Teach Yourself Semi-Modals in Non-Stative Verbs

I discovered I had a drinking problem yesterday.

I hide my empty bottles behind my armchair, as I'm not sure whether NDN comes in occasionally to have a look round the flat. When I checked on them yesterday I found that that they'd started their own breeding programme, a theory confirmed when I saw that each bottle in addition to the ones I had purchased was of the same brand of beer as the one I favour.

Protesting about being taken outside, they meanly broadcasted my relationship with alcohol to the occupants of the lift by settling loudly in erratic outbursts of clanking. Outside in the rubbish collection area, I slipped on the ice and they escaped, slithering joyfully to all corners of the courtyard, which is overlooked only by three forty-storey blocks of flats.

Life out here is not without its difficulties. On the bus, and in the street, I get stared at. At school, my colleagues go "s-s-s" to me as they pass me, which confused me at first until I realised that it's the polite form of "hello", reduced by the cautious native volume to sibiliants. It reminds me of meetings for the over-60s I had to go to help with when I was young at the Salvation Army. The one sound that sliced the room during the otherwise quavering hymn-signing were their shiny sibilants. The old rugged cross's last phoneme sang round the hall on a superfluity of saliva, the last fluid to be exhausted.

On Thursday I got to school and couldn't find the USB stick containing my lesson plans. I made up a day's lessons with half an hour, some paper, a pen and my imagination.

I set the first group a role play game in which we were in a restaurant. They had to choose their occupations, and I would be the waiter. There's one bright lad who wants to do well, and he's dragged down by the others. Same everywhere.

For another, much younger group, I made up a shit animal crossword, then did an equally pedagogically pointless "guess the city" game using hangman. A more advanced group is on modal verbs again, so building on my confident and thorough knowledge of them, I read through a grammar textbook in five minutes beforehand to refresh my memory about how they are used with non-stative verbs and the exceptions involving semi-modals.

There was one little light in the day though. During a break in lessons, when I was using the Kazakh teacher's classroom, she came in to collect something, just as I was trying to work out how to pronounce some of the phrases she had laminated onto the wall. She lighted on me and helped me though them. My eight- and nine-year-old pupils gathered round to listen to me mangling the simple Kazakh phrases on the wall, proffering the correct pronunciation and laughing at me or congratulating me according to the degree of my error.

But now... I'm off -- to an address I know I will be wandering
around and around trying to find -- to meet some of the other restless flotsam which has washed up in Astana for some reason, to meet and chat and, I hope, dance at a meeting for "global minds" at a "conceptual bar", at which DJ Lemonpie, no less, is playing.

One of my favourite house nights is on in Glasgow tonight, one that I've never missed since day one, so my heart will be in the Merchant City tonight, but despite having already got through my one-a-day, plus the Saturday supernumerary, and my feeling that everyone will be soberer in every way and that there's a possibility that I will act in a manner there that does my future here no good, I want very much to start socialising.

Update: it didn't happen. I found Akmeshit St, (great name), wandered up and down in minus 17 and could not find the place. Mind you, It was described as a "conceptual bar", so maybe we'll all get a text soon saying "hope you enjoyed the joke last night folks. It's a conceptual bar -- it doesn't exist! Geddit? Never mind, next Saturday, we're going to a real one." I got in, opened some beer and felt a bit lonely and down, knowing that had I been at home, I'd have been at this great little basement club in Glasgow I go to.