Family

On Wednesday the 3rd I left Birmingham after my 48-hour stay there. The bus went through Leicester, which seemed massive and full of monstrous architecture. We wended our way along streets dotted with shops called “Polski Sklep” and “Bunătăți Românești”. After several hours I arrived in Cambridge on a sunny evening; the bus dropped me off at Parkside, beside a park (!) where a cricket game was in progress. The local buses had changed since my last visit in the Mesozoic, and I was frantically trying to determine where my bus to St Ives went from – it wasn’t Drummer Street as usual – only finding out when it whizzed by. That meant another half-hour wait. It was a nice feeling to arrive at my parents’ flat in St Ives again. I liked the homely smell that it has.

The next morning, after a particularly good sleep, I read something online about taramasalata. I’d never eaten it before – its lurid pinkness and complete overkill of a name turned me off – so I decided to buy a tub of the stuff from Waitrose. That sort of food doesn’t last long when you open it, and anyway I’d be leaving in three days, so I ended up having lashings of bright pink paste with everything. I’m not sure I’ll have it again. I then met up with some old friends over coffee. These were the couple who came to visit me in Romania five years ago. He was very ill earlier in the year, and is in the middle of a long recovery. In the afternoon I took Mum’s bike out for a ride down the thicket and through the Hemingfords and Houghton, and then I went back to my friends’ place for dinner, which was almost all homegrown produce. She had earlier given me a tour of their extensive fruit and vegetable patch (not that “patch” does it justice).

Then came Friday. The big day. The day I’d maybe see my aunt. My brother had warned me that she’d be almost unrecognisable from the time I last saw her in December 2018. I’d tried calling her the day before but got no reply, so I hopped on Mum’s bike for a six-mile ride over to my aunt’s place in Earith, passing through Needingworth and Bluntisham, knowing my trip might be in vain. Handily, they have a bike track all the way to Earith. I arrived at her four-centuries-old house which has two numbers and a name, and knocked on her cobwebby door. No answer. Then I phoned her. To my surprise, she answered. “I’m right outside your door,” I said. She got dressed, then let me in via the back gate. She had aged, a lot, and had put on several pounds. Her back greatly reduces her mobility, but she refuses to have surgery on it, saying it’s too risky. No, it isn’t. Without surgery, you face the certainty of being housebound very soon. But there was no point in saying that. To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. At 9:30 in the morning, I half-expected her to offer me a glass of wine, but she seems to have cut back on that. Her house and garden looked in good nick. (Admittedly she has a helper.) We chatted for over an hour in her garden, when normally she doesn’t want to talk to anyone. It was all very pleasant. After I left, she offered to take me to the station on the day of my flight, and although it was easier for me to simply get the bus from St Ives, I appreciated that.

That afternoon I met my friends again. She and I walked through the meadow to the Hemingfords, and there I got a taste of how the other half really live. He met us at the end, the Three Jolly Butchers pub, in his car, because he can’t walk that sort of distance. In the middle, we had a pint in the beer garden at the Axe & Compass in Hemingford Abbots, which is just across the road from my old kindergarten, or “playschool” as we called it. At the Jolly Butchers we all ate something different. I had fish and chips again, and a cider – about twenty quid’s worth.

The next day I took the bus into Cambridge. I didn’t do a lot there. I wandered over to Midsummer Common where they have a big fair every June where loads of people get stoned, or at least used to. That day, instead of a fair they had “Our Place in Space”, a kind of exhibit of the Solar System. This was the start of the tour, and the four inner planets were all a short stroll from the sun. Walk across the common to the Cam and several miles beyond (it was all at scale), you could reach the outer planets, including (yes!) Pluto, but that would have taken me all day, so I abandoned that idea and instead grabbed an enormous coffee in a two-handled cup from Costa. I then bought some books from Fopp, which was always one of my favourite shops in the city, and more from Oxfam, though I knew most of them wouldn’t go in my luggage.

I finished a second book, then saw my friends one last time, then saw I had a message from Ryanair telling me to be at the airport three hours before my flight. Flying is deceptively time-consuming. I had a quick chat to my parents until the data ran out on my phone – blame Brexit for that – and after a broken sleep I was off to Stansted.

My brother’s place – a four-bedroom house with an actual garden in a semi-rural part of Dorset – is something I could only dream of owning. (Or, more likely, the upkeep would be a total nightmare for me. I wouldn’t mind having their cat, though.) I got there in time to see the tail end of the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games on TV, with a mechanical bull and Duran Duran. A few days later I’d be seeing the action live.

I slept well, and my first full day in the UK went by quickly. My brother took delivery of a new bike, we went to the pub, my brother had a long chat with his neighbour and again at the local butcher’s where he got meat for the evening’s barbecue. He chatted away freely and I felt slightly jealous. After the barbecue, my sister-in-law offered me Eton mess. I had to admit that I didn’t know what Eton mess was. It’s one of those things I’d heard of and knew you could eat, but that was the extent of my knowledge. Just like Prosecco, which you can’t move for now, it wasn’t a thing when I last lived there almost two decades ago. (Eton mess is a dessert containing meringue, whipped cream, and various berries.) Then we sat down to watch the last ever episode of Neighbours.

On Saturday morning I went to a car boot sale with my brother. These open-air household goods markets soared in popularity in the early nineties (“they’re better attended than church!”) and are obviously still very popular today. This one was big. For a combined fiver, I bought two games for my younger students. If I lived there, I’d be going all the time. My brother then showed me his record player and stereo system, which I quite fancied. (I don’t think he bought it for a fiver at a car boot sale.) The clear highlight of the day came in the evening when we ate fish and chips and mushy peas on Bournemouth Beach. Judging by the price, fish and chips have become something of a delicacy during my time away. Growing up, they were the treat to end all treats. The smell, the wait, the unwrapping, the proper greasy chunky chips. When my brother and I were little, there were abandoned sheds at the bottom of our garden and we pretended to run a fish and chip shop from one of the sheds. When we got home we saw a documentary on Kate Bush. I really enjoyed that. I think she’s amazing and really cool, and I’d definitely like to have some of her stuff when I get my record player.

On Sunday we visited Durdle Door, which is a limestone arch on the renowned Jurassic Coast. It’s also a fun name to say. It was pretty busy there, but it would have been heaving, or rammed as Brits tend to say these days, if the weather hadn’t been overcast. We speculated as to how much money it would take for us to jump from the top of the arch. A million pounds? Ten million? We quickly settled on infinity. For me personally, the question becomes far more interesting if you leave the world of money. Would I jump if it meant I could have a family and all that normal stuff? Probably not – just watch this – but for sure it gets closer then. We also speculated on when the arch will collapse. It will one day. On the way back we stopped at Wareham, which lies on the River Frome, and had an ice cream. It was a typically British setting that doesn’t even begin to exist in Romania. Then we had a pint at a nearby pub and watched the second half of the women’s Euro football final between England and Germany. We only had one eye on the game. With ten minutes to go, Germany duly made it 1-1 and the match entered extra time. “They’ve fucked it up now, as usual,” my brother said. But no, the Lionesses scored in the added period and lifted the trophy. During the match my sister-in-law was cooking. “Hey Google, twenty minutes,” she said to her tablet. Ms Google confirmed, and the countdown commenced. I got strong Black Mirror vibes from that. My non-voice-activated phone timer gets plenty of use in my lessons, but when I’m cooking I think, it’s about quarter to now so that’ll be five-past-ish, and if I forget and it all burns to a crisp, no-one will see my calamity anyway. Such is life when you live alone.

It was great spending time with them. They’re lovely people, both of them. Five years ago I said that if you didn’t know my brother, you might think he was a dick from some of the overconfident black-and-white stuff he came out with. But since then his sharp edges have been rounded off. He’s contemplating life outside the army, he’s doing a correspondence university course to helpfully aid him in that, and he’s a few weeks from becoming a father. As for my sister-in-law, she’s as nice as ever.