Life Behind The Curtain

Despite hearing a hundred different reason why I shouldn't, I find I like it a lot here. The staff are friendly, my students mostly great and I'm still at the stage where even the walk home seems wonderfully exotic. The only negative is the high cost of everyday items - and even then I was braced for the worst after a year in the Czech Republic (although at least beer will always be cheap there).

On my salary and deductions - a whopping 31% since New Year tax rises - I'm living on a budget of about 100 lats a week (£130). It leaves me comfortably above subsistence level but doesn't support many extravagances, what with a pint of beer going for anything up to three lats in the Old Town. The difference, I suppose, between my buying power here and in Japan is this: in Tokyo I would occasionally think carefully about the cost of eating in a restaurant. Here I have the same dilemma in the supermarket, looking at a tin of peas.

Football In The Credit Crunch

For now there's still an incredible amount of money sloshing around the Premier League, but you can't help feeling the general trend is towards the shit. Half the league is skint or up for sale, Everton, West Ham and Newcastle are as unwanted as Steve Gerrard's music in a Southport bar, while Manchester United and Liverpool fans will have nothing to smile about when Glazer and Hicks pass on the costs of their next set of loans. And where's the fun in being the world's richest football club when the best it gets you is Scotty Parker's centre circle pirouhettes for £12 million and a hundred grand a week?

While they're in that kind of mood, how about Xisco for six?

The Latvian Language Conundrum

What language should a foreigner learn in Riga? The question isn't as straightforward as it sounds: over half of the city's population speaks Russian as their first language, and though all children take school leaving exams in Latvian not everyone remembers it a few years later. Only one person from the school's admin staff is a native Latvian speaker; seven of my eight classes are made up of people who speak Russian. "Use English," my students advised. "All young people know it."

Most Latvians, a linguistic minority in their own capital city, would react differently. Some take it to extremes. One of my workmates tells a story about a woman asking him directions to the ferry terminal. "I knew enough Latvian to understand the question but not enough to answer it so I explained very slowly in English. She stopped me halfway through, "You are in Latvia. Speak only Latvian." I gave her a crash course in bad language. In English."

I Start Teaching

My first class were all Russian speakers, seven kids between 15 and 17 years old. They reminded me of Italians: nice, intelligent but a complete pain in the arse to control. I heard more spoken Russian in the first ten minutes of the lesson than I had in my entire thirty-two-and-three-quarter years of prior existence - a time which seemed suddenly remarkably blessed, like an English village in the years before 1914.

We went through the usual getting to know you activities (teenagers are always interested in a new teacher, just not in anything you want to tell them). They recoiled when they heard where I lived ("People drink beer outside, on the stairs.") and burst out laughing when they discovered I'd been in Japan. "Why did you leave Tokyo to come here? I think you must be crazy. In Latvia the economics are..." she could find no adequate word for what she wanted to say, so settled for throwing her hands in the air. "It does not matter. You will not stay here more than a month." "Why not?" I asked. "Nobody could," she replied, with a further fling of the hands.

My adults were more optimistic. "Go to Sigulda," said one, "it's very nice in autumn."

Christmas in Old Riga

The restored House of the Blackheads and St Peter's Church, Ratslaukums (Town Hall Square).

At Work

It was just getting light at half past eight. On the street outside a line of traffic waited impatiently to cross the tram tracks. With the wind chill, the temperature had fallen to minus twenty-four.

The short walk to work took me past the Stalinist Empire State Building, straight through the central railway station (blasts of heat, straggly queues in front of the ticket windows and a yellow shop sign with ‘Food Supplements, The Special goods, Functional Food’ written in three languages, including badly punctuated English), across the square in front of Rimi Supermarket, and to the edge of the misleadingly named Centrs, not quite, in fact, the centre of town but Riga’s most important shopping district, where small groups in uniform were scraping snow off the pavements with flat spades like pizza shovels.

I sat on my own for an hour filling out an Application for Requiring a Residence Permit, which asked in Russian, Latvian and English for the names, addresses and birthdays of my parents, siblings and ex-wife, my proficiency level in Latvian and other foreign languages, places of employment in the past five years, and whether I had "ever been inflicted a penalty on committing an offence" (No, I think).

And yet the application itself was surprisingly simple. The usual delay on a stiff-backed chair, two or three questions in English (and a brief telling off for "not understanding the form"), and a fortnight's wait until I go back to pick up my permit. In the Czech Republic the same process took six months; finally I gave up and worked as the Czechs do - in the black.

Shopping in Riga

The sun had come out but the shoppers were all indoors at Riga's Central Market. All around the converted German zeppelin hangers that form the main part of the market there were stall holders with fur hats and bodies the size of beer kegs, selling oranges and grapes from slatted benches covered with snow, and wooden kiosks with Zippo lighters, leather caps, pirated CDs and cheap, unbranded shoes.

Things were livelier inside, though the choices were more or less the same. There was a queue of old people in a four aisle supermarket, slabs of meat and pale yellow cheese laid out in open-topped fridges, pile after pile of dull-coloured winter vegetables, fish tanks full of carp, and a shop selling pasta and tea bags at prices that made Tokyo seem cheap.

I walked outside, back into the cold, and continued on to the station. Skaters circled a Christmas tree, two men in coloured capes were dancing to the panpipes.

Welcome to Latvia

The airport car park was covered in slush, brown and dirty grey, with piles of icy snow where the grass had been. My driver smiled ironically, "Welcome to Riga, cleanest city of the world."

Laughing, he kept up his despairing monologue all the way through the boxy, concrete suburbs. "Here everything is expensive. You go to the supermarket and think I don't need this bread today, the milk can wait. Everywhere is corruption. In Estonia and Lithuania they have better ideas, younger people. Here only corruption - soon we will be more expensive than Moscow."

We drove past a TV tower, over a bridge. There were heaps of snow on the pavement; I caught a glimpse of church spires and red roofs in the distance. "Crime is high here too. You don't have a car? Be careful on the streets after dark."

Where I Live

I live on the second landing of a five-storey tenement in a part of the city my guidebook describes as "quiet, run-down...seemingly untouched by post-Soviet economic changes". The snow-piled banks of the Daugava are fifty metres away, there's a chemist's on the corner opposite and a shop selling fireworks directly behind. I can walk to the centre in ten minutes, past an outdoor market, a bus station advertising one-way tickets to Prague for thirty-two lats, a glass-fronted multiplex and the city's first ever skyscraper, a reinforced concrete, Gothic space rocket gifted by Stalin to his new subject people.

Upping Sticks

You can't blame Shay Given for being disillusioned at life in the coconut shy that is a Newcastle United goalmouth. As good as he is, with Harper and Krul in reserve he's also the one saleable asset who can be replaced from within the existing squad. But his reasons for wanting to leave tell you everything you need to know about the state of the club under Ashley and Wise.

Gone are the dreams of cup runs and the Champions League. Unlike Shay, the best we can hope for now is that things don't get any worse.