The UK

Life :) - The UK

The Big Day and trip report — Part 1

June 1, 2018 by 0 Comments

On Thursday morning I found out that my odds of making it from Luton to Plymouth that evening had been cut from slim to nil, thanks to a sudden shift in UK train times. I found a relatively cheap place to say on Booking.com, some way from the airport. Having booked it, you can imagine my dismay when I received an email requesting a £15 cleaning fee on top of the £40 I was quoted. What a joke.

In the afternoon it was off to the airport. Timișoara airport is in two parts. Before you go through security you’re still in Romania, but beyond the checkpoint is Airportland, where everything is priced in sodding euros. My flight was with Wizz Air. I had to laugh the last time I flew with them, when a group of Romanian travellers commented that Wizz Air “wasn’t as good as Ryanair”, as if Ryanair was some kind of gold standard. This time my flight was delayed by an hour and 40 minutes, so any chance of getting to Plymouth would have been blown out of the water, no matter what the train times were. Wizz Air flights from Timișoara “board” about an hour before take-off, but then you’re kept in a sort of pen until you finally board for real. The experience isn’t very pleasant. I also had to put my hand luggage in the hold.

Two and a half hours after taking off, we touched down in Luton. I then waited at the luggage carousel. And waited. I got to know all the uncollected bags from the previous flight intimately. The carousel took two minutes and ten seconds to complete each circuit: 80 seconds inside and 50 outside. I was in the middle of estimating its speed when bags, including my tiny one, suddenly appeared. I then bought a return ticket to Plymouth from their “travel centre” for a rather ridiculous £112; luckily there was a man supervising the machines who advised me what sort of ticket I should buy. It’s 15 years since I last lived in the UK and I’m now totally clueless.

I then had to get to my accommodation. I’d printed out a Luton map (an anagram of my online name) which only really became useful once I’d exited the confines of the airport. The walk was about 2.5 km. I arrived just before eleven, barely in time to grab a tasty but meagre Chinese takeaway from across the road. The rooms were numbered G (ground floor), F (first floor), S (second floor) and T (third floor). I’d never seen such a system before, and it would have broken down if the building was any taller. I slept well in room S24, but I’ll still hammer them when I come to “rate my stay”, on account of the underhand way they imposed their cleaning fee.

Life :) - The UK

UK trip – Part 2 (and some goals)

April 17, 2018 by 0 Comments

As much as I’m enjoying the warm weather, my flat is approaching sauna territory, so I’m currently shirtless.

On Thursday I made my monthly trip to the out-of-hours doctor and the next day I picked up my drugs from the pharmacy, including (of course) the antidepressants. Going to the pharmacy here is always fun, because you get to see the tremendous array of over-the-counter medicines available. You can get the wonderfully-named Spazz, which comes in a yellow and black box, or better still, Codamin. Who knows what Codamin does, but judging by the box alone, I know I want some.

My life isn’t exactly terrible right now, but my time in the UK made me realise it could still be better. Here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Use the internet less. Way less. Of course sometimes I really do need it – it’s kind of important for my job – but not having it in the UK made me realise what a time-waster it can be. (My internet is currently down for some unknown reason, so I’m tapping this out in Word.)

2. Get up at seven, at the latest, every weekday (sometimes I have lessons which force me to get up earlier than that).

3. Lose some weight. Last month I stepped on a set of scales for the first time since I moved here. I pretty much dismissed the reading out of hand. I mean, the first digit was an eight! That couldn’t be right. Obviously. But then I tried to get into two pairs of trousers I’d left at my parents’ flat. I wriggled my way into one of them, just, but I had no chance with the other. Mainly I need to eat smaller lunches, as much as I love the salami and cheese and eggs I’ve become accustomed to, and far less bread in general.

4. Wear (and in some cases buy) clothes that I want to wear. Not what I think I should wear. Shit, I’m my own boss now. I’m the only person doing what I’m doing in this whole city. I can do what I like (and if I do, I’ll feel better for it).

5. Join a tennis club. For social reasons. Outside work, I’m not meeting enough people.

I was going to write about the rest of my UK trip, but not a lot happened. I did a fair bit of reading (by my standards), met up with my friends who came to Romania last autumn, bought a suit in Marks & Spencer’s in Cambridge for my brother’s wedding, watched Masters golf and snippets of the Commonwealth Games on TV (watching sport is a bit of a rarity for me these days), and got wet. Other than the day I spent in London, the weather ranged from iffy to atrocious. I found a new appreciation for St Ives – if you ignore the northern two-thirds of it where most of the people live, it’s very pleasant and at times bustling town that I was blasé about when I lived there. On my last day I got my brother’s old racing bike pumped up and took it for a pleasant ride around Houghton and the Hemingfords. It was locked away in a shed with a yellow “Danger of Death” sign on the door. He assured me it was safe and the sign was a deterrent only, but I admit I did get a second opinion from somebody else who lived in the complex.

Flying back from Luton was horrible. Flying from major airports is such a rigmarole now, and there are simply too many people in too little space for too long. This time we faced a 90-minute delay because our plane was late arriving from Tel Aviv. Probably 95% of the passengers were Romanian and when I got chatting with a family in their native language, I thought, you know what, I’m not doing too badly here. So that was something. But it was a low-stakes situation, and I need more of them. The in-the-air bit was fine, and as for arriving to the sounds and smells of Timișoara, well that bit was bloody fantastic. Even if it was after two o’clock in the morning. This place felt like home.

International travel - The UK

UK trip – Part 1

April 13, 2018 by 0 Comments

I’m back in Timișoara after a few days in the UK, and I’m happy to be here. The city is green all of a sudden, and temperatures have rocketed into the mid-20s.

Just before I left for the UK I made a trip to the Easter market. I bought some colourful wooden eggs and hand-painted fridge magnets showing the name of my home town, for my aunt’s benefit in particular. I also bought a plate of hot mămăligă with sausages and cheese. I asked for 300 grams but got (and paid for) a lot more, and had nothing but my bare hands to eat it with. With my bus to the airport imminent, this was a challenge.

My experience at Timișoara airport was quite stressful. I hadn’t printed my boarding pass, despite doing the online check-in business, because I couldn’t figure out how. The only way I could avoid a €42 charge was to bring up the boarding pass on my phone somehow. I got there in the end, after farting around with the WizzAir app. I thought I’d been careful to ensure I had no liquids over 100 ml, but that damn bottle of pumpkin seed oil, five times the limit, totally slipped my mind. When I told them it was oil they dropped it into a hole which I thought would lead to oblivion, but in fact it was some kind of scanner. My precious oil was given the all-clear. (At the UK airport I’m sure it would have gone straight in the bin.)

After an uneventful three-hour flight, I touched down in wet, miserable Luton. My plan had been to take a taxi the few miles to Hitchin and then catch a train to Cambridge. Getting a taxi wasn’t as simple as hopping in: I had to enter a black and yellow cabin or shed, and order from there. “Could you tell me the postcode?” I hadn’t a clue. They looked it up on their system. “That’ll be thirty-three pounds and…” What? They said the traffic was so bad that my ride would take an estimated 51 minutes. I could just about have walked it in that time. Instead I bought a National Express bus ticket from an extremely helpful woman, after attempting to buy one from an overly fussy machine that wouldn’t take my £20 notes because they weren’t smooth enough.

I arrived at my parents’ flat in St Ives just before ten in the evening and went almost straight to bed because I’d be meeting my university friend in London in a matter of hours. The next morning I got amazing customer service once more, this time from the bloke at the ticket desk at Cambridge railway station. (After 18 months in Romania, all British customer service suddenly seems bloody awesome.) By not catching the next available train I saved £16. My friend and I met at the British Museum, where we spent some time chatting while browsing the Chinese section and the exhibition of coins and medals. The British Museum is a remarkable trove and it costs absolutely nothing to visit. From the museum we meandered over to a nearby pub, where I found out my friend had been vegetarian for eight years. I had my first fish and chips since 2016 and it was wonderful. From there we made our way to Regent’s Park via a board game shop. He seemed impressed that I knew the difference between Ameritrash and Euro games. We chatted some more in Regent’s Park, grabbed something to eat (a Thai green curry in my case) and then it was time to go home. We were extremely lucky with the weather, but my “run” of blue skies was to end after just one day.

Politics - The UK

There’s hope

June 10, 2017 by 0 Comments

At midnight on Thursday I tuned in to Radio 5 Live for the exit poll. I’d expected a Conservative majority of 50 to 60, but as Big Ben struck ten and the bells of Catedrala Mitropolitană struck twelve, I thought, I bet it’s 100. The projection, that the Tories would fail to win a majority at all, took just about everybody by surprise. That can’t be right, can it? The initial handful of declarations in the North-East did cast some doubt on the predicted seat totals, but they ended up being pretty much bang on. The Tories finished on 318 seats, eight short of an overall majority, and they now have to rely on the DUP, a party from Northern Ireland. And just who are the DUP? The U stands for Unionist, so they want to remain part of the UK (the opposite of Sinn Féin, who don’t even take their seats in parliament). They have strong Protestant links, they’re anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, anti-climate-change, and seemingly anti the planet being more than 10,000 years old. Obviously they’re just what Britain needs right now.

But I must admit I was pretty happy with the results. I had high hopes for Theresa May when she became PM last July, but she’s turned out to be hopeless. She speaks only in soundbites, she’s wooden, she lacks warmth and a personality that people can relate to. All of those frailties became glaringly obvious during her awful campaign. May kept repeating her “strong and stable” mantra. Did she borrow that from John Key, I wonder? (Although he said “shtrong and stable”.) One journalist branded her “weak and wobbly” which was closer to the truth. She’s in the wrong job.

As usual in recent times, the Tories neglected the young, which in their eyes are anybody under about 45, but this time they managed to piss off older people too with their “dementia tax” and removal of winter fuel payments to pensioners. They also wanted to bring back fox hunting. Seriously? On the other side Jeremy Corbyn, who had been viewed as little more than a joke by people across the political spectrum, ran a good campaign. He looked comfortable in his own skin, he was approachable, he actually looked like he gave a shit about people. As a result, turnout among under-35s was up sharply, and they voted in large numbers for Labour.

May called the snap election because she thought the Tories would win a stonking great majority and they’d be able to ram through a hard Brexit and whatever else they wanted. Her arrogance backfired spectacularly; she has been greatly weakened. For all of us who dream of a fairer society in Britain and elsewhere, there’s still a long way to go – the Tories got 43% of the vote across Britain after all – but this is a good start.

Between them the Conservatives and Labour polled in the low eighties, so this really was a return to two-party politics which the awful first-past-the-post system encourages. It would be fantastic if some sort of PR could be introduced (New Zealand-style MMP would work well), but I’m not holding my breath. John Cleese tweeted that he wouldn’t vote at all because he lived in Kensington, a safe Tory seat. In the event Kensington was the very last seat to declare following multiple recounts, and Labour scored a major upset with a razor-thin 20-vote win. It goes to show you never can tell.

International travel - The UK

England: latest update

October 4, 2016 by 1 Comment

On Sunday I did a six-mile walk through Hemingford Grey, Hemingford Abbots, Houghton and St Ives. It’s so easy here to go on a longish walk, or bike ride, without having to worry about personal locator beacons or wear lycra. It’s all so much more accessible. You don’t even have to wear helmets on your bike here (I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but they are a hassle). I walked past our old house, my grandmother’s old house, the tennis club, the school I went to until I was eight, and the place where my playschool used to be (it has been replaced by a smarter building and only the old sign now remains). I saw the water mill in Houghton in operation and watched a narrow boat make its way through Houghton Lock; it was travelling upstream. As I watched the lock fill up an old lady remarked how wonderfully slow and calm the process was. Being early October the blackberries were out, and in enormous quantities (I might fill up a shopping bag and make a pie tonight, but I’ll only have two evenings to eat it). The stinging nettles were everywhere as they were as a kid. The thicket linking Houghton and St Ives, following the Ouse, that I must have walked and cycled through hundreds of times to see my grandmother, had that same distinct smell. This time I didn’t see a muntjac deer. When I was almost home a brass band was playing on the Quay.

On Saturday I met up with my university friend in London. He was with his girlfriend from Normandy who, after just two years of living in Birmingham, is fluent in English which she speaks with a Brummie accent. I was blown away. What’s the secret?

We met in Covent Garden and saw one of those street performers who unties himself. We walked along the Thames, got some food from an outdoor market, then spent a couple of hours at the Tate Modern (trying to figure out at least some of the exhibits) and a couple more at a pub before finishing up at a pizza place on Tottenham Court Road.

The highlight of London for me was the pub, because that gave us the chance to chat. We talked about Brexit quite extensively. My friend was amazed by the result; he’d expected something along the lines of a 60% Remain vote. I’d expected a close vote, and although I was bitterly disappointed by the Leave result, I wasn’t all that surprised (as anybody who for some bizarre reason read my blog in June would have seen). We agreed that Remain failed to make an emotional case for their position (peace in the region since WW2 being the obvious one to make); otherwise they probably would have won. Following Theresa May’s speech on Sunday it appears Britain will be out of the EU (but I’m still not sure what that really means) by March 2019. My friend and I for some reason ended up discussing my mum. He said that you don’t win by having the most shit when you die. Mum would do well to understand that.

Yesterday I went to Cambridge, which is a beautiful city, especially on a lovely sunny day like yesterday. I tried in vain to find a Romanian dictionary. Well, they were there, but in short supply and well beyond what I was prepared to pay. My best bet would be to wait till I get to Romania. I know there are all kinds of dictionaries and apps out there, but with a physical dictionary you get to see adjacent words and I think you learn more as a result. I went into some clothes shops, expecting to find the more interesting items that you’d never get in New Zealand, but I was sorely disappointed. Unlike what I saw the previous times I’ve come back here, everything was deeply drab. Maybe austerity under Cameron and Osborne is to blame. In Oxfam I found David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, a large tome that I bought for £2.50 and will remain at my parents’ place until I next come back here.

I see this is my 100th post.

International travel - The UK

Back in Blighty

September 30, 2016 by 1 Comment

It’s over six years since I was last in the UK. When I arrived yesterday I felt a distinct weirdness, but I’m already over that. In fact right this minute I feel better than I have in weeks if not months.

I thoroughly recommend Emirates. All four legs of my journey were extremely pleasant. The staff were friendly and the food was the best I’ve ever experienced on a long-haul flight. Admittedly I got lucky by having at least one empty seat next to me, and sometimes two, all the way from Sydney. Emirates run a ten-abreast configuration on their 777s, as many airlines unfortunately do these days, and you can really use an empty seat or two there. The airline is a colossus and its mega-hub, Dubai, is heaving with A380s. Emirates fly nearly half of all the four-engined double-decker behemoths in existence. We spent a bit longer than we bargained for in Dubai as all planes were grounded for over an hour thanks to a rogue drone.

I watched some films on the plane but nothing remotely blockbustery (I’m fed up with that). I saw The Man Who Knew Infinity, the story of the great mathematician Ramanujan and his mentor Hardy who was played by Jeremy Irons. Given that it was set in Cambridge and I noticed that both my flight number and row number were prime before I got on the plane, this was an unsurprising choice of movie for me. I then saw Eddie The Eagle, the story of the British ski jumper from my youth, Where to Invade Next?, the Michael Moore film that suddenly made me want to visit Slovenia, and a weird animated film called Anomalisa.

Although everything went without a hitch, apart from the drone, flying half-way around the world without a stopover is always an ordeal. And even at Heathrow, 32 hours after I left Christchurch, there was plenty of travelling yet to endure. I was carrying 35 kilos of luggage. At least I beat the rush hour in London. I’d forgotten just how far it is on the Piccadilly Line from Heathrow: almost an hour. I then scrambled onto the non-stop train to Cambridge and took the new guided bus to St Ives (it actually sprang into action in 2011 not long after I was last here, but it’s new to me). I hit rush hour in Cambridge and I must have been a right pain in the butt on that bus with my bags. It was almost 6pm when I arrived at my parents’ apartment. I got a takeaway curry in town and at 8:30 I was out like a light. I slept for ten hours.

St Ives has changed surprisingly little. There wasn’t a Polski Sklep last time I was here, and Tom’s Cakes would appear to be healthier than the smoke-filled windowless betting shop I remember. But many of the businesses I remember from 2010, and even as a kid, are still running. And the river, the bridge, the meadow, the things that make St Ives what it is, have hardly changed at all.

My aunt popped in this morning but I missed her. She brought me some food and a copy of the Daily Mail, of which I can only bring myself to read selected bits. I was out FaceTiming my parents from the library and trying to recover the money from my frozen Barclays account.

On Saturday I’ll be going to London to catch up with a friend from university. There was a piece on the news about people born in the eighties being only half as wealthy as those born in the seventies. I was born in ’80, he in ’79. He qualified as an actuary ten years ago and has done very well for himself. He has quite an amazing mind and has always worked hard. I wouldn’t mind being half as wealthy as him.

Why on earth am I doing this? That’s what I thought on Tuesday just before boarding the plane. Even getting to that point was quite a challenge for me. Now I get the feeling that it might, just might, all be worth it.