Back to school after almost a week off and the anxiety has returned, refreshed from its break. Waiting at the bus stop can feel like being in a nightmarish science fiction film. I texted Wendy. "Darling, every morning when I'm getting ready for school, I feel this sense of huge anxiety. I never feel prepared and I feel a complete fraud. I hope this feeling subsides soon into something more banal Xx"

I want my weekday mornings to dull into the customary resignation that characterises work for millions, not this sickness and worry. In the canteen, sitting with the other teachers, my spoon runneth over with borsht, because my hands are shaking.

I don't have my own classroom, and the computers are allocated to individual teachers. I was firmly told off in Russian a few days ago for using a guest account on one of them. Mine won't work because it's not connected to the whiteboards or speakers and so on. The photocopier has been out of action for over a week and the children don't have exercise books for English so everything's on loose bits of paper. They're bored with doing pen and paper exercises all the time, and one class in particular ignores me and fights and throws things at each other.

At the bus stop, someone asks me something. I shrug my shoulders and say "no" in Kazakh, and return to another preoccupation, The Injunction. I don't want to sour anything when I come back to Lancaster in June, but I will have to find a way of telling Wendy that I am refusing to obey it. Her ex uses their daughter as his proxy in his attempts to keep me away from Wendy, by refusing to allow The Little Dictator to be in my company even for a moment.

Because I haven't got a work visa, I have to leave Kazakhstan every four weeks. I was given 30 dollars -- in real Abraham Lincoln paper money -- for my hotel and expenses in Bishkek. Being short of money, I got in touch with a couchsurfer in order to pocket my accommodation allowance.

When I got to Bishtek I couldn't get in touch with him. I was wandering around the bazaar, a warren of little alleys with jackets one minute and whole skinned lambs with their heads still on the next. Night was drawing in and I had nowhere to stay.

I went to what I hoped was a cheap hotel but I had to change all my dollars in order to stay there. It was a noisy, sleepless night, with banging of doors and loud talking long into the night, intermittent silence only between about six and eight. At half nine someone rapped on the door. I said "yes yes", but at five minute intervals she came back. The third time, I thought I'd better let her in. She watched me get my things together and asked me if I was German. No breakfast was ever mentioned.

I had my fare to the airport -- 50p for fourteen miles -- squirrelled away, but little else. I bought a cup of tea from a stall, then decided to just get to the airport. I waited and waited and waited for the matroska -- one of those little minibuses -- but every number except the one I wanted came and left. I had almost resigned myself to having to hitch-hike.

A driver got out of his matroska for a fag. I drew a little picture of a matroska and a road and an aeroplane, and wrote the word "airport" in Russian. He pointed me across the park to another road and the right stop.

We passed through a poverty-striken landscape -- breeze block buildings with corrugated iron rooves, stray dogs and cats, people trudging down long unmade roads that stretch off into the distance. A group of oxen wandered around outside a house, and outside another, a group of men were digging energetically into a house-sized mound of coal, bagging it up.

I sat down in the welcome warmth of the airport, drooling at the bars which glistered with drink, envying the comfortably off people sitting there with beer and wine and food.

All at once, the policemen who were "guarding" the place decided to come and sit adjacent and opposite to me, attracted by the free mobile phone charging point. For the first time in my life, I had six revolvers and two machine guns within lunging distance. The chattiest one of them engaged me in a friendly, if laboriously translated, conversation.

He asked me if I'd eaten anything. "There is an inexpensive restaurant upstairs," said Googlecop. I stood up and shrugged and pulled out all the money I had, much less than a pound.

Using only raised eyebrows and movements of his head, he said "come with me. It's ok, I'll pay." And so, flanked by two armed policemen, I was led out of the public part of the airport, down some steps and into a canteen. I pointed at the food and he ordered for me. Potatoes and meat in a tomato sauce, two hard-boiled eggs, bread, and delicious apricot juice, thick and brown and sweet. I was so grateful.

We went back upstairs. Before we got back to the airport, he introduced me to his colleagues who were on outside duty. He wanted me to give him my whatsapp number. He made a gesture of waving his hand between our mouths and pointing to my phone. I don't know my number or how to give it to anyone, so I handed my phone over to one of the clutch of young policemen keen to show his smartphone prowess. It was all bobbing fur hats and laughter. They had the honesty and generosity of children.

Our first leg flight was called, three hours late, but post-security, flight there was none. We were left in a mall with posters of the most Western-looking models they can find on their budget, girls in ecstasy at a watch. Hour after hour passed. I got talking to au un-flying Dutchman, who told me about his son who'd been expelled from a private school in Asturias. I gave myself backache from trying to straighten up to appear less short to him.

He suggested we have a drink. I wanted a drink very much. Not a drink, but five or eight. I asked him if he could sub me one, trying to create a jovial triviality of my inability to find £2 for a pint. We sat there, in the middle of the night, in a glossy, stilled, liminal zone.

Our flight eventually left at 3.30am, just after my London boss had told me not to go in on Monday. I got home at 9.30 and went to bed. When I got up there were two messages from Lidia at school, who knew I'd spent the night sleepless in airports. "What about lesson plans for Year 4?", followed by a shorter one a few minutes later: "?"

Oh Lord above,
who hath, in thy infinite kindness,
bestowed upon our fair city of Astana,
in our beloved country of the fermented milk of the mare
and verily unto the meat of her bottom,
the blessed coldness of minus 35.
And thus hath moved your agent here on Earth,
to issue a decree
that all places of instruction be closed,
and rest be given to the instructors therein,
We beseech thee, almighty Father,
that thy graciousness be extended another day,
and another day,
and another,
e'en unto the weekend.
For thine is the snow, the wind and the skiving,
for ever and ever, or at least until Friday,
Amen.

It worked, and I've had a doss of a week. School's been closed because of the cold, but I went in for half of today to help plan a special public lesson the English Department's doing about "ecological problems." They mean environmental ones but one doesn't want to be awkward three weeks in.

I'd been told that I'd be working with Hira. I couldn't place her; Kazakh names are difficult to remember. Lidia introduced me to her. "Hello!" I said. Black straight hair to just below her shoulders with a parting slightly set to the left, black top with black sequins, undone black jacket, tight black trousers and little black boots with a blocked one-inch heel, and most of all, her dark green eyes.

We went downstairs into, for me, a hitherto undiscovered staff room. Some tall grey metal lockers, a couple of tables, and a tempting sofa made for horizontal Anglo-Kazakh snogging.

She talked volubly, and the notes she made were a mess. Both endeared her to me: conscientiousness at work makes me uneasy. In the canteen, Svetlana, the other English teacher, had had a younging haircut and was wearing a groovy orange short-sleeved dress.

Nice Other Teacher came in with an excellent and unusual ensemble of a straight calf-length dress with black squares of various sizes on a grey ground, with a long-sleeved light open jacket of the same pattern. It was clashing enough to avoid being a twin-set but harmonious enough to have my grateful eyes roaming over it in a way that I hope was inoffensively brief, yet noticed.

She doesn't speak much English, but from little more than a foot away, she stopped and looked straight at me. "Hello," she said. "Hello, I smiled back. "How are you?" Lidia's already told me she's single. The day was starting to feel like a set-up for flirting.

Until misery guts Soviet maths teacher turned up, refusing to make this the day when she broke her silence towards me. I am going to grind her into a "good morning" with relentless manners; then once I've done that, make her jealous with my flirting with Hira, Svetlana, and Nice Other Teacher and make her crispy cuntflaps unstiffen for the first time in years.

While I was there, I ran off a few photocopies of something to teach the present perfect. I reckon that Keith acquiring a tash has landed him in a form of the present perfect that he's been longing to tell people about for years.

We've got our second day off in a row today, because of the cold. The Met Office reckons it "feels like" minus 46. I wanted to see what that really does feel like, so yesterday I took Mr Joyce to a "German" brewpub.

There's always the staring, the treacly slow passage of a couple of seconds during which they stand absolutely still and don't say a word to you during the facial inspection; before a super-ego'd civility resumes its precedence over their id-driven bemusement at unfamiliar racial features. They want to be decent, but they can come across as country folk sometimes. Fuck knows what it would be like to be black here.

The beer was 900 Tenge -- £2 -- but that's a lot of money when you can get a perfectly good bottle of Kazakh wine in the supermarket for 950. I stayed for only the one, feeling self-conscious and disabled by my lack of Kazakh, missing the shameless open-ended afternoons down The Shipbuilder's Arms, missing Karen in her narrow-waisted broderie anglaise top and black miniskirt, and how she gives me license to say the first thing that comes into my head.

I went to pay with a 1000 note. The waiter brought my bill, revealing its rune in a red leatherette apparatus that looked like a prop from Fawlty Towers. He disappeared with my money, and I stood awkwardly at the bar next to a young local girl, before realising that he wasn't coming back with any change. I fiddled with my phone to provide a cover for a fiftysomething foreign man hovering next to a woman half his age.

Checking my emails, I am invited to an interview for a job in Piedmont, (which I decline), and I arrange a meeting with the Export Director of a refrigeration equipment firm to discuss giving the executives business English lessons. I've never been in such demand in my life.

One from Wendy glints like a single sequin; I save it till last. She ends it with a paragraph, "I want to get drunk with you", and sexual desire for her washed over me.

I changed some money yesterday. Not quite all of it, because the cashier refused one of the old style tenners, pointing at the dates during which Charles Darwin was alive and shaking his head. But with what was acceptable for transmutation, I'm off to buy a "smartphone". Wish me luck -- I hardly know what a smartphone is. Work wants me to have one, and I can Instawhat home for free.

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.

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?"