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?"

Last Sunday, NDN, my next door neighbour and minder here in Kaz, took me to show me the school. First we went to buy some paper for the school. NDN, a retired Kazakh Government official, pointed out Nazarbayev's portrait, looking up at it with starry eyes.

"That's our President," she said. "Our President. That's our President." I nodded and assented with stepwardly upward force. "I know it's your fucking President. You can hardly escape him can you? Is he the Kaz 'government official' who bought a 65 million Euro apartment in Paris in November?" I didn't say.

For some mysterious reason, she stopped the car about a hundred yards away from the Presidential Palace. "Please look here," she said. "Yes?" I replied, thinking I was going to be shown another architectural expression of the benevolent refulgence of The Father.

Instead, she wanted me to get out; and said that she would pick me up from the same spot in five minutes. The area was deserted, yet hostile. I walked nervously around the huge building with the bitterly amusing name, "The Ministry of Justice", aware that two policemen in a nearby police car were watching me, hairspring alert.

I decided to turn back and wait for her. Out of nowhere, I saw this huge black clad man staring at me from about twenty yards away. He was walking in a slow, wide-legged way towards me, gun stiff at his side. At that moment, she arrived to pick me up. He watched me get in, his eyes tracing me.

Seeing the outside of the school filled me with a foreboding almost unto sickness, because of the irreversibility of what I had done. Afterwards, NDN took me to an agreeable little caff nearby. I ploughed my way through the nearest thing to vegetarianism that I could find -- a chicken and potato pie effort, a carrot salad that seemed to go on and on and on, reproducing itself in the dish as fast as I ate it, with a side of potatoes. I had this odd pre-sweetened tea. Here's the bill for two of us. There are 400 Tenge to the pound.

On my way to my first day at school, I stared from NDN's car at the half-mile of golden, reflecting glass windows of the curving edifice of government buildings which acts like a protective parabola to shield the Presidential Palace behind it. Fear, insecurity, and temporary power as architecture. I had a dissociative, fatalistic feeling, a resignation to death. A stress reaction, certainly; an unglamorous out of body experience, perhaps.

The school is on one of those unplanned, scruffy Soviet-style estates
where smoking urchins hang out of windows and shout down to people
below. There's a dodgy looking little shop and the building itself is
placed at a jaunty angle facing no street in particular. Inside, it's Soviet-modern: black lettering on gold-coloured plates just to let you know what floor you're on, but only a single plug socket in each classroom.

As NDN said goodbye and handed me over to Lidia, my mentor at school, I felt this urge to grab her coat tails and and beg her not to leave me. Lidia was lovely though, a rare example of an adult Kazakh who can smile, and to my great surprise, the first day went reasonably well; and there was one moment when I looked out to see a black cat plunging with feline delicacy into the snow with every step, and I had to resist a premature hope that this might actually work out for me.

The propect of eating with the other teachers in the canteen had been another colour to my fearful, sleepless night, but Lidia was an expert translator-cum-canteen host. I had borscht and bread for 50p. I am the sole male member of staff in the school, and I have been informed that they consider me too thin and that I would benefit from some proper Kazakh food. I'm trying to steer the horse away by stressing how much I love the range of vegetables you can get here.

I sat down with Lidia afterwards, who said that I'm the third native English teacher this academic year. "Please don't leave us looby. Please stay until the end of the year at least. I saw a fire in your eye this morning looby" (Lidia, that was fear), "and you're the first person ever to mention wanting to learn Kazakh."

When I got in there was an odd email from the London office. "Please be careful with what you say to any local teacher in the school. Don’t say anyone that you are experiencing problems apart from Lidia. No one should know you [have] had a long break [from teaching]. Some of the local teachers see us as a threat and will report everything what you say or do to a director, anything can be used against us." I'm not surprised. The native English teacher is paid a lot more than the other teachers, doesn't have to work Saturdays, and gets to live in a rent-free flat that they wouldn't be able to afford.

And one from my brother, reporting that my Mum, who is convinced I live in a wooden hut with only a friendly horse for company, is willing to send over the fare home immediately, should I desire it. The untravelled visit their anxiety on the traveller: Kim told me that my flat might be bugged.

Turn the radio up, Winston

The school and I are in a state of co-dependency, which provides both parties with equally good a hand. And so far, I'm having a fine time here, easily funded with not much. I changed £100 at the airport six days ago for 40 000 Tenge, and I've still got 17 000 left. The line between drunkard slacker and breadhead can be a fine one.

Christmas was lovely. Kirsty's glittering and overfed artificial tree, the cat arching in front of the gas fire, and most of all, my girls back after their first term at their various universities.

On 27th, me and Trina went over to Middlesbrough. My mum enjoys a trip to the Toby Carvery, where we can eat food sweltering under lamps which ferment every airborne excrescence that your average sneezing, coughing, spluttering, nose-picking Smoggy can fling at it.

As part of my New Year's Resolution -- to have the kind of difficulties I want to have, rather than the ones I have in Lancaster -- I started answering ads for TEFL jobs. With her connivance, I'd forged a reference from ... and played the Caring Dad card by explaining the hectares of vacant space on my cv with the unanswerable "full-time childcare responsibilities".

Fifteen applications yielded three interviews, one of which -- for a job in Kazakhstan -- had to be scheduled for mid-carvery. I borrowed Trina's phone and we Instawhatted for half an hour. She rang back to say I'd got the job -- but -- "please could you not tell anyone at the school that you haven't got any recent experience?"

So I'm typing this tonight from my grace-and-favour apartment in Astana, the second coldest, and the gaudiest, capital city in the world. I'm bang in the centre of town, surrounded by Our Glorious President's monuments to himself.

A day later, at the Christmas meeting of the Unholy Trinity, Kitty and Wendy sparkled. "Maybe he'll meet a female yak farmer," said Kitty. "Maybe he'll meet a female yak," said Wendy.

I called in at the The Shipbuilder's Arms, where Les gave me a betting slip. "Your going away present, he said, "because you're a star." The horse, called A Sky Full of Stars, came in at 8/1 and I had a free afternoon's drinking. An ex-Army bloke, as drunk as un-habitual drinkers get on furlough, released his ambivalently friendly grip around my neck only when I reached a pitch of repeated and increasing force to iterate that I was not going to Afghanistan.

The night before I was to leave, sleep was almost impossible. Amongst my preoccupations was The Injunction. Issued by Wendy's ex, administered by her, and obeyed by me. It makes me glower with resentment that both me and Wendy comply with its terms. Wendy can do what she wants, but I'm not going along with it any more. Neither am I waiting on her months-old promise to "sort it out".

Possibly spoiling the pre-departure goodwill, I sent a text to Wendy saying that, as far as my own actions are concerned, The Injunction no longer applies. "I'm fucked if I'm doing all this and then coming back to obey some little twat's orders -- having to hide behind a car when I simply want to drop a card off!"

On the flight out, there was a three hour stopover at Frankfurt. To get out to the big concourse where all the bars and cafes are you have to go through security again, whereupon I was taken aside, in the company of a German gentleman carrying a yard-long gun, because my computer had tested positive for explosives. I've had my finger in a couple of dodgy pies in the past but I'm not a bomb-maker.

They made me switch it on and load it up, and so I stood shaking like a leaf while Herr Flick stood over me with his weapon while it came on.

As soon as the "server not found" message came up on the start page, they let me go. I asked the marginally more approachable of the cops what the problem had been and he unhelpfully repeated "it came up for explosives."

On the second leg, I had a very good spinach and cauliflower curry, plentiful large glasses of red wine, and enjoyable sign language banter with my neighbour. As I went to get off the plane, the man behind me genially poked me in the back to indicate that I was wearing one of my own shoes and one of his.

I arrived in Astana at 5.30am, fending off the predatory taxi drivers picking on foreigners to offer their services at special prices before I was met by the school owner's aunt.

We walked into the car park. The cold was shocking; my trousers had turned into paper. She couldn't find her car for a few minutes, but when we did, she turned the heated seats on, which felt weird. Cold should be a holistic experience.

She kept talking about taking us to "our house", and I imagined us living together, and how secretive I'd have to be about my drinking. We went to the block, where to my partial relief I given a mercifully briefly tour of a flat adjacent to hers. As soon as she left I collapsed into bed.

My body is resolutely refusing to adapt to Kazakh time. It's half past three in the morning here and she's taking me out for dinner tomorrow. Which may well involve something which once had a mane.