I’m getting plenty of work in the run-up to my trip away. Six lessons yesterday, four today. I finished off the New York version of my skyscraper board game with both the teenage boys today. Both games finished with identical 21-15 scores (a loss and a win for me). They were both a bit more clear-cut than the time we played the Chicago version. The different buildings – some bigger and harder to build than others – appear in a random order in the game, and in both these latest games the big guns like the One World Trade Center and Central Park Tower came out towards the end, when it would have more fun if they’d come out at the start when you have more time to complete them.
Not long now until my holiday, which could still be marred by the latest Covid wave, a record heat wave, and a veritable tsunami of flight delays and cancellations. My brother and sister-in-law said they’d be happy to meet me off the plane at Stansted on Thursday the 28th, then they’ll take me down to their newish place in Poole. I expect I’ll spend the weekend with them. After that I’d like to see my friend in Birmingham where the Commonwealth Games will be in full swing – since I was in New Zealand for the successful Auckland games of 1990, this event has become a bit of an anachronism, but it’s probably the only chance I’ll get to see (for instance) live weightlifting. Or we might end up meeting in London instead if getting to Birmingham from my brother’s place all gets too hard or too expensive or both. Then I plan to spend the rest of my British break at my parents’ flat in St Ives. I’m pretty excited about the Italy bit before and after my stay in the UK.
A maddeningly common sight, near where I get my water. I still have my old mattress.The roof of umbrellas on Strada Alba Iulia today. And as if by magic, the US dollar and euro exchange rates have essentially converged.The Chicago edition of my board game…… and here’s the New York edition.
I’ve had a bit of a crappy time of it the last few days. On Wednesday night I had a piercing sinus headache on my right side – one of those “screwdriver rammed up my nose” ones – and although it eased at around four in the morning, it destroyed my sleep and my energy for the next day. Yesterday was an improvement, but the pain returned last night and I’ve reverted to go-slow mode today. I was grateful for the storm that put paid to this evening’s tennis.
The first half of the week wasn’t too bad. I got good feedback from the two teenage boys about my new skyscraper-building board game. The first one said something like “isn’t it amazing that you’ve actually made this?” which was nice to hear. I was on solid ground with them; after a combined 400-odd lessons, they probably weren’t going to say they hated my stupid game and didn’t want to see me again. (Someone basically did tell me that once, though it wasn’t a game I’d created.) The timing was good because they’d just had their high-pressure exams in Romanian and maths that will determine where they go for their final four years of school, so there was a good chance they’d be receptive to some kind of game.
Lots of politics this week. The US Supreme Court have made abortion illegal in something like half the states. Even if you are anti-abortion, actually banning it is monumentally stupid and evil. Thousands of women will die because of this ruling that has been handed down by half a dozen ultra-extreme religious loons whose concern about a child’s life seems to evaporate once it is born, if their attitude to guns is anything to go by. And where will they stop? Will abortion soon be outlawed nationwide? Homosexuality too? Who was it who said that America shouldn’t fear Islam, but fundamental so-called Christianity instead? They’ve been proven right. This latest ruling will have repercussions that go beyond America’s borders; I could see abortion laws being tightened in religious countries like Romania. The whole political system in the US so utterly messed up. It would be good it could burn to the ground.
In happier news across the pond, the Conservatives lost both the by-elections they were contesting on Thursday, the sixth anniversary of the Brexit referendum. In the next general election, voters absolutely all-capital-letters MUST vote tactically for whatever party is most likely to beat the Tories. Labour, Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru, it doesn’t matter. If Labour don’t win a majority, that doesn’t matter either. In fact it’s better if nobody wins a majority. The more chance there would then be of the terrible electoral system (albeit not nearly as egregious as the American one) changing.
I called my sister-in-law last night. I knew she and my brother had gone up to St Ives, but was very surprised to see her in the church by the river. She said she was at a “Booze in the Pews” event. After the news from the US yesterday, I was glad to hear that so few people in the UK now use churches for their original purpose that they hold drinking sessions there. My sister-in-law, six months pregnant, wasn’t partaking.
I plan to travel to the UK in a month’s time, but I’ve been unable to book a flight because I still haven’t got a replacement debit card after I nearly got scammed two weeks ago. I’m getting just enough cash payments to tide me over from week to week. What a pain.
I’ve just had a phone call. It was a woman from the mattress company. She spoke so damn fast at the beginning that I almost blacked out. After all this time, Romanian on the phone can still be a real challenge for me.
Right now I’m living in a near-permanent state of fatigue. I don’t know if it’s the heat, the stress related to the move, the regular bike rides, or some combination. I don’t feel refreshed even after a full night’s sleep. Maybe I really need this new mattress.
I had a chat with my brother on Sunday. They still had the bunting out for the jubilee. It’s obvious that he’s had enough of life in the army. All the early starts and pointless trips are getting to him. Amazingly he’s started a correspondence university course in – I think – business management. He says he’ll finish it in 18 months. My sister-in-law, who is expanding, was more upbeat. Mum keeps referring to her future grandson as Herbie, which was the name of a guinea pig we used to have. (We don’t even know what it’ll be yet. It’s still an it.)
After being booed at the jubilee, Boris Johnson survived his confidence vote last night, but a whopping 41% of his Tory colleagues voted against him. His supporters – a bunch of overgrown schoolboys – banged their desks in unison on learning the result. A good result for the country, Boris said. In the medium and long term, I hope he’s right. A divided party with a lame-duck leader that staggers on to the next election, then gets well and truly stuffed. The UK ends up with a coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems, and the SNP. They introduce proportional representation. That would be good for the country.
Shortly before the jubilee celebrations, the British government announced that pounds and ounces and other imperial measurements could be making a comeback, not that they’ve totally gone away. I’ve always quite liked imperial measurements because they’re batshit mad and much more fun to say than the metric versions. I recently got one of my students to read a simplified version of Alice in Wonderland in which Alice’s heights had been converted into metres and centimetres, and it felt like we’d been transported to a lab. I still remember Dad (“you can’t even see those silly millimetres”) ordering sheets of glass for his paintings in inches, one by one, over the phone. “Twenty-four and five-eighths by seventeen and three-quarters.” The person on the other end would repeat the dimensions back to him, and the whole thing took on a poetic quality, a bit like the BBC shipping forecast. But, after being taught in metric and living all those years in New Zealand, and now Romania where non-metric is almost unheard of, it’s obvious that metric is far superior for doing actual calculations and when you’ve got to, you know, do business internationally. Going back to imperial would quite clearly be crazy.
The shipping forecast, read four times a day on Radio 4, has a place in British culture. It follows a strict format that hasn’t changed in decades, running through the evocative names of the shipping areas – 31 in all – always going round the British Isles clockwise in the same order: Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, and so on. I liked listening to it as a kid, and I still remember the warnings of “hurricane force 12” in the storm of October 1987. It’s still popular today, even if it’s far less in demand, thanks to the internet. It reminds you that you’re part of something far bigger, that there are people out there exposed to the high seas, not in air-conditioned offices. Regular listeners get to know the announcers. I tuned in over the weekend and listened to a forecast read by Neil Nunes, who has quite a wonderful deep voice. He comes from Jamaica and started at the BBC in 2006. Apparently some rather bigoted listeners complained at the time that his voice wasn’t British enough. The late-night forecast is preceded by Sailing By, a beautiful song. (YouTube comments are nearly always awful, but the ones for Sailing By are delightful.) Other maritime countries, like New Zealand, have shipping forecasts too, but they don’t have the cultural signficance of the British one. The shipping areas are rattled off in a great 1994 song by Blur called This is a Low. Damon Albarn, whom I’ve seen live, likes referencing the sea in his songs.
After Saturday’s washout, I played tennis on Sunday. It was a hot one, and I was relieved to be playing doubles and not singles. They had some kind of party on the beach volleyball courts next door, with music that I found almost unbearable. I partnered a 14-year-old girl against two men, and we played a heck of a set lasting roughly an hour. Following numerous deuce games, we got to 6-6 but then fell 6-1 behind in the tie-break. We saved four set points but my error on the fifth was the last shot of the set. We had to call it a day at 2-2 in the second set. After that we picked sour cherries from the laden tree next to the courts. It’s a great time for fruit right now.
As promised last time, here are some pictures.
I took this picture on Saturday night. Magda, on her 58th birthday, with Domnul Sfâra, 87.A last picture of Piața Victoriei on the day I left for good.A game of backgammon at Piața Lipovei. You can also see the egg and coffee machines.A law firm. The two names are identical, just that one (Kovacs) is written in the original Hungarian way while the other (Covaci) has been Romanianised.An old, and small, Pegas bicycle at the supermarket yesterday. This dates from communist times when these were virtually the only bikes around. In the last few years, modern Pegas bikes have come on the market, though they’re no longer made in Romania.
I’m still at the disorientation – “Where does this go?” – stage of living in my new flat, and with none of the bells or clattering trams to fix me in either time or space. Instead of the early-morning trams shuttling workers to their six-till-two shifts in factories that make car headlamps or foam products, I now hear trucks that could be carrying anything anywhere. On the plus side, I hear more birds, and the location honestly isn’t bad. There are tram lines just out of earshot, the river is close by, and the big market, nestled among the old Austro-Hungarian buildings, is only a five-minute bike ride from here. Inside, it’s a mishmash of eighties bathrooms with old-style cisterns and chains, seemingly endless Ikea-like wardrobe space, and modern appliances that won’t stop beeping at me. Yes, OK, OK, give me a minute. This apartment block is one of half a dozen in what you might call a pod; in the centre of the pod is a car park which, as well as functioning cars, contains walnut trees, two abandoned souped-up VW Beetles, and a farm vehicle long out of commission. My particular block was built in around 1980 and comprises ten flats. My deeds, or whatever you call them here, tell me that I own 12.78% of the block, so more than my fair share, and as I potter about the place I get regular reminders that I have much more space than I need, especially now when all my lessons are either online or at my students’ places. It isn’t as bad on that score as my flat in Wellington; when I returned from my trip to America on a wintry September day in 2015, I almost burst into tears at how empty and lifeless it seemed. The good news is that I’m less exposed financially than when I bought my Wellington apartment, so even the worst-case scenario won’t kill me, assuming no Russian bombs descend on this city. On Friday I bought some home and contents insurance (with a war exclusion, of course) and ordered a mattress made here in Timișoara.
Yesterday my tennis was called off for the third time running. I’d only just left on my bike when it started to bucket it down. I stood under a tree for a while and then went to my neighbours’ (Florin and Magda’s) place back at the old block. I caught the end of Iga Świątek’s crushing win over Coco Gauff in the final of Roland Garros on their TV, and then we went to the restaurant by the river. It was a balmy evening and the rain had stopped. Not until people started turning up out of nowhere did I realise that the get-together was to celebrate Magda’s birthday. People chatted, and sometimes I was fully involved in the conversation while at other times I was trying desperately to tune in. (That’s not far off what happens, at best, in my own language.) I had some traditional Romanian food – that means meat – and three beers, which is a lot for me these days. I got home at about 10:30.
Jubilee celebrations are still going on in the UK, and that’s mostly what my parents wanted to talk about this morning. Mum said that 70 years on the throne is an incredible achievement. (As all it involves is not dying when you have the best healthcare imaginable, I’m unconvinced.) My brother’s house is apparently decked out in bunting. Although I’m no royalist (I’m agnostic – I really don’t care), I can hardly blame people for wanting a party (whatever the reason) after two years of lockdowns and not being able to get vital surgery or see their sick relatives. I emailed my friend in Birmingham (no royalist either) to ask how his long jubilee weekend was going, and I got a pretty clear meh in reply. Little sign of bunting around his way. I’m detecting a pretty strong north–south (or east–west) divide.
The French Open has been great from a tennis point of view, but the organisation has been lacking at times. I don’t like the way they’ve tried to make it more like the Australian and US Opens with night sessions starting ridiculously late. Some of the play has been sublime, but even when I was watching Nadal come up with an extraordinary passing shot at set point down against Sascha Zverev, I found myself pining for those women’s finals in the nineties, when people were smoking in the stands and you could tell that it was the French Open. Now it could be almost anywhere. I expected Djokovic to beat Nadal in their quarter-final, which at times threatened to outdo their famous Australian Open final. Zverev’s ankle injury in his match with Nadal was excruciating even to watch. Nadal got out of jail twice there (first by robbing Zverev of the opening set, and then being saved from a six-hour-plus match); he’s a huge favourite in the final against Casper Ruud.
It looks like I might have bought a flat. On Tuesday I met up with the owner, a very bronzed lady in her forties, and asked her about the heating and why there are massive mirrors, covering entire walls, in what will hopefully be my teaching room. She said she used to run gym classes in there. I offered her €110,000, just €3k more than my previous offer, and later that afternoon the agent came back to me to say she’d accepted. (The original price was €120k, which she then lowered to €115k.) I now have about eight more questions I wish I’d asked her. With this property lark, there are monsters everywhere, as I know full well. The process shouldn’t take too long – this isn’t the UK, with such horrors as chains and gazumping – but what do I know about buying in Romania, really? I’m using a solicitor who has decided to take the whole week off after Orthodox Easter. Then there’s the question of getting the money across from New Zealand. Obviously the property stuff will be front and centre in my life for the next little while.
I’ve just read this long article about public phone boxes in the UK. The old red ones are a symbol of Britishness; I imagine one next to a parish council notice board or a village green, near a cylindrical post box of the same colour. I don’t know what it is about that shade of red, which was also the colour of the old Routemaster double-decker buses. When I was growing up, our front door was that colour too, and I remember my brother and I being disappointed when Dad decided to paint it green. Some of them have been converted to mini libraries, or now house defibrillators; many more have been removed. I remember them stinking of pee and cigarettes. I last used one as recently as 2016 when I washed up in the UK with no way of making a call on my mobile. I tried calling my aunt but each time I got her answer phone which was useless to me.
Snooker. I stayed up far too late last night to watch John Higgins edge over the line in a deciding 25th frame against Jack Lisowski. These evening sessions can run and run, and I’m two hours ahead of Sheffield where it all takes place. Today the semi-finals start. These are three-day matches, played over a gruelling best of 33 frames. Ronnie O’Sullivan will play John Higgins, while Mark Williams takes on the delightfully (!) named Judd Trump. It’s a heavyweight line-up, all right. O’Sullivan, Higgins, and Williams all turned professional way back in 1992 and have all won multiple titles. It seemed they’d been around for ages even when I stopped watching 19 years ago. Trump won in 2019 and is supremely talented too. O’Sullivan will surely be the crowd favourite. I’ll watch a frame or two – but no more than that – tonight.
It’s a drizzly, grey old day today, reminiscent of the Land of Red Boxes.
That 21-year-old has managed to get Covid, or so he said, so neither of this week’s scheduled lessons have happened. Covid does certainly provide people with an excuse, if they really just don’t fancy it for whatever reason. For now, though, I’ll trust him.
My cold didn’t last long, by my standards. Last weekend I was still suffering, so I didn’t play tennis. Instead I played a few poker tournaments from the micro buy-in series. The last of them was a marathon: I went 5¾ hours in the single draw, hanging on and hanging on and for a fleeting few minutes I thought, heck I could win this thing, get my name on the trophy (wouldn’t that be nice?) before ultimately finishing 17th out of 1300-odd entrants. I didn’t make much money – so much of the money is handed out to the top three or four, even in a big-field tournament. My bankroll is $1015. This weekend there’s another series taking place – it’s the brainchild of Mason Pye, a Twitch streamer, and includes anything but no-limit hold ’em. My kind of series. We’ve got a wet weekend in store – perfect for poker.
Last night I had a Zoom call with my friend from university. He’d just been to Manchester and Blackpool for his birthday. We talked about the contrast between visitor-friendly Manchester (a city I’ve never ever been to) and his home city of Birmingham, which does little if anything to promote itself. We’re talking Romanian levels of promotion here. Even Liverpool, which I visited in 1998, does a much better job there. He talked about Lord of the Rings, so much of which is Birmingham-based, and how the city completely failed – refused – to take advantage of the film series that came out in the early 2000s. (When I moved to New Zealand at that time, you couldn’t move for Lord of the Rings stuff. I flew out on a 747 which had been totally Middle-Earthed up.) My friend told me the alarming news that his 40-year-old sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer, but should be OK. What a shock though.
It’s been an unusually warm and windy Thursday in Timișoara. A whopping 23 degrees, with a strong breeze – a southerly, and I’m guessing force 6 on the Beaufort scale. Seeing the autumn leaves swirl in a whirlwind is quite beautiful.
On Friday I got a call from the police. What happened to my your bike? I told him, and he said I had to come in to give a statement so he could close the case. I went in first thing this morning. When I arrived, the receptionist was smoking. He asked me who I’d spoken to. No idea, I said. Eventually the officer met me and showed me to an upstairs corridor with several rooms on both sides. He led me into room 8 where we sat down. There were mugshots pinned to the wall as well as two stopped clocks, one advertising Camel cigarettes. I tried not to get too close to the officer; he wasn’t wearing a mask. Just imagine getting Covid because of a $90 bike.That would be so typically Romanian. He typed up a statement and I had to write some bits and bobs on the end. He told me my written Romanian was better than some Romanians’. Then I was free to go.
Yesterday I met the guy who teaches at British School. We had a drink in Piața Unirii. It was sunny, 17 degrees, and pretty lively when you consider that it came at the end of Romania’s deadliest week since the Second World War. (This week will surely be deadlier still.) Nobody checked our green passes or anything of that sort. We talked about teaching and Margaret Thatcher, then I gave him a short impromptu Romanian lesson.
My near-neighbour, whose husband plays tennis, recently gave me five pancakes. In return I baked them a quince crumble. I’ve had no feedback whatsoever on that, despite meeting him twice at tennis since then, so I’m guessing it wasn’t exactly a hit. At the weekend a new guy in (I guess) his late fifties showed up. Shortly after my arrival in the country, I learnt that one in three adult Romanians no longer have any of their original teeth. This guy had about four teeth in total. The spoof travel guide Molvanîa, written by Australians and a minor hit in New Zealand at about the time I moved there, is surely based on Romania and its neighbour Moldova.
Another British politician has been murdered. Conservative MP David Amess was stabbed to death on Friday at his constituency office in Essex. I didn’t know much about him, except that Mum once joked about his surname (“a mess”), and he once spoke out in parliament against a drug, Cake, which was entirely fictitious. British politics, and Britain in general, is in a dark place right now.
On Wednesday night, I met one of my students. She paid me for my lessons, then showered me with gifts. It was dark, but there was clearly a book (in Romanian, inevitably), some sarmale, and a cozonac. Damn. You’ve wrecked my Christmas Eve cooking plans. (I’m serious. I’m not great at planning, and when I do make a plan, it throws me for a loop when someone makes me suddenly abandon it.) I can still make some salată de boeuf, I suppose. But when I got home, I opened the glass container to find some salată de boeuf. She must have read my mind. Or this blog. I’ll have a go at all that Romanian cuisine some other time.
On Christmas Eve, not a lot happened. I had a lesson with the woman in Brașov. She’d forgotten that we’d scheduled a meeting for Christmas Eve, and when I called her at 8am she was still in bed. We eventually had the lesson at ten. No grammar or anything taxing. Just chat about Christmas and Covid-related stuff. She said she was glad Romania is always behind other European countries, because it means the vaccine will be safer when it gets here. Then I got the business about allergic reactions. Then the stuff about the MMR vaccine causing autism, which is utterly, dangerously, false. In the evening I heard that the Brexit deal had gone through. With days until the deadline, there were only two real options. This was the second worst option. I was sad to learn that Britain will no longer be part of the Erasmus programme, which I took advantage of in 2000-01. None of the students left out in the cold were old enough to vote in the referendum. (Die-hard Brexiteers will applaud this, of course. Erasmus is for the elite, or some such shit. It even sounds Latin, doesn’t it? Mr Erasmus was in fact a philosopher and monk from Rotterdam. Since the programme began in the late eighties, over three million students have taken the opportunity to study abroad in Rotterdam. Or anywhere.)
Not that much happened on Christmas Day either, really. It was a wet day. (One of my ex-students sent me a video clip of her Christmas morning in Austria. It was snowing there.) Mum and Dad called me from Hampden – they’d had their Christmas dinner in Moeraki. I ate some of all that Romanian food I’d been given (I felt far more grateful than I did on Wednesday night), drank some Romanian drink (the red wine was called Sânge de Taur, “Bull’s Blood”), and read my book. I’ve almost finished Kate Atkinson’s extremely clever Life After Life, which didn’t do much for me at the start (this is too clever) but quickly grew on me. Once I’ve finished that, I’ll start on my present, Inocenții by Ioana Pârvulescu. That will keep me going. My brother called me; he and his wife had done a normal Christmas dinner for the two of them, with all the turkey and pigs in blankets. He’d have been quite happy not to bother, I think, but she takes Christmas pretty seriously. My brother told me that St Ives had been flooded. Not the south side where we lived that often got flooded before the embankment was built in 2006, but north of the river where most people live. It’s been a very crappy Christmas for them. I dread to think what Christmas will do to the Covid situation in the UK. I don’t think 25th December dominates anywhere in world like it does there. Then I spoke to my aunt, who immediately asked me if I was bored. She’s obsessed with boredom. No, and so what if I am. There are far worse things in life than being bored. Thanks to Brexit, from the middle of next year my pre-pay phone plan will no longer include calls to the UK.
Dad’s cousin, whom I called my uncle when I was growing up, died on Tuesday (the 22nd). I don’t know if there will even be a funeral, let alone where or when or how. He’s one of a number of male family members to have died of cancer a few months either side of their 70th birthday. Dad, now six months past his 70th, has been through the wars but keeps hanging in there.
I was going to meet my student couple later today at their rather nice-looking house Sânandrei, but she’s just texted me to say she’s ill. It would have been my first real time spent with other humans for ages, and last night I was contemplating what to wear. My blue shoes? Hopefully we can still catch up.
Over breakfast Mum read out an email she’d received from my
aunt who stayed two nights in Timișoara after my brother’s wedding. Wow, some
people have stressful Christmases. We went for coffee along by the river and met
an old friend of my parents on the way; I think he thought I was weird for
living in Romania. After coffee we had a very enjoyable walk down the thicket
to Houghton and back. The track was busier than I ever remember it; people were
making the most of the weather which was extraordinarily mild for the time of
year. After a late lunch we messed around with my beard trimmer and I got packed
for my evening flight. I was happy to be heading back, but it had been a real
pleasure to spend some time with my family. I still marvel at how my brother
found such a wonderful partner, and how they’re able to do all that housey
stuff together that I could never imagine. Mum and Dad have their moments, but
it helps a lot that I get on much better with Mum these days. I realise that
she’s always wanted the best for me. She hasn’t always known what the best is,
but that’s not really her fault.
I arrived at the airport with time to spare and got some “reduced to clear” sandwiches from Marks & Spencer. It was very busy at the check-in desk with several hundred Poles and Romanians jockeying for position in the queues. One bloke directed a barrage of F-bombs and other insults at the poor woman behind the desk, and after insulting her sister (!), he got chucked off the flight. By the time I reached the gate, I felt I was already in Romania. There weren’t a lot of Brits on the flight. I sat on the very back row, next to a younger chap from Petroșani, which is a three-hour drive from Timișoara. What an ordeal. We landed at 1:40 am, to a customary round of applause, and I was home in no time, although I didn’t get to sleep until nearly four.
Monday 31st
I got up at ten to ten. At lunchtime I met S at a café on Strada Mărășești. She asked me about New Year’s resolutions and I said I wanted to improve my Romanian. Could we speak Romanian from the start of 2019? She let out a huge groan. She doesn’t understand why communicating in the local language is so important to me. When I was in England she texted me to ask if I wanted to go a New Year’s Eve party. I said yes, hoping that she might forget. She hadn’t forgotten. She told me where it was, but I didn’t take it in, due to the anxiety that the mere mention of a party provokes in me. “Under something” and “on the corner of something and something” was all I remembered. Everything is closed here on 1st January, so I did a load of grocery shopping in the afternoon, making good use of my new backpack. Close to party time, I wandered around Libertății and Unirii, thinking I might figure it out, but to no avail. I had to call her. It was definitely under something. It was a small dungeon-like room, beneath one of the city’s many pharmacies, where you could see the brickwork and smell the mould. The music would have been fine if it had been at half the volume. I’m sure S (whom I hadn’t seen in party mode before) and her two friends could tell I wasn’t exactly having the time of my life there. Just before midnight we went out to see the fireworks, be couldn’t see much from our vantage point. S told me that her two goals for 2019 were to travel around the world and, um, to have a baby. Both?! I thought that might be it for the night, but no such luck. We bundled back into the vault, and by the time we left (phew!) it was 2019 in the UK too. It would be nice if parties or social events could one day be as much fun as, say, being stuck in Airportworld.
Tuesday 1st January
After breakfast I had a bout of excruciating sinus pain,
lasting an hour and a half. With the New Year bells going full-bore from the
cathedral, I thought, hell must be something close to this. It was that painful, like a screwdriver being
rammed up my nostril. The lack of sleep probably didn’t help, and neither did
the alcohol, not that I drank that much. Lying in bed was no good; I paced up
and down, up and down, until it gradually subsided. What a start to the new
year.
This was my first Christmas Day in the UK for 16 years, and what an incredible day it was. My brother and sister-in-law had it all planned with military precision. It was the first time they’d done Christmas dinner, but they could have fooled me. We had Eggs Benedict (their own eggs, of course) with salmon for breakfast, an unexpected treat. My brother followed our late uncle’s method for cooking the turkey: two hours in the oven and as long again on the barbecue. It was melt-in-the-mouth stuff. Before long the Christmas pudding (which is always a highlight) was eaten and the dishes were washed, and it was back to TV watching. Michael McIntyre’s show was really funny (especially this cooking prank), as was Dad’s Army, which is now almost half a century old. As for presents, I got some kids’ books and the Bananagrams game (for my lessons), a backpack, some cash from Mum and Dad (it’s a bit ridiculous to be getting cash from my parents at my stage in the game, but there you go) and all kinds of stuff to help tame my beard. Christmas Day 2018 will live long in my memory.
Wednesday 26th
We walked off our Christmas dinner by doing a tour of Poole, which I quite liked. I discovered that gin bars had become a thing. Another trip to Primark, then it was TV time. We watched programmes about Ken Dodd and Torvill & Dean, although the highlight was the BFG which was beautifully done. We played a few games of Bananagrams.
Thursday 27th
A third trip to Primark to get a suitable suitcase for my
flight back to Romania, and then it was time to say goodbye to Poole, and my very
house-proud brother and sister-in-law. It was great to see them, but being in someone
else’s territory for any length of time always makes me anxious. The journey to
my parents’ flat in St Ives was a long one. Many people were driving home after
Christmas, but many others were simply shopping. Consuming. Sometimes we barely
moved. A journey of 180 miles took over six hours, including the two short
stops we made. At least the road signs in the UK are good. It’s one of those
things I took for granted when I lived there, but I now see that they’re brilliantly
designed to be read at 70 mph. The little details like the hook on the
lower-case ‘l’ that helps make for a friendly, readable font, the yellow route
numbers on a green background for A-roads, the calming blue motorway signs, the
airport icon that also functions as an arrow: these things all add up. They
save lives.
Friday 28th
In the morning I called on some family friends, the couple who came to Romania in 2017 for the road trip we did, and we had a very enjoyable chat. They then came to my parents’ flat in the evening for so-called nibbles (in reality a proper meal). In the middle I went for a walk with Dad around the meadow and back through Hemingford.
Saturday 29th
At 10am we went to my aunt’s place in Earith. It’s been sad to see her world get progressively smaller over the years. She doesn’t have meaningful relationships with either of her children, who are now both in their late forties. She does, however, have a soft spot for both me and my brother, perhaps because we’re harmless. On this occasion she wasn’t too bad, and even in her worst periods she’s always had the knack of making people laugh. We didn’t stay too long. In the afternoon we called into Homebase where my parents spent ages not choosing some wallpaper, and then drove through some villages I hadn’t seen in a couple of decades, such as Abbots Ripton and Woodhurst. We stopped at Broughton and went for a walk there. My brother sent Mum links to properties in St Ives. He’s always felt bitter about my parents moving to New Zealand in 2003, and now that they make regular trips to back to the UK, he senses that they might want to move back permanently. I think that would be very unlikely and a bad move: the UK isn’t a great country to get old in.
by 
