Expensive French perfume is wasted on the Kazakhs

I arrived at school this morning having had my usual bottle of wine the night before.

"Er...are you wearing cologne?" asked Lidia, once we were in my tiny office. "Well," I said unsuspectingly, "I wear Coco Chanel. Is it a bit strong?" "No, I just wondered if you had... well..." and she meandered about a bit before she asked me if I'd had a drink before I'd set off for work.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm very sensitive, and the children notice everything. I thought -- you don't like the cold, so you take a drink."

She was keen for us to go early to dinner in the canteen, for our homemade 60p meal. To talk privately? To give me something to eat to make my breath less obviously suggesting an Englishman abroad?

We had a delicious vegetarian rassolnik, beetroot salad, and kompot -- a warm mixed fruit juice -- in the canteen. I ate it quickly, hoping to eradicate the stubborn perfume of last night, during which she leant confidingly or sniffingly into me, telling me about the daytime drinking of the teacher I have replaced. "I like a couple of glasses of wine with my meal at night Lidia, but simply because of the lack of opportunity now I'm not a daytime drinker."

Later, she called me into her class in order to help her advanced learners with modal and semi-modal verbs. A bollocking for coming in with wine breath would have been easier to deal with.

I've got the bus service worked out now; getting used to being stared at whilst on one will take longer. My favourite bus conductor pushes, not without decorum, between tightly packed bodies in order to collect our 20p fares, and sing-songs each stop in Kazakh with a rising intonation which has none of the irritations of the Australian variety.

I got lost coming back from the shopping centre the other night.

Half a pound of cheese, same of olives, a tub of beetroot salad, a bar of soap, a loaf, two toilet rolls, 200g of ground coffee, a bottle of Moldovan pinot noir and three bottles of beer -- came to thirteen quid, but my delight with my bargain haul was tarnished by the fifty minutes that followed.

The address guides you to this glossy lower slab of restaurants, behind which stand three 35-storey blocks of flats. I live (let's say) in Flat 131 in block 1/2, 23rd floor.

However, you have to know which entrance to 1/2 you need to use, because the lifts are arranged in the blocks so that they communicate only with their side of it. Unblessed with the esoteric knowledge of the local babushkas, and not having had an opportunity to pop down the Department of Municipal Works of Glorification to study the architects' plans, I sweated self-consciously in my tweed jacket, riding up and down the lift, trying various combinations of floors and room numbers -- and worse, up and down the unlit stairs, the haven of our block's secret smokers -- thinking there might be a secret door to the magical other side which holds my 131.

I walked repeatedly past the adjacent flats 130 and 132, and imagined that Our Father must have ordered the disappearance of Flat 131 due to a recent infringement of the Non-Specific Offences: Other (Other) (as amended) Against the Provisions of the Annexe to the Civil Code published in some editions of the Astana Police Gazette on 26th December 1997, before the idea of trying the other lift occurred to me. Having worked more on faith than knowledge, I lighted with spiritual relief on my front door.

On Friday night I sent a text to Wendy: "Time was on a Friday night, I'd be off me tits in some dodgy warehouse with the fittest girl on the planet dancing to some well hard techno. Now I'm repeating phrases in Kazakh back to a computer screen. But I'm back in June. I wonder if I could persuade her out again?"