TEFL: Teaching English… For Love?

I think most of us will have been attracted to one of our colleagues in the staff room at one time or another.  At a school in Hong Kong I once became smitten by one of my co-workers; was it her looks, her charm, or her knowledge of English verb tenses? I don’t know, but I couldn’t get her out of my mind – it would wander to visions of us staring at each other adoringly over a copy of Cutting Edge’s Teachers’ book (Pre-Int edition), or imagining us skipping hand-in-hand to a lecture on the latest innovations in English language teaching by Scott Thornbury.

One day my dreams seemed to have come true.  We were chatting by the photocopier when somehow or other I ended up being invited to dinner at her flat in Sui Sai Wan on Hong Kong Island.  That day my classes passed in a blur; my mind distracted by the wonderful prospect of the evening’s date.  As soon as my classes finished, I sped home, showered, changed and tried to think of some amusing lines or anecdotes I would use to woo my lovely colleague.  En route I picked up a bottle of red and a box of chocolates from the Seven Eleven, jumped on the MTR (the subway) and headed off for a night of romance. 

There I was, staring up at one of Hong Kong’s ubiquitous skyscrapers that seemed to disappear into the mists, a patchwork of lights coming from the occupied apartments – one of them my colleague’s.  My heart pounding, I walked towards the tower block’s entrance firmly gripping my bottle of red in one hand and a box of pretty-good chocolates in the other. And that’s when everything started to go a bit pear shaped…

I saw a nice-looking couple in the lift smiling at me while holding the elevator doors open, so I broke into a sprint – and ran headlong into a wall of glass.  In the stunned moment immediately after the ‘bang’ my gaze took in the startled Nepalese security men looking at me from behind the reception desk, the couple in the lift frantically trying to press the button to close the lift doors, the neck of the wine bottle in my hand – the rest of the bottle was in bits in a pool of red wine on the floor, and the imprint of a Neanderthal-like nose and forehead on the glass doors I’d just run into.  I extracted my thumb from a soft-centered chocolate in the squished box, put it under my arm and opened the door.  I offered to clean up the mess, but the security guards were keen for me to just go, so I walked to the lift, blood oozing from a cut on the bridge of my nose and waited patiently for the lift.

Kate’s apartment door was ajar so when I rang the doorbell, I heard her shout ‘come in!’ and so walked in and popped my head around the living-room door where she was on the phone to her mum.  Her big smile disappeared instantly when she saw me with blood now all over one side of my face with smears of chocolate also present where I’d try to wipe the blood away.  She abruptly told her mum ‘I have to go’ and then listened to my explanation (still holding the neck of a bottle of wine in one hand) through blocked nose as she drove me to Accident and Emergency.  Four hours at A&E waiting for me to have stitches in my nose didn’t help – we never had another date.  I guess it’s true – love hurts, it really really does.      

By Delv

Photograph: from pixabay.com, by  Ben_Kerckx