carrying spores from some killer mushroom or something. i checked the orange juice bottle in case they’d somehow got in there, but couldn’t find them. i checked they weren’t coming out of the tap, but they definitely weren’t as sometimes they weren’t there in your drink but sometimes they were. i checked the freezer finally and it was because our sesame seed bread rolls which were in there had bashed into the ice making section and little seeds were in the ice cubes which you then put in your drink which then melted and you’d see them floating around your drink. i felt like a detective who had just solved a big mystery, like sherlock holmes must have felt a lot of the time, or poirot. eureka.

last story for now. last thursday i felt slightly unwell, i had a sore throat when i woke up. while we were in town (as part of the continuing mystery of how to achieve sub section 2 paragraph 3.1a of the work permit debacle) i went to the doctor’s therefore. i said to the receptionist um i was in mexico a few weeks ago and i now have a sore throat, do you have the swine flu vaccine please? no. does anywhere in belize have it? no. ok, thanks, bye. [exit, to the sound of the whole waiting room sniggering at me]. better safe than sorry, or at least better to know my options. which aren’t very many as i’m sure you wouldn’t be allowed on a plane if you had swine flu, i read they were installing thermal detectors in airports to spot people with fevers so i’d be caught red-handed. i feel fine now by the way.

today’s parting comment – did you know that the longest single word you can make from the letters on the top line of a qwerty keyboard is typewriter. how serendipitous. or perhaps pre-planned?