Monday 

Garfield has nothing on me when it comes to hating Monday mornings. Monday signals the beginning of another week and the passing of my one solitary day off - Sunday. I would love to have the whole damn weekend off but Saturday is a busy day at my school and it brings me in around 2000 baht. I would be 8,000 baht down if I gave up Saturdays and that's a sizable chunk of my salary.

Two things dawn on me this morning - firstly that I forgot to go to the laundry yesterday to pick up my washing and secondly that I haven't prepared today's lessons. My own absent- mindedness continues to wear me down and I'm now faced with wearing a pair of socks and underpants that are both very much at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to the weekly wash cycle. Still - if I can manage to stay sitting down in class, the students won't notice Bart Simpson peeping out from under my trousers.

I arrive at school at 8.57 for my 9.00 morning class. God, how I hate getting to school and having no time to prepare, not even time for a quick coffee. Water's just not the same. Not even time for a quick puff on a cigarette.

Without caffeine and nicotine, I feel gloomy - very gloomy indeed. Things are made worse by the fact that my group of three teenage girls haven't done their homework. They promised implicitly that they'd do it but no - they lied. My whole lesson plan (checking homework) has gone well and truly out of the window. Is this the moment when I vent all my growing frustration, stand in front of the whiteboard and call them lazy, good for nothing arseholes? Would they complain to the front desk if I did? Would I get the sack? Come to think of it - do I even care?

During the break I stand and smoke a fag near the fire exit. Great to at last take some nicotine into my lungs, but not so great to hear the weekend war stories from my teaching colleagues. Nana Plaza is going down the pan apparently. Number 27 at the Doll's House has a hell of a set of top bollocks on her. And John's sexual performance on Saturday night matched that of the great John Holmes himself - she was begging me to stop.

Difficult for me to either digest or comment. I'm too busy trying to work out an interesting and entertaining way to teach phrasal verbs. I decide that there isn't one. There's only one thing that can get me through the next lesson - a hastily photocopied word-search. The students will never use words like 'telescopic' or 'botanical' but it's the actual searching for the words that they enjoy - and isn't that what it's all about?

In the afternoon, I'm summoned to the office of the director of studies. He doesn't have a teacher to do the corporate job at XYZ computers out at the Whoflungdung industrial estate. It's a nice little earner - 600 baht an hour - if you can put up with the journey which involves a one-hour bus ride, 3 motorcycle taxis and a canal boat.

I arrive just in time for the class. Six overweight executives wearing glasses sit around a conference table. That's actually all that's in the room. There's no whiteboard, no board markers and no hope. I get out a book called 'presentation skills for a new generation' and the class ask me about whether I prefer Thai women to farang women. An hour into the lesson and we eventually turn to page 73. It looks dull - it looks deadly dull. I'm beginning to wish that I'd made more photocopies of the word-search.

A two-hour bus journey, 3 motorbike taxis, and a canal boat later, I'm standing outside my local laundry shop. She hasn't finished my washing. God, how I loathe and despise that woman with her nervous and embarrassed Thai smile which translates as 'life is a bag of shit...and this is your bag of shit' What I really need is a bag of freshly-laundered clothes.