I graduated the same year, in 1992, also having enjoyed the benefits of a free university education (state-paid tuition fees, maintenance grant). Living in rural Cumbria, I didn't have access to any drug scene, but one of my abiding memories of the remainder of the nineties is watching multiple television repeats of Trainspotting. This was on Russian television, in the middle of the 1997-98 Siberian winter. Out of work, desperate, I'd taken up a job as an English teacher at a private school in Surgut, an oil and gas hub on the Ob River. It paid a thousand dollars a month plus free accommodation, which was a huge step up after years of failure to get a job in Britain commensurate with having a degree, but which had the downside of months of constant minus-twenty-to-thirty-degree temperatures, very few hours of daylight, and a town that literally looked like a gulag.
Traumatising, though. The other teacher from England ended up losing his mind: he managed to keep it together in lessons, but in the middle of the night I would wake to hear him from the other room repeating the word "what" over and over again in a multitude of mocking, cartoonish voices, punctuated by the thud of him banging his head on the wall to get it to stop.
Besides the awfulness of the place itself, part of his breakdown was also due to three of his pupils: the sinister Gleb Mirny, his golem-like sidekick Kalugin, and the goblinesque Alyosha "Govnyosha". I did write a novel about it in the 2000s, but abandoned it, subsequently incorporating some of the ideas and material into my novel Card Catalogue (Dalkey Archive Press, 2020), which is actually set in Bucharest, where I have been for more than a quarter of a century.
I graduated the same year, in 1992, also having enjoyed the benefits of a free university education (state-paid tuition fees, maintenance grant). Living in rural Cumbria, I didn't have access to any drug scene, but one of my abiding memories of the remainder of the nineties is watching multiple television repeats of Trainspotting. This was on Russian television, in the middle of the 1997-98 Siberian winter. Out of work, desperate, I'd taken up a job as an English teacher at a private school in Surgut, an oil and gas hub on the Ob River. It paid a thousand dollars a month plus free accommodation, which was a huge step up after years of failure to get a job in Britain commensurate with having a degree, but which had the downside of months of constant minus-twenty-to-thirty-degree temperatures, very few hours of daylight, and a town that literally looked like a gulag.
You see, that’s initiative. I barely moved outside a tiny patch of southwest London for about five years after graduating.
Traumatising, though. The other teacher from England ended up losing his mind: he managed to keep it together in lessons, but in the middle of the night I would wake to hear him from the other room repeating the word "what" over and over again in a multitude of mocking, cartoonish voices, punctuated by the thud of him banging his head on the wall to get it to stop.
Oh, man. I don’t mean to trivialise but this definitely feels like it has potential for a novel.
Besides the awfulness of the place itself, part of his breakdown was also due to three of his pupils: the sinister Gleb Mirny, his golem-like sidekick Kalugin, and the goblinesque Alyosha "Govnyosha". I did write a novel about it in the 2000s, but abandoned it, subsequently incorporating some of the ideas and material into my novel Card Catalogue (Dalkey Archive Press, 2020), which is actually set in Bucharest, where I have been for more than a quarter of a century.