Six days before I was supposed to start teaching, I received an email telling me I was not qualified to teach.
This was mildly surprising because I had already done the interview, taught the trial lesson and been told I would probably have around eight hours a week.
The woman who made that arrangement had since left.
New management. New rules.
I have taught at universities, written several books in English and spent most of my adult life earning money through the language. Unfortunately, I lack the appropriate certificate saying I can teach it. I was, well still am, a PhD-holder from the London School of Eonomics. Subject: Polish politics.
Fair enough. Rules is rules.
The new director was perfectly polite.
Poland had not conspired against me.
Another little plan had simply disappeared.
Again.
This has been happening for about six years.
I came back to Warsaw shortly before Covid, got stuck here during the pandemic and watched much of my freelance work disappear. Since then I have performed the familiar dance.
Pivot.
Diversify.
Upskill.
Network.
Repeat.
At various points I have worked for or with Polish Radio, PAP, TVP World, the Institute of National Remembrance, the National Bank of Poland, universities, media companies and assorted institutions.
There have been good people and interesting work.
There have also been contracts I never quite understood, small payments requiring heroic quantities of paperwork, jobs disappearing while I was still working out what the job was, and institutional misunderstandings conducted with enormous seriousness over remarkably little money.
Perhaps I am simply bad at Polish institutions. Or, quite frankly, unable to give a fuck.
Entirely possible.
I am tired of Poland talking endlessly about Poland to itself. If it could package and export this commodity, Poland would be a world power.
Is Poland understood in the West?
Does Poland have an image problem?
Does Poland need rebranding?
Has Poland finally become a major European power?
Has a Polish man won the regional tiddlywinks championship in Paraguay?
I don’t think Poland needs rebranding.
You cannot organise a conference and instruct people to like you.
And after all these years, I am tired of staring at Poland while Poland stares back.
Meanwhile I have a small company.
Sometimes. When there isn’t enough money to pay ZUS, I suspend it.
When somebody wants an invoice, I need the company again.
Then ZUS returns.
I have occasionally been unable to pay the accountant whose job is partly to calculate how little money I have.
There is a certain elegance to this.
So I pivoted again.
I built a website offering English conversation classes. I wrote the copy, organised the courses, paid for technical work, promoted it and waited.
Current results:
Students: zero.
Enquiries: zero.
Emails expressing vague curiosity: zero.
A wonderfully clean dataset.
I still teach privately. I write for a Turkish news agency. I teach at the University of Warsaw. This week I appeared on Egyptian television talking about European asylum policy. So I am not totally useless. But not a grand hill of beans.
When you have very little money, you discover how much of ordinary existence costs.
I currently have 127 złotys to last nine days.
This produces an interesting new professional role.
The internal actuary.
He wakes up before me.
Fourteen złotys a day.
Approximately. Grosze now count.
Potatoes are good.
Beans are good.
Carrots.
Onions.
Pasta.
Anything that expands when introduced to water.
Coffee outside is suddenly an astonishing luxury.
The internal actuary objects.
So you walk.
Cycle.
Cook.
Sleep rather more than usual. Don’t require a dentist whatever you do.
You learn which pleasures remain free and which only appeared free because you previously had money.
A bicycle ride costs almost nothing.
A walk is still free.
A conversation is generally free, although getting across Warsaw to have one may not be.
A bus is not free.
Spontaneity turns out to have a surprisingly specific price.
When people say money doesn’t matter, they normally have some.
Without it, the geography of the possible begins to shrink.
You don’t disappear entirely.
But you become quieter.
You stop entering places.
You stop suggesting things.
You stop saying, shall we meet there?
You calculate first.
You begin to understand that participation itself has an entrance fee.
That is perhaps the part of poverty I had understood least.
The probem is I have spent more than twenty years here and don’t think I ever particularly wanted to.
There is actually very little here I want to join or ever did.
I have friends here. People I love. Places I know intimately. I speak the language, imperfecty. I know where the roads go.
That is different from wanting incorporation.
Maybe Poland was a very long holiday.
An extraordinary one.
Marriage, children, houses, books, arguments, elections, football, hospitals, friendships, journalism, winters, summers, births, deaths, absurdities.
At some point the holiday became a life.
And at some point the life ran out of steam.
The difficulty is that I cannot simply pack a suitcase.
I own a house here.
More importantly, I have three sons here, aged 11, 12 and 12.
They go to school. They need their dad. They need, ideally, a reasonably functional human being who turns up, listens, cooks, watches football, occasionally knows what to say and occasionally has the sense to say nothing.
So the dramatic Polexit has certain practical weaknesses.
Then there is England.
If the house sells, I may emerge with something around a million złotys.
In Poland, that is solid money.
In the parts of England I know and might actually want to live in, it buys a modest garage.
There are other things to look at.
I have started writing a book about England. Publishers have shown an interest.
Perhaps that is the only pivot that interests me now.
Not another marketing strategy.
A change of direction.
The tools I developed looking at Poland can finally be pointed homewards.
Meanwhile I will make a Polish edition of my latest book. Send it to publishers. Wait for the inevitable silence.
There is no tragedy here.
No blacklist.
No great injustice.
No lesson.
The holiday was just very long.
Much of it was extraordinary.
It simply seems to be ending.
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