There's an Egg in My Soup Read Online Free PDF Page A

The houses would gradually disappear until, finally, there would be nothing but darkness. I liked those evenings. I would drink one beer after the next, watching this transformation from day to night. By the time it got dark I was almost fit for bed. And I would wonder where all the people were in this town. It seemed to just grind toa standstill once night fell.
    In the mornings I would wake and take a minute to remind myself where I was. Then I would take a look around the flat, maybe fix up one more room, unpack a bit more, and plan what to do with the place for the year.
    Still lacking the courage to queue in the main store for proper food, I was driven to the pizza restaurant a number of times over the next few days, until some old woman farted at me. I can still picture her perfectly. She stood outside a planked-up wooden house, sucking the guts out of a cigarette, idly examining the evening. Short legs planted into a pair of furry slippers, she fixed me with a stare from some way off. Then as I passed, she winced up one eye and farted loudly. Maybe she didn’t mean it. But I won’t forget that fart. It was the only form of human communication in days.

Class Acts and Strange Tongues
    In contrast to the quiet of the previous few days, the day school started was mayhem. The night before it was due to commence, the students began arriving in droves to take up their rooms on corridors that had until then been like a tomb. It had been explained to us that all schools have their boarding blocks, but that didn’t mean they were all boarding schools. Kids would come from remote villages or towns scattered across the province or even further, and rather than face long journeys on infrequent buses through cold winters, would instead stay in the blocks for a very small fee, since the schools were essentially run by the State.
    I sat up for hours that night, distracted by the chaos of slamming doors, screaming kids who hadn’t seen each other all summer and a discordant mix from a variety of stereos playing a variety of music.
    Poring over the books and notes that I’d taken with me, I realised I hadn’t a clue how I was going to get through it. Too many years in college had put the idea in my head that I wanted to teach. It was the necessaryextension of a long period of academia without any practical applications. In fact, it was the only route I wanted to go down, because I was really a domesticated college animal. Business, uniforms, suits and nine-to-five jobs held no interest for me whatsoever.
    But as I sat there that night reading over the notes from the training school, I realised that I’d no idea where to even begin. Teaching is a vocation and, like many vocations, it can call on those who have the heart, but perhaps not the expertise, to deliver. It occurred to me that evening that maybe I was one of those poor souls. Good intentions are not always good enough.
    The instructors in the school in Dublin had bent over backwards to prepare us. We had spent weeks in mock lessons, experimenting on Spanish and Italian kids who had volunteered to be taught by the teachers who had never taught before. Throughout the training a lot of worrying issues were raised regarding the schools to which we were being sent. Tape recorders, televisions, photocopiers, proper books and possibly even chalk would be lacking, so we were warned to prepare and to take with us any amount of props that could be used to get us out of sticky situations – regular and irregular verbs written on stiff pieces of cardboard and laminated; articles from magazines; photographs, books and lots of coloured markers. But I was still trying to come to grips with the complexities of English grammar. The ability tospeak and write your native language doesn’t qualify you to explain its make-up. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that there were an infinite number of questions that could leave me stumped up there.
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